Venting my political frustrations
America is a failed state. The point of a state is that people face problems beyond their ability, and that larger organizations can handle those problems. But while the oldest states mainly existed to protect an ingroup against outgroups, modern states do a seemingly impossible number of things. This is why the world has broadly landed on democracy as the dominant form of government., when a state does so many things it can easily lead to tyranny and mismanagement. That fact is mitigated or answered by the state’s people voting in those who are competent and voting out those who are not. Trump is not competent on any level. He has decided the copper-age style of state that only exists to maintain an ingroup and oppress any outgroup is the exact kind of state America should be. People have little clue as to why Trump is implementing tariffs on nearly the entire world, especially when American production cannot be built anywhere near fast enough to make up for the issues in imports, but I understand it as the power play a warlord makes. To Trump, the soft power America has built and utilized to become the strongest global power is fake. The rest of the world is either other warlords who are to be respected, vassals who should know their place under the leader’s heel, or weak representatives of land to be conquered. I don’t believe the American people want this. I don’t believe the American people are stupid, ignorant, and cruel enough to support this as an option. I’ve seen people say that the administration is simply doing everything it is saying it would do, and while Trump said he would do some heinous things, this is a few steps even above that. When I think about the president and the people who voted him in, I feel despair, fear, anger, and hopelessness. I can’t bring myself to write an article about that. Instead, I’ve chosen to write about one major cause of Trump’s rise to power that people constantly seem to ignore or deny: the complete failure of the Democratic party.
People remember Obama fondly, but looking at retrospectives (including his own website’s timeline detailing his presidency and life) it’s shocking how little he truly accomplished. He promised change. He was and remains the best political speaker of my lifetime. Perhaps that’s why he’s remembered so fondly despite having five major (notable compared to what you’d expect a president to do) accomplishments that were not undone during Trump’s first presidency. Those include: the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), the repealing of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, the economic recovery after the 2008 recession, and the killing of Bin Laden. The ACA, repealing of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, and DACA are fine accomplishments I have no complaint about (beyond encouragement: do more of this!), and the killing of Bin Laden is certainly a good thing, but that shouldn’t distract you from the issues.
As much as the economy recovered from the great recession, wages remained stagnant, and by 2016 three quarters of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. Obama was first elected because people were angry at George W. Bush’s failures in the Middle East and his handling of the recession. While Obama did slowly back out of America’s forever-wars in the Middle East, the defense budget still ballooned and Obama continued the time-honored American tradition of War Crimes with his use of drone strikes. DACA did protect migrants, but Obama also ramped up programs like ICE to be “tough on the border”.
It gets worse considering the many demands Obama failed to meet. The early 2010s saw the rise of a movement against police brutality. The killings of Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, and far too many more led to a three word outcry, a demand for the world to acknowledge a truth they ignored: Black Lives Matter. Obama gave his sympathies, giving perhaps the most powerful quote of his presidency by saying “if I had a son, he’d look a lot like Trayvon”, but no police reform came. The terrible mass shooting of elementary schoolers at Sandy Hook wrote a horrible future on the wall, with innocent blood as ink. No gun reform came. The Occupy Wall Street movement made clear that Americans were not happy about the economy. No finance reform came.
But Obama had been stonewalled from accomplishing much of anything by a congress controlled by the opposing party. Biden has no such excuse.
2020 was the first presidential election I could vote in, and I remember being underwhelmed with Joe Biden. He campaigned on a return to normalcy. It was the kind of play only someone with the experience he had could sell. He pitched that he could bring Republicans back to their senses. It was the kind of play only someone so committed to moderate politics could make even slightly believable. He appealed to the common sense that united everyone, regardless of party affiliation. He barely won. Trump rallied around the idea that Biden had rigged the election somehow. Then, he encouraged a mob of his supporters to storm the capitol to overturn the election, attempting a coup.
This should have been a moment to change course. Even if Democrats didn’t think Dolad Trump was personally responsible for January 6, any association with the biggest attack on American democracy since the Civil War should’ve been a political death sentence if not incredible legal action. Instead a slow-moving investigation released their findings two years later. For reference, Hillary Clinton’s handling of the crisis in Benghazi was a constant talking point on the far right, well before the “but her emails” jokes. I still don’t understand what the issue was over Benghazi or how it meant Hillary Clinton was a terrible criminal, but it was a major factor in her losing in 2016. Donald Trump was behind the most visible crime in America since OJ Simpson fled police in a Ford Bronco, and the Biden administration chose to move on.
The Biden administration did pass a large infrastructure bill. It would have been nice if they did more. Then I would have more to say in this paragraph.
Policy-wise, I supported Biden because I wanted gun control, police reform, and for spending to be moved from the military towards the public good. Biden did nothing for gun control. Biden spat on the massive protests in response to the murder of George Flloyd by repeatedly declaring, “we need to fund the police!” in response to calls to defund the police. He continued to balloon military spending.
