stickdog99 wrote:But at least you have to ask if he is a neocon. You don't even have to ask that question about those who are in control of the Democratic party. At least Trump will sometimes pretend that he thinks that war, censorship, inflation, and corruption are bad things. Democratic party leaders clearly don't.
I think this is overwrought and frankly skewed. "War, censorship, inflation, and corruption" sounds like a laundry list of complaints looking for a universal perpetrator. I don't think inflation belongs on the list, because the administration—the progressive corners of the administration at the FTC & DoE antitrust division—have taken historic measures to curb outsized pricing power & inflation. That went under-reported, of course, because the private equity owners of US news media were the very targets of the antitrust lawsuits & regulatory actions (in other areas of their vast holdings).
It's in this area of financial regulation that a Republican regime is likely to be especially destructive, setting the stage for another major financial crisis.
The GOP is always more corrupt, just going by conviction rates in Republican administrations vs. Democratic administrations (the difference is oddly stark). I think that's just the nature of the longtime GOP
big-business/finance first ideology; those sectors invite the most corruption. The Democrats are catching up, but they have more do-gooders.
With regard to war, the point of my post was that The Blob, essentially neocon, always wins. I've heard the lie "there were no wars under Trump!" many times, but The Blob actually stopped Trump from starting wars, and got him to expand the US role in Syria. The Blob got its way, and I think anyone hoping that this time will be much different will be disappointed.
If the Democratic party actually believed its own rhetoric about Trump, why didn't they offer voters anything other than "Don't Worry; Be Happy" to stop him?
Because 50 years of billionaire-funded organization & propaganda has infected every corner of life with "trickle-down" ideology that sees any government role in the economy as "interference in free markets" and some kind of slippery slope to Maoism.
I think no other factor has been more powerful in steering the Democratic party (and the public mind) away from the politics of full employment and toward the "trickle-down" right. With the (assumed) dependency on campaign contributions from the financial elite, control by the financial elite is assured.
I now think the USA will have to hit bottom before it realizes and accepts that it has a problem. An authoritarian, deregulatory, budget-slashing regime will certainly hasten that. All *I* can do is watch and take notes.
