I had a recent experience with a bunch of Zoomers. They had serious knowledge gaps that reflected the civics and history classes they never got. It was, at most, a minimal handicap.
When I mentioned something, their phones would whip up, they'd start typing, and each would read off something significant about whatever I'd mentioned. By the time the phones went down, they had decent comprehension and usually I'd learned something new.
From what I saw, we don't need to worry about the Zoomers.
To me, there's a different, HUGE demographic out there that we are ignoring. I travel a lot thru the white part of America, and when I can, I'll pose these five goals to anyone willing to talk. Most people I speak to don't vote, and the rest are split 50/50, but almost everyone agrees with my five goals, which are nothing but Bernie's platform with the details removed.
First, US laws must apply the same way to everyone.
Second, Government should not tell people how to live
Third, I only want my tax dollars spent where I save money or make money.
Fourth, We need taxation, education, and health care systems that a normal person can understand.
Fifth: Every kid that qualifies for trade school, apprenticeship, or college should be able to go.
These are Progressive goals, with the details boiled off the bones. I rarely hear disagreement.
Great bullet points. I would only quibble with how tax dollars are spent. In so many cases, our taxes need to help the downtrodden regardless of profit motive. It's a moral imperative. And sometimes the government DOES need to tell stupid people how to live -- by not dying! Seatbelts, stop signs and vaccines come to mind.
I had the same reservations, which is not to come down on Stabilizer, who makes excellent points. People must be told what to do in many cases, or more correctly, what NOT to do. The guiding principle for this, though, must not be someone's religious prejudices, etc., but careful analysis of the common good and wellbeing of the community. and the environment. There must be ample space for public feedback on all such issues. But people should not be free to spray their gardens and fields with RoundUp (the shit should be banned) or put a septic tank in a wetland, etc. Government is the only body with the facilities to enforce such restrictions. On the other hand, if I'm gay and want to marry a person I love of the same sex, or I'm a woman and I want autonomy over my own body, or I have a non-typical gender or other identity, such things do NOT concern the government in any way
Exactly! Details matter. Progressivism is, and should be, constantly defined and/or redefined to reflect a higher, selfless morality and the common decency required in a civil society, pinned to science and ongoing reality -- universal ideals rather than some stubborn, individual ideology based on nothing but one's traditional "faith" in unchangeable thought processes and mercurial feelings.
You are assuming details. Tax dollars spent on homeless people save me money, so spend them. Tax dollars helping those who need help save me a little money, but mostly they make a nice profit, so spend them. Telling someone how to safely drive a vehicle is hardly telling them how to live. Telling someone to get vaccinated is never a total fiat. Austria allows citizens to skip vaccination. They cannot leave the house except one shopping period a week all the selfish people are allowed to shop at shops that decide to remain open. Seems great way to handle it, except I'd like a requirement of a forehead tattoo that says "Too dumb to vaccinate".
"Again" ...I missed the point?Lol -- such passive aggression.
Glad you clarified, since i don't read minds and only respond to one's written words. Like I said: quibbling.
Also, in my book (of government), it IS telling people how to live by not acting stupidly to put one's own life in danger as well as others, which is the whole idea behind seatbelts, stop signs, vaccines, and such. No?
For instance, please don't smoke in my presence, since you are polluting the air I breathe, causing me great harm, putting my life in danger. I can think of a long, long list of ways a government should tell their citizens how to live, and also of an equally long list of why it shouldn't. Details matter in fleshing out generalities, which is the deeper point.
One of our greatest history teachers and a mentor to many individuals involved in our state department and a key mentor to Bill Clinton - who wrote a powerful history of the modern world and america, in terms of America wrote that every election is always decided by ...
Thanks Thom for this hopeful perspective. One of the speakers at a recent Bioneers Conference addressed her potential for a brigher future:
America is battling for its soul. There’s a darkness over the country that can be characterized by gloom or hope: “Is this the darkness of the tomb – or the darkness of the womb?”
“Although we’ve mounted a powerful resistance to tyranny, injustice and violence during the Trump era, with 202[2] in sight, we need more than resistance. We need to birth a new America. The extraordinarily passionate and effective civil rights attorney, faith leader and activist Valarie Kaur shares why she’s convinced that what our times demand is Revolutionary Love. It’s an orientation to life and our movements that harnesses all of the body’s emotions—grief, rage, and joy—and calls us to our highest bravery. We need to reclaim love as a form of sweet labor—fierce, demanding, and life-giving —and draw from the wisdom of the midwife: when in labor, breathe and push!"
We can't let the oligarchs bury our democratic experiment. We must bury them!
It’s a hopefully sentiment, but probably too early to be sure. Cycles in history or economics may well exist, and people have suggested ones that are from a few months to several centuries long, but one has to be careful not to cheery pick the data too. America had terrible depressions in many other years besides 1857 and 1929 (though to be fair these were often on a 20 year cycle until the federal government took more control of the economy). And the parameters change! Life expectancy has more than doubled since the American Revolution, so presumably the average age of people active in government and economic affairs has also gone up.
That said, I do notice with many of my college students (often in their 20s and 30s) that they want to study environmental science. They know and understand what is happening to the earth. Also when I’m substitute teaching in junior or senior high schools the kids just don’t care about each other’s races or religions. And they are so connected to the world and can see (if not always completely grasp) other cultures. Such things give me hope and on that basis you may well be right. Like the shift from Eisenhower to Kennedy, the current generation of older people won’t stay in power that much longer and more open minded people may gain power.
Thanks for bringing up "The Fourth Turning" today, Thom, and again for your bringing the Strauss & Howe book to my attention several years ago. I've read it three times...and took a deep dive into it. So I'm going to try to offer a slightly different take on what you are calling "The Great Forgetting." I have a slightly darker view of this 4th Turning that has regularly occurred every 80 or so years since the War of the Roses in England in the 1400's. The key factor that caught my attention when studying this book was the fact that our generation, Thom, the Boomers--called generically by the authors the "Prophet Generation"--was for some reason the catalyzing group in their later years that caused the 4th Turning to occur. This generation starts out as "prophets" but ends up causing a cataclysmic mess--for reasons I'll get into shortly. But first, just consider who has been the leader of our recent surge in facism--Donald J. Trump, a Boomer. And what generation do Putin, Erdogan, & other autocrats around the world belong to? Who went BIG for Trump in 2016 & 2020 & 2022? Our generation--the Boomers ! Our generation !
