#duopoly

The bipartisan consensus for regime change against Iran hit the wall of Iranian resistance. But Trump is forced into talks while democrats attack him from the right and expose themselves as partners in crime.

The United States began its latest attempt at regime change against the Islamic Republic of Iran on February 28, 2026. The Trump administration bragged about torpedoing an Iranian ship returning from a naval exercise in India and killing more than 80 sailors. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth released a video of the act of war and added, "They thought they were safe in international waters," an admission of a U.S. violation of international law. The killing of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and some of his family members and the bombing of an elementary school in the city of Minab were also war crimes.

Fortunately, Iran was able to defend itself against the aggression and responded against U.S. assets located in vassal states in the region. Iran restricted traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and disrupted oil supplies to nations around the world. The waterway was open and accessible before the U.S. attack. It is now controlled by the Islamic Republic of Iran and it decides the price of the toll and in what currency it will be paid.

The end result of Iran's successful self-defense is that the U.S. has been forced to the table to negotiate and treat the country it designated an enemy as an equal that must be treated with respect. Even at the very moment that the Pakistan/Qatar mediated talks began in Switzerland, Iranian officials still had to make the point that they were not to be trifled with. ...

The complainers were not just among those who are thought of as republican neo-conservative firebrands, but democrats too, including those claiming to be liberals. They chimed in with commentary worthy of the right wing because, despite labels of conservative and liberals, they are all right wing. The democrats' leader in the Senate, Charles Schumer, has long been in favor of regime change against Iran and has made that point publicly many times....

Another Senate Democrat, Cory Booker, also excoriated Trump but like Schumer, not for the reasons he should have. "We have surrendered our power. We have capitulated to the enemy. And they now are mocking us. Look at everything that's coming out of that country from their internal dialogue all the way to what they're saying publicly. They know that they've won this."

Senator Chris Murphy followed in the same vein as his Democratic Party colleagues....

Susan Rice, who served as Barack Obama's National Security Adviser, joined the fake condemnation....

There are no congressional democrats or their pundit spokespeople who will state the simplest facts about Iran. They will not say that the U.S. had no right to attack Iran. They will not say that Iran has the right to self-defense under international law and that it has the right to demand compensation for damage done to their country.

They will refer to Trump's "mistake" or "blunder" and accuse him of incompetence, but they make the charges only because he failed at the regime change they also want to see enacted....

Anyone who wants to see the U.S. engage in peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world will not be elected to high office. Senate seats don't come cheaply. They require raising millions of dollars and the people who can give and raise that kind of cash are not looking to send peacemakers to Washington.

The end result is fake outrage from people who claimed they wanted to vote on a war resolution but didn't really want to and finally did when the game was up and the U.S. was forced to stand down. No one should be impressed by the last minute, symbolic, non-binding vote taking place at the eleventh hour.

The U.S. has definitely lost this battle but will not stop the war for hegemony.

I have posted previously on this topic, yet as time marches on the disaster waiting is getting worse.

We all know it, it is staring even his supporters in the face, yet what happens after Trump passes away is potentially getting uglier by the day. Months ago I suggested the Republicans start planning for a Trump world. Then later on I was a bit more direct of what the Republicans will be facing once Trump is gone. Now it is beyond the planning phase time frame and what is looming for this country is flat out insane.

The power play after Trump will wreck havoc on this country. We have all heard the phrase power does not exist in a vacuum or something to that nature. Also today I was overhearing a podcast from a historian named Heather Richardson I think talking about there is a power shuffle or loose power structure going on in the administration right now. Not exactly sure since I was overhearing and not paying complete attention. Yet her point seemed to be that behind the scenes people are starting to position themselves for what happens after Trump. Some names she mentioned that might be jockeying around were JD Vance and maybe Tucker Carlson, but she also mentioned Carlson may be backing Vance.

The real issue is most of his cabinet and sycophants rely on Trump for power. They need him more for their future than their own careers will allow them to be successful. And there isn’t much cohesiveness amongst the group either. If and when Vance becomes President, how much of Trump’s cabinet and staff will he keep. And what happens when the infighting begins as they desperately cling to power.

