Will there even be an American call to arms at this point if Taiwan gets invaded?
2025 American Political (ob-?)Scene
- Thread starter JRT
- Start date
DOR
Voter
American Democracy, RIP
Two hundred and fifty years after Paul Revere, Lexington, and the birth of our great nation, we are coming to an end.
People who choose not to understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory are now in charge of our science.
Folks claim to be Christians, yet they give their respect, their support, and their votes to politicians who treat their fellow human beings as if they were animals.
Leaders who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution that they have not read are ignoring our checks and balances in order to dismantle our democracy.
Those who do not realize that the greatest increase in standards of living, for the largest number of people, ever in all of human history … they are the ones destroying the very institutions that we – the United States of America, and our allies – created at the end of World War II.
It was glorious while it lasted.
Two hundred and fifty years after Paul Revere, Lexington, and the birth of our great nation, we are coming to an end.
People who choose not to understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory are now in charge of our science.
Folks claim to be Christians, yet they give their respect, their support, and their votes to politicians who treat their fellow human beings as if they were animals.
Leaders who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution that they have not read are ignoring our checks and balances in order to dismantle our democracy.
Those who do not realize that the greatest increase in standards of living, for the largest number of people, ever in all of human history … they are the ones destroying the very institutions that we – the United States of America, and our allies – created at the end of World War II.
It was glorious while it lasted.
The modern right wants a strong powerful centralized government much like Democrats do. The notion of small government is in a trash bin, they want the government strong to enrich what they want to support and strong to punish the things they don't want to support or want gone. DOGE is not about cutting the size of government, it's about getting rid of stuff that doesn't serve the President's agenda. Meanwhile Hegseth is asking for 8% annual reductions in budget from the Pentagon while Trump turned around and floated the first ever trillion-dollar budget for it. That pretty much is eating up any such reductions DOGE is doing. DOGE are nickel and dime-ing savings, they're not going after the entitlement spending which is limiting their effectiveness.
I listened recently to a Chris Spangle "We Are Libertarians" network podcast from the month prior to Trump taking office asking as its theme "can libertarianism survive the populism era?" and then went into that. One good thought from the show was how a good number of libertarians (small-l libertarians, not the party as We Are Libertarians has always leaned toward libertarian movement rather than party) effectively over the past 15 years have become monarchists. Not monarchists in the sense of a hereditary executive staying in 1 family for centuries but monarchists in the sense of we hold an election every 4 years and the person that wins should by fact reign as King (or Queen if we get there). It's a philosophy of a very very strong Executive. They've come to that position because they tried persuasion and view persuasion as having failed, aided by the past few decades the Judicial Branch has seriously become more powerful than the Legislative Branch, the Legislative Branch is in an era of historical weakness comparatively. So the only way to ever get policy victories is to get them into the policy of a presidential candidate that wins. Everything else is irrelevant. So the presidencies of Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt are what to strive for - compared to other Presidents power was heavily centralized into the Presidential office. Yes, it's funny considering what has been said in the decades since that "conservatives" (I don't view Trump supporters at current as conservatives if you use a constant definition of the word that predates 2016, but that's another thread) are wanting to emulate FDR, but that's what is going on. Trump's stated hero is McKinley, but he's acting like a right-wing version of FDR if you look at how both Presidents used power to get what they want.
Why I shake my head at such things is say someone pro-massive immigration is the Democratic nominee for President in 2028 and wins. If you're on the right or a Trump supporter and for example view Trump's impoundment of congressionally-allocated funds as constitutional, there's nothing stopping this Democratic President from impounding all funds allocated to Customs and Border Patrol or ICE under the same reasoning that the previous King used. I doubt most of the modern right cares about such things. One criticism I have for all of American politics at present is there is very little foresight going on, not that foresight is necessarily present in most other countries' politics. Europe the past few years effectively got caught with their pants down.
