A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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SECOND

Friday, June 18, 2021 5:27 PM

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

I think people need to rethink their assumptions about the US and its various levels of government, and what they should and should not be focused on.

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1KIKI

Friday, June 18, 2021 7:07 PM

I've already posted my priorities at least a dozen times. I had 2.




I think it would be really interesting if people were able to choose broad categories for how their tax dollars get spent when they filled out their 1040's. I wonder how much would go to the military. Or to fossil fuel company subsidies.

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SIGNYM

Friday, June 18, 2021 10:38 PM

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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

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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.

But here's the thing: Three (and a half) of the four narratives actually overlap. You can create a unifying narrative out of them if you want something for America, BUT IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU WANT.

Do you want

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