No, we did NOT FORGET what happened in the Great Republican Depression nor WWII--our knowledge and adherence to the facts were OVERRIDDEN by the personal interests of our Boomer generation--unleashed big time by Ronald Reagan's "Greed is Good" mantra in the 1980's...eh? And here is where I'm puzzled why Strauss & Howe did not delve into the dichotomous forces at play throughout all six of their Fourth Turnings--and clearly point out that these crises come around every 80 years or so due to the dueling forces in the human psyche of authoritarian vs. egalitarian sentiments. As I view it now, the small-self-centered, immature, violent-oriented part of our human nature comes to the fore during the 4th Turning and causes the egalitarian part of our society--the youth--to fight back. Also missing from their book, the authors failed to make the huge point that the outcomes of all 6 of those 4th Turnings have been a score of 6 for the egalitarians and 0 for the authoritarians. Wow! Really Great ! Eh? Of course, the authors also pointed out that future outcomes--like an investment in the stock market--are not guaranteed to be the same. But like you, I'm encouraged that Gen Z is engaging in this struggle and really helping to tip the balance toward the egalitarian side. I tip my hat to AOC for her spot-on highlighting this fact--and the possibility of a brighter future of sharing & caring....vs. dividing & killing....if all of us fight for it together.
" ... due to the dueling forces in the human psyche of authoritarian vs. egalitarian sentiments." - Glen Brunner. Thanks for sharing such a concise and thought-provoking analysis.
Human nature is infinitely complex and expanding exponentially, much like the universe itself -- staggering proportions, astonishingly violent, forever unknowable, opposing forces of gravity and energy that somehow have produced the most delicate yet tenacious of all things: life! Our very existence is the deepest (and most wonderful) of mysteries.
...And death, our constant companion, the flip side. But when we're alive, why not just give in to it fully, the energy flowing all around us, the "brighter future" that's here right now, this instant, if we would only pull back the curtain in our minds, individually and collectively? The possibilities are endless.
Maybe it just takes about eighty years for Homo sapiens to come to the big forks in the long road of evolution: psychologically, to either follow the path of death or take a chance with life, a risky gamble to say the least. But really, that choice is also our constant companion.
One of my favorite bumper stickers is an image of Buddha that says, "Let that shit go." Another one is, "I'm going to hell in every religion." (The latter has nothing to do with anything -- just thought it was funny }:--))
This is so inspiring, and raises our awareness so much. I have thought about how i can be helpful to zoomers and will continue to so - through writing, discussion, music and history lessons. Literature. But somehow getting involved in their world. I hope part of their world is a recognition that big tech and big data must be demonopolized and decentralized so as not subject to control by power elite and business concerns. (Stuff like mastodon may be a good sign of whats possible for networking socially).
But we have to help Zoomers recognize and rid society of so many corruptions, just look at crypto investing as an example of scam mentality dominating.
Tom its critical to have work like yours where the focus is on learning and is potentially on everything out there in the world and not just in the crazy stuff tucker or lindsay or trump said yesterday.
We can point zoom is to C-SPAN and link to a 1985 program in which Ralph Cippoline and Carl Sagan testified before the U.S. Senate about climate change. We can point out that the head of the committee in the Senate was republican senator Durenberger who also proposed an "economic bill of rights" similar in scope and details to the one proposed by FDR when he called political opponents of such a thing "fascists".
We can point out that today's Democrats don't seem to support any such kind of economic bill of rights.
I am very concerned that the two party system is frustrating everyone's attempts and otherwise applicable trends that enable this 80 year transformation to take place.
I don't agree that a constitutional amendment is necessarily relevant to achieve more three party elections, at least as to federal elections, Because the elections clause in article 1 is broad enough or can be interpreted as being broad enough to require three candidates and run-off voting in all federal elections because it allows Congress to regulate the "manner" of elections. This is precisely the biggest secret that the power elite don't want anyone to know they want us to except the stupidity system without question and they simply cannot fathom what it would be like if there was some third-party on the stage in the debate making it seem completely irrational when one party says there should be no national healthcare system, for example.
Again Thom you've been so helpful and right on top of things when you got focused on the voting issues and your recent book....
I was so angry when I read the brynovich arizona (us s ct) decision because I had seen on the day it came out Pete Williams the mild-mannered MSNBC man on the street who explained to everyone with a series of points written on the screen that most of the restrictions in Arizona that the Supreme Court upheld were either already in place or weren't that significant .....then I went and read the case and saw how alito basically took a whole series of Warren court decisions about democracy and ignored all of them stood them and basically wiped out the whole conception of democracy as a fundamental right.
So for weeks we are sort of this election as being "democracy on the ballot" yet we have lovely individuals like Jen psaki (her P is silent) telling us on cnn television that what voters really care about in this election is .... crime!
As a radical Boomer I’m pulling for the Zoomer generation to end this nightmare and perhaps lead us to a better world. I sure hope so. That said I too was fascinated a bit with the Fourth Turning, but to tell you the truth it kinda reminds me of numerology and kabbala.
I just don’t believe ideas and events end or begin in cyclic, although my mind tends to want to find the death of Queen Victoria and that of Queen Elizabeth as being a Turning and therefore harbinger of events to come. You know like another horrific world war killing tens of millions for no good reason than to satisfy the ego of insane people.
No generation escapes the statistics. A certain percentage will be psychopaths, sociopaths, thieves, liars, religious nuts, and abusers of every stripe. The difference will always be in knowing what to do about them, discovering what creates them, and having the courage to confront them.
I am certain there are turnings, and we are watching one happen.
Perhaps it has to do with the generation at the beginning of the period refusing to give up. Boomers were one of the most divided generations EVER. But, those of us who loved our hippy values did not lose them. We melted into the work force and kept fighting the status quo and the phony societal conventions we shed earlier.
Zoomers will have those stats concerning people to deal with just like everyone else. Their advantage will be in the science, communication, and free information available. They are going to need to use it wisely, we are about to hit the 8 billion mark.
This is most likely because of the US 2-party system: Both parties are 100% funded by large global and US corporations; the labels Democratic and Republican are mere deceptive PR strategies to lull 'lazy' voters into a hopeful voting pattern believing in the respective temporal election promises.
Both Presidents Clinton and Obama were servants of Corporate America and lulled us 'The Voters' into believing that they were 'Servants of the People.'
Now we are looking at Mr. Hartman's clever analysis of the 80-year cycle, and perhaps we should look at the 'distractions' of such engineered events as the Ukraine War, the Covid Re-set and the odd events surrounding the US Endless War historical scenario without, of course, falling into the sad labeling of calling anyone adherents of conspiracies. One might just look at the confluence of money flows and profits between 1980-2022, and compare that, perhaps, to similar historical eventsof the Gilded Age of the 1920-30s leading up to WWII. The financial manipulations between American and European investors between WWI and WWII are matters of history, but also subject to the 80 year cycle of a 'Harddrive' wipe of our collective memory https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/americans-who-funded-hitler-nazis-german-economic-miracle-eger
Thus the astute questioning all responsible adults should be doing as we-lemmings are marched over the cliffs is, perhaps: Who has been making the money in the 2019-2022, and who is selling the next profit scenario for our collective masters?