Every other issue was either ignored or blocked. Blocked by The Supreme Court (but talking about Court reform is too radical). Blocked by moderate democrats. Blocked by the Senate Parliamentarian, a person in government who never came up in public discussion before and likely never will again. So efforts on voting rights, handling student debt, and protecting abortion rights either stagnated or were pushed back despite the rare instance of Democrats controlling the house, senate, and presidency. When Dobbs V. Women’s Health (a case in which Women's Health seriously lost) came down, it was another big moment. Here was a moment to really get everyone together, the greatest attack on one of your core base issues possible, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead their response was pathetic. And as if Biden could be a worse president through inaction rather than action, he chose not to do a primary.
When Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, I bought the hype. Kamala was brat. Kamala was a woman. Kamala was young(er). Then came the DNC, where Harris went on stage to deliver her first speech as the presidential nominee and emphasized how America must have a “deadly fighting force”. She said that she’d appoint a Republican to her cabinet. She gave no impression that she’d be anything different from Biden, and outright confirmed it in an interview with The View. She made sure I remembered the 2020 Democratic primary, where she was dubbed “Copmala”. The general strategy was the same as Biden’s, to reach past the centrists into the Republican camp with the gambit that moderate Republicans would support a moderate Democrat before Trump. Not only did Harris not earn the support of moderate Republicans, she lost the support of many Democrats as well.
I believe people both overestimate and underestimate the Palestinian conflict’s impact on the election. Many chose to not vote based on that issue alone. Some fools even chose to vote for Trump. On its own, I doubt it would have made a massive difference. Pro-Palestinian activists had already dropped their bar from “ceasefire now” to an arms embargo, but even that was far and away too radical for the Harris campaign. If you hold no sympathies for those who chose not to vote on this issue alone: consider if Harris was anti-abortion. She’d still be a better president than Trump, but you’d understand why she’d lose votes.
I live in Georgia, specifically in a district that flipped for Biden in 2020. I saw no ads about abortion, racism (which would have been very easy to make considering how blatant Trump was with the “they’re eating the dogs” moment), voting rights, police reform, or healthcare. Instead, the ads I saw were about the economy. No ads about January 6th, or Project 2025, just the economy. Having the economy be her campaign’s primary focus while inflation ran rampant made her seem like a blatant liar, and let Trump push his messaging on anti-immigration with no message to counter it. I was concerned about reproductive rights, healthcare, cops not being able to extrajudicially murder people, children feeling safe in schools, free speech, trans rights, and so many more things. Kamala Harris was the candidate to vote for on all of those issues, but she didn’t tell me or the public that. She made sure that the public knew: she cares about the economy.
The reactions to Trump winning have been so frustrating. I can’t stand the people who act like this is karma coming around on the people who voted him in. I can’t stand the people who act like the Democratic party did next to nothing wrong and are doing everything they can. When Democrats “protested” the State of the Union, the overwhelming response I saw was, “DO SOMETHING!”. One reddit user responded to this sentiment saying “oh, so you’re upset at them for doing performative nonsense and you want them to do… more performative nonsense”, and while I don’t care to find that commenter I will answer them now: YES!!! POLITICS IS PERFORMANCE! It would be very easy for Democrats to convince people that Trump is incredibly corrupt, fascistic, and a terrible president if they acted like it! At every point possible they should be screaming their lungs out about how this moment is a disaster for America and possibly the end of Democracy! The worst that could happen is that people will call them radical and unreasonable. That happened to Trump, and he won.
Not being your opponent isn’t a winning strategy. The American public thinks every politician is a lying corrupt demon and if you can’t disrupt that you’re in a bad spot. Clinton ran a campaign spurning the voters that rallied around Medicare for All or the 15$ minimum wage. She had no ideas that countered “build a wall” or “lock her up”. I couldn’t name you a single policy Harris ran on off the top of my head. Both would have been better presidents than Trump. Neither gave me the impression they would’ve been good presidents.
I wrote this article to find some catharsis, but I have found none. I feel like I should protest, but I live in the suburbs. I have no connection to any groups that would organize such a thing, and I’m starting to wonder the point of protesting when everything I’ve seen people protest for has been ignored besides the fight for gay marriage. I feel hopeless. I don’t want to believe the American people want to go to war with Canada or the EU. I don’t believe the American people want to get rid of Social Security. I don’t believe the American people want most of the Federal Government gone. But they voted for the people who are pushing that.
Democracy is meant to be a government answerable to the people. The past few years have proved to me that in American Democracy the people cannot answer anything. The Senate does nothing, only existing to stop presidents from doing things and occasionally shut down the government. The President can do anything, including illegal things, and face no consequences. The Supreme Court can also do anything and face no consequences. The public votes for the senate and presidency, but your senate vote matters a lot less depending on where you live. California has five million more people living there than the twenty lowest population states combined. 12% of the population has the same senate votes as Wyoming, a state with 0.2% of the population. Your presidential vote is the same, as most states can be completely ignored in a presidential election in favor of swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida.
As I’m writing this my heart is hurt. I want to believe the propaganda about America being great, about America being the world's longest-lasting Democracy and how amazing that is. I want to feel like things can get better. I look to the Democratic party for that. They look at me, indignant, and say “well what do you want ME to do?!” I don’t know what I can do but sob.
