No, there absolutely is a coherent plan, it’s just that part of that plan is to create chaos and the appearance of incoherence. We absolutely should keep that straight.

It’s also true that Trump’s orbit contains a lot of other useful idiots, but they are hangers-on, not who I would consider to be his handlers.

Of course it does take a certain kind of idiot to ever embrace fascism, but we can’t mistake that for incompetence.

To be fair, Trump really is pretty stupid. His handlers aren’t.

the people that can afford those can afford a lower than desirable resale value

You sound unfamiliar with the average American consumer. Americans tend to buy the most car they think they can afford. They also might have been counting on the fact that electric vehicles cost more up front, but return that value and then some the longer you drive it.

it doesn’t really look like the used market for these has taken that hard of a hit either.

If it does, I might go out and buy myself one. As I said before, we don’t want these vehicles to be retired before their time.

At the very least debadge that heap, when I see that I like to think the owner is trying at least.

I would definitely suggest that people do this, but I wouldn’t call it “the least”, at least in regards to owning a Tesla. Removing the badge is probably the most effective thing they can do. That stuff gets noticed and has an impact. If they sell the car, it will just be bought by someone else and continue to be a billboard for Elon. I see a lot of Teslas in my area and have been looking for badge removals or “Elon bad” bumper stickers, and so far have just seen one without badges.

I could see this administration contracting for 100k cybertrucks for the USPS right before shutting down the USPS.

Plenty of Teslas were bought before most people had any idea that Elon was a fascist sociopathic asshole. Not everyone who bought one can afford to just dump a functioning vehicle with shitty resale value. Anyways, we don’t really want to see every Tesla on the road retired at the same time, so somebody will be driving them.

Cybertrucks are a bit different in my estimation. Anyone who bought a Cybertruck should have known who they were buying it from. Those owners bought that car to signal something, and I think it’s fair to let them know that the signal was received.

They have some engineer working on how to cram fiber into that thing, I can almost guarantee it.

And after he unconstitutionally pulled funding from the Chips Act that was designed to address this very issue.

Adding in cost of ownership, EVs are cheaper than ICE vehicles. Electricity is way cheaper than gas, and electrics require almost zero maintenance. Also, even 200km meets the needs of a whole lot of drivers just fine. Our family’s secondary vehicle is a Gen-1 leaf with 140km of range and I think we’ve used a public charger 4 times in over 10 years.

I treat Leftists as interchangeable, since you all parrot the same talking points.

Wow. Of all the criticisms to make of the left, this has got to be the most ignorant. Leftists are legendary for infighting and there are more different perspectives among leftists than you can probably find in the entire rest of the political spectrum combined. But sure, we’re all alike.

Like how suddenly everyone forgot about Gaza.

NOBODY has forgotten about Gaza.

are you really suggesting Obamacare increased economic inequality?

I didn’t suggest anything, I said it. To be more fair though, I believe it did address inequality in a positive way for those at the bottom rungs who got significant subsidies. It might have even helped the middle class for a moment or two, but that time is passed. Obamacare offered the insurance companies a business model where they were practically guaranteed to be able to increase year over year profits by 10-15% annually for the foreseeable future, and they have definitely taken advantage of it. (Obamacare requires them to submit an explanation if premiums go up more than 15% a year.) The one other cost control that passed was a requirement that they had to spend at least 80% of premiums on actual healthcare. That created an incentive to increase their spending on care by the same 10-15% growth target, which has been a massive boon for big pharma, hospitals, and other providers - giving them that same 10-15% growth rate - and they don’t even have the same 80% requirement. Before Obamacare, most hospitals were non-profit. Now, most hospitals are owned by Wall Street and are merging into giant conglomerates that are draining the pockets of the working class and the federal government. Meanwhile, doctors are leaving the profession because working for these companies is so bad. We have a massive doctor shortage in this country that keeps getting worse, and Obamacare was a big driver for that.

Yes, Democrats are pro-business.

Oh great. More thought terminating cliches. Guess what, I’m pro-business too. Bernie is almost certainly the furthest left elected Democrat in congress, and even he is pro-business. Mainstream leftists who are pushing for “full worker ownership of the means of production” are at the absolute fringes of the American left. You can find some on lemmy, but there are no popular streamers I know of, and no prominent activist leaders.

But there is a significant wing of the Democrats that constantly push for more regulation and trust busting, higher taxes on the rich, more benefits for the poor.