Looking at the US 2022 Mid-Term elections it would be worthwhile to tally up the percent of legislators, state and federal that voters simply re-elected, again. Instead of never voting for any incumbent legislator. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates
Like Mr. Hartman I have had the blessings of living and working in many of the world's cultures and market places, and I am praying every day that America and its voters will not go the way of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini et.al., and find a governance balance that will respect the needs of both urban and rural communities.
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama both own a significant responsibility for the 1980-2020 reign of corporate governance, and it would be foolish to assume their Democratic heirs are not making similar deals with the Devil(s) like Mr. Clinton made with the Glass-Stegall repeal and the Obama care no-solution.
Just look at how Senators Murrary and Durbin are serving their pharmaceutical corporation masters by trying to make personal healthcare more expensive https://anh-usa.org/durbin-anti-supplement-bill/
Why every fourth generation? Arnold Toynbee, it is said, had the answer to that:
“When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
It takes 80 years, he argued, for what Daniel Quinn called a “great forgetting” to happen, forcing a society or nation to learn its lessons all over again.
We repeat mistakes we don’t remember. Or make even worse mistakes.
If there had been a single senator in the Senate in 1999 when Phil Graham suggested doing away with Glass-Steagall, arguing that it was no longer needed because it had worked so well, they would’ve laughed him out of the building. But all the people in the Senate in the 1930s — when Glass-Steagall saved our nation from the banking crisis of the Republican Great Depression — were long dead. Almost 80 years had passed.
The very definition of an internet conspiracy theorist is one who cherry-picks favorable articles that seemingly lend credence to the biased dirt targeted at groups of marginalized people and perceived enemies -- in this case, liberals and the Democratic Party as a whole. Easy targets. Demonizing Democrats has been a class project in Republican Party dogma writ large for decades. Now, at this late juncture, they've gone full tilt boogie. Of course they have.
When it comes to equal-opportunity bashing of Democrats, notice that it's always the description never the substance; always the bad and the wrong, seldom a good word to be found; always the ugly warts, never the cure, never the beauty; all the scandals, never the many great accomplishments, never in the context of realpolitik and what's actually possible with all the give-and-take complexities in extreme human nature playing out in the stratosphere, when one party or the other holds the reins of ultimate earthly power -- you know, all the real-life consequences when it's the wrong party, people getting hurt, suffering, dying by the droves. When right-wing ideology pervades the land, we all suffer the dire consequences.
It's all the rave on the right, unchained nutballs with guns, some with Hitler mustaches, open fascism with classic Mussolini poses to boot. In direct opposition is a people's democracy in representative form, as the Constitution intended, imperfect but striving to be better. With average Joe Republican nowadays, though, it's never an honest, counterposing argument, never an in-depth analysis of their party's much greater sins, violating both the letter and the spirit of our laws and our basic principles with deliberate, despicable lies. The propagandists have kicked the dump truck into high gear at Karl Rove speeds, accusing their enemies of their own transgressions, robbing the best arguments and flipping the narrative, the oldest disinformation tactic in the book.
But most important is an imperative of blind (some would say willful) hypocrisy to "own the libs." Always the lie, never the truth. When pressed, a conspiracy wingnut's typical alternative, mostly unworkable "solutions" are so way out there that one has to wonder what happens to a human brain sucked into the "inter-tubes." Is it like getting spaghettified in a black hole? Scary stuff when considering that a good third of the citizens of the most advanced (hahahaha) nation on Earth, numbering in the tens of millions, are running buck-ass naked in the streets, dripping snot and pulling at wild hair, howling at the moon like zombies on steroids.
One could say that the firehose rhetoric is fast and furious on both sides, and that would be true. (Lol, I plead guilty as hell.) The burning question, though, is do mere words -- symbols of deeper realities -- reflect truth or lies? That's the soul-searching question we must pose to ourselves, which naturally is a most difficult thing to do in life. But failure is how we learn and grow, beyond all the rhetoric.
In effect, like it or not, we have a two-party system. So choose a side, the right side next time around! Make a real difference; change life for the better for everyone. Instead of just whimpering like lost puppies in the snow about all the injustice surrounding them, looking inside from the outside, come on in and be part of a party on the move, changing with every vote, growing in popularity, while the "other" party of liars, traitors, and fools sinks into mean-spirited irrelevance.
America can do this. We can kick big money out of our House, our Senate, our presidency, and all of our state governments, which is just as vital as the national politics if not more so. We have to gang up on the really bad guys. Too much is at stake not to show a united front in the face of this juggernaut of greed infecting both major parties, largely thanks to the really fckd Supreme Court decisions by corporatized wingnut justices, as Thom endlessly points out.
Politics is war by another name without the guns. When people give up on "the system," however screwed it may be, instead of trying to fix it, anarchy ensues, and that's when the guns come out. People lose faith in democracy at a fundamental level. Is that really where we're going at this point in history when the world is burning up both figuratively and literally? Don't we need some semblance of actual representative democracy to survive, to have any chance of saving ourselves from ourselves?
Evidently, these are fundamental questions that Republicans (mostly) have lost sight of -- the very threads holding the tapestry of our multi-racial/cultural/religious democracy together for god sake! Right now, that means joining the Democrats, hold your nose if you must, and simply out-vote the moneyed-up bastards stealing our wealth who are the true enemies of democracy.
(By the way, yes, the moneyed interests at the top of the pyramid do control the Republican Party nearly 100 percent, but the big guys also play both sides of the fence as insurance and own a sizable chunk of the Democratic Party too. Of course they do. Still, the rampant corruption of sell-out Democrats like Manchin and Sinema (among many) is certainly not 100 percent as casually purported, even though that might seem symmetrical in the usual, made-up, logical-fallacy, both-sides argument.)
This late in the game, there's not much time and opportunity left to mitigate the evils of human nature spreading around world? The clock is close to midnight on every front.
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" - Yogi Berra (Haha, sorry, couldn't resist.)
Far be it for me to pour cold water on Democratic schadenfreude -- God knows a little positivity and levity at the well-deserved expense of Republican arrogance and overconfidence is always a welcome relief in the otherwise gloomy zeitgeist and liberal angst over elections, also well-deserved. Sometimes politics can be fun even in defeat.