I listened recently to a Chris Spangle "We Are Libertarians" network podcast from the month prior to Trump taking office asking as its theme "can libertarianism survive the populism era?" and then went into that. One good thought from the show was how a good number of libertarians (small-l libertarians, not the party as We Are Libertarians has always leaned toward libertarian movement rather than party) effectively over the past 15 years have become monarchists. Not monarchists in the sense of a hereditary executive staying in 1 family for centuries but monarchists in the sense of we hold an election every 4 years and the person that wins should by fact reign as King (or Queen if we get there). It's a philosophy of a very very strong Executive. They've come to that position because they tried persuasion and view persuasion as having failed, aided by the past few decades the Judicial Branch has seriously become more powerful than the Legislative Branch, the Legislative Branch is in an era of historical weakness comparatively. So the only way to ever get policy victories is to get them into the policy of a presidential candidate that wins. Everything else is irrelevant. So the presidencies of Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt are what to strive for - compared to other Presidents power was heavily centralized into the Presidential office. Yes, it's funny considering what has been said in the decades since that "conservatives" (I don't view Trump supporters at current as conservatives if you use a constant definition of the word that predates 2016, but that's another thread) are wanting to emulate FDR, but that's what is going on. Trump's stated hero is McKinley, but he's acting like a right-wing version of FDR if you look at how both Presidents used power to get what they want.
Why I shake my head at such things is say someone pro-massive immigration is the Democratic nominee for President in 2028 and wins. If you're on the right or a Trump supporter and for example view Trump's impoundment of congressionally-allocated funds as constitutional, there's nothing stopping this Democratic President from impounding all funds allocated to Customs and Border Patrol or ICE under the same reasoning that the previous King used. I doubt most of the modern right cares about such things. One criticism I have for all of American politics at present is there is very little foresight going on, not that foresight is necessarily present in most other countries' politics. Europe the past few years effectively got caught with their pants down.
DOR
Voter
Big Government Democrats were of the LBJ's era; since Bill Clinton, the emphasis has been on government doing what it has to do, because the private sector can't or won't; and preventing mindless bigotry from denying people an equal opportunity. Throw in some environmental stuff (old school conservation conservatives) and the obvious self-interest of preventing one country from bullying another and that about sums up the modern Democratic Party.
Monash
Military Professional
Yep, Trumps rampant use of Presidential 'decrees' has changed the playing field, possibly for ever. Until or unless the US Supreme Court comes down hard on the entire process and declares it unconstitutional outside of very narrow circumstances and/or imposes time limits on how long any any decree can stay in place before approval from Congress has to be sought etc the field is wide open for future Democratic Presidents to do exactly what Trump has been doing. (And imagine the howls of outrage and 'treason' we'll here from the far right then.)
Amled
Well-known member
AI must be a God given boon to a mega-egoist like Trump.
Case in point: Is it too much of a reach to imagine his personal AI unit turning out self-aggrandizing productions, like Trump…with a crown! As a beatifying Pope in full ornate! For not to mention the gigantic golden statue in a Gaza City; strangely bereft of Gazans!!!
What’s next?
Trump replaced as The Almighty, in Michelangelo’s masterpiece: The Creation of Adam???
Case in point: Is it too much of a reach to imagine his personal AI unit turning out self-aggrandizing productions, like Trump…with a crown! As a beatifying Pope in full ornate! For not to mention the gigantic golden statue in a Gaza City; strangely bereft of Gazans!!!
What’s next?
Trump replaced as The Almighty, in Michelangelo’s masterpiece: The Creation of Adam???
Officer of Engineers
Military Professional
Gun Grape
Resident Curmudgeon
Can't blame Somalia on Democrats. Bush ordered the military in as one of the last acts of his Presidency (Dec 92)
Clintonism has been dead in the Democratic Party since Obama's election.
(And really a lot of Democrats' gripes about Obama was he didn't do more. There are more Obama turned Trump voters than either Democrats or Republicans care to admit. Obama's 2008 message was effectively "the country sucks, YES WE CAN change it." In foreign policy terms he was even the Democratic Party's version of an isolationist. Both of those 2 points have parallels with the current President. They're not exactly the same by a long shot of course, importantly Obama believed in institutions, Trump does not - which is why Trump is not a conservative, Biden in an Edmund Burke philosophical sense was more of a conservative than Trump is. But I think a lot of Democrats that have expressed general disappointment with the outcomes of Obama's presidency wish he believed in institutions less.)
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DOR
Voter
Col. Yu,
“Who decides the right or wrong policies?”
Not Elon Musk, that’s for sure.
If you want to lay every single mistake of however many years of history on the heads of Democrats, all I can say is no, sir, you are ill-informed.
rj1,
“Clintonism has been dead in the Democratic Party since Obama's election.”
