The current freak-out by Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and other right-wingers about democratic socialism is quite rational. In socialism, they see a formidable foe.
The current freak-out by Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and other right-wingers about democratic socialism is quite rational. In socialism, they see a formidable foe.
My 27 year old son was 17, and just becoming aware of politics when Trump first took office. His entire political awareness of “Democracy” and “Freedom” has been under the perverse MAGA era. Is it any wonder that young Americans have such a negative view of our current governmental system?
I explained to my son that things weren’t always like this, that our government was relatively sane before Trump, and he countered with the absolutely true statement that we didn’t have Medicare 4 All, free college, free day care, etc., all the things that EVERY other civilized nation provides to their citizens, so it doesn’t seem like American Democracy has EVER been a decent system.
And you know what? He’s absolutely correct. Things weren’t better before Trump, we were just a lot more polite about getting fucked over. The Democrats entire existence has been to convince us to accept everything the Republicans were steadily taking from us.
So from the perspective of young people, whose entire view of American Democracy has been Donald Trump’s perverse vision of it, something like Socialism, or even Communism doesn’t sound so bad. After all, countries like Scandinavia, China, and others are among the most successful governments on the planet by EVERY metric, but we’re supposed to be happier with being the biggest terrorist nation on Earth?
After all, we can kill thousands of people with the press of a button! Isn’t that wicked cool enough? You want food, too?
China does the exact same thing and the people in general are worse off. But you go queen.
How do you figure that Chinese people are worse off than Americans? In what regard?
China has had serious problems in the past, but they systematically addressed them, and now they are poised to have an amazing future.
OTH, it’s hard to imagine America having a decent future, without a similar commitment to systematic change, and other than the Progressives, NOBODY is willing to make that commitment.
We need to stop finding excuses why we shouldn’t emulate countries that are demonstrating proven success with their policies, and start borrowing ideas, and do it for the next quarter century.
But that will never happen as long as MAGA and their Democratic Quislings keep blocking any sort of progress on behalf of the Sociopathic Oligarchs.