Therein lies the rub: Losing Congress, either one or both houses, is a major defeat for Democrats no matter how the results are sliced and diced and reimagined. Sure, it could have been worse -- a lot worse! -- but it's a huge loss nonetheless, irrespective of the seemingly miraculous bucking of historical trends in midterms for the supposed "party in power," meaning primarily the White House, since Congress is mired in hopeless gridlock and promises to remain so for at least another two years.
Rightly or wrongly, Democratic "leaders" succeeded in scaring the crap out of their voters to whip them to the polls, the drop-off boxes, or the Post Office -- whatever, just vote goddammit! Of course, they were greatly assisted by rabid Republicans who just couldn't help themselves in pissing-off most normal human beings who still possess functioning brain cells.
So that worked. Now, it's on to 2024. Can Democrats improve their learning curve even further with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and cohorts fully transforming the "people's house" into an open-air cesspool of toxicity, which will make the first two years of the Biden Administration seem like a kumbaya moment of bipartisan tranquility? As they say, strap in, because it's gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
So, Democrats need to keep mainlining fear and anger ...because it works! Unfortunately. Ask a Republican. Hope does too, just not as much. Sorry for being cynical.
Here's the real crisis of democracy and a crisis that was not caused by only Republicans. In fact, this core crisis is being propagandized by you Thom Hartmann, Joe Biden, the liberal media and the Democratic Party. Oh, and in this clip there is one of your lies dispelled when you were shouting me down as spreading Putin's propaganda. Sad to see you become a part of American Empire in order to save Biden's presidency and cover for the militarism and poor judgment of Democrats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fTxHIVUjRc
I'm sure you won't look at the link. And personal attacks are all I hear from Biden liberals, just like the Trumpers. Are you able to address the issues that I am trying to bring to the fore, or like Thom Hartmann will you accuse me of being a propagandist for Putin? As for "bitchin'," I have spent countless hours canvassing and phonebanking for Democratic Party candidates who do not take corporate PAC money as that is the only answer to the corporate alignment of both political parties that is destroying our government and nations around the world.
It's tit-for-tat bitching, blogging on a blog that bitches about Republicans. The trouble is that one bitch is mired in truth, the other in lies. It's up to the voters to figure out which is which by employing common sense, in short supply these days.
If you look at the link the truth is that the Democratic Party is the McCarthy Party, blindly supporting a proxy war with Russia, direct confrontation with China, and destruction of sovereign nations around the world with no room in that party for any dissent or critical thinking. And a liberal base that thinks that losing the House against a degenerate political party is some sort of great accomplishment. What is wrong with this picture of "democracy?"
Not certain about this but one thing is for sure - democrats are part of 2 party system, which means they dont support any voting, candidates, primaries, etc that arent in the interest if their party having control over candidates.
Here in Ground Zero of the democratic failure - New York State - we have traded in ny-17 a black gay green-new-deal supporting member of Congress for a corrupt Republican head of the republican machinery in New York State. And sean p maloney barely campaigned here, had no discussion of issues, no get out the vote drive at all.
For some reason I can't "like" your honesty but unlike the vast majority of "team blue" members on this board you have hit the nail on the head. They refuse to see it because...well...evil Republicans, Putin and Trump are all that matters.
Hit what nail on the head, that Democrats are evil, bad, no good, out of touch with the base, bad for Democracy, yada, yada?
One thing is certain though: As a lifelong member of "team blue," I for one refuse to see "it" -- YOUR interpretation of OUR party, almost like through the lens of "team red" -- the party of traitors and prophets of false religion and fake democracy, actively destroying real democracy with outright lies. But only a token nod to all of that wingnut bullshit from the good doctor in long screeds against the Democratic Party.
Selective critical thinking is no thinking at all.
Well my friend I'll continue my work for Democratic Party candidates who do not take corporate PAC money and to implement a national health care system, which Democrats continue to actively work against, and you continue your work from your end. Hopefully we will have some time before the health care system collapses and our coasts are underwater before those who leave no room for dissent lead us to World War III.
Oh, so now Democrats are responsible for starting WWIII?! Jesus F. Christ, gimme a fckng break!
Today's Ukraine-Putin disaster was the direct result of the truly idiotic actions of one Donald John Trump, the COVID mass murderer, and the shameless, boot-licking acquiescence and huge failure to act by the Trump-owned Republican Party when it was their time to step into the breach and do the right thing and impeach the rotten sonofabitch! Twice they had their chance and twice they failed the American people and failed the world.
Not a peep, which was a big green light for Trump's BFF to do whatever the fck he wanted in Ukraine. And so he did.
But in the selective re-reading of history by the haters of truth, it's all on the evil Democrats for not abandoning a whole continent of allies to the tender mercies of the world's worst dictator just because he rattles his rusty sabers.
Weak. Very weak! In the eyes of Putin who only backs down when forced, trump was a godsend. Giving into bullies is one way to guarantee WWIII.
But yeah, keep trying to change the history of who's responsible for what. That's always helpful for a serious discussion in the search of a real solution. The crisis in Ukraine was a 100 percent joint operation between Trump, Republicans, and Putin from the get-go.
But they lost the election "bigly" and handed the whole shit show to Biden, blaming him and the Democratic Party for the predictable consequences of the Republicans' own gross stupidity and negligence and shocking foreign policy naivete.
Thank God for Biden in repairing the damage Trump did to our NATO alliance and for mobilizing the rest of the world in opposition, stopping a murderous dictator from overrunning Eastern Europe. Can you imagine the utter carnage had our own murderous dictator stolen the election as planned? Thank God for Democrats whipping up their voters.
Your sentiments are fine, but your arithmetic is garbage. You are miscounting generations. The silent generation was the group that gave birth to the boomers, but you are placing them too late in time. Boomers are thought of as 1946-1964. Look at the Pew article please and don't send out messages that do not make any sense. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/
If older people would actually engage in conversation with younger people, they would soon discover that up-and-coming progressives eschew the labeling of new generations by older generations.
I had a recent experience with a bunch of Zoomers. They had serious knowledge gaps that reflected the civics and history classes they never got. It was, at most, a minimal handicap.
When I mentioned something, their phones would whip up, they'd start typing, and each would read off something significant about whatever I'd mentioned. By the time the phones went down, they had decent comprehension and usually I'd learned something new.
From what I saw, we don't need to worry about the Zoomers.
To me, there's a different, HUGE demographic out there that we are ignoring. I travel a lot thru the white part of America, and when I can, I'll pose these five goals to anyone willing to talk. Most people I speak to don't vote, and the rest are split 50/50, but almost everyone agrees with my five goals, which are nothing but Bernie's platform with the details removed.
First, US laws must apply the same way to everyone.