Also Trump’s supporters will allow people to tell them it isn’t Trump that was a failure, but all these cabinet and staff members that let him down which will include Vance. People like Andrew Vought and Steven Miller may be the first to go, but also the most dangerous as the go out. Especially Vought because he probably has the most cohesive plan working, yet needs Trump to continue it. Well, honestly I am going to leave that sentence out there, but I do not know if Vance and Vought are on the same page. Vance may keep him since he does have a working plan. Miller not so much and offers no real advantage to Vance and whatever he may want to do once he becomes President. Personally though I would love to see both go since for different reasons, they are both dangerous to our democracy.

There are a plethora of cabinet members though that need to go and how attached to any of them is Vance. I don’t think much, yet they may do some crazy things (not that they aren’t already) on the way out the door. Most of Trump’s cabinet since there for loyalty reasons to Trump won’t offer much for Vance and easily are a hindrance if not an outright disaster ongoing for him.

Vance becomes President by default if Trump passes away before 2028. Yet every problem that Trump created will fall onto Vance’s lap. It could end up being the worst thing that could happen to any one person. And the problems are only getting worse even if oil and gas prices come down a bit in the short term. Iran already thinks he is a joke and will probably shut the Strait of Hormuz down or slap ridiculously high tolls on certain countries daring him to do something about it. Trump’s tariffs still cause headaches for our trade partners and they won’t want to jump on board to save him. He will have to repair NATO and trade alliances with people who will not trust him one bit, nor respect him.

So Vance will become impotent from day one, he will have cabinet members trying to hold onto their jobs either with outlandish actions or accusations, and a country that never wanted him in the first place. Why this isn’t major fodder for the talking heads world astounds me.

The post Trump world is going to be a nightmare and now that there are temporarily some Senators acting tough may not be enough to settle the power structure down in D. C.

Add the rise of socialist democrats in very democratic cities, you can see major jockeying of partisan madness as both sides get dirtier and dirtier with their hate and finger pointing. I know these same socialist democrats think they have tons of momentum going their way, but it will hit a major wall outside their specific regions. They think their ideas will take hold because of how bad Trump has been, yet to this day they do not see the fact that people wanted Trump to succeed because of what he says were his policies. Those policy wishes do not change just because Trump passes away. And of course there is the far right that is more emboldened and just hates everybody (including themselves) so they aren’t going away. The possibility of political outbreaks throughout the country exists if someone doesn’t grab the national attention quickly and offers some policy that tampers down inflation and more importantly the political rhetoric. It won’t all go away, but if we get lucky and someone can grab the middle’s attention and support, it might be less of a rocky ride.

Yet there is no one currently in any spotlight that offers us a chance to settle down the partisan hate without the ugly happening first. Our country as a whole can look much worse than a green reflecting pool very fast. The good news is and I think Ms. Richardson also brought this up is that most people in this country still like our country and what we represent. What we need is for a very dynamic person to rise to the top with practical ideas that people see as possible. Sounds fairy tale like, but we are almost to that point. Most people ignore the far right so they very rarely gain much traction with the body politic of this country, yet the far left does garner some waves of momentum occasionally and that is more dangerous than the middle realizes. Right now too much socialism is not the answer even though to rebuild our way of life some socialistic type ideas will need some attention. A delicate balance to say the least but yo yoing from one extreme (Trump’s right wing bigotry and authoritarianism) to the other extreme is not the answer no matter how often the left is going to cheer it on since people like Mamdani are capturing some major attention with some success in New York. Yet what works for New York isn’t going to fly in quite a few other cities and states. Just the nature of the political beast in a large and diverse, in more ways than one, country.

This large and beautiful country with the infamous melting pot we so love to tout works best when there is local politicians having some control over their respective areas, along with a national government that tries to create basic baselines of federal oversight and balance that gives equal benefit throughout the country. With the rise of the one percent, that hasn’t been the case in decades and people do feel it. We just hope that the center line is strengthened going forward and the wealth divide crumbles in a positive way so the majority have the opportunity we always say we have.

