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Originally Posted by topleybird
I buy the "no president ever popular enough with the electorate" part, but I don't think that's going to matter in the slightest
I think the path here is: this Congress doesn't pass voting rights legislation; Democrats get creamed in the midterms; the now overwhelmingly Republican Congress rubs its collective hands with glee as states pass more voting rights removal laws and continue gerrymandering, and Congress itself presumably passes all kinds of nasty shit to help; the Democrats stage Hamilton performance after Hamilton performance in protest, but somehow this never leads to them winning another position of power ever again
This feels so overwhelmingly pessimistic when I write it out that I feel like it must be ridiculous, but at the same time I've seen absolutely no sign that it isn't going to go exactly this way (perhaps the final point is a slight exaggeration)
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Nah, I'm with you. The DNC blatantly eschews any sort of populist sentiment which openly challenges neoliberal corporatist institutions. The GOP, by contrast, has convinced the masses that Donald Trump is their champion. And to be fair it's really easy to do that when your whole platform is based on not believing in anything at all.
The GOP is now waging war on ideology as a concept. They've intentionally stripped language of its meaning, specifically with respect to political discourse. These are the people who said "truth isn't truth", and "what you are seeing and what you're hearing are not what's happening". Alternative facts. If you keep changing the narrative, you're never wrong. And since objective truth is dead and buried, whatever the would-be autocrat says is truth. To a certain extent, this is the logical eventuality of a society rooted in unscrupulous sales and marketing tactics. The ultimate con has begun.
The end result is this postmodern hellscape where all symbols and signifiers have devolved into an endless precession of simulacra. The civil war they keep talking about was already waged along ideological lines, on an intersubjective stage. But there no longer can be common ground for sharing of ideas in good faith, via language, because the stage itself has been nuked from orbit. Words have been stripped of their meaning by decoupling them from anything grounded in reality.
One side believes in nothing. The GOP has the luxury of saying "government is inherently bad, everything sucks, look how shitty we're making it," with the Democrats left to make these feeble attempts to hold the pieces together, these symbolic capitulations in place of meaningful structural change, because that's their role in the "competitive" oligopoly. Fighting (or having the simple appearance of fighting, there is no difference between signifier and signified) tooth and nail to fix decrepit bridges in this country, is now perceived as "socialism".
At a certain point, we're going to be left in this ruinous nihilistic landscape, where objective reality has been so neglected that someone is going to have to put the pieces back together, and historically, that's where another Donald Trump would swoop in, but this time, someone who isn't a colossal fucking dipshit loser moron fuckface. We're looking at shortages of nurses, doctors, teachers, exploding childcare costs, crisis levels of student debt, housing shortages exacerbated by multinational firms buying up property in neighborhoods where they do not reside, stagnant wages offset by inflation when wage increases do occur, accelerated concentration and centralization of capital at all levels of the economy, climate change running rampant due to the eternal demand for 3% annual growth, and on and on down the toilet bowl it goes, as some other internet warrior dismisses these objective realties as just more noise in the sea of arbitrary, sliding value scales, just one more opinion signifying nothing...
This whole Republican-Democrat dynamic is, in the language of the business management textbooks, a "competitive" oligopoly in terms of market share, but the D's and R's are somehow more efficient at keeping the outsiders out than Coke or Pepsi. We're talking >99% market share. The Democrats pretend to believe in something. That's their role. And ostensibly, the things they are supposed to believe in are noble - parity along racial and gender lines, a basic standard of living for all, in short, a more egalitarian society, a true meritocracy, in contrast to the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer simply by birthright and propagation of mediocrity through arbitrary genealogical criteria if not outright sociopathic behavior- but most people who are halfway paying attention can see through it now, they know that our political institutions are rotten to the core. Not to be confused with "both sides are the same, I am an enlightened centrist" - there's a nuance here. That includes people who have voted Democrat their entire lives and will continue to do so, because there is no alternative other than ideology or not-ideology. Believe in something, as ineffectual as our representatives may be, even knowing they don't really want the things that they claim to want, or hand the keys over to the proto-fascists and their hedonistic nihilism. And rather than piss off their donors and lobbyists, because the real money comes when the politicians become lobbyists, they pretend to do something while doing nothing except serving as a lightning rods of ineptitude for the folks with legitimate economic grievances and not enough education to see how thoroughly beaten they are. That's the role of the Democrats - to present an illusion of choice created between those with power and those without.
So yes, I think you're correct, and I think one thing we can count on from the Democrats is more symbolic capitulations, more kabuki, as the GOP seizes more and more power by overtly flaunting objective reality as an ontological concept. If there's any alternative, I lack the vision to see how it could possibly unfold.