I literally do blame the Democrats for Trump, and if you don't, you weren't paying attention.
Plenty of us were critiquing Clinton's campaign on those merits and were consistently talked down to in shocker the same way we're being talked down to now. Shocker, she lost. I remember saying a few weeks before the election "We're about to get Brexited." I put my vote down for Clinton, because Trump is fucking insane, and that was clear before he was President. It was clear in the fucking 1980's.
Being able to critique our leaders is supposed to be what is the difference between us and conservative voters. They're the cult who unquestioningly believes all the bullshit that comes out of Trump's mouth and diapers. I find it weird that people think we should be more like them in regards to our leaders like that would be a good thing.
It was sweeping reform. Just because we are far from having something good doesn’t mean this wasn’t sweeping reform that fixed some huge problems.
The Dems in Congress had an asshole preventing them from doing more but they went as far as they could go, they wanted to go farther, but they moved things forward, not just rhetorically but legally. And it was something people had tried and failed to do at all for decades. Because some of the things that were addressed are off the table, the conversation moved towards going further in the right direction, instead of spinning in circles with the same conversations we were having in the 90s.
I see too many people on Lemmy who say this stuff about how the Democrats had a supermajority and sat around, and they are wrong on the time they had and they are wrong on the facts of how they used their time. I don’t know if it’s because they were too young to follow it at the time, they’ve completely forgotten, or they are intentionally skewing the facts to suit an agenda. But I’m so tired of seeing it.
100%...people also forget that the blue dog coalition contained people like Joe Lieberman who would not vote for any bill that contained a public option.
I get that hindsight is 20/20 and really Obama's coalition likely should've just nuked the filibuster...but this was in early 2009. Not everyone knew how unhinged the Republican party would become during Obama's tenure.
This was 2009. A significant number of people had been describing the GOP as fascists under Dubya.
I'm sure you could find a significant number of people describing Reagan as fascist as well and in a way none of them were wrong, but in another sense they all were. It was a slow erosion of norms, trust, a deepening corruption, and changing actors that were more and more unhinged, and it only really seems obvious that it was headed this direction in retrospect.
And there are still people claiming on this very site today that calling the 2024 GOP fascist is abusing the word.