A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Real talk about FDR
Big progressive change has always involved massive compromise
By Matthew Yglesias | Jun 09, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/real-talk-about-fdr
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of the most important presidents of American history, a man who stabilized the economy during the Great Depression, laid the foundations of the social safety net, won World War II, invested in public infrastructure and beyond. So it’s no surprise that he’s often held up by contemporary progressives as a model for how to get things done, including in progressive publications like The Nation. Nor is it particularly surprising that the Roosevelt Institute is the name of a leading think tank on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
At the same time, I can’t help but think that the actual historical Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a much more complicated figure than the iconography would suggest.
He was, like everyone who gets things done in politics, a fundamentally pragmatic person who cared a lot about things like winning elections and building political coalitions. That meant, in his case, a lot of bowing to reality on the cultural issues of his time. These days, essentially every conference I go to features some procession of speakers who talk about how Democrats need to be pragmatic but also that we can’t just “abandon our values.” But on certain issues, FDR really did ruthlessly abandon progressive values. In some instances, he did this in ways that I think were tough-minded and admirable and that contemporary progressives should take more seriously as a model.
But in others, he did so in ways that make me profoundly uncomfortable and seem clearly much too far. Mass internment of Japanese-Americans, for example, really was more of a major historical crime than a concession to political reality.
I’m not arguing for FDR’s cancellation. But I do think it’s important to recall the complexity of history and the complexity of politics.
It’s relatively easy to find historical activists or writers whose ideas are uncomplicatedly admirable — people who took principled stands that were ahead of their time and helped shift long-term public opinion in a better direction. But nothing happens without practical politics, and practical politics is a fundamentally ugly business. It’s hard to know, really, how to definitively judge historical figures. But whatever you make of FDR’s choices, it’s just not the case that he’s a model of uncompromising progressive governance. The impulse on the left to claim him as such despite the facts is telling about the basic unworkability of the purist approach.
FDR’s devil’s bargain with segregation
Probably the biggest example, in terms of both scope and significance, is the way the political power of the midcentury Democratic Party depended on hard-core segregationist politicians elected from the Jim Crow South.
Almost every white person at that time had ideas and attitudes about race that would be considered retrograde today. But FDR was not simply a person of his time.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Economics expert pinpoints the exact moment in 2012 when 'America went to hell'
Geography was more important than we thought.
By Tod Perry | June 16, 2025
https://www.upworthy.com/economics-expert-pinpoints-the-exact-moment-i
n-2012-when-america-went-to-hell
America has never been a perfect place, but since the Civil War, it has been one where most people bought into the idea of the country and supported the institutions that keep it running. People may disagree on politics and culture, but when America was threatened, whether it was 9/11 or World War II, people came together to fight for the country they love, even though the reasons may have differed.
However, it’d be naive to say that sentiment is still as strong as it once was. Since The Great Recession, many people have felt that the vibes are off in America, and polls and research back those feelings. Right around 2012, when smartphones became ubiquitous, there was a considerable rise in the number of people who felt that America was on the wrong track and that racism and sexism were considerably worse than they were just a year before. There was also a big spike in mental illness.
So what happened in 2012? Did the world suddenly become drastically worse overnight, or had our perceptions been changed?
Why does it feel like America is on the decline?
Other developed countries have experienced similar vibe shifts since 2012, but it has hit America the hardest. Economics blogger Noah Smith explains why this feeling of malaise has hit America so hard, and he illustrates it perfectly in a viral Substack piece called “Social media destroyed one of America's key advantages.” Smith is an American blogger and commentator on economics and current events and former assistant professor of behavioral finance at Stony Brook University.
In his Substack post, Smith postulates that the technological change hit America the hardest because it punctured our geographical buffers. “A hippie in Oakland and a redneck in the suburbs of Houston both fundamentally felt that they were part of the same unified nation; that nation looked very different to people in each place,” Smith writes. “Californians thought America was California, and Texans thought America was Texas, and this generally allowed America to function.”
