[Tainari88]

What 3rd run, there are term limits. Or you mean this time? Well he wasn't perceived as such compared to Biden so its a moot point.

is he going to leave office in 2028? Or is Trump going to say, that the system is rigged against him and there are a lot of work that has to be accomplished. I do not see that egomaniac giving up his influence to someone else unless he is dead. His attachment to power is too great.

I do see him remaining even if he loses within the Republican primary. He will wind up fracturing the Republican party into Trump devotees and some other far Right extremist like Vance or some other person the inside types in that party deem the successor.

If people have suffered enough under his presidency they will vote for the opposition most likely. But that the entrenched people allow a peaceful transfer of power? No.

So there will be violence. That is almost certain because of the behavior pattern.

[Hakeer]

is he going to leave office in 2028? Or is Trump going to say, that the system is rigged against him and there are a lot of work that has to be accomplished. I do not see that egomaniac giving up his influence to someone else unless he is dead. His attachment to power is too great.

I do see him remaining even if he loses within the Republican primary. He will wind up fracturing the Republican party into Trump devotees and some other far Right extremist like Vance or some other person the inside types in that party deem the successor.

If people have suffered enough under his presidency they will vote for the opposition most likely. But that the entrenched people allow a peaceful transfer of power? No.

So there will be violence. That is almost certain because of the behavior pattern.

It will be Vance vs. ? in 2028.

[Tainari88]

It will be Vance vs. ? in 2028.

Who knows? The United States are rejecting socialists. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly popular socialists in the US Congress and the senate. AOC is currently 35 years old and engaged to be married to her fiancé Riley. A web developer. She would be 39 years old. But? Too radical for the Democrats. I think if she survives a Trump presidency without serious issues? She will be a senator for New York state or some other neighboring state.

President? No. The Democrats are foolish and will not go full socialist.

I think they will try to get someone like Corey Booker? That might work. Or something like that. I do not know.

Sanders is older, even though he is not in cognitive decline like Biden or Trump will be.

The important thing is to get rid of corrupt money from both parties. Prohibit corporate donors.

Frankly, I think the USA is on its way down in general. Too many mistakes over time and eventually the ones competing with them will have breathing room for their own plans over time.

Tulsi Gabbard would have been a much better pick for Republican nominee status by far than Nikki Haley. But? That is what the Republican party produces. Boeberts, MTG and other stupid candidates that do not make sense and are all about power without knowledge and cheap conspiracy theories.

I took a quiz on political issues and questions and who I aligned with that were running for the Democratic nomiation. My score was 91% agreement with Marianne Williamson. The best selling author.

I also took another political quiz and Nelson Mandela was another one I had close alignment with.

So? If Marianne Williamson runs again? I would vote for her. But she was forced out by the establishment Democratic party.

I like very feminine women, intelligent with fine minds, and who are compassionate and loving and want peace and not war and a government for the people and by the people.

Which means the US warmongering imperialist machine will never pick her as president. Hee hee.

Her full speech in the DNC primaries.

[Verv]

Or it's just getting replaced with another type of oligarchy. The strong confidence in this kind of statement is something you should think about more. Then again, you are true believer, so if I take this as a statement of faith than confidence, then it makes sense. Having faith in your feelings as truth is a feature of this new era. It's an interesting paradox coming from the type of people that like saying "fuck your feelings".

The idea that the current type of oligarchy is just being replaced by another makes sense.

This is truly a challenge for anyone who stands up for any populist movement. Both the left and the right suffer from this in multiple ways - sometimes the movement is hijacked by the already privileged, or sometimes the movement is pure for a generation and then it is abruptly replaced by a new ruling class that is not loyal to the initial principles.

I think this is also what is at the basis of conservatism in America: disbelief in the ability of the government to not be corrupt, not be cronyist, not be a stepping stone for industrialists and financiers to gain power over the society.

This is also where folk Libertarians & the radical left can kind of unite - rallying against centralized government authority.

Can Trump authentically represent that? It's hard to say. He has some conflicting tendencies.

[Hakeer]

Who knows? The United States are rejecting socialists. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly popular socialists in the US Congress and the senate. AOC is currently 35 years old and engaged to be married to her fiancé Riley. A web developer. She would be 39 years old. But? Too radical for the Democrats. I think if she survives a Trump presidency without serious issues? She will be a senator for New York state or some other neighboring state.

President? No. The Democrats are foolish and will not go full socialist.

I think they will try to get someone like Corey Booker? That might work. Or something like that. I do not know.

Sanders is older, even though he is not in cognitive decline like Biden or Trump will be.

The important thing is to get rid of corrupt money from both parties. Prohibit corporate donors.