Second, Government should not tell people how to live
Third, I only want my tax dollars spent where I save money or make money.
Fourth, We need taxation, education, and health care systems that a normal person can understand.
Fifth: Every kid that qualifies for trade school, apprenticeship, or college should be able to go.
These are Progressive goals, with the details boiled off the bones. I rarely hear disagreement.
Great bullet points. I would only quibble with how tax dollars are spent. In so many cases, our taxes need to help the downtrodden regardless of profit motive. It's a moral imperative. And sometimes the government DOES need to tell stupid people how to live -- by not dying! Seatbelts, stop signs and vaccines come to mind.
I had the same reservations, which is not to come down on Stabilizer, who makes excellent points. People must be told what to do in many cases, or more correctly, what NOT to do. The guiding principle for this, though, must not be someone's religious prejudices, etc., but careful analysis of the common good and wellbeing of the community. and the environment. There must be ample space for public feedback on all such issues. But people should not be free to spray their gardens and fields with RoundUp (the shit should be banned) or put a septic tank in a wetland, etc. Government is the only body with the facilities to enforce such restrictions. On the other hand, if I'm gay and want to marry a person I love of the same sex, or I'm a woman and I want autonomy over my own body, or I have a non-typical gender or other identity, such things do NOT concern the government in any way
Exactly! Details matter. Progressivism is, and should be, constantly defined and/or redefined to reflect a higher, selfless morality and the common decency required in a civil society, pinned to science and ongoing reality -- universal ideals rather than some stubborn, individual ideology based on nothing but one's traditional "faith" in unchangeable thought processes and mercurial feelings.
You are assuming details. Tax dollars spent on homeless people save me money, so spend them. Tax dollars helping those who need help save me a little money, but mostly they make a nice profit, so spend them. Telling someone how to safely drive a vehicle is hardly telling them how to live. Telling someone to get vaccinated is never a total fiat. Austria allows citizens to skip vaccination. They cannot leave the house except one shopping period a week all the selfish people are allowed to shop at shops that decide to remain open. Seems great way to handle it, except I'd like a requirement of a forehead tattoo that says "Too dumb to vaccinate".
Again, you are missing the point.
"Again" ...I missed the point?Lol -- such passive aggression.
Glad you clarified, since i don't read minds and only respond to one's written words. Like I said: quibbling.
Also, in my book (of government), it IS telling people how to live by not acting stupidly to put one's own life in danger as well as others, which is the whole idea behind seatbelts, stop signs, vaccines, and such. No?
For instance, please don't smoke in my presence, since you are polluting the air I breathe, causing me great harm, putting my life in danger. I can think of a long, long list of ways a government should tell their citizens how to live, and also of an equally long list of why it shouldn't. Details matter in fleshing out generalities, which is the deeper point.
This cant be emphasized enough:
One of our greatest history teachers and a mentor to many individuals involved in our state department and a key mentor to Bill Clinton - who wrote a powerful history of the modern world and america, in terms of America wrote that every election is always decided by ...
who does NOT vote.
See tragedy and hope by carol quigley
Darkness of the Tomb OR Darkness of the Womb?
Thanks Thom for this hopeful perspective. One of the speakers at a recent Bioneers Conference addressed her potential for a brigher future:
America is battling for its soul. There’s a darkness over the country that can be characterized by gloom or hope: “Is this the darkness of the tomb – or the darkness of the womb?”
“Although we’ve mounted a powerful resistance to tyranny, injustice and violence during the Trump era, with 202[2] in sight, we need more than resistance. We need to birth a new America. The extraordinarily passionate and effective civil rights attorney, faith leader and activist Valarie Kaur shares why she’s convinced that what our times demand is Revolutionary Love. It’s an orientation to life and our movements that harnesses all of the body’s emotions—grief, rage, and joy—and calls us to our highest bravery. We need to reclaim love as a form of sweet labor—fierce, demanding, and life-giving —and draw from the wisdom of the midwife: when in labor, breathe and push!"
We can't let the oligarchs bury our democratic experiment. We must bury them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIrl_Ob0jvg, 2019 Bioneers conference.
YES!
It’s a hopefully sentiment, but probably too early to be sure. Cycles in history or economics may well exist, and people have suggested ones that are from a few months to several centuries long, but one has to be careful not to cheery pick the data too. America had terrible depressions in many other years besides 1857 and 1929 (though to be fair these were often on a 20 year cycle until the federal government took more control of the economy). And the parameters change! Life expectancy has more than doubled since the American Revolution, so presumably the average age of people active in government and economic affairs has also gone up.
That said, I do notice with many of my college students (often in their 20s and 30s) that they want to study environmental science. They know and understand what is happening to the earth. Also when I’m substitute teaching in junior or senior high schools the kids just don’t care about each other’s races or religions. And they are so connected to the world and can see (if not always completely grasp) other cultures. Such things give me hope and on that basis you may well be right. Like the shift from Eisenhower to Kennedy, the current generation of older people won’t stay in power that much longer and more open minded people may gain power.
Thanks for bringing up "The Fourth Turning" today, Thom, and again for your bringing the Strauss & Howe book to my attention several years ago. I've read it three times...and took a deep dive into it. So I'm going to try to offer a slightly different take on what you are calling "The Great Forgetting." I have a slightly darker view of this 4th Turning that has regularly occurred every 80 or so years since the War of the Roses in England in the 1400's. The key factor that caught my attention when studying this book was the fact that our generation, Thom, the Boomers--called generically by the authors the "Prophet Generation"--was for some reason the catalyzing group in their later years that caused the 4th Turning to occur. This generation starts out as "prophets" but ends up causing a cataclysmic mess--for reasons I'll get into shortly. But first, just consider who has been the leader of our recent surge in facism--Donald J. Trump, a Boomer. And what generation do Putin, Erdogan, & other autocrats around the world belong to? Who went BIG for Trump in 2016 & 2020 & 2022? Our generation--the Boomers ! Our generation !
No, we did NOT FORGET what happened in the Great Republican Depression nor WWII--our knowledge and adherence to the facts were OVERRIDDEN by the personal interests of our Boomer generation--unleashed big time by Ronald Reagan's "Greed is Good" mantra in the 1980's...eh? And here is where I'm puzzled why Strauss & Howe did not delve into the dichotomous forces at play throughout all six of their Fourth Turnings--and clearly point out that these crises come around every 80 years or so due to the dueling forces in the human psyche of authoritarian vs. egalitarian sentiments. As I view it now, the small-self-centered, immature, violent-oriented part of our human nature comes to the fore during the 4th Turning and causes the egalitarian part of our society--the youth--to fight back. Also missing from their book, the authors failed to make the huge point that the outcomes of all 6 of those 4th Turnings have been a score of 6 for the egalitarians and 0 for the authoritarians. Wow! Really Great ! Eh? Of course, the authors also pointed out that future outcomes--like an investment in the stock market--are not guaranteed to be the same. But like you, I'm encouraged that Gen Z is engaging in this struggle and really helping to tip the balance toward the egalitarian side. I tip my hat to AOC for her spot-on highlighting this fact--and the possibility of a brighter future of sharing & caring....vs. dividing & killing....if all of us fight for it together.