Why did America fundamentally change in 2012?
Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s piece. Please check out the entire piece on the Noahpinion Substack.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/social-media-destroyed-one-of-americas
Quote:It may sound cynical to believe that America was a better place when people were less likely to talk to people with a different worldview. But, given how things have gone in the past 15 years, it’s fair to say that putting every American in a proverbial ring to fight it out just makes everyone feel under attack... and the fight never ends.
Like some kind of forcible hive mind out of science fiction, social media suddenly threw every American in one small room with every other American. Decades of hard work spent running away from each other and creating our ideologically fragmented patchwork of geographies went up in smoke overnight, as geography suddenly ceased to mediate the everyday discussion of politics and culture.
The sudden collapse of geographic sorting in political discussion threw all Americans in the same room with each other — and like the characters in Sartre’s No Exit, they discovered that “Hell is other people.” Conservatives suddenly discovered that a lot of Americans despise Christianity or resent White people over the legacy of discrimination. Liberals suddenly remembered that a lot of their countrymen frown on their lifestyles. Every progressive college kid got to see every piece of right-wing fake news that their grandparents were sharing on Facebook (whereas before, these would have been quietly confined to chain emails). Every conservative in a small town got to see Twitter activists denouncing White people. And so on.
The problem with the Like button
Another developmen
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Harvard and your Anti-American "intellectuals" working there.
If they love the Chinese so much, I suggest they all move to China.
Maybe it would be good for them. They could get a real taste of what they're trying to turn America into.
You understand nothing. You’re anti education. Do you understand what that says about you? What you’re telling everyone about yourself? That you are anti knowledge. Anti being well read. Anti competent, aware and skilled.
You say you are a jack of all trades. Hey dummy, you knew nothing until you learned. Until you educated yourself and acquired the skills. And that Gilligan applies to all life skills. Too bad your education ended where it did. You might have amounted to something. But it did end and you didn't.
You’re not a genius like you said in one of your posts about when you were young, you’re a moron. Big difference, big difference. Hurry now, try to find where I misspelled words. Too funny...
T
I'm not anti-education. I'm anti-indoctrination.
I bought my house with cash when I was 32 years old and haven't held a single cent of debt since I was 25 years old. Virtually retired now for going on 15 years.
Don't talk to me about "success", mutt. You keep living your sad little life alone in that shitty little apartment because you spent your entire adult life buying shit you didn't need and paying interest and high taxes just to be able to keep paying those bills. Meanwhile you have no family or friends that care a lick about you and your time on earth has almost run out.
Your life sucked. Your life continues to suck. And when you're gone there will be nobody there to mourn you because your dead whore of a mother is already dead and everyone else you ever knew hates being around you.
You are a complete failure.
It’s always the same with you. Your entire understanding of the world revolves around buying your house and debt, if it can be believed.
You possess zero sophistication, zero worldliness.
You keep defining my world even though you know nothing about me Jack. What’s my name, Jack?
You have a need to project onto me what you perceive to be a dismal existence. An existence you created because I don’t post all my personal shit here.
Like hospice’s and how my mother died. It’s like I said Gilligan. This site for you is about therapy, revenge and forgiveness. Only to start the process over again. You’re chasing your tail here. Get some real help before Trump, your fearless leader, takes away your health care. Why, because you voted for him. Another brilliant decision.
And since you are not smart enough to figure it out for yourself, I'll clue you in. If you post in chat, that shit disappears.
T
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At the end of the weekend, your party is still dead, you have no friends or family and you hate America.
That's all anybody needs to know about you Ted.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you described yourself and every Trumptard I know. You Trumptards have daily lives so very fucked up and you think being fucked up is normal, that everyone including the Libtards, live that way. It is not a secret, but the less that a Libtard shares with the coping mechanisms, the strategies people use to manage difficult emotions and situations, of Trumptards, the longer the Libtard lives.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
At the end of the weekend, your party is still dead, you have no friends or family and you hate America.
