A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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So you're going to put it in a place where it will never be seen again; brilliant.
T
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Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father Alexander Hamilton insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.
Question: Toward the Revolutionary War’s end and immediately following it, the United States enters the so-called critical period, which sees existential threats to the fledgling country in the form of mutinies, rebellions, and economic turmoil. How did this period influence Hamilton’s thinking?
Answer: The war has contradictory economic effects. It produced widespread destruction, but it also provided tremendous economic stimulus and created an economic boom. The three armies had ravenous appetites for everything: weaponry, boots, paper, salt, livestock, fodder, firewood. This consumption drove production and investment, much of it paid for with vast emissions of paper money. All of this created an inflationary boom. But when the war ends, the economy collapses into a depression about as bad as that of the 1930s. Investment dries up, production and consumption contract, and huge often unpayable debts come due.
At the same time, a plethora of small military conflicts emerge. The governments of Georgia and South Carolina are fighting Maroons—armed, self-emancipated people of African descent living in autonomous communities. From Georgia up to the Ohio territory, Native Americans and settlers are fighting. This combat is particularly brutal in what is now Kentucky. Rival groups of white settlers clash in what is now Eastern Tennessee and in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, commercial conflicts are breaking out on the coast. New York imposes crippling tariffs on New Jersey and Connecticut. Maryland and Virginia struggle over navigation and trade on the Chesapeake.
Exacerbating all this is an environmental crisis. In 1783 there are two massive volcanic eruptions—one in Japan, the other in Iceland. The latter goes on for almost an entire year. Emissions from the eruptions create a cooling effect across parts of the Northern Hemisphere. In the Northeastern United States this means harsh winters, catastrophic springtime flooding, and cold, wet summers. All of this hurts crop yields, which only exacerbates the economic crisis.
Finally, the critical period involves brutal, deflationary, debt-fueled austerity. Congress and the states have borrowed heavily, and by the mid 1780s they’re attempting to extract enormous amounts of money from increasingly stagnant economies. Taxes go up and public spending is cut. This increases the economic burden on common people, hampers investment, constricts consumption, and drives down prices. As the value of money suddenly increases, people start hording it. Private sector investment contracts, which hurts economic growth, causing further deflation.
All of this culminates during the summer of 1786 in Western Massachusetts, where a widespread foreclosure crisis turns into an almost year-long guerrilla war known as Shays’ Rebellion. Named for Daniel Shays, who had been a captain in the Continental Army, and then helped lead the uprising, these rebel farmers actually called themselves “Regulators.” To stop foreclosures and evictions, they closed down the courts and threw out all the judges and the lawyers. State authorities attempted to muster the militia, but the units either refuse to mobilize, or mobilize and then dissolve—or, worst of all, switch sides and join the rebellion!
In desperation, the merchant elite and the government of Massachusetts create a privately funded army. During the bitterly cold winter of 1786–87 there is on and off combat including two actual force-on-force conventional battles that even involve some artillery. But mostly the fight takes the form of ambushes, small shootouts, assassinations, beatings, arrests, arson, threatening “night letters”—basically guerilla terror tactics and counterinsurgency.
As Shays’ Rebellion is being mopped up in late May 1787, the Constitutional Convention convenes in Philadelphia. The Convention is a direct response to the panoply of crises tha
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Keep in mind, during the American Revolution, the richest people in the country were all white Southern elites. This was true even as about a third of white southerners were landless, desperately poor, often semi-vagrant. (Keri Leigh Merritt’s 2017 book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, is really good on that contradiction.)
Economic life for some whites got worse between the Revolution and the Civil War:
Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass that was unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socioeconomic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these “masterless” men and women threatened the existing southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.
Download that free book at https://libgen.unblockit.ltd/search.php?req=Keri+Leigh+Merritt
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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SEOND you certainly are a dedicated poster.
T
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Quote:This is true.
Originally posted by THG:
SEOND you certainly are a dedicated poster.
The animating force of modern Republicanism is this: Democratic Party rule is an existential threat to America and is by definition illegitimate. It is a belief that explains much of what we’ve seen from the GOP in the past few decades, the glue that binds together Republicans.
There are at least three critical features of the GOP as an institution that have allowed this process to go on as it has.
First, there is the argument, offered by mainstream Republicans at the highest levels, that freedom itself is on the ballot: that the Democratic agenda is so catastrophic that it might spell the end of America as we know it.
This is something Republicans have been saying about Democratic policies — including ones common in other advanced democracies — for decades. In 1961, Ronald Reagan warned that the passage of Medicare would be the end of liberty in America: that if federalized insurance for the elderly were to become law, “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
Sarah Palin offered a more recent variant in 2009, writing in a Facebook post that Obamacare would create “death panels,” transforming the “America I know and love” by imposing “a system [that] is downright evil” on it.
In 2014, Ted Cruz claimed that Obama’s use of executive orders was creating “an imperial presidency [that] threatens the liberty of every citizen.” In 2019, the National Republican Congressional Committee — the official arm of the party responsible for House races — all but accused Democrats of being murderous Stalinists.
Hyperbole in politics is normal, of course. There are plenty of examples of rank-and-file Democratic partisans calling George W. Bush “Hitler.”
The difference is that casting the opposing party as an existential threat, a demonic force bent on destroying the very fabric of a free society, has become an accepted part of conservative rhetoric at the highest levels of the party. Yes, you’ll see an example here and there, but there is simply no comparison with how Democrats talk about Republicans; polarization in the United States is profoundly asymmetric.