" ... due to the dueling forces in the human psyche of authoritarian vs. egalitarian sentiments." - Glen Brunner. Thanks for sharing such a concise and thought-provoking analysis.
Human nature is infinitely complex and expanding exponentially, much like the universe itself -- staggering proportions, astonishingly violent, forever unknowable, opposing forces of gravity and energy that somehow have produced the most delicate yet tenacious of all things: life! Our very existence is the deepest (and most wonderful) of mysteries.
...And death, our constant companion, the flip side. But when we're alive, why not just give in to it fully, the energy flowing all around us, the "brighter future" that's here right now, this instant, if we would only pull back the curtain in our minds, individually and collectively? The possibilities are endless.
Maybe it just takes about eighty years for Homo sapiens to come to the big forks in the long road of evolution: psychologically, to either follow the path of death or take a chance with life, a risky gamble to say the least. But really, that choice is also our constant companion.
One of my favorite bumper stickers is an image of Buddha that says, "Let that shit go." Another one is, "I'm going to hell in every religion." (The latter has nothing to do with anything -- just thought it was funny }:--))
This is so inspiring, and raises our awareness so much. I have thought about how i can be helpful to zoomers and will continue to so - through writing, discussion, music and history lessons. Literature. But somehow getting involved in their world. I hope part of their world is a recognition that big tech and big data must be demonopolized and decentralized so as not subject to control by power elite and business concerns. (Stuff like mastodon may be a good sign of whats possible for networking socially).
But we have to help Zoomers recognize and rid society of so many corruptions, just look at crypto investing as an example of scam mentality dominating.
Tom its critical to have work like yours where the focus is on learning and is potentially on everything out there in the world and not just in the crazy stuff tucker or lindsay or trump said yesterday.
We can point zoom is to C-SPAN and link to a 1985 program in which Ralph Cippoline and Carl Sagan testified before the U.S. Senate about climate change. We can point out that the head of the committee in the Senate was republican senator Durenberger who also proposed an "economic bill of rights" similar in scope and details to the one proposed by FDR when he called political opponents of such a thing "fascists".
We can point out that today's Democrats don't seem to support any such kind of economic bill of rights.
I am very concerned that the two party system is frustrating everyone's attempts and otherwise applicable trends that enable this 80 year transformation to take place.
I don't agree that a constitutional amendment is necessarily relevant to achieve more three party elections, at least as to federal elections, Because the elections clause in article 1 is broad enough or can be interpreted as being broad enough to require three candidates and run-off voting in all federal elections because it allows Congress to regulate the "manner" of elections. This is precisely the biggest secret that the power elite don't want anyone to know they want us to except the stupidity system without question and they simply cannot fathom what it would be like if there was some third-party on the stage in the debate making it seem completely irrational when one party says there should be no national healthcare system, for example.
Again Thom you've been so helpful and right on top of things when you got focused on the voting issues and your recent book....
I was so angry when I read the brynovich arizona (us s ct) decision because I had seen on the day it came out Pete Williams the mild-mannered MSNBC man on the street who explained to everyone with a series of points written on the screen that most of the restrictions in Arizona that the Supreme Court upheld were either already in place or weren't that significant .....then I went and read the case and saw how alito basically took a whole series of Warren court decisions about democracy and ignored all of them stood them and basically wiped out the whole conception of democracy as a fundamental right.
So for weeks we are sort of this election as being "democracy on the ballot" yet we have lovely individuals like Jen psaki (her P is silent) telling us on cnn television that what voters really care about in this election is .... crime!
Marc s
As a radical Boomer I’m pulling for the Zoomer generation to end this nightmare and perhaps lead us to a better world. I sure hope so. That said I too was fascinated a bit with the Fourth Turning, but to tell you the truth it kinda reminds me of numerology and kabbala.
I just don’t believe ideas and events end or begin in cyclic, although my mind tends to want to find the death of Queen Victoria and that of Queen Elizabeth as being a Turning and therefore harbinger of events to come. You know like another horrific world war killing tens of millions for no good reason than to satisfy the ego of insane people.
BTW happy anniversary to you both!
Yes, happy anniversary to Louise and Thom! (yesterday)
No generation escapes the statistics. A certain percentage will be psychopaths, sociopaths, thieves, liars, religious nuts, and abusers of every stripe. The difference will always be in knowing what to do about them, discovering what creates them, and having the courage to confront them.
I am certain there are turnings, and we are watching one happen.
Perhaps it has to do with the generation at the beginning of the period refusing to give up. Boomers were one of the most divided generations EVER. But, those of us who loved our hippy values did not lose them. We melted into the work force and kept fighting the status quo and the phony societal conventions we shed earlier.
Zoomers will have those stats concerning people to deal with just like everyone else. Their advantage will be in the science, communication, and free information available. They are going to need to use it wisely, we are about to hit the 8 billion mark.
Thank Heavens. I have been so frightened for our Democracy. Now we have a chance🙏
Our much celebrated Democratic president Clinton abolished the protections we had in the Glass-Steagall legislation that had protected us since 1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation. Later, after the 2008 global crash he protested loudly that his actions had nothing to do with the following crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation.
This is most likely because of the US 2-party system: Both parties are 100% funded by large global and US corporations; the labels Democratic and Republican are mere deceptive PR strategies to lull 'lazy' voters into a hopeful voting pattern believing in the respective temporal election promises.
Both Presidents Clinton and Obama were servants of Corporate America and lulled us 'The Voters' into believing that they were 'Servants of the People.'
Now we are looking at Mr. Hartman's clever analysis of the 80-year cycle, and perhaps we should look at the 'distractions' of such engineered events as the Ukraine War, the Covid Re-set and the odd events surrounding the US Endless War historical scenario without, of course, falling into the sad labeling of calling anyone adherents of conspiracies. One might just look at the confluence of money flows and profits between 1980-2022, and compare that, perhaps, to similar historical eventsof the Gilded Age of the 1920-30s leading up to WWII. The financial manipulations between American and European investors between WWI and WWII are matters of history, but also subject to the 80 year cycle of a 'Harddrive' wipe of our collective memory https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/americans-who-funded-hitler-nazis-german-economic-miracle-eger
Thus the astute questioning all responsible adults should be doing as we-lemmings are marched over the cliffs is, perhaps: Who has been making the money in the 2019-2022, and who is selling the next profit scenario for our collective masters?