I guess that depends on what you mean by significant, and how much more regulation etc. This is really pretty much meaningless without specifics. It could mean almost anything. Not that I am asking for specifics because that would take the conversation in a tedious direction that is really not necessary. What I’ve been talking about is the party as a whole, specifically the party establishment / leadership. I entirely agree that there are good ideas championed by various people in the party, but those ideas will never go anywhere when they are opposed by party leadership. If party leadership opposes a primary candidate, they are almost entirely capable of killing that candidacy. The only reason they give us primaries at all is that they were forced to when massive protests were turned into riots by a Democratic fascist Chicago mayor. They much preferred the smoke filled rooms, but running a reality TV contest was an acceptable fallback. With their ability to manipulate an election process spread over months, they can pretty much get their pick every time.

Leftists refuse to vote, so the progressive wing of the Democratic party has a dramatically smaller base than it should.

This is very wrong. According to Pew, Progressives are the most reliable voting bloc, beating out even “faith and flag” conservatives. Too much MS-NBC rots your brain. This myth just comes from the Democratic establishment making excuses for their failures. Progressives are telling the establishment how to win with normie voters. It’s not progressives staying home, it’s average Americans who find Democrats insufficiently inspiring. Without a Republican driven narrative, establishment Democrats have no narrative at all.

It is entirely possible to have both a liberal economic philosophy AND a strong government to check businesses. Europe has been doing it for generations.

Europe is definitely doing it better than the US, but even they have a long ways to go. They have been moving in the same direction as the US, just slower.

The problem is Republicans - both the business interests capturing the government, and the reactionaries tearing the government down.

Republicans are absolutely responsible for the reactionaries, but they are barely ahead of the Democrats in corporate capture. The problem is both Republicans, and Democrats who are so weak that they can’t garner enough support to beat Republicans.

Doubtful. These aren’t American prisons after all.

Not that I don’t think the judiciary has been weak but, ultimately, there is very little they can do with an executive branch that decides to just ignore them. The judiciary relies almost entirely on the executive to enforce their rulings. The cops report up to the president, not the courts.

The checks on the executive are willful compliance to the judiciary or, barring that, impeachment in Congress. It doesn’t seem like we can expect either to function properly.

You don’t get to spend all day conflating liberals and neoliberals and then just de-conflate them whenever you want.

I’m personally very careful about not conflating liberalism with neoliberalism, but it’s an easy mistake to make so I just went back to check if I did that anywhere here, and there is not one instance in this whole conversation where I made it. If there was any confusion whatsoever, it was in your own head.

You damn Leftists have spent 10 years pretending that liberal = neoliberal.

Classic bad faith argument. Now I’m supposed to answer for all “damn Leftists” (thanks for finally taking the mask off BTW) over 10 years? Let’s see how you do answering for every bit of idiocy that came out of just Biden’s mouth in the last 10 years, nevermind the entire neoliberal establishment.

Neoliberals are fucking Republicans. Bush, Cheney, Romney. If you’re talking about neoliberal policy, then this whole conversation has little to do with Democrats.

Obama’s greatest achievement was the implementation of a healthcare plan designed by the same Heritage Foundation that brought us Project 2025. For the cost of fixing some truly barbaric inadequacies of the previous system, it also massively accelerated the flow of wealth in this country to big corporations. The whole point of the system was that the establishment saw populist demands for healthcare reforms as a threat, and they needed to make the smallest concessions they could while cementing the hold of capital over the healthcare system. It worked just as intended, but the discontent didn’t go away. Then there were the bank bailouts and the complete lack of consequences for bankers and CEOs that gambled with the entire economy, but that one is so easy that it almost seems unfair to mention it. If you google “first neoliberal president”, there doesn’t seem to be much disagreement about the title belonging to Carter. Clinton was arguably the most neoliberal President. Reagan presided over the biggest neoliberal shift, but Clinton took it marginally further. “The era of big government is over.” came from Bill Clinton before he drove the biggest reduction in the history of the federal safety net until (maybe) the current presidency.

So let’s get this shit straight right now: are we talking about Democrat policies and politicians, or Republican policies and politicians?

If you line up the economic philosophies of Obama and Mitt Romney, the differences are vanishingly small. Up until that point, “both sides” arguments legitimately had a whole lot of juice. The only real departure was the reliance of Republican rhetoric on selling hate. Even that was pretty recent, since the Defense of Marriage act passed in 1996 with overwhelming bi-partisan support. Biden was almost entirely on the side of Republicans for most of his time in congress. As I said above, I certainly acknowledge that he made some significant improvements in his tenure as president.

Neoliberalism and liberalism are two different things. You can’t just swap out one for the other. It’s precisely the difference between the two that ultimately result in fascism.

Wikipedia - Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.

