the US will just incrementally move further and further right
This is just historically inaccurate. The US has been moving left (on average) since the late 1700s. The US was founded as a slave state in which property owning whites were the only ones who could vote for representatives and only representatives could elect the president. The US committed genocide against the native peoples and annexed territories by imperial conquest. There was no such thing as labor rights until the unions took them barely 100 years ago. We’re still making progress, but not without bumps along the way.
needs a healthy cleaning from the inside out
How?
Seems to me there’s 2 options, the constitutional way and the violent revolution way. So far in our history, the violent revolution way has been started quite a few times and it usually gets stamped out or enough concessions are given that it simmers down. Of course you can’t forget that the biggest one was an unsuccessful right wing revolution, better known as the Civil War.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The cruel joke of it all is that a “moderate” Democrat in year 4 is guaranteed to produce an extremist Republican in year 8. We played this game after Nixon, got a four year reprieve, and then landed on 12 years of Reaganism. We got force-fed Clinton by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party and he immediately shat the bed in the '94 mid-terms, after passing… what? A deficit reduction bill that did nothing to improve the lives of his liberal base?
That’s not even getting into Democrats who are actively hostile to their base voters. From your Jim Justices (who straight up turn coat the day after the election) to your John Fettermans (who mostly just scream and cry about anti-semitism now) to your Kristen Sinemas and Bob Menendezes (fully sold out to corporate interests from inside the party) to your Henry Cuellars and John Whitmires (actively complicit in the Trump regime’s ongoing ethnic purge in his home state of Texas) to your Charlie Crists and Michael Bloombergs (literal former Republicans who become Democrats and then just cost the party elections for the next ten years).
These are the slop candidates the party offers up every two years. I don’t actually know if they’re “better” than Republicans when they all govern exactly the same.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours ago
I believe those slop candidates are actually overall worse. They prevent the US from going into a charged enough state to enact actual change. They are the pacifier that keeps people inactive.