Looking at the US 2022 Mid-Term elections it would be worthwhile to tally up the percent of legislators, state and federal that voters simply re-elected, again. Instead of never voting for any incumbent legislator. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates
Pairing this data with voter participation many may despair at our collective ability to vote rationally and effectively in our own best interest https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_elections
Like Mr. Hartman I have had the blessings of living and working in many of the world's cultures and market places, and I am praying every day that America and its voters will not go the way of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini et.al., and find a governance balance that will respect the needs of both urban and rural communities.
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama both own a significant responsibility for the 1980-2020 reign of corporate governance, and it would be foolish to assume their Democratic heirs are not making similar deals with the Devil(s) like Mr. Clinton made with the Glass-Stegall repeal and the Obama care no-solution.
Just look at how Senators Murrary and Durbin are serving their pharmaceutical corporation masters by trying to make personal healthcare more expensive https://anh-usa.org/durbin-anti-supplement-bill/
The Democratic Party has lost a huge section of voters working against the millions of people who now vote with Alternative Practioners https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/according-new-government-survey-38-percent-adults-12-percent-children-use-complementary-alternative-medicine.
Mr. Hartman's citations:
Why every fourth generation? Arnold Toynbee, it is said, had the answer to that:
“When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
It takes 80 years, he argued, for what Daniel Quinn called a “great forgetting” to happen, forcing a society or nation to learn its lessons all over again.
We repeat mistakes we don’t remember. Or make even worse mistakes.
If there had been a single senator in the Senate in 1999 when Phil Graham suggested doing away with Glass-Steagall, arguing that it was no longer needed because it had worked so well, they would’ve laughed him out of the building. But all the people in the Senate in the 1930s — when Glass-Steagall saved our nation from the banking crisis of the Republican Great Depression — were long dead. Almost 80 years had passed.
The very definition of an internet conspiracy theorist is one who cherry-picks favorable articles that seemingly lend credence to the biased dirt targeted at groups of marginalized people and perceived enemies -- in this case, liberals and the Democratic Party as a whole. Easy targets. Demonizing Democrats has been a class project in Republican Party dogma writ large for decades. Now, at this late juncture, they've gone full tilt boogie. Of course they have.
When it comes to equal-opportunity bashing of Democrats, notice that it's always the description never the substance; always the bad and the wrong, seldom a good word to be found; always the ugly warts, never the cure, never the beauty; all the scandals, never the many great accomplishments, never in the context of realpolitik and what's actually possible with all the give-and-take complexities in extreme human nature playing out in the stratosphere, when one party or the other holds the reins of ultimate earthly power -- you know, all the real-life consequences when it's the wrong party, people getting hurt, suffering, dying by the droves. When right-wing ideology pervades the land, we all suffer the dire consequences.
It's all the rave on the right, unchained nutballs with guns, some with Hitler mustaches, open fascism with classic Mussolini poses to boot. In direct opposition is a people's democracy in representative form, as the Constitution intended, imperfect but striving to be better. With average Joe Republican nowadays, though, it's never an honest, counterposing argument, never an in-depth analysis of their party's much greater sins, violating both the letter and the spirit of our laws and our basic principles with deliberate, despicable lies. The propagandists have kicked the dump truck into high gear at Karl Rove speeds, accusing their enemies of their own transgressions, robbing the best arguments and flipping the narrative, the oldest disinformation tactic in the book.
But most important is an imperative of blind (some would say willful) hypocrisy to "own the libs." Always the lie, never the truth. When pressed, a conspiracy wingnut's typical alternative, mostly unworkable "solutions" are so way out there that one has to wonder what happens to a human brain sucked into the "inter-tubes." Is it like getting spaghettified in a black hole? Scary stuff when considering that a good third of the citizens of the most advanced (hahahaha) nation on Earth, numbering in the tens of millions, are running buck-ass naked in the streets, dripping snot and pulling at wild hair, howling at the moon like zombies on steroids.
One could say that the firehose rhetoric is fast and furious on both sides, and that would be true. (Lol, I plead guilty as hell.) The burning question, though, is do mere words -- symbols of deeper realities -- reflect truth or lies? That's the soul-searching question we must pose to ourselves, which naturally is a most difficult thing to do in life. But failure is how we learn and grow, beyond all the rhetoric.
In effect, like it or not, we have a two-party system. So choose a side, the right side next time around! Make a real difference; change life for the better for everyone. Instead of just whimpering like lost puppies in the snow about all the injustice surrounding them, looking inside from the outside, come on in and be part of a party on the move, changing with every vote, growing in popularity, while the "other" party of liars, traitors, and fools sinks into mean-spirited irrelevance.
America can do this. We can kick big money out of our House, our Senate, our presidency, and all of our state governments, which is just as vital as the national politics if not more so. We have to gang up on the really bad guys. Too much is at stake not to show a united front in the face of this juggernaut of greed infecting both major parties, largely thanks to the really fckd Supreme Court decisions by corporatized wingnut justices, as Thom endlessly points out.
Politics is war by another name without the guns. When people give up on "the system," however screwed it may be, instead of trying to fix it, anarchy ensues, and that's when the guns come out. People lose faith in democracy at a fundamental level. Is that really where we're going at this point in history when the world is burning up both figuratively and literally? Don't we need some semblance of actual representative democracy to survive, to have any chance of saving ourselves from ourselves?
Evidently, these are fundamental questions that Republicans (mostly) have lost sight of -- the very threads holding the tapestry of our multi-racial/cultural/religious democracy together for god sake! Right now, that means joining the Democrats, hold your nose if you must, and simply out-vote the moneyed-up bastards stealing our wealth who are the true enemies of democracy.
(By the way, yes, the moneyed interests at the top of the pyramid do control the Republican Party nearly 100 percent, but the big guys also play both sides of the fence as insurance and own a sizable chunk of the Democratic Party too. Of course they do. Still, the rampant corruption of sell-out Democrats like Manchin and Sinema (among many) is certainly not 100 percent as casually purported, even though that might seem symmetrical in the usual, made-up, logical-fallacy, both-sides argument.)
This late in the game, there's not much time and opportunity left to mitigate the evils of human nature spreading around world? The clock is close to midnight on every front.
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" - Yogi Berra (Haha, sorry, couldn't resist.)
Far be it for me to pour cold water on Democratic schadenfreude -- God knows a little positivity and levity at the well-deserved expense of Republican arrogance and overconfidence is always a welcome relief in the otherwise gloomy zeitgeist and liberal angst over elections, also well-deserved. Sometimes politics can be fun even in defeat.