Yet to even get there we will face the ugly algae of Trump’ reflecting pool running rampant throughout D. C. for possibly years. A sad and true reality we face.

On Cue, top Democrats do tedious gotcha posts while reinforcing every premise of the war. Who is this for?

The minute President Trump announced a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran on Sunday to "end the war," the response from Democrats has been a range of somewhat decent -- if tortured -- support for an end to hostilities to cynical, goading attacks from the right. This is a fairly common feature of our bipartisan pro-war Washington consensus: We are permitted to debate the timing and process of attacking Iran, but never its legitimacy, morality, or legality. It is simply taken for granted by leaders of both parties, and of course the vast bulk of US media, that it is the US's divine right to bomb and sanction any country at any time for any alleged crimes we, unilaterally, determined it committed.... The response by liberals stateside to these alleged transgressions is not to call for the strengthening of international law, or UN-directed diplomacy, but to reinforce the central premise that the US is the global police man whose job is to sort out the world into good guys and bad guys. And what matters, more than anything, is the competency and efficacy of disciplining those who both parties agree is A Bad Guy.

The worst and most shameless example of a right-wing attack came, predictably, from Sen. Cory Booker. He accosted Trump for "releasing billions of dollars to this enemy,"....

What Booker is demagoguing against here is the same thing the Right demagogued against Obama: returning money to Iran that the US stole from it. This should be a welcome development, as this is an immediately reasonable demand given that Trump sneak attacked Iran and killed over 3,000 of its people, including over 150 in a girls school. Of course, Iran needs some type of recompense for this unprovoked attack. Trump agreeing to this sensible demand is a good thing that should be encouraged and defended as such, not presented as a Give Away To Terrorists....

Let us make clear some obvious points: Trump is primarily responsible for the criminal attack on Iran. He should never have torn up the 2015 JCPOA which, while it was achieved through brutal sanctions, was still obviously preferable to an attack on Iran that murdered thousands. Democrats are right to be frustrated and annoyed by the blatant hypocrisy of Republicans destroying the JCPOA, killing over 10,000 people, including more than 1,000 children in Iran and Lebanon, then reverting back to many of its key premises. This frustration is understandable. But vapid gotchaism, while scoring temporary political points, in the long run reinforces dangerous right-wing premises that narrow political space to support the current settlement proposal, and set the table for perpetual hostility towards Iran in the coming years....

The reason this posture is popular is not because we have any evidence it plays well with voters. It's popular because it hits what I call The Jake Tapper Sweet Spot, the most coveted posture in Washington for politicians and reporters alike: look like you're Speaking Truth To Power while propping up the core ideological premises of our permanent security state. Appear anti-Trump while smuggling in deeply problematic assumptions about Iranian motives and "nuclear ambitions." In other words: it plays well with party elites and donors -- namely pro-Israel donors....

It's a fine line between acknowledging the war failed on its own terms, and promoting those terms, as such. Democrats, especially those who view themselves as "progressives," don't need to overcorrect and promote the latter. They ought not do AIPAC's bidding to score a slick gotcha. The stakes are too high, the forces of war too powerful and ever-present.

A few months ago I wrote a post about what happens after Trump passes away. Since then the economic, political and geopolitical landscape began to fall off a cliff.

There needs to be some kind of come to reckoning about what we do as a country once mother nature takes over. He is not young and contrary to White House nonsense, he is not healthy.

And once he passes here is the short list of problems, if things stand as they do, Vance faces:

Iran war: Trump has put us in a precarious situation as it is and once he passes we have no real strategy. Not an iota of one to start negotiating. Vance has different viewpoints than Trump also. And then there is Hegseth, what might he do in the immediate aftermath. Will anyone in the Pentagon step and in and try to manage the war? Iran may be just sitting back and waiting for this moment because they could come out of this real strong due to Trump’s lack of vision and Vance’s ideology of no foreign wars. The Strait of Hormuz will be under their control for decades possibly. The whole war is a disaster to begin with and Trump passing will force , to even have a chance of salvaging anything, into a very forceful stance. And yes what does that exactly mean? The repercussions of this war are an immediate and long term disaster.

