[rubecube]

Originally Posted by direwolf

That's an embarrassing defeat for team blue in Virginia. Dems better get their act together quick, or they're gonna lose everything in '22 and '24.

They also need to find a way to get Manchin and Sinema on board before those two dips***s torpedo Biden's entire presidency. That two people can have that much power and basically hold all of Congress and a country of 300 million people hostage is pretty ridiculous.

I'm still baffled as to why sane, rational people would still vote for Republicans after the insanity we've witnessed over the last few years, and yet here we are. That country is beyond screwed.

Because the Democrats have zero credibility at this point and people are rapidly losing faith in the democratic process. The result of this is almost always a rise in pro-authoritarian sentiments.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...risis-1248615/

“Austerity measures implemented between 1930 and 1932 immiserized and radicalized the German electorate,” found a#recent study#from economists and historians looking at Weimar Republic data showing a statistically significant link between local budget cuts and working-class voters’ support for the Nazi Party. “Austerity worsened the situation of low-income households, and the Nazi Party became very efficient at channeling the austerity-driven German suffering and mass discontent.”

They conclude: “Imposing too much austerity and too many punitive conditions cannot only be self-defeating, but can also unleash a series of unintended political consequences, with truly unpredictable and potentially tragic results.”

Led by President#Barack Obama, Democrats used their new power to enrich their corporate donors with a#multitrillion-dollar bailout, while throwing#stimulus crumbs#at the rest of the country. The Obama administration also#refused to prosecute#a single banker involved in the financial crisis and allowed bailout money to#subsidize Wall Street bonuses, no doubt pleasing the finance-industry moguls who funneled a#record amount#of#cash#to Obama’s campaign. Then Democratic leaders#rescinded#the rest of that bailout money before it could be used for its intended purpose: to directly help millions of homeowners going into foreclosure.

Perhaps most tone-deaf of all, Democrats mimicked what Weimar leaders did in the early 1930s — they championed an austerity agenda in the name of fiscal responsibility, launching a#high-profile initiative#to slash Social Security benefits amid an economic emergency.

Hammering Democrats for not delivering real help to the working class, Trump was buoyed by a 10-point spike in the GOP vote share in the American counties that saw life expectancy stagnate or decline, according to#research#from Boston University’s Jacob Bor.

That dynamic echoed the 1930s, when there was “a significant association between mortality rates and increasing vote shares for the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany,” according to Bor and his fellow Weimar researchers, who ultimately#concluded#that “when people are suffering, they may be more open to the siren calls of right-wing radical populist parties.”

This isn’t to directly liken Trump and his followers to Nazis. But look no further than the Charlottesville uprising, the Jan. 6 insurrection, or a typical Trump rally to know that the MAGA movement’s authoritarianism and bigotry echo some of the dark themes of the 1930s. And polls show those events are influencing public opinion —#recent survey data#suggests more than a quarter of Americans today hold views that are right-wing authoritarian.

If these cuts end up sticking, and if Biden keeps refusing to wield power to help the country, Democrats may have placated the industries that bankroll their campaigns, but they will have made it harder to convince midterm-election voters that Americans’ lives have improved under the party’s reign. Democratic candidates will be left begging voters to support them as a last line of defense of democracy against the kind of insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol earlier this year.