Frankly, I think the USA is on its way down in general. Too many mistakes over time and eventually the ones competing with them will have breathing room for their own plans over time.

Tulsi Gabbard would have been a much better pick for Republican nominee status by far than Nikki Haley. But? That is what the Republican party produces. Boeberts, MTG and other stupid candidates that do not make sense and are all about power without knowledge and cheap conspiracy theories.

I took a quiz on political issues and questions and who I aligned with that were running for the Democratic nomiation. My score was 91% agreement with Marianne Williamson. The best selling author.

I also took another political quiz and Nelson Mandela was another one I had close alignment with.

So? If Marianne Williamson runs again? I would vote for her. But she was forced out by the establishment Democratic party.

I like very feminine women, intelligent with fine minds, and who are compassionate and loving and want peace and not war and a government for the people and by the people.

Which means the US warmongering imperialist machine will never pick her as president. Hee hee.

Her full speech in the DNC primaries.

Bernie will be age 87 in 2028. I love him, but his window to the presidency has closed. The sexism in the country is so damn strong that I don’t want to risk running a woman against Vance.

Hakeem Jeffries has emerged as the leader of the party in the House and — by 2028 — possibly the whole party. He is as much hardcore progressive as any of them. He in the CPC and BCC. Trump will target him for investigation by FBI, IRS, CIA, as he was on the impeachment prosecution in Trump’s impeachment by the House. He’s close to the top of the “enemies within.”

[Rugoz]

I think this is also what is at the basis of conservatism in America: disbelief in the ability of the government to not be corrupt, not be cronyist, not be a stepping stone for industrialists and financiers to gain power over the society.

Money in politics is subject to rules and regulation. Campaign spending limits, limits to individual contributions, public financing of campaigns, etc. etc.

It's conservatives who oppose these limits. It's the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that allows corporations to spend unlimited money on campaigns (through Super PACs), because according to the aforementioned conservative majority, any limits would violate the corporations' "right to free speech".

Every GOP voter complaining about "oligarchy" and money in politics is a bloody fucking hypocrite.

[Verv]

:knife:

Money in politics is subject to rules and regulation. Campaign spending limits, limits to individual contributions, public financing of campaigns, etc. etc.

It's conservatives who oppose these limits. It's the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that allows corporations to spend unlimited money on campaigns (through Super PACs), because according to the aforementioned conservative majority, any limits would violate the corporations' "right to free speech".

Every GOP voter complaining about "oligarchy" and money in politics is a bloody fucking hypocrite.

... Yes, and the solution was to constrain the government so much that there were so few things the government did so that it would not be influenced or manipulated by corporations to make big profits, right.

This was why the government has a very strict rule that the government will reward the contract to the company that can meet the exact requirements but at the cheapest price, so as to have a criterion through which they could make cronyism between the government and corporations impossible.

It's also interesting that conservatives want to do things like abolish the Department of Education because they think public schools should be state funded and controlled or even because they understand that very cheap private education facilities can do the job better and with more efficient use of their funds.... It also automatically ends the ability for the public to be indocrinated via state monitored education.

Lots of other things on this.

I am not saying you should be a conservative that believes this, I am only saying these people exist and you can work with them or choose to respect them in terms of cooperating to try to defeat oligarchy.

There's competing visions of how this is done.

[Rich]

Joe Biden won the backing of the Democrat establishment to take down Sanders because of his support amongst VDSAD (Very Dark Skinned African Descended) Americans. They supported him because they were far less Woke than the rest of the Democrat party, and wanted to prioritise winning over the Trans Agenda and the Fake Green Reset. Once elected as President, Joe Biden opened the borders and ruled as the most Woke, the most Cultural Marxist President in history, by a long a mile. This is why Mrs Woke-Woke-Woke, aka Kamala Harris, couldn't think of a single thing she disagree with Joe Biden.

[Tainari88]

@Potemkin I think Marianne here has a good plan for the Democrats. Do you think they will obey her? No.

But that is the crisis. A value system crisis.

[Tainari88]

Joe Biden won the backing of the Democrat establishment to take down Sanders because of his support amongst VDSAD (Very Dark Skinned African Descended) Americans. They supported him because they were far less Woke than the rest of the Democrat party, and wanted to prioritise winning over the Trans Agenda and the Fake Green Reset. Once elected as President, Joe Biden opened the borders and ruled as the most Woke, the most Cultural Marxist President in history, by a long a mile. This is why Mrs Woke-Woke-Woke, aka Kamala Harris, couldn't think of a single thing she disagree with Joe Biden.

Biden establishment man had to be woke woke even though he personally was not that woke. Why? The progeressives did hold a bit of power within the Democratic party. They pressured him into it. Did he like it? Probably not. But Joe Biden has always been a very useful tool of the Democratic party elite Rich.

