I just think it pretty clearly isn’t the only way to fight established power when we saw a person that was hated by most establishment powers at the time of his first election and who spent half the money campaigning ended up beating them. Sure, he was obviously not interested in real change, but the fact is they didn’t want him in and he got in anyway. Americans are done with neoliberalism and are desperately looking for alternatives. Even worse ones…

I don’t entirely agree.

While I don’t agree with the way Congress is arranged with a clearly establishment-favoring Senate, we shouldn’t take this to mean there’s no such thing as a tyranny of majority as we’ve literally seen it play out historically many times. Look at Jim Crowe laws passed by majority white populations that harshly kept black Americans down for years up into living memory. Or anti-gay laws… tyrannies of majority 100% happen and it’s a big reason why we have specific Constitutional rights that try to prevent it. Groups using democracy as a cudgel to smack down other groups certainly happens though. I would agree that the Senate is more about preserving current power structures than actually trying to prevent that though.

I also just don’t agree at all that Biden wanted Trump to win… I think this is a hammer looking for a nail and seeing one, honestly. We just aren’t going to agree on that point and aren’t going to see each other’s point of view, and we’re not going to be able to prove hidden intentions, so I’m not sure this point is worth harping on. What I would say is that as Democrats and Republicans are both neolibs, Democrats would sooner see a Republican elected over someone they deem to be an actual threat from the left.

Then why aren’t you out there doing it?

Second part first, agree totally. I don’t mean to suggest Trump truly represents some sea change against neoloberalism… but his rhetoric was very much a rejection of a lot of it. He’s absolutely a liar in terms of actually representing change from the status quo… he’s a pure kleptocrat, plain and simple. But the point is that facade is what resonated with people because even those without the knowledge base or words to form why they’re over neoliberalism, are very much over neoliberalism. Regular people, not, not just political nerds.

First part, hard disagree because it informs strategy on how to move past it. If you believe both sides are colluding to keep the masses down and there’s no real electoral path to improvement… well, we’re at the stage of violent revolution and there’s no point faffing about further. Neither of us are out there with rifles yet, so I’d argue neither of us really, truly thinks that’s the case yet. Because that actually does happen in places like Gaza, and for good reason - they literally have no other recourse. We’ve got the table tilted against us, but ultimately we can and do upset the institutional power still. Trump, while he didn’t represent real change, was absolutely totally rejected by institutional power in his initial run and managed to win by establishing a faux-populist cult of personality… that literally could not have worked if electoralism was truly totally dead.

100% not a psy-op or collusion. They really just both bought deeply into the shift to neoliberalism in the 80’s, and it has so defined politics for the last 4 decades that few politicians have wrapped their heads around the fact that the continual rejection of both parties by the people is really a rejection of that neoloberalism that we’re clearly in the death throes of. Trump succeeded not because every person who voted for him was a racist (I mean, that’s definitely a big cadre among his supporters, but it isn’t what got him in), he succeeded because people are so desperate to end the neoliberal norm that’s crushing everyone that they’ll vote for a guy that literally soft-pedals fascism over another neoliberal.

But I really do think the majority of them are true believers. They’ve been born and raised in that politically environment. It’s all they know and they really can’t imagine anything else, even if it’s really only been a few generations ago that things looked very different.