These arguments do not merely attack Democratic policies; they attack the very idea that Democrats can be legitimate leaders of the American government. Among some Republicans, they bleed into baroque conspiracy theories about Democrats as individuals, explanations for how people like Obama and Hillary Clinton can support such heinous policies. Obama isn’t merely a liberal Democrat; he must be a Kenyan Muslim anti-colonial plant pushing America toward full communism.
Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their book How Democracies Die, talk of “mutual toleration”: the idea that, in a democracy, both parties respect the other one’s right to win elections and hold power. In the United States, Republicans have all but told their supporters that Democrats do not, in fact, have a right to rule — that they are fundamentally hostile to the American way of life.
More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22217696/republicans-trump-cap
itol-hill-storming-mob-responsible
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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For once I agree with Salon:
Quote:
Can we save democracy from the two-party system?
The reason the U.S. is effectively a one-party state, and only nominally a two-party one, is obvious and known to all: Democrats and Republicans serve the same masters. Whether the president is an African-American Democrat or a white nationalist Republican, he staffs his administration with representatives of the highest stratum. Power remains in essentially the same hands — CEOs from the biggest firms, bankers from the biggest banks, executives from the biggest names on Wall Street, orthodox economists, corporate lawyers, corporate lobbyists, ex-generals, etc. — people who can be trusted to serve the system that has served them. A large contingent simply moves back and forth between government and the corporate world.
Another way politicians of both parties avoid addressing tangible public needs that run counter to their patrons' interests is by pandering to nationalist vanity, a classic strategy especially effective in a country that has chosen to remain at war for the past 75 years.
(For example) Obama specialized in over-the-top flattery of the national ego that presented itself as hard truth. He used the occasion of the Nobel Peace Prize award in 2009 to boast about our many wars and violent interventions since 1941, saying they all promoted peace and security, as we had in saving Europe (single-handed) from the Nazis and Soviets. Clearly, America has been singled out to fight evil. On other occasions, Obama would talk about the kind of people we Americans are, and the kind we are not, using flattery to reassure us that whatever punitive action he had taken or was proposing was simply what our collective conscience demanded.
(And) The fantasy of American greatness was there for Donald Trump to exploit. With his MAGA and KAG (Keep America Great) rallies, Trump took pandering to near-fascist heights while leaving his campaign promises unfulfilled or taking actions directly contrary to them, and suffering no consequences at the ballot box.
Unfortunately, government social programs do not get the same welcome in Congress as requests for "national security" funding. Those programs unavoidably limit the amount of money private companies can extract from the public and that politicians can extract from the companies for their services. In other words, they "squander precious taxpayer dollars" on not-so-precious taxpayers. The media also do their part to put social programs in a bad light. Look how they seized the opportunity Trump provided to misrepresent and denigrate populism, as Thomas Frank has noted.
Long before the Supreme Court made it official, "Money talks" began to emerge as our dominant political ideology. Such a system does not require the players to be conscious of it. On the contrary, their amour propre requires them not to be. No conspiracy is called for. Politicians only have to know which side their bread is buttered on and that they and their families can get very rich through holding office. They are genuinely convinced — indeed, have persuaded themselves — that the policies that benefit them most are good for everyone.
https://www.salon.com/2021/01/09/can-we-save-democracy-from-the-two-pa
rty-system/
There's much more in the article, accessible at the link.
If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?
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Quote:There's a once-in-a-generation chance to split up the Republican Party, and what's on the leftwing menu? How to split up the Democratic Party. Sometimes I truly despair. This is just not the time.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
There's much more in the article, accessible at the link.
If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?
If one admires Sanders - and Warren and AOC and Omar and so on - why not accept their strategy? Which is NOT to split up the Democratic party or make voters disgusted with it, to the benefit exclusively of the GOP, but to pull it to the left. Why not see how remarkably successful they've been at that?
Chomsky rightfully called the Republican Party the most destructive organization in the history of mankind. Who's doing something about it? The biggest victory this past week was taking the speakership of the Senate away from McConnell. That was not achieved by armchair handwringing over the Democratic Party but by tireless on-the-ground work by Stacey Abrams and her people working the two Georgia Senate runoff elections.
Republican Party 'most dangerous organisation on earth'
1kiki, IS THAT A BIG ENOUGH DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS?
www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-39879374
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Salon is progressive/liberal. Their opinions need to be scrutinized before being accepted as the right course to follow. What they report is certainly more relievable than say, FOX.
T
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Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term. The GOP’s Electoral College advantage grew in 2020, even as Republicans lost the presidency.
More at https://www.vox.com/2021/1/11/22224700/electoral-college-joe-biden-don
ald-trump-bias-four-points-one-chart
Clinton lost in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which tipped the electoral college map in Trump’s favor. Trump’s margin of victory in those three states? Just 79,316 votes. And in 2004, John Kerry lost to George W. Bush by losing Ohio by a little over 118,000 votes. The elections are getting closer and closer, year by year. That is a wonderful advantage for the GOP. They will own the White House with a probability around 50% of the time. 50% is the GOP's probability in 2024 and it matters not at all who the GOP runs or how well Biden performs his duties. The winner will be decided randomly, not logically or reasonably.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/hillary-clinton-margin-loss-vo
tes
Americans can't accept that Presidential elections are random events caused by the silly design of the Electoral College. Trump certainly couldn't accept the randomness, the unknowableness of Presidential elections. When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version. Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. He and his voters believe they can know ahead of time who will win, but it is not possible when the Presidential election is really 50 smaller elections, not one great big election (with a possible runoff) as it is for every other office in the United States.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2021/01/10/post-truth-is-pre-fascism/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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