Economy: First the war has driven up the price of oil, gas and food worldwide. Vance may do something stupid to try and resolve the war to get shipping through the Strait of Hormuz so he can hold on to any inkling of a presidential bid. We are about to lose on three or four fronts economically on the world stage and only very stringent matters will let us hold on to some semblance of respectability. China is loving this and my bets are on they loved having Trump over to gauge his health to see how fast they can move on Taiwan, world trade and more.

Putin and Europe: Putin is getting desperate and in a bid to save his Presidency he may take even more action in Europe while we are dealing with Trump’s death. No one in Trump’s administration has the cajones to do something about him or will care. Europe will be hung out to dry and either get mired in a slow moving WWI scenario or come out with a quick victory and manages to save their identity. Unfortunately not their economy unless their victory is complete and they can open their doors to a new Russia so new trade with Russian oil and gets off the Middle East pipeline. If Europe survives Putin and a more open Russia emerges then that is good for Europe, yet all countries not named Iran in the middle east will suffer a setback as they lose customers for their oil.  Iran will still be the main supplier of oil to China and will be openly competing for other Asian markets. This can only embolden Iran and with us out of the picture some of the other Middle Eastern countries are in trouble.

Israel: Just saying the name almost says enough. Once Trump is gone, what is Netanyahu’s fate? What is Israel’s fate? Does Iran rebound enough to repress their surrogates attacking Israel? Will we even respond? Could we respond?

Japan and Korea: Not as dramatic as Israel, yet they are both facing what will be a very emboldened North Korea.

Domestic political turmoil: Who survives Trump? Are there real Trump allies willing to create violence in America for their benefit?  Who fights them? Then there is the duopoly’s lack of vision for a post Trump world. Neither side is ready with a plan going forward to address the above listed issues or even the most basic of issues like restoring law and order, punishing the grift and fraud, actually passing a domestic budget and whatever else may come up. We still need healthcare costs addressed, social security improved, better education, the infamous infrastructure addressed, homelessness, food security, small and mid size businesses helped, tax reform, campaign finance reform and imagine the financial markets in the immediate aftermath. Who does what? Does the market crash?

In my original post I just talked about the very basics. Since then, I have only seen one or two articles maybe talking about a post Trump world. We were unprepared then and Trump has only made things worse. The possibility is there for complete domestic upheaval and no one in this country has the political clout to pull together enough of a coalition to maintain some stability.

And this could happen at any moment. Am I doom speaking? Yes a bit. Could more practical heads manage to salvage the aftermath? Yes, but we need to start planning now to help that become a reality.

And the duopoly is not ready. Too many Republicans have succumbed to Trump’s influence over the party to even begin to think, much less act productively. Their desire for power has rendered them incapable of governing responsibly. The Democrats are clueless. Sure they talk pretty words, have wonderful platitudes, shout to high heaven about the evils facing us, without even knowing the true depth of those evils and then more down to earth, have no real plan. They think they do, they talk like it, but really pull back the curtain and again it is high minded words and platitudes. And the current Youtube and other blogs from the ideological spectrum only add to the partisan madness. They are not independent. They are noise. They complain about the other side or just make stuff up for an audience. So many pro and con to Trump are so tied to him that what do they do afterwards? 

I have tried throwing out ideas to take better paths historically in this blog. Yet some of them are very grandiose. Yet who knows maybe some large projects may help bring us together as a country. If we all started working on the same goals instead of pointing fingers at each other we may live on. For now though, natural disasters and more are going to test us each and every time. And slowly due to Trump’s rot on our infrastructure, it will catch up to us.

Hopefully my pessimism is misguided and we drudge our way through and come out on the other side with some semblance of our country. It looks bleak to me, yet though I still have hope. If saner heads on either or both parties or my dream of more independents and third parties come to fruition then we can rebuild this great country because more often than not, if a people survive a calamity they usually build something better. Or let’s hope so.

