The Democratic Party in Trump's Fascist 2nd Term. Commentary, Ideas & Strategy (+ non Woketicism)

You are all confusing what may or may not be a social or societal good with what wins elections. You are confusing governance with winning elections.

 

Let me be young and stupid. Plus, I have a whole posting history with Kaz in a forum outside of P&CE that would support continued correspondence. We have our disagreements here and there.

 

How is this different from someone on the left saying they vote Democrat but not for DINOs that support, for example (and using the verbiage they would use) the genocide in Gaza?

It’s the same thing!

 

Party loyalty for him only goes one-way.

 

Again: Gretchen Whitmer, 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Unofficial campaign slogan was, "Fix the damn roads." Won by a wide margin in 2018. 2022, widens her margin, winning 10% with independents. Polling at one of the highest popularity ratings for governor (Despite that awkward Trump photo) behind the likes of Andy Beshear. That slogan by the way is found on a lot of press releases and such.

As for the fix the damn roads, fix them she has. Last summer a major road right outside my house got repaired. Not to mention the numerous roads all over Michigan have been getting fixed. Especially in SE Michigan, which had never gotten any attention from Republicans.

 

Like I said, at the state level this works. Which federal infrastructure improvements do you think would move the needle for someone running for federal office?

 

One can absolutely agree about the opposition and reasonably come to the conclusion that it would be helpful if the left in this country was more united behind the Democrats, who (after all), are the only party in this country with the potential to mount a strong political battle against the ruling party, in November. I hate to keep harping on this but if you see another way, put it out there. I don't know how it is in your area of New Jersey but it's conceivable that there are now more red hats across the country than ever. And we're not winning over any winnable right-wing votes with radically left-wing politics. It's pure fantasy to suggest otherwise.

 

Also consider..... (just generally for the convo, not directly at you)

Fixing EXISTING infrastructure is MUCH easier to get done than building NEW infrastructure.

That's a bit of the problem with the Build Back Better Plan, because it is a generational effort and requires a decade or two of consistent effort. That seems completely impossible at the national level right now.

 

I think this is the point.

Although delivering on your campaign promises around helping ordinary people won't guarantee you a win... NOT delivering makes it a LOT more likely you'll lose.

 

Sure, close to 50% of the Infrastructure bill has been spent on projects but do not let facts get open the way of your funny narrative....

 

We the people are dumb and want politicians to promise us candy, not logic.

That is for winning elections, so Song is right on that point.

Abundance is something you do after you win, not something that helps get elected first.

One of the issues Klein and Thompson have is that the cost of living is getting expensive, that is making a lot of young people disaffected and turning radical in the search for answers (turning more socialist)

What the Abundance bros want the democratic party to do is to get out of the old mentality of only trying to fix demand, they say we can not just let the republicans run on the supply side.

Democrat solutions to raising cost of living has always been ask for higher wages and continue to subsidize demand, while passing regulations that increases the cost of doing business.

When supply is restricted and you subsidize demand, prices will just go up.

Klein and Thompson is not against the subsidizing of demand, they just understand that if you just do that, then we are never going to solve the problem.


in one of their interviews they used an example (I think it was New York, but maybe it was another city) they said that they would be if a city government made it illegal for private companies to build houses, and they created a Singapore type entity in charge of building all public housing in the city. But even after doing that, they problem would remain if the cost of building public houses were 750K per units, that would mean a lot less houses build than if we tackled regulations at the same time and got the cost down to 250K per unit. This was when a story from Chicago came out that the city built 'affordable housing' at the cost of 700K per unit (Chicago Corruption for the win)

https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-mayor-spends-700k-per-affordable-apartment-unit/

Correct over 20 Billion of approved funds were not able to be allocated before republican re took power.

That is the problem, too much red tape to get the money out on time, many times Democrats think just passing bill to allocate funds is when their work ends, that way they can campaign on the big number of funds approved for this or that project.

But when people look into the details, they find a lot of wasted time and a bureaucratic mess that makes it very difficult for the funds to actually be deployed, that is the part that the Abundance bros want to push Democrats to look at, not just pass bills and call it a day, look into the bureaucratic checkpoints that slow down the government process and try to fix them.

https://statescoop.com/with-most-bead-proposals-in-states-leave-nearly-21-billion-unclaimed/

 

BTW if Abundance people think they are going to convince many Republicans to join forces with them, they could be very wrong.

Twitter it's not the real world, but they are going to get as much push back from the crazy right as they are getting from the crazy left.

"I wonder if this “Abundance movement” would essentially be PRC-style Communist political system with managed capitalist economics. A pragmatic realization that capitalism is needed to maintain some amount of complacency among the populace with the communist policies (and to pay for them )."

I wonder if this “Abundance movement” would essentially be PRC-style Communist political system with managed capitalist economics. A pragmatic realization that capitalism is needed to maintain some amount of complacency among the populace with the communist policies (and to pay…

— Jeremiah Rabitor (@JeremiahRabitor) February 9, 2026

 

Take it from someone who lives in a state where a GOP member called the GOP governor "The Pothole Governor."

Fixing it gets you a lot of mileage.

 

Take it from someone living in a red state that is growing very rapidly:

Building NEW infrastructure is incredibly more difficult than repairing/improving old infrastructure.

 

Do you have a link for that?

 

I'm aware, but I know it's possible. I've mentioned my city I live in. There's new apartments and such going up. Which is needed because the place is getting expensive. Detroit's getting plenty of new stuff built (The Hudson Tower is incredible). Which is good because it's definitely needed.

If anything, NIMBYs just need to be moslty ignored. The ones in my city are anyway, given that they keep losing city council elections by significant margins. The Detroit NIMBYs are just the usual gentrification thing, which to me is funny because the Detroit they remember going back to the 1970s wasn't exactly a party.

 

Who is this guy Rabitor? There’s nothing in his Twitter bio to suggest he’s anything more than a rando you found that agreed with you. What’s next, spelunking the comments section for backup?

 

Rando guy that disagrees with me. (I am in the YIMBY / Abundance bandwagon)

Basically left wingers (on social media) think Abundance is some Libertarian plot to stop the socialist revolution.

Here is an example of some right winger with a conspiracy on how Abundance is some type of Communist plot to take over America and make us into a China type of state police government.


Just an example of how social media makes people crazy.

 

So you are really doing this. This is to the Larry Elder and Clarence Thomas version. Of racism. White people aren't openly running around calling black people ************s so we aren't really a racist country anymore. This is the nature of your argument.

You know how you talk about anti-Israel talk can quickly slip into anti-Semitism because people can't tell the difference and seem to actually have some negative views on Jews. People here are telling you that Klein's speech has been slipping from lets run moderates to lets run candidates that are the anti-thesis of what we stand for as liberals. He occasionally slips into let's abandon the minorities territory.

Two metaphors for you. Just to highlight the fact that it doesn't have to be explicitly said to be understood.

 

This is the part where you two agree:

 

I do not agree that abundance is that at all. (or the conspiracy that that is what Abundance would lead us to)

Shit I think an abundance agenda if implemented would lead us away from the socialist path that I fear the Democratic party will be forced to take in the future.

 

The way infrastructure is handled in the USA is quite baffling from A Dutch/European? pov.

 

Yes, because Europeans don’t understand how big America is until they live here. A running joke in MLS forums is how Europeans come to MLS and struggle severely with the travel. They didn’t know how long the various flights would be.

Our population density and yours are too different.