And, your point is? We are not all progressives, nor are we all Dixiecrats, or union organizers, or tree-huggers. Further, you will have a very hard time proving an isolationist streak in more than a sliver of the Democratic Party.
Yes, Joe Biden – and Barack Obama, and every other president in history – is more of a conservative than the Orange Anti-Christ. The vast majority of American politicians all into the same category: believers in the Constitution, and not in dictators.
Monash
Military Professional
I fairness to the Obama Administration just getting the Affordable Care Act though Congress and dealing with the constant attempts of red States to have it overturned was an undertaking that just by itself that tied up the majority the Obama Administration's time, effort and political capital on the Hill for years for a good part of at least his first term.
Clinton is as relevant to the modern Democratic Party and how it conducts business as George W. Bush is to the modern Republican Party. Even Hillary herself acknowledged that, she was a completely different candidate in 2016 than she was in 2008.
Ben Rhodes says hi in regards to your last sentence. Biden is very anti-isolationist, I've said several times before either here or elsewhere I consider Biden's foreign policy as much a rejection of Obama's as it was Trump's. All things I've seen is Democratic partisans moving forward are pretty eager to throw Biden under a bus in the view of looking forward to 2028. Does that apply to his foreign policy? Too early still, I think Democrats want to make it clear they are pro-UN, pro-NATO, while at the same time they do want Europeans to be responsible for their own defense and they don't want to be taking part in wars. It's a position of "we're pro-Ukraine and Israel defending themselves...but Biden was taken for a ride". Now you have a party that have been anti-defense industrial base and military spending for decades as it takes away money that should be going to help the domestic population are now...what exactly?
Most Americans simply don't know or don't care about anything outside of this country combined with the lay person's civics knowledge is incredibly minimal (which plays into EVERYTHING going on). It's true for people that vote Republican and it's true for people that vote Democrat. So Biden focusing heavily on Ukraine and NATO...that's not what a lot of Americans care about. Look, I'm on this board, I clearly care about geopolitics, most Americans don't as evidenced by this board has very few active posters in addition to several other areas in society you can look at. Go prepare me some civics or foreign affairs exam and I'll hand it to a hundred random people, we can see the results.
Re Democrats and foreign policy, it's clear if there was a presidential primary in 2024 that all sorts of positions vis a vis Gaza-Israel would've been put on display in the party that the party bigshots really would not have wanted. Come 2028 they'll have a free-for-all that both parties in modern times seek to actively avoid because it gives their activists their strongest voice. But it's weird for me who became an adult around 9/11 that the Democratic Party became the war hawk party in American political discourse as they did under Biden.
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Officer of Engineers
Military Professional
Elon Musk did not decide Black Hawk Down nor Kosovo.
No, I am NOT ill-informed, You PURPOSELY decide to mis-interrupt. I cite NO examples that were not the fault of the Democratic Party. Black Hawk Down was a repeated decision by the Clinton Admin not to give assets needed to do mission THEY'VE ASSIGNED.
If I was to lay every single mistake at the head of the Democrats. I start with the ACW which to this day, the Democrat Party refuses to accept ... and frankly, so refuses the Republicans also.
The point I've made is a direct challenge to your claim
The Democratic Party FUCKED UP with Black Hawk Down AND Kosovo.
DOR
Voter
Fiscal Nonsense
How do you carve $335 billion out of spending, and destroy $2.11 trillion in revenue?
Less money for Agriculture (-$88.3 bn for farmers, children’s meals) and more money for war (+$124.6 bn).
Less money for Education (-$234 bn) and Welfare (-$220 bn for Medicare), and Energy and Commerce (-$245.2 bn); and more for deportations (+$148 bn).
The numbers don’t add up, but that’s the plan.
www.cbo.gov
How do you carve $335 billion out of spending, and destroy $2.11 trillion in revenue?
Less money for Agriculture (-$88.3 bn for farmers, children’s meals) and more money for war (+$124.6 bn).
Less money for Education (-$234 bn) and Welfare (-$220 bn for Medicare), and Energy and Commerce (-$245.2 bn); and more for deportations (+$148 bn).
The numbers don’t add up, but that’s the plan.
Estimated Budgetary Effects of a Bill to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Title II of H. Con. Res. 14, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
As ordered reported by the House Committee on the Budget on May 18, 2025
www.cbo.gov