Quote of the Day
This is a nightmare scenario for the Dems right now. We better pray long and hard that the country is going to be in a f‑‑‑ing depression, because I don’t know how else we find ourselves out of this mess.
Democratic Strategist
July 14, 2025
Democrats find reasons for hope and fear six months into Trump 2.0
They did not specify which “Democratic strategist,” said this. To me, it sounds like something James Carville would say.
No matter.
The important thing is that what this tells us about the Democrat leadership. It tells us that their access to power is more important to them than the wellbeing of the people in this country.
Prepare and respond appropriately.
I think you should start with Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence.”
Democrats are as interested in a peaceful, successful society as republicans. But they’re victims of a couple conditions, one of which is incompetence – they have no strategy for winning elections with a vision, so some of them like your unknown speaker are willing to just take disaster/chaos as an opportunity.
The other is an inability to agree on a singular vision for the future that they can get others to buy into. A relevant Brian Eno quote (in two forms, because I can’t find proper attribution):
“The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.” – Brian Eno
“There R many futures and only 1 status quo. This is why conservatives mostly agree and radicals always argue.” – Brian Eno
In earlier years the dominant culture (white christian culture) was more homogeneous and thus dems could create large successful coalitions that agreed on a unified set of goals. As the society has become more diverse and that diversity has become part of the dominant culture it has become far less possible to create singular visions for the future, and since dems are the “progressive” party they’re now stuck trying to unify groups of people who aren’t able to agree on which future they want to work towards.
I think you are being FAR to generous as to the motivation and methods of the upper-level Dems as to their motivations. They are all about power and control, imposing their will on the masses, full-stop. They have utter contempt for the average person.
The average rank-and-file Dem voters are a mixed lot, many of whom have simply been gaslit for so long they can’t tell truth from falsity, reality from wish-casting. Most of the R rank-and-file voters just want to be left alone, but the Dem leadership simply won’t… stop… poking… them….
New York, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., Los Angeles; now Portland, Seattle, Denver…
Democrats have no interest at all in “peaceful and successful”; no place they’ve taken over ever becomes peaceful or successful. Every place they govern only becomes worse, more poor and dangerous for the common citizen, and the Democrats and their donors get more wealthy and isolated from the community they manage.
Democrats only want power, not the good of the citizens, and this has been provable for generations now.
Are you just being lazy or are you actively avoiding reality? Have you talked with a democrat outside of a pissing match in an internet comments section?
The idea that democrats are a bunch of evil savages who just want chaos and destruction is so obviously false that I can only assume you push the idea in order to dehumanize them and make it easier to avoid any complicated arguments. And when you talk about democrats only wanting power, I will also note the current administration and say “Really? It’s just democrats who enjoy power? Have you read a newspaper lately?”
In reality, democrats want the same thing republicans want: to live in peace and be happy. Where the two diverge is in their beliefs around how that can best be accomplished. You can argue their *methods* are evil all you want, knock yourself out. But when you start characterizing their *desires* as a) not what their desires actually are and b) evil, you’re creating a straw man so you can avoid dealing with a nuanced, complicated human.
And yes, they do the same thing, and I make the same argument to them: grow up and stop making people you disagree with into caricatures that don’t require you engage with them as human. It’s just lazy.
As I said in my first reply, I make a clear distinction between leadership and rank-and-file Dems. If the leadership were honest actors seeking the betterment of their people, then they’d have policies that actually worked well from time to time. Their policies consistently fail, from price controls, to over-regulation that is hugely counterproductive, to trade policies, to labor policies that reward gaming the system far more than good behavior, to gun control that only disarms the good guys, across the board they fail at making things better for the average person they are supposed to represent. This is not a bug; look up “Cloward–Piven strategy” and “Kalergi Plan”, and compare it to what’s happening in the west.
Yes, the average Dem voters often just want a fair system, but they are unable to understand incentives, human nature, the corruption of government and regulatory capture, Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, basic economics, or the spiritual / evil nature of this world. They might mean well, but without a firm grasp on reality, they are easily misled by the amoral/evil bastards pulling the strings.
But you may not need to worry about it if you and your kids are vaxxed. https://www.emerald.tv/p/are-clot-shots-killing-200000-people
It’s not even true of dem leadership. I’m not connected to any national dem leaders, but I am to Seattle city council so I have a well grounded understanding of what local dem leadership wants. And it’s not power for power’s sake. It’s a pretty straightforward desire to make a lot of basic stuff better (e.g. fix homelessness, crime, the drug epidemic, etc.) and is not part of some kabal-led plan to take over the world.
And the irony is that “Sure as death and taxes, liberals eating their own.” The biggest headwind to getting anything done is Seattle democrats vilifying each other for failing to pass the purity test.
So when republicans pile on and say “oh they’re all just evil bastards” I can only shake my head at the inability of anybody these days to actually muster the patience to have a conversation with somebody they think is “on the other side.” There’s nobody “pulling the strings,” it’s not nearly that clever. It’s back to the Brian Eno quote on the liberal side, and the sad willingness of folks on the conservative side to paste caricatures on the wall and throw darts at them.