Therein lies the rub: Losing Congress, either one or both houses, is a major defeat for Democrats no matter how the results are sliced and diced and reimagined. Sure, it could have been worse -- a lot worse! -- but it's a huge loss nonetheless, irrespective of the seemingly miraculous bucking of historical trends in midterms for the supposed "party in power," meaning primarily the White House, since Congress is mired in hopeless gridlock and promises to remain so for at least another two years.
Rightly or wrongly, Democratic "leaders" succeeded in scaring the crap out of their voters to whip them to the polls, the drop-off boxes, or the Post Office -- whatever, just vote goddammit! Of course, they were greatly assisted by rabid Republicans who just couldn't help themselves in pissing-off most normal human beings who still possess functioning brain cells.
So that worked. Now, it's on to 2024. Can Democrats improve their learning curve even further with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and cohorts fully transforming the "people's house" into an open-air cesspool of toxicity, which will make the first two years of the Biden Administration seem like a kumbaya moment of bipartisan tranquility? As they say, strap in, because it's gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
So, Democrats need to keep mainlining fear and anger ...because it works! Unfortunately. Ask a Republican. Hope does too, just not as much. Sorry for being cynical.
Tears-o-Joy…🙏❤️Thom
Here's the real crisis of democracy and a crisis that was not caused by only Republicans. In fact, this core crisis is being propagandized by you Thom Hartmann, Joe Biden, the liberal media and the Democratic Party. Oh, and in this clip there is one of your lies dispelled when you were shouting me down as spreading Putin's propaganda. Sad to see you become a part of American Empire in order to save Biden's presidency and cover for the militarism and poor judgment of Democrats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fTxHIVUjRc
No need to tell me what you stand for Barry….just bitchin’ is all I hear
I'm sure you won't look at the link. And personal attacks are all I hear from Biden liberals, just like the Trumpers. Are you able to address the issues that I am trying to bring to the fore, or like Thom Hartmann will you accuse me of being a propagandist for Putin? As for "bitchin'," I have spent countless hours canvassing and phonebanking for Democratic Party candidates who do not take corporate PAC money as that is the only answer to the corporate alignment of both political parties that is destroying our government and nations around the world.
It's tit-for-tat bitching, blogging on a blog that bitches about Republicans. The trouble is that one bitch is mired in truth, the other in lies. It's up to the voters to figure out which is which by employing common sense, in short supply these days.
If you look at the link the truth is that the Democratic Party is the McCarthy Party, blindly supporting a proxy war with Russia, direct confrontation with China, and destruction of sovereign nations around the world with no room in that party for any dissent or critical thinking. And a liberal base that thinks that losing the House against a degenerate political party is some sort of great accomplishment. What is wrong with this picture of "democracy?"
"blindly supporting" ...
"the McCarthy party" ...
"direct confrontation with China" ...
"destruction of sovereign nations around the world" ...
Yup. A propagandist for Putin AND Xi Jinping.
Ze link, ze link, look at ze link!
What is wrong with THIS "picture of 'democracy'" is selective "critical thinking."
Not certain about this but one thing is for sure - democrats are part of 2 party system, which means they dont support any voting, candidates, primaries, etc that arent in the interest if their party having control over candidates.
Here in Ground Zero of the democratic failure - New York State - we have traded in ny-17 a black gay green-new-deal supporting member of Congress for a corrupt Republican head of the republican machinery in New York State. And sean p maloney barely campaigned here, had no discussion of issues, no get out the vote drive at all.
For some reason I can't "like" your honesty but unlike the vast majority of "team blue" members on this board you have hit the nail on the head. They refuse to see it because...well...evil Republicans, Putin and Trump are all that matters.
Hit what nail on the head, that Democrats are evil, bad, no good, out of touch with the base, bad for Democracy, yada, yada?
One thing is certain though: As a lifelong member of "team blue," I for one refuse to see "it" -- YOUR interpretation of OUR party, almost like through the lens of "team red" -- the party of traitors and prophets of false religion and fake democracy, actively destroying real democracy with outright lies. But only a token nod to all of that wingnut bullshit from the good doctor in long screeds against the Democratic Party.
Selective critical thinking is no thinking at all.
Well my friend I'll continue my work for Democratic Party candidates who do not take corporate PAC money and to implement a national health care system, which Democrats continue to actively work against, and you continue your work from your end. Hopefully we will have some time before the health care system collapses and our coasts are underwater before those who leave no room for dissent lead us to World War III.
Oh, so now Democrats are responsible for starting WWIII?! Jesus F. Christ, gimme a fckng break!
Today's Ukraine-Putin disaster was the direct result of the truly idiotic actions of one Donald John Trump, the COVID mass murderer, and the shameless, boot-licking acquiescence and huge failure to act by the Trump-owned Republican Party when it was their time to step into the breach and do the right thing and impeach the rotten sonofabitch! Twice they had their chance and twice they failed the American people and failed the world.
Not a peep, which was a big green light for Trump's BFF to do whatever the fck he wanted in Ukraine. And so he did.
But in the selective re-reading of history by the haters of truth, it's all on the evil Democrats for not abandoning a whole continent of allies to the tender mercies of the world's worst dictator just because he rattles his rusty sabers.
Weak. Very weak! In the eyes of Putin who only backs down when forced, trump was a godsend. Giving into bullies is one way to guarantee WWIII.
But yeah, keep trying to change the history of who's responsible for what. That's always helpful for a serious discussion in the search of a real solution. The crisis in Ukraine was a 100 percent joint operation between Trump, Republicans, and Putin from the get-go.
But they lost the election "bigly" and handed the whole shit show to Biden, blaming him and the Democratic Party for the predictable consequences of the Republicans' own gross stupidity and negligence and shocking foreign policy naivete.
Thank God for Biden in repairing the damage Trump did to our NATO alliance and for mobilizing the rest of the world in opposition, stopping a murderous dictator from overrunning Eastern Europe. Can you imagine the utter carnage had our own murderous dictator stolen the election as planned? Thank God for Democrats whipping up their voters.
Your sentiments are fine, but your arithmetic is garbage. You are miscounting generations. The silent generation was the group that gave birth to the boomers, but you are placing them too late in time. Boomers are thought of as 1946-1964. Look at the Pew article please and don't send out messages that do not make any sense. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/
If older people would actually engage in conversation with younger people, they would soon discover that up-and-coming progressives eschew the labeling of new generations by older generations.
Every generation brings hope for a better future.
WOW….a ‘feel-good’…give ‘‘em hell!