My letter to Ralph Nader... Could a principled impeachment lead to a peace president -- a constitutional revolution?

A political realignment is long overdue in the US. It has stalled largely because of the power of the duopoly, which is designed to marginalize anti-establishment forces. There are occasional rhetorical flourishes about left-right alliance, and there has been limited cooperation on matters such as the Epstein scandals between Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna.

But left-right cooperation is massively under-utilized as I've highlighted with my VotePact.org project. And contrary to popular refrain, left-right agreement is not rare, it's just repeatedly treated as an aberration even though it keeps happening.

Especially troublesome has been that impeachment has remained a partisan affair, with each impeachment calcifying partisan compulsions to the point of brain-deadness and effectively immunized presidents from principled impeachment over illegal wars and therefore strengthened the Empire.

I am including a link to an article that says everything I have been saying for decades, maybe not in the same words, but generally speaking.

The democrats have been clueless for a long time. This article is couched that the Democrats have sucked up to Wall Street and more, yet overall it says the Democrats quit being Democrats and to me that is basically why I have been calling them clueless elitists. 

I am including the article for reference. Since I am a conservative I tend to fear too much government spending especially with the enormous debt we are carrying so I cannot jump on the policies in the article. Yet it is the Democrats actually trying to do something again and some of the ideas are workable if managed well.

Republicans whether Reagan, RINO or MAGA will immediately denounce these ideas because they are now incompetent when it comes to governing. That is the one talking point Democrats have had for years that is correct. Otherwise and this article calls it out indirectly neither party has cared for the vast majority of Americans for an extremely long time. The article even references how Trump won in 2016 by appealing to the working class in the rust belt. Of course that is well known history, yet people especially Democrats have glossed over that for years.

So have some people in the elite DC circles and elite press circles starting to wake up to what has been obvious for decades. We need new parties. On occasion I have said if either the Republicans or Democrats get it together and change then that would work too.

Apparently or maybe that may be happening if you read this article. I need to see more. Again as a conservative I would rework some of their ideas, but at least they are doing more than lip service and whining. They are putting some work into change.

We will see what happens. Maybe we can claw something together from the ashes of the Republican party that Trump is burning down. And finally go forward putting the people of this country first.

Whether liberal or conservative we need to get money out of politics which includes as the article mentions getting rid of super PACS and even more, stricter rules on lobbyists, (if you try to eliminate them you will get too many lawsuits around freedom of speech) and stop gerrymandering all together. That has done more to prop up the duopoly and stifled true representation of the people. Make the candidates earn their seat and we will get better governance and policy.

Here is the link:

This phony Democrat got blown out of the water — and that's terrifying for Trump | Opinion

Trump is a new version of an old problem.

Basically I consider myself an average college educated person and I have no idea what that means. I say that though because I have a point later on to make.

First I still read and am working on one project that in actuality is a very intense study. Much more than I am sure I wanted to undertake, yet as I get older I do not want my brain to rot so I am making the effort. You can find it on Substack along with this blog. In working on that project I am reading quite a bit beyond the book I am studying. I mainly comment as a journal what I learn from the reading about the book.  Occasionally I take side trips just to discuss related thoughts and topics in general.

As part of the reading I bought the book “the Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine”. I am not going to discuss St. Augustine’s ideas in this post.

Reading through the introduction there were two paragraphs that hopefully shed some light on my frustration with trying to get people to understand why we need change in our country. Or actually may be helping me understand why no one wants to listen.

Here is part of one paragraph from the introduction to the book mentioned above written by Herbert A. Deane:

“…In quiet times men tend to take for granted the state and the order and security that it provides. After a period of stable government and security for life and property, they are tempted. To regard peace and order as “natural” and “given” and to forget that, to a great extent, they are results of elaborate, delicate contrivance.”  This is footnoted and references Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan”

Why it matters to me is that we have been in quiet times so maybe what I have been saying for the last forty years had no interest in the academic world or academia. And I say we have been in quiet times for decades probably starting with the 1950’s. Yes I know we had Vietnam, the protests, the Nixon administration and resignation, the cold war, the post cold war and more. Yet for all that happened most Americans including the working class had a sense of security of life and property. People were able to obtain a decent life for themselves. There was nothing that truly shattered their world view.