Biden, in stark contrast with his predecessors and his own congressional record, moved away from neoliberalism. All of the good things he did were a direct result, but they were far too little and far too late, as evidenced by the routing of Democrats in 2024. Democrats tried to blame it on a global rejection of incumbents, but the lie of that is demonstrated by the one big exception, Mexico. Mexico, a far more conservative country than the US, somehow managed a successful transition from an aging male left wing leader to his chosen replacement, a younger female. The difference is that those leaders were populist left, not neoliberals. Media propaganda is just as bad in Mexico too, so that doesn’t follow either.

Digging further into the right wing takeover of media, that is a direct outcome of neoliberal policy and doomed Democratic efforts to suppress populism. For corporate media, neoliberalism allowed corporate consolidation to turn all the cable news sources into media wings of the two parties. Online media is different.

10-20 years ago the online media space was absolutely dominated by grass root progressives. Democrats and Republicans cooperated to pressure social media companies to start driving users to more “trusted” (corporate owned) media. Democrats assumed the job was done and largely disengaged while Republicans began investing in and networking right wing voices online. Again, Democrats suppressed healthy populism while Republicans fostered and tried to make use of right wing populism. Ultimately, right wing populism couldn’t be controlled and, with Trump’s assistance, it ended up overrunning the Republican neoliberals.

What you described is not an alternative to what I described before, it’s just the details of how it played out. Even now there is a lot I’m leaving out, but I’m really not looking to write a book here.

I’m going to give this one more try without the metaphor because I think this is an important point that everyone should understand.

Cutting funding to AIDS research and medical care is a very fascist thing to do, and fascist Republicans are the ones responsible for doing it. Fascists are what formal logic would label the proximate cause for the change. Events also have what are labeled as distal causes which include the broader set of circumstances that led to the event happening. In that case that would include the societal factors that led to the rise of fascism in the first place. That is where neoliberalism gets to shoulder some of the blame. Neoliberals aren’t the ones cutting AIDS funding, but they set the stage for fascists to take over.

Neoliberal policy has led (as it always does) to massive wealth inequality and a general mistrust in government. That leads to populist movements. Populist movements seek to reform “the system” to fix real or perceived injustices. They can be positive (think Bernie or AOC) or negative (think MAGA). Negative populism includes racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and all kinds of scape goating. When politicians ride negative populism into power, that is fascism.

In a society like ours with record setting inequality and a marketplace where predatory corporations are ripping people off as a regular business practice, stopping populism is like trying to stop a tide from coming in. Neoliberals (Republicans and Democrats) have been trying to do that for 50+ years. When “anybody but Bernie” Democrats crashed into MAGA and Trump, the rise of fascism and, ultimately, the end of funding for AIDS research was locked in. Democrats fought tooth and nail to suppress healthy populism, so most of the populist ferver went to supporting Trump.

Populism is here to stay, until some real reform starts to happen. As long as Democrats keep trying to suppress it, fascism will continue to benefit.

No, it’s a salient example of how (metaphoric) pneumonia kills us.

Damn. So, no right wing government exists or has ever existed will ever exist or could ever exist. What a clever model you dreamt up. No wonder you find it so easy to defend establishment Democrats. Everyone is just as good as everyone else if just put in the right context. You are certainly right about the math. It’s a pretty damn useless way to model the world though.

It’s called an analogy. Actual AIDS policy is irrelevant to my point.

But hey, “both sidez” lol

Here is something “both sides” do, thought terminating cliches.

So, half of the Taliban is left wing? Half of the third Reich was left wing? No, the center of office holders is not how we measure political leanings. You can go with political theory that defines left and right in a pretty fixed way, or you can go by the center of the population. By either of those standards, the Democrats are moderate right wing.

There is nothing particularly “stupid” about Americans. They are just flawed humans, and there is a reason for the mismatch between where they fall on issues and where they fall on (let’s call them) themes. The themes come from the narratives they receive from our two right wing parties. Ask them about particular issues and they think like individuals. Ask them about themes and they line up with the narratives coming to them from our two right wing parties.

That’s not even a proper use of that meme.

If Americans don’t wake up to the fact that both of our parties have been leading us down a road that only leads to fascism, we will just keep sinking in the quicksand.

Look at it like this. Democrats are AIDS and Republicans are pneumonia. AIDS will never be the thing that kills you, but it’s the thing that should have been addressed to avoid the pneumonia. Pneumonia will absolutely kill you, but only takes hold when there is already a broader issue.

Democrats took away our ability to effectively fight fascism, and now fascism has come for us. We might beat fascism back for a time, but failing to address the broader issue means that time will be short.

Huh? What center are we talking about? Democrats are left of Republicans (marginally before Trump, but still) but the center of office holders is a pointless measure. Issue by issue the Democrats are solidly to the right of the vast majority of the US population.