That's all anybody needs to know about you Ted.
A little window into 6ix's experience of life in America. Top-most comments are the most recent, and the bottom-most comment is the oldest:
6ixStringJack: Sorry to hear about your friend's mom. Sounds like you guys are pretty tight. That's how it was with my friend's dad. I spent more time with him than either of his sons the last few years of his life. I feel bad for my buddy because his life was nothing but chaos at the time and he didn't spend nearly enough time with his dad. But nobody knew that it was happening except for his dad, who kept all of that to himself until he got the bad news that it was terminal. He'd been living with cancer for years and taking care of it without even letting his family know about the diagnosis.
6ixStringJack: Its a shame that people judged you like that when your mom was passing. Everybody has their opinions and most people cant keep them to themselves. I haven't seen my mom or step-dad for probably over 5 years at this point. Not since they moved to Florida. We talk on the phone maybe 3 times a year now. There's probably a good chance that I never see them again, so I'm not really worried about it. I hope it's quick when it happens though. I don't want her to suffer.
6ixStringJack: Had my grandma's kids known that it was a murder drug, I don't think they would have been so quick to give it to her. That's not how it was sold to them by the lying doctors. There were plenty of lesser drugs in that kit like codine and similar stuff, but we jumped straight to the murder drug because that's what the doctors and the hospice nurse told them to do.
6ixStringJack: I hope that 17 years on you don't think about it too much anymore. It's only been 2 and I know I think about it way more than I should, but I don't think about it as much as I used to. It was just made worse with my friend's Dad dying 6 months later, and he was the most positive person I had in my life. 2 very important people died that year and I just haven't been doing what I need to do ever since. Kinda buried myself in projects and keeping my mind as busy as I can.
6ixStringJack: Sounds like you mom and my grams basically had the same diagnosis. That was the 6-months-to-a-year diagnosis. Outside of a hip surgery and glaucoma surgery a few years prior, she was never in the hospital for anything and rarely ever got sick. She quit smoking in her early 40's and all of the sudden she got sick and it was stage 4 lung cancer.
6ixStringJack: My dad and uncle didn't do anything. Then again, they had just around the same relationship with their mom as I do with my own, so I can't judge. I did things for my grandma that I would never do for my own mom. Fortunately, my step-dad's kids and my brother's wife are rich, so I think she's going to have a pretty nice time of things in her last few months when that time comes without me needing to be involved. My old man is rather well set up too, so I should be good there.
6ixStringJack: My grams was pretty overweight by the end. My aunt took a few weeks off of work and was ready to take a leave of absense, and I was there every night with her. If you had asked me only 1 week before that I would never be caught dead wiping anybody else's butt or even helping out with that process, but it's amazing what you do in the moment for the ones you love. It was a rough week without
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In Trumptard country, they die young (Expressing Personal Freedom by smoking and over-eating and getting drunk)
Century-Long Study Reveals Startling Differences in Life Expectancy Across U.S. States
By Yale University | June 16, 2025
https://scitechdaily.com/century-long-study-reveals-startling-differen
ces-in-life-expectancy-across-u-s-states/
Published in JAMA Network Open, the study found that some states, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast, saw big improvements in life expectancy. But others, particularly in the South, showed little to no progress over the entire century.
The researchers pointed to California and Kentucky as examples of how local health policies can influence mortality rates. California was an early adopter of smoke-free workplace policies in 1995, which led to entire generations of young people growing up in smoke-free environments, as well as generations of working-age adults who were prompted to quit, the research said.