The city council of Sodom on the Sound is a case study in totally clueless “not understanding” incentives, human nature, the problems with price controls, diversity, and Pournell’s Iron law. Your Dem “purity-spirals” serve evil well, because your actions have plausible deniability of their inevitable horrible outcomes (because [see: don’t understand incentives and human nature]. But hey, as least your middle-schoolers will know all about anal sex before they get to HS. Example: you clearly DON’T want to end homelessness, because everything you do makes housing more expensive. The fact you don’t see the string manipulating the party ties into that whole “not being in touch with reality” thing.
And while the city council isn’t national leadership, it means your connection is elevated from “rank and file Dem” to “useful idiot [technical definition]” of communism. You are the sort of reason I’m seriously looking at details WRT moving out of this state corrupt, bizarro-world state with magnificent geography and climate, even though the house is paid for, my wife and I both like our jobs.
Couple things:
1) I’m not on the council, I just know someone who works there and gives me lots of detail on a regular basis, so when you say “you do” or “you want” you’re pointing at the wrong person. Don’t shoot the messenger.
2) Your example is a perfect case: “you clearly DON’T want to end homelessness, because everything you do makes housing more expensive. The fact you don’t see the string manipulating the party…” In reality, some council members vote regularly for things that would make housing less expensive (e.g. higher density, rezoning, ADU adoption, etc.) but have for at least a decade been foiled by the far left. Now that the council is moving back to the center (ish) many of those approaches are getting more traction. Though if Sara Nelson loses her re-election in Nov and gets replaced by a lefty it’s likely much of that progress will stop.
So when you talk about a “string manipulating the party” I have to point out that if that’s real, whoever holds those strings is unbelievably bad at puppeteering, and probably shouldn’t quit their day job.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence.”
That applies when no other data are available.
“I hope for a recession to get rid of Trump. Sorry if that hurts people”
Bill Maher, 2018
I am in agreement with John on this sentiment.
Off to the camp’s gun range!
RE: “praying for a depression”
My workplace is public sector, and represented by a union. (I won’t say which, but it holds to every stereotype that makes people hate public sector unions.)
We’re currently in bargaining for the next two-year contract, and on the subject of cost-of-living increases — negotiated as a percentage increase, so the actual dollar amount depends on an employee’s current salary — something came up that I found very interesting.
The union’s proposal: For 2025, they propose an increase of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) plus 3%, but not less than 4%. Pretty standard.
Now, here’s the interesting part: For 2026, they propose CPI plus 4%, but not less than 4%.
Read that again, and consider what it would take to invoke that “but not less than” part.
The public sector union is anticipating that the Consumer Price Index — the amalgamation of overall market prices — could drop to zero or go negative in the next two years.
But wait: 2026 is still the Trump presidency. So the union is forecasting (read: tacitly admitting) that prices could go down, meaning that inflation is potentially negative, and the U.S. Dollar is stronger…
… which is exactly opposite what they said Trump’s economic policies would do when they fully endorsed a full Democrat ticket — including Biden and then Harris — during the election.
Like I said. Very interesting.
And if that holds true, if the CPI drops and the dollar is stronger, that’s going to hurt the Democrats at the mid-terms. (Which just means it’s the Republicans’ race to lose … so don’t count the Dems out yet.)
That is interesting. Where did they get the information to make that projection?
I don’t know, and they aren’t saying. All I have is the current set of proposals from both the union and management, not how either side got their numbers — for what I know, it could all be completely arbitrary, just both sides trying to get the best compromise they can, nothing more — and it’s too early to see where the final agreement will end up.
That said, in the past the union’s proposals and final agreement have always been written either as a flat percentage (not tethered to the CPI), or to assume a positive CPI — sometimes a considerably positive CPI. And so it caught my eye that this one did neither.
Not necessarily.
There are two reasons for drops in prices. One is simply a reduction in inflation.
But the other is a major recession, which typically sees a drop in prices. Indeed, one way of reducing inflation IS to induce a recession.
So, it COULD be that they are expecting a recession, rather than simply a reduction in inflation (which IS happening in any case).
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While I agree that Democrats often care far more about staying in power than what is good for the country, in the case of Trump, they seem to believe (whether sincerely or not) that Trump is bad for the country. And that anything “good” that develops under Trump merely raises the likelihood that Trumpism stays in effect, which is ultimately bad for the country.
The problem, of course, is that Mitt Romney, as Joe Biden claimed, was going to put Black people back in chains, and George W. Bush was the second coming of Adolf Hitler. So, at some point, the Dems simply believe that anyone other than Dems IS fascism revived, and that’s indistinguishable from the hunger for power.
What a bunch of whinning crybaby men children you are. Very much like your narcissist in chief. It’s funny how you only think one side can do this, And yet there are clearly multiple instances for both sides of the political aisle cheat, lis, steal, and care more about power and status then they do the people they serve. The difference is you look the other way when a republican does it, and yet when a democrat does it, holy he’ll and I have to suffer through all of these idiotic Ayn Rand posts and about how this is the rebirth of communism.
Ayn Rand died a pauper and penniless, just like her ideas.
All of you are too stupid to realize that the whole point of this clown show is to get us fighting each other while they steal everything from us.
Wake up. You’re so-called freedom and right to vote. It’s just a modern day form of feudalism And you’re too stupid to realize you’re the ones working in the fields.