The problem with American politics is that we just have an evil party that wants to exclusively do evil things, then we have an opposition party that pretends to be virtuous but includes things like unity and compromise as their virtues which means they will always try to compromise with the evil party by doing things that are only halfway evil, and then we have centrists preaching that both parties are just as bad and only the centrist is the enlightened one!
Which of course isn't true, because the centrists are just halfway between the evil party and the party that's compromises with the evil party at every turn.
If Republicans are pure evil, and Democrats try to meet the pure evil party at the halfway point by letting them do half evil things, by my math, centrists are about 75% evil.
Like, it is incredibly frustrating as Americans that we couldn't have universal healthcare like most of the world does. We had to have a compromise with the Affordable Care Act that would have just had a public option. And even then while having a majority, not all the Democrats could get on board with having a public option for health care, so that needed removed from the final bill. We had to compromise on our compromise just to get to a point where people couldn't lose insurance for pre-existing conditions!
We propose plans that are meant to help American citizens survive, and the other side is like "nuh uh, can't do that, helping the sick will hurt predatory businesses that prey on sick people."
And that's the end of it! Biden doesn't even try to bring back the public option when he's in power.
Oh, and the Affordable Care Act also did expand Medicaid to allow more poor people to use it. You wouldn't know this in a conservative state though, because most of them at the time refused the Medicaid expansion for their citizens.
Practically all of the Medicaid expansion would have been paid for by the federal government too! Which not only would provide health care for the citizens of that state, it's also money brought into their economies! Money spent on healthcare pays for more local doctors who can spend that in their communities. Any state that accepted the Medicaid expansion would be just a little bit wealthier than one that didn't. There was no downside for the individual state!
It is hard to express how evil a state government has to be to turn down free money to pay for the healthcare of their citizens!
And then the other side gets power again and they start making more restrictive rules for Medicaid to cut more poor people off of healthcare!
That's right everyone! The evil party has decided that the problem with American healthcare is that it is too readily available! There are too many sick people in the United States who aren't dying, and they want to fix that by killing you and killing your parents and killing your sick relatives!
Sorry, but the evil party has decided that they can't afford to pay for the healthcare of your loved ones because they need to give subsidies to AI companies and they need to build a ballroom at the White House and we need weapons to bomb schools in Iran!
Understand that your life as an American citizen is less important to the evil party than a bomb they will use to blow up little girls in another country.
We might as well be using poor and sick Americans as the ammunition.
In an ideal civilization, democracy would be a fight between two sides with differing visions for how to make the lives of their people better... But that's not what we have!
Instead, we get half the country that's like "hey, why don't we build a detention center where we hold immigrants without due process and surround that by a moat filled with alligators so the brown people will be eaten alive when they try to escape, turning the swamp water red with their blood, and we can call it Alligator Alcatraz!"
And that's... That's a real policy!
If you weren't American and are reading this, thinking that it's hyperbole... Nope! Alligator Alcatraz is a real thing, and it's what the proponents call it! The Republicans call this detention facility for immigrants who are being detained without due process Alligator Alcatraz. The left, more fittingly, calls it Alligator Auschwitz.
But frankly, I think we're probably just a couple years from getting to the point where Republicans are so comfortable being openly pure irredeemably evil that they start calling it Alligator Auschwitz themselves!
I mean, during Donald Trump's first term, he granted a pardon to sheriff Joe Arpaio for his convictions related to racial profiling, who ran jails known for inhumane treatment that he once referred to as concentration camps, so it's not like it would be a huge stretch!
In short, American politics is a choice between one party that wants to commit genocide against puppies, another side saying "we want to protect puppies so how about we only let you genocide half of them," and another group in the middle who somehow cannot figure out whether they should go with the puppy-murdering party or not, and believe them both to somehow be extremists on opposite sides.
And if you point out how completely evil anybody has to be in order to support the puppy-murdering party, you will get people popping up telling you not to dehumanize people, and asking you be more empathetic to the pro-puppy-murder people!