In contrast, Kentucky essentially made no effort to control cigarette smoking, resulting in higher cigarette use and, therefore, higher mortality compared with California. Similar patterns for smoking and higher mortality were observed in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the study said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Speak Our Truth
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, faggot.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By Jerry Cayford | Jun 17, 2025 6:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/speak-our-truth.html
I was always attracted to that old dichotomy: people must be either stupid or lying when they claim to believe some obvious falsehood. This dichotomy is a staple of Democratic theorizing about our political culture. (Sometimes the choice is between stupid and evil, which amounts to the same.) For example, Adam-Troy Castro’s social media classic “Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters Are Stupid?” has been circulating since halfway through Trump’s first term. https://brucegerencser.net/2019/05/why-do-liberals-think-trump-support
ers-are-stupid-by-adam-troy-castro/ But this simple dichotomy is losing its appeal. It is just not plausible that tens of millions of ordinary Republicans — our neighbors, friends, and families — are stupid or evil. There have been many proposed explanations of this puzzle: information siloes hide the obvious from otherwise intelligent people; tribalism exerts a powerful evolutionary draw. I believe, though, that there is a different and hidden complexity here.
. . .
Perverse consequences follow bad thinking. Twenty years ago, in the difficult Iraq war terrorism and torture cases, we established that courts have oversight of government actions even in Guantanamo and black sites. It should be laughable today to suggest that any executive action on American soil is beyond judicial review. Lawyers should be threatened with contempt of court for daring to claim such a thing before a judge. Yet exactly this immunity from review is relentlessly claimed by the Trump Administration.
. . .
In that old picture, we look at reality, call a spade a spade, everyone sees what’s true, and then we fight about values. But that’s a fantasy. We have all been in enough political arguments to know that this is not how they go. Republicans do not breezily grant the charges, but rather dispute them: that statement was ironic; this action is reasonable when seen in context; that one was distorted by the media; this one is done by your side, too; and so on. Every word of every charge will turn out to be elastic and debatable.
An exchange between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Bernie Sanders (recounted in “R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise” (New Yorker) by Daniel Immerwahr) shows how these partisan disputes really go:
At the confirmation hearing, Bernie Sanders invoked “sixteen studies done by scientists and doctors all over the world saying that vaccines do not cause autism.” Kennedy was unfazed. “Look at the I.O.M. assessment of those sixteen studies, Senator,” he replied, referring to the Institute of Medicine.
Sanders batted this away. “You have said, ‘The vaccine was the deadliest vaccine ever made.’”
“The reason I said that, Senator Sanders, is because there were more reports on the system,” Kennedy explained, referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which collects self-reported data. “There were more reports of injuries and deaths than any, than all other vaccines combined.”
Sanders continued: “You disagree with the scientific community that—”
“Oh, I just, I’m agnostic, because we don’t have the science to make that determination.”
Immerwahr’s article puts questions of “epistemology” — how we know what’s true — at the center of our political problems: “Kennedy’s rise represents a growing epistemological rift in the country. Increasingly, ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t just describe divergent political judgments but also sealed-off understandings of what is true and how we know it.” He does not try seriously to defend that thesis, however, and mostly documents the difficulties that experts, policymakers, and all of us — left and right — have deciding what is true. And really, the two sides do not have d
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Nobody cares. Your party is dead. The Legacy Media is dying. Anyone you're posting will not be employed within the next 3.5 years.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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I don’t want to be Mr. Wet Blanket Scold, yelling at Democrats to stop talking about immigration.
But I do wish all these members of Congress making a show of demanding entry to ICE detention facilities and hoping to provoke conflict and news on this question could take a minute to think. Picking fights with Trump is smart. Making news is smart. Being confrontational in selective ways is smart. But if it’s possible to be smart and creative about picking fights and making news, shouldn’t it be possible to be smart and creative about picking fights and making news on Democrats’ best issue (Medicaid cuts)? Can’t you make news at a hospital facing closure if these cuts go through? Visit a clinic providing care to the poor? I liked this effort.
It’s not, again, that the ICE visits are bad. But they offer a reminder that it’s possible to put effort into your political messaging and try to get attention for things, and yet the attention-getting instinct seems largely absent around this reconciliation bill. Where are the protests? Where are the stunts? This bill is deeply unpopular, and yet massively undercovered despite being objectively important.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-parliamentary-cities
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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