All of them are into manipulating people like Mafia people. The Democratic party. Who is wanting Sonia Sotomayor to step down because they are scared of losing that seat to another far Right justice because she hit 70 years old and is a type 1 Diabetic? The party elite. They want her to step down and slam in a younger puppet for the SCOTUS. They are assholes without basic fundamental values. Bernie Sanders was asked if he thought ousting Sonia was a good idea? He said no. A flat no.

You are dealing with people who say they serve the people and are a bunch of fake elitists that suck. That is reality.

You have to be realistic. They lost and they lost big time. They are lucky if they still have their underwear on by the time the Trump fascists get done with woke elitist stupid shit.

They sold out. Asking for money. My email was flooded with shit emails about donate now. We want money now. Fuck those people! Stop asking for money and start living a value system. Hillary had more money for her campaign than Trump had and she LOST. They do not self reflect. They want to keep going with their rotten value system.

The Republican party has defined itself. They are selfish, pro business, racist, sexist and nasty power hungry horrors. But they know how to lie, cheat and steal very effectively. If you study Roy Cohn? He gave the three rule thing to Trump and it works!!

They are low lives.

How do you fight them? You adopt the values that guarantee victory. How? By being the antithesis and serving people FIRST. Dump the selfish shit.

Juan Dalmau won over every stripe of Puerto Rican that had been brainwashed to vote for the pro Yankee option. How did he win them over? Serving them without asking them for money or taking advantage of them. Being clean. Not corrupt. You live the values. You do not spout lies, cheating and stealing.

Eventually you win people over with behavior. Not with cunning and lies and manipulation. Eventually the value system they live by has to be stark and the society either adopts it as their own or rejects it. If they reject it? They are done politically. The entire society will be about selfish power hungry people who will empoverish everyone but themselves. With no compassion.

Or they adopt good values and change their political system. Those are the choices. It is up to the ones with good value system to lay the foundation for victory.

Dalmau was the only man who never was corrupt, did not lie about important things, and actually came through with actions on what he was talking about. The others did not. So now? He is gaining ground like a freight train. Full speed ahead. Now it is a matter of time before it hits critical mass. Just because his competition are rotten value people that eventually no one trusts anymore. Too many corruption scandals. They did it to themselves. Bad values.

[Tainari88]

Bernie will be age 87 in 2028. I love him, but his window to the presidency has closed. The sexism in the country is so damn strong that I don’t want to risk running a woman against Vance.

Hakeem Jeffries has emerged as the leader of the party in the House and — by 2028 — possibly the whole party. He is as much hardcore progressive as any of them. He in the CPC and BCC. Trump will target him for investigation by FBI, IRS, CIA, as he was on the impeachment prosecution in Trump’s impeachment by the House. He’s close to the top of the “enemies within.”

The US voters are more woman haters than the supposed machista nation of Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina and many others who in Latin America have already voted in a woman PM or President. I think it has to do with many factors. One in which the USA is a very imperialistic nation.

Though you might get an American Margaret Thatcher but I doubt she would win the Republican side of the nomination.

The Democrats have to give up corruption with money from corporate donors. And they need to give up on elitism. If they refuse to do so? They will be defeated over and over again by the Republican fascist Trump Vance combo party.

You either go full socialist agenda and very hard Left...or you will be eaten alive with the wishy washy liberals who love to be bribed off and have their snobby attitudes of exclusive club shit that they do there. That is reality.

[Hakeer]

The US voters are more woman haters than the supposed machista nation of Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina and many others who in Latin America have already voted in a woman PM or President. I think it has to do with many factors. One in which the USA is a very imperialistic nation.

Though you might get an American Margaret Thatcher but I doubt she would win the Republican side of the nomination.

The Democrats have to give up corruption with money from corporate donors. And they need to give up on elitism. If they refuse to do so? They will be defeated over and over again by the Republican fascist Trump Vance combo party.

You either go full socialist agenda and very hard Left...or you will be eaten alive with the wishy washy liberals who love to be bribed off and have their snobby attitudes of exclusive club shit that they do there. That is reality.

Citizens United case decided by Roberts Supreme Court created Super PACs. They can raise unlimited amounts of money to create unlimited corruption. Democrats opposed it. Republicans supported it. In the 2024 election, 88% of the single-candidate Super Pac money went to Republicans (top 4 were for Trump)…
https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spe ... super_pacs

Bernie Sanders was interviewed on CNN yesterday. He reiterated that we want to reverse Citizens United. Unfortunately, we do not have control of Congress or the Supreme Court. Personally, I would like to have a cap on campaign spending. Period. I don’t need to see the same ad on TV ten times.

