While posting in some other threads this question popped into my mind. In order to get rid of Trump right now, would you lefties agree to let Republicans have majority control of both the House and the Senate (60 Republicans or more) for the next eight years in exchange for Trump being gone and being immediately replaced by a Democratic president for eight years? Please stick to the question as is, election cycles aren't taken into account so please don't lecture me about how political election cycles work.
Excellent question. I'm assuming that you're trying to figure out how many of us are at least consistent, and how many of us take our hatred of the president to the point of irrationally compromising our goals and convictions.
I'm probably going to be in the minority here, but absolutely not. It's worth noting that I'm not part of the 'resistance' and I'm viciously anti-establishment. I despise the president, but I feel like he's a symptom of a much larger problem. As crazy and unhinged as he seems to be to those of us on the left, there was a time that we all couldn't fathom a more incompetent, more disastrous president than George W. Bush.
The fact that no party has been able to hold the White House for more than one or two terms in decades shouldn't be taken for granted. It's a sign that Americans trust neither of the parties, and I don't believe they are wrong to feel that way. We can't agree on who's exactly to blame, or the specifics of what's wrong, but in a country where we grow up being taught to be prideful of our democratic process, hardly anyone actually participates in it. I strongly believe that the public is weary and lacks faith in politics and our politicians, and that it actually doesn't have to be that way.
We progressives (specifically the Berniecrats. I feel that I need to specify, because words like 'progressive' and 'liberal' seem to shift meaning depending on the person using those terms) generally look at the last few decades with a great deal of disdain for third-way Democrats, or neoliberalism. While conservatives may view things as becoming too liberal, particularly from a social front (SJWs, political correctness, anti-free-speech campuses), we see our own party as having become increasingly right-wing in terms of economic policy, to the point where both parties having the same sponsors has become a sad running joke. The Democrats really don't stand for anything. They pay lip service to identity politics while bending to will of Wall St.
My point? If we hadn't elected Trump during the last election cycle, we would have almost certainly elected him in the next, or someone worse. I know that's not a popular opinion, but only because a lack of imagination, and I've learned not to test Murphy's law. Suppose we oust Trump in favor of another lackluster Dem that spends the next eight years doing nothing to instill confidence in leftist policies; people on the left feel that he's far too authoritarian, and I share those sentiments, but what happens when we elect someone that is even more authoritarian, or possibly a more competent authoritarian? What if Trump is simply the prototype of what's to come if we don't do something to change the course of public discourse?
We could oust Trump, and even replace him with an actual progressive that my ilk would approve of, but I wouldn't stack Congress with Republicans in order to accomplish this. That stands to effectively neuter the new administration, and mediocrity simply won't do. We need out of this vicious cycle, more than anything else. I feel like the only way to do that is through another FDR, and through decisive,
real change.
But, hey, if I'm wrong about the viability of my economic stance, my whole ideal will completely backfire and end up destroying my movement in the same manner that hoped/hope that Trump would mark the end of the Republican party as we know it, so there's that.
So was that par for the course, or a bit off the rails from what you expected?
