A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:McConnell’s move, like everything he does, is calculated. First of all, it helps unite a fractious Republican base, which cares deeply about conservative jurists – and views McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland in 2016 as a moment of triumph.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?
Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
Second, it is likely to stir up the Democratic base – and confirm that Breyer needs to retire and Biden needs to fill the opening created ASAP. Which could well impact Breyer’s ultimate decision.
Breyer may announce at the end of this term – which will be at the end of this month – that he is retiring. He'll be 83 in August. But if he decides to stay on an extra year so that he can be another Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying on the job, the fight for control of the Senate next year will have epically large stakes in the Supreme Court.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Didn't answer my question, so I didn't need to be quoted.
Stop quoting people then posting unrelated shit, dummy.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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The railroads were the first great crony capitalists. They bought politicians, bribed judges, and, in Henry Adams’s phrase, turned themselves into ‘local despotisms’ in one state after another. In the 1860s, when railroads helped the North subdue the South, Congress repeatedly gave away parcels of land the size of northeastern states. Gifts to the Union Pacific were, cumulatively, equivalent to New Hampshire and New Jersey combined. By one scholar’s estimate, if all the land given to railroads in that decade were cobbled into one state, it would be the third largest, smaller than Alaska and Texas but larger than California.
https://roanoke.com/opinion/columnists/will-is-the-america-of-today-ev
en-capable-of-performing-great-building-feats/article_b37f18bc-ca4a-11eb-99a2-43d85e1e038c.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom, puts it this way: “If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.”
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.
Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.
The two parties reflected a society that was less free than today, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices, but with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties. Americans then were more uniform than we are in what they ate (tuna noodle casserole) and what they watched (Bullitt). Even their bodies looked more alike. They were more restrained than we are, more repressed—though restraint and repression were coming undone by 1968.
Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.
Part 1 about How America Fractured Into Four Parts.
Call the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other peNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
He is right about the two parties trading places though.
It's something that I've said for a LONG time here.
Funny how second seems to ignore that part of the passage he posted being a lifelong Democrat and all, innit?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:The American pie is getting so much smaller. It's no wonder Americans are primed to try and feed off of the 'other'.
Just popping this up for discussion. Those four parts don't necessarily collide; they're not mutually exclusive. This is just another brainiac-sounding way to divide people up even further.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:
SECOND:
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.
Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.
...
More about fractured American Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 at https://web.archive.org/web/20210609154909if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/
Impatient readers jump to the end of the essay: All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.
. . . we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.
This essay is adapted from George Packer’s new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603663
SECOND: Just popping this up for discussion. Those four parts don't necessarily collide; they're not mutually exclusive. This is just another brainiac-sounding way to divide people up even further.
People work for reward. Our old narratives are breaking down because we are actually living in the realm of a FIFTH narrative, one which the elites have been steadily imposing on us for decades, and that is WORK DOESN'T PAY. BECOME A CONSUMER/USELESS EATER. GO INTO DEBT. WHINGE ABOUT "OTHERS" HAVING MORE PRIVILEGE.
But here's the thing: Thr
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Quote:I will show you a map to my life: https://goo.gl/maps/SkseYXJVEMPsmGMV7
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
People work for reward. Our old narratives are breaking down because we are actually living in the realm of a FIFTH narrative, one which the elites have been steadily imposing on us for decades, and that is WORK DOESN'T PAY. BECOME A CONSUMER/USELESS EATER. GO INTO DEBT. WHINGE ABOUT "OTHERS" HAVING MORE PRIVILEGE. . . .
At one end is NASA. The other end is Taylor Lake Village where I had a house on the lake. I've talked to many people who had worked at NASA during the Apollo years. They had a purpose, a drive, a meaningful life, at least until Nixon, who didn't give a damn about the space program, other than as a way to win a few votes with aerospace contracts, killed purpose, meaning, life. America would be a much better place today if the space program hadn't lost most of its purpose fifty years ago when it shifted money to that overpriced Space Shuttle. The good old days are long gone because of politicians like Richard Nixon. He made the whole country poorer with his bad judgement, but especially he made the poorer half poorer than they could have been.
There are programs other than space that could keep America motivated and improve many poorer Americans' lives. One example: Is anybody interested in saving the world from climate change? But there is too much political opposition to that or any other thing that looks like a moonshot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Background
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?
Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?
What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?
Pobrecito
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Boy, have you got a grotch against Nixon, or what?? Nixon, you may recall, started a whole 'nother meaningful endeavor, and that was the EPA. As far as being the "big baddie" in xfering wealth to the wealthy, I think that prize goes to Obama.
Anyway, I should have picked a different word than "meaningful". I don't meaningful to the person who performs it, I mean meaningful to the society at large: People generally agree that the work is useful for society as a whole. Growing food is meaningful. Making steel, chemicals, cement, chips, cloth, glass is meaningful (or should be). Teaching and healing is meaningful. Pollution control, energy conservation, environmental remediation is meaningful. Building bridges, repairing roads, renovating houses and waterworks and pipes is meaningful. Protecting our borders is meaningful. Enforcing just laws equally is meaningful.
Much of that has been made meaningless by the elite, which is why recovering the narrative is meaningful.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:Don't blame me. I was a construction engineer building petrochemical plants here and overseas. After that, I was selling natural gas and cattle in America. All those careers are based in the U.S.A. Product is made here, or grown here, and sold here or to foreigners. But it is not possible for more than a few hundred thousand people to make a living the way I did. One class of jobs requiring many millions of working Americans: saving the world from climate change. Those millions of jobs won't be created because of political opposition to spending the money.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?
Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?
What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?
Republican policy on climate change: "Planning for our energy future requires us to first determine what resources we have in reserve. Thirty years ago, the world’s estimated reserves of oil were 645 billion barrels. Today, that figure is 1.65 trillion barrels. The more we know what we will have in the future, the better we can decide how to use it."
"The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anticoal agenda."
"The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public’s consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party. Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation."
"We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act."
"Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate."
More at www.gop.com/platform/americas-natural-resources/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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