So let’s go to the next paragraph in the introduction:

“When, however, men face serious difficulties which the traditional political and social  system seems unable to solve, when conflicts between groups, classes, regions, or religious sects within the society become so intense that consensus evaporates, and above all, when a crisis of the most fundamental kind undermines the body politic because traditional beliefs, attitudes, and values no longer command virtually automatic assent from most members of the society, thoughtful men are once more driven to the effort to examine the bases of social and political order and to suggest new answers to the questions of politics.”

Are we at this point? Obviously you know I am going to say we are at some juncture here or I wouldn’t be writing on this topic.

And there are two situations where the body politic is no long receiving assent from most members of society or we are ascending to that point.

One of the two is the AI problem which I am not going to address in this post. It is a problem that will definitely cause us to examen where we are in our society and it is rushing at us faster than we can cope.

The other problem is the more traditional problem of economic and political endeavors. And the Trump problem is not new. He is just the updated version of this problem and that is elitism is taking over the country and the body politic. Trump himself is more the catalyst to the problem than the actual problem. Elitism has been building in this country for a few decades, but not until recently with Trump’s false promises for the working class has it been thrust into our faces with what is really going on with his grift and corruption.

The other way elitism has taken over is how our Congress is controlled by lobbyists and large donors.

Elitism that causes the elitists to try and control all aspects of our lives only for their benefit eventually creates dynamic social change. I think most people are beginning to see we are well into this dynamic playing out.

My anger rests in the fact I saw this coming.  And this goes back to me confessing the I am an average college educated person. All the academia stood in their ivory towers and few professed nothing but ignorance about what was happening starting in the 1980’s until now with the slow gradual shift to elitist self-serving policy.

I was not educated enough to ridicule the academic elitists to cut through their need to sound superior to us in what they said was wrong with our country. Their ignorance led to a social revolt of the working class buying into Trump’s nonsense. I just saw that the two parties had created a duopoly that was becoming self-serving for their own power and becoming beholden to an elite class.

And yes I know I was not the only one who saw this coming, but now that we are sitting on the cusp  of possible major social change I am mad because I screamed at people there was an easier solution twenty years ago.

I screamed we needed new parties without being able to cut through the morass of people not affected by what was coming. Again it goes back to the “quiet time” when men took for granted the social order.

We see now the hate being played out by the very people losing to the elitists that is directed by the elitist mentality of pitting democrats and republicans as two sides and each side must win. All the while the two sides are actually the same side, the American people. And again this has been pointed out for decades by more capable people. And again this fell on deaf ears by large chunks of academia and politicians because they existed in that quiet time where some semblance of prosperity existed.

And to me, I get angrier because this can be fixed. Our country can regain the quiet time (well except for the AI problem developing) by going back to educating the people what I have been saying. Lose the partisanship in our politics, take money out of our elections, either force the duopoly into developing new leadership and ideas or create new parties to do such. We are still at a point where drastic social upheaval change is not needed. This isn’t going to last much longer though.

And the irony is that the elitists upending our society would still benefit from us reclaiming our (the people’s) interests in our government, economy and society.

As long as we have a market economy there will be rich people/elitists. That isn’t the problem, it is their control of our lives that is the problem. We created a government that can hold that in check. We let the “quiet times” blind us to the need for constant vigilance.

So now I ask you do we let this wonderful country slip into moral decay due to the powerful thinking they are above us? Or do we do our diligence and reclaim the basic and fundamental aspects of our government, society and economy and continue this wonderful experiment called the United States of America?

