In Reply to: We are winning this thing without violence posted by amadbruin on November 04, 2026 at 07:32:15
It's hard to fully rig voting across the land without having a mechanism in place that determines who gets to run for office and who doesn't. The infrastructure that would make that possible does not exist and the Trump-Miller-Vought axis were not able to build it (they had to insist on using ICE to deliver immediate pain on individuals rather than building a mechanism of control). So in some way, I'll have to admit that the non-party centric organization of elections (as opposed to the parliamentarian system) turned out to create a better firewall against authoritarianism. Same goes for the localized nature of elections, the fact that they're run by states). As someone who pays a lot of attention to how systems work (can't help myself on that front), these are actually points that I need to reconsider in my thinking,
That said, the obvious thing here is that whether this was a success or not will entirely depend on what the Democratic majorities in the congress decide to do going forward. My worry is that they will sandbox themselves into "kitchen table issues" which has become a safe zone for Democrats: a place where they can present a sanitized form of politics without having a significant impact on the way things are and kinda sorta still be in the game without actually playing. That would be a serious mistake. The party needs to understand that the mandate they are given, which is not all about the nebulous concept of affordability but about how power is exercised in the country, who holds it, how it's wielded and who it's wielded against.