I’ve only lived in Germany for a year and a half so if some more experienced Germans could tell me what I’m missing and explain why things aren’t so bad that would be nice, but it seems like this country is shifting in a negative direction politically from this polling data and it scares me.
If AfD ends up being the second biggest party in the Bundestag next federal election I’ll be quite upset but that’s how it goes I guess.
I’m confident we’ll see an outright fascist win the White House here in America next year. (The marketing team won’t call it fascism of course, but it’ll be something that sounds cool and functionally the same) It’s going to be hard for Joe Biden to sell himself on reelection when everyone is living with a 30%-50% increase in their cost of living and he didn’t do anything meaningful about it. And, as you saw with Trump, my countrymen don’t care what an asshole or how corrupt a politician is if they sell themselves well as a candidate of change.
And once a fascist runs America, other countries will follow suit.
Confident doomsaying is always easy and popular on politics threads, and I just don’t buy it here. Before the 2022 midterms, commentators were just as confident that the economy (and inflation!) would hand the GOP a huge victory in Congress. Didn’t happen.
Biden’s done exactly what he said he would, which is to focus on and fight for laws and measures that have a chance of passing the US Congress. Hard to argue with his strategy.
On the economy:
Legislative record:
Every president in recent memory that had control of Congress lost it at the midterms. It happened Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. That Republicans didn’t win Georgia was due to one thing: the promise of $2000 in COVID aid, of which only $1400 actually materialized, and that is Biden (and really, all the neoconservatives’) MO. Make the promises and find a way to finagle your way out of it once you’re elected.
Yeah. Most people are working 2-3 of them to afford to live. And, as I’m sure you’re aware, consumer prices aren’t the only piece of this puzzle.
A half-measure at best, and you know it, because as with everything they do, we only have bipartisan support if the wealthy get the lion’s share of the money. That’s how it was with Obamacare and COVID relief. It’s what they do.
It seems like you’re deliberately misrepresenting things here. The so-called gun control bill’s biggest provision was to make suggestions to the states that they’re in no way bound to implement. What’s even worse is Biden could issue an executive order to cancel federal contracts for any company that sells AR-15’s to the public, and he wouldn’t need Congress to pull it off. Neither major party gives a crap about gun violence.
That totally matters in a country where marriage policies exist mostly at the state level, and the Supreme Court has already admitted they’re gunning for gay marriage next.
Now, I get it. No one wants to feel like they actually voted for the conservative outcomes that result whenever one of the two major parties is elected, but you did, and that’s not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of historical record.
My point is simple. People will remember when they’re working full-time and still can’t afford to live, and that is the reality of Joe Biden’s presidency. They’re not going to care that Trump or DeSantis are pieces of shit.
This is the only part of your comment that I take issue with. There was ample opportunity to vote for an actual progressive in the 2020 presidential primary election. We got Biden because that’s who people voted for. They could have voted for Sanders or Warren, and they chose not to. That’s a voters problem, not a party problem.
Personally, I’m reticent to blame the voters in a country where 40,000,000 of them can’t afford to miss a day of work.
And I wouldn’t call Warren a progressive except in the performative sense.
That doesn’t seem to be stopping any right-wing voters, many of whom are equally poor.
Okay, but they didn’t vote for Sanders, either.