And yes I am reading St. Augustine’s City of God, yet that did not cause this sudden understanding of our moral decay. I saw this coming in the 1980’s and have been screaming in the woods ever since. My current readings including City of God only make my anger stronger since I am seeing how easy it is to reclaim our lives and it falls on the ignorant ears of our so called intellectuals that are blindly stupid.

Sure I am an independent, yet sometimes I give advice, well sort of.

First I am writing this in the city of man blog. If you do not know why I am referencing this there is a second blog on the Substack version of this blog that has that answer. Otherwise this is just some thoughts headed into the midterms which are still much further away than the Democrats would like them to be if they really paid attention.

And yes many Democrats are going what?!?!?!?!?!

And yes Trump is falling faster than a lead weight attached to another lead weight and a couple of feathers, but that isn’t the issue right now.

I wrote previously that the Republicans in general need to have a post Trump plan. I haven’t seen that yet, but they got their advice.

The issue will be the economy and the Democrats cannot come out and say Trump screwed up the economy no matter how horrendous or not it is in November. They need to have a rational economic plan that sounds like it is a unified Democratic plan. And it cannot sound socialist or anything too far leftist. Why?

I have said this too many times, yet Democrats really want this to be false. This country is still closer to the center right than the left or barely the center left. Democrats tell me the country is closer to the left. I listen patiently and quietly as they say these arguments. And then I also hear them say they have no idea why people would vote for Trump other than him conning them.

And then they just do not hear, most people care about the economy and the best answer politically is center right ideas. People want to be rich or at least successful. They do not want their lives defined by “a state”. Sure people will accept the government helping people, it has become part of the political dialogue. Yet to say the state should be in charge of our lives, will send people in this country running.

There may be about 20% of this country and they are a loud 20% who do believe in a stronger socialist agenda, yet even many of them would draw the line at a complete state run economy. So anything that sounds close to that or sounds too much reliance on the government will chase away the majority right now even though tired of Trump.

Sure the Democrats can blame Republicans for some of the country’s current travails, but if they chirp away saying all Republicans are bad and then do not offer a rational alternative they may keep people at home. Which leaves open a strong showing by Trump supporters (and right now they are still supporting him) going to the polls and electing who he wants. It is not probable, but very possible if the Democrats chase people away. And the Democrats have a history of doing just that. Don’t believe me then explain to me why Donald Trump won in 2016 and 2024. He didn’t win an outright majority in 2016, but won because the Democrats shut themselves out of the infamous old blue wall or the three to five states from Michigan to Ohio to Pennsylvania.

The Democrats, the party of the working man was snubbed by the working man and has been ever since more or less. Yes the working class should still want the Democrats in power if the Democrat traditional platform existed. It doesn’t anymore. It moved too far left, created a woke culture, which in of itself isn’t the deal breaker, it was the way it was presented to America. Elite Democrats got on their high horse and told everyone how horrible they were if they didn’t go along with what they were told to believe. This caused enough people to run to Trump. If you keep talking down to people, they stop listening much less supporting you. Simple as that, yet Democrats do not want to hear that because it takes away their supposed leadership role.

It is good some Democrats are coming out against the old guard. This needed to be done 15 years ago. Instead Obama caved too much to the vanguard of the party and let Hillary set the party back at least ten years. Well now they can climb out of this morass if they start singing a whole new song. They can still be a liberal party. They just need to realize they aren’t dragging this country to the left at the moment and rethink their messaging to show they can generate sound economic policy without taking away everything. It is more of a thin rope to walk than the Democrats usually attempt. Yet if they want to win the mid terms then in 2028 they better have a very respectful open the big tent kind of mentality and actually have policy that attracts people to that tent.

They start being partisan or elitist and lecturing, they could flub the midterms spectacularly.  Also like mentioned above November is not next month. Much can happen between now and then to give the Republicans some footing to distance from Trump and keep an economic policy that doesn’t scare people.

Now for my real feelings. Both parties still are failing this country. The partisanship anger and hate needs to go. We need new leaders and new parties. Yet for now the Democrats have a chance of keeping the duopoly alive if they make some major changes to their messaging and hopefully their actual policy.