Comment by scrubs
5 days ago
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.
The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.
It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
When we “overshot left” it was by electing a centrist cishet man who identified as Christian and had different colored skin from the prior presidents.
Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
The dyad left-v-right is just stupid. The issues are complex. We must move under and out of the political bs of conservative v. liberal if we're gonna get anywhere.
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Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
Take the stupid of the far right and idiots like Trump, then multiply through by -1. It presents differently but it'll still screw stuff up keeping the idiocy in cycle. There's morons on left too!
The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred.
But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences?
Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled.
I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
They’re talking about those times we let women vote, implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow. Really overshot lol.
Ah yes, the period of slightly-less-suffering. What a monumental mistake on all our parts...
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
If it’s not America it will be China and I don’t think you want to live in that world.
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I would too. If we agree that monopolies are bad for private industry, why isn’t it just as bad as having one world power. I think Trump and MAGA are uninformed idiots. But they have caused the EU to start building up their own military industry, countries to focus more on their own research and decouple themselves from the US. I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.
The US has given me all sorts of opportunities I wouldn’t have anywhere else in the world as a native born citizens. I plan to extract as much as I can from it and keep my eyes open to retiring somewhere else.
I continuously vote and advocate for policies like universal healthcare, pre-K education, etc. But what are you going to do when voters vote for politicians thst ars against their own interests - getting rid of FEMA when the states that need it the most are Republican, Medicaid, etc.
This isn’t a pie in the sky shrill “I’m leaving the US tomorrow”. But my wife and I already did the digital nomad thing domestically for a year starting in late 2022 and going forward starting next year, we are going to be spending more time out of the country in US time zones while I work remotely starting with Costa Rica.
And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
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Corporations. European politics can be captured by large corporations the same way the US has been. It was unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere as well.