General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This short video might inspire you, and it will certainly inform. Also, goodbye and good luck. [View all]Sarah Ibarruri
(21,043 posts)this country - the entire country stupidly and grotesquely went right wing in the 80s, with Reagan the evil clown. No matter who said what about what, the population just went right along with rightwingerizing everything as if it were funny and amusing, and confirmed it in the polls each and every time by electing right wing a-hs. We are now still living in the resulting cesspool.
I don't think the U.S. has the same options as Europe. Europe has multiple political parties, for example. Perhaps it's because Europe has been to hell and back, and has been in really rough situations, with very right wing governments having put in place multiple right wing rules, that they are extra cautious about right wingers taking control, and they allow other parties, from the Communist, to the Green, to whatever.
The U.S., on the other hand, is geographically isolated from everything, has suffered little (it considers, for example, 9/11 to be horrific because it didn't live through any world wars in its own skin), and thinks of itself as the undisputed king and controller of the world precisely because that isolation has helped it avoid confrontation and it hasn't had to ponder much.
It is true that the people here can't protest easily for the reasons I mentioned (it's a country of sprawl and on wheels which creates horrible distances, and it has work laws that threaten workers with losing jobs if they miss work or protest something at work, etc.). However, those that can protest if they want to, either don't, or won't, preferring instead to sit in front of a reality show or have a few beers and wait for some magic wands to be waved around and fix everything. They leave the effort to protest to a few hundred that do show up, if that many. Let those few hundred knock themselves out while I sit here and have my ice cold beer!!, seems to be the attitude.
A case in point is the Democrats. As we sit on our keisters and expect politicians to force through legislation without any support from us except lots of whining, we see absolutely nothing wrong with that. Fact is, politicians need support. Republican politicians have always received support, emotional, grassroots, and all kinds, from their constituents. Democratic politicians just end up with only a handful of supporters and a few whiners who want their bidding to be done without having to lift a damned finger. Politicians aren't magicians. All of them need need a strong constituency's support, and I'm not talking about donations of money, either. And because it's hard to protest and defend and back our politicians, Democrats just don't, except for a few. Instead, most Democrats just get online and whine and whine and whine.
Just the way I see it.