The guy on your video blames liberals for creating this problem. As a progressive, educated, baby boomer liberal (one of the guys he is blaming), I will admit that Democrats have screwed up from time to time. For example, Bill Clinton supported NAFTA, which exported jobs to Mexico. Bernie, of course, vigorously opposed. Obama had a chance to not extend the Bush tax cuts for billionaires. Good in short-term, but not long-term. On the other side of the ledger (the 800 pound gorilla that this guy doesn’t even mention), we have fucking Ronald Reagan who started the massive inequality spiral in 1980 with his tax cuts, union-busting, recruitment of Evangelicals and all the rest. It continued with Bush and Trump. They do NOTHING for working class people except talk the talk.

Another thing. He says Bernie is going along with Biden. No. Biden went along with Bernie. Not just in proposal large tax increases for billionaires, but also in bring back manufacturing jobs…
https://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2024 ... nvestments

Trump LOST 200,000 manufacturing jobs and Biden ADDED over 700,000 new manufacturing jobs…
https://www.bluegreenalliance.org/resou ... strations/

But the guy in this video doesn’t talk about that. Why? The problem is that we are a country where facts don’t matter to half the population. In the opinion polls, people said that Trump would do a better job than Harris on the economy. The fact is that every Republican president from Reagan to Trump has had a recession, and every Democratic president has had to dig out of the hole created by his Republican predecessor. That is also a fact. But then again, facts don’t matter.

Project 2025 is a blueprint for Christian white nationalism. They would like for liberals to feel intimidated by all their anti-
“woke” talk. Some of it on the margins is justified, but that should not stop us from fighting against prejudice and bigotry toward blacks, gays, transgenders, or others who are not white Christians, especially when it turns into legalized fascist discrimination against what Trump call “garbage” and “vermin.”

[wat0n]

Facts do matter, it just depends on what you're looking at. An example:



The real median household income hasn't gone back to the 2019 levels, I think this has something to do with Trump's win as it suggests many middle class households' real incomes had not fully recovered by 2023, illustrating the effect of the high inflation in 2021-2023 - even though this may also have to do with composition effects (older workers leaving the workforce during the pandemic and not returning after) and other factors unrelated to economic policy.

[ingliz]

Prophetic words ...

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

— H.L. Mencken

[Hakeer]

Facts do matter, it just depends on what you're looking at. An example:



The real median household income hasn't gone back to the 2019 levels, I think this has something to do with Trump's win as it suggests many middle class households' real incomes had not fully recovered by 2023, illustrating the effect of the high inflation in 2021-2023 - even though this may also have to do with composition effects (older workers leaving the workforce during the pandemic and not returning after) and other factors unrelated to economic policy.

That is true. Zakaria was talking about this on his show yesterday. The incumbents have been losing elections in France, Japan, etc. all over the world, because the party in power is blamed for the recession caused by the pandemic. It isn’t exactly fair, but understandable.

Of course, Trump’s management of the pandemic was horrific, which put Biden in a deep hole. He did stimulus spending to dig out, but it did cause inflation. Although inflation has steadily declined to under 3%, voters punished Harris.

[Tainari88]

Citizens United case decided by Roberts Supreme Court created Super PACs. They can raise unlimited amounts of money to create unlimited corruption. Democrats opposed it. Republicans supported it. In the 2024 election, 88% of the single-candidate Super Pac money went to Republicans (top 4 were for Trump)…
https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spe ... super_pacs

Bernie Sanders was interviewed on CNN yesterday. He reiterated that we want to reverse Citizens United. Unfortunately, we do not have control of Congress or the Supreme Court. Personally, I would like to have a cap on campaign spending. Period. I don’t need to see the same ad on TV ten times.

The guy on your video blames liberals for creating this problem. As a progressive, educated, baby boomer liberal (one of the guys he is blaming), I will admit that Democrats have screwed up from time to time. For example, Bill Clinton supported NAFTA, which exported jobs to Mexico. Bernie, of course, vigorously opposed. Obama had a chance to not extend the Bush tax cuts for billionaires. Good in short-term, but not long-term. On the other side of the ledger (the 800 pound gorilla that this guy doesn’t even mention), we have fucking Ronald Reagan who started the massive inequality spiral in 1980 with his tax cuts, union-busting, recruitment of Evangelicals and all the rest. It continued with Bush and Trump. They do NOTHING for working class people except talk the talk.

Another thing. He says Bernie is going along with Biden. No. Biden went along with Bernie. Not just in proposal large tax increases for billionaires, but also in bring back manufacturing jobs…
https://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2024 ... nvestments

Trump LOST 200,000 manufacturing jobs and Biden ADDED over 700,000 new manufacturing jobs…
https://www.bluegreenalliance.org/resou ... strations/

But the guy in this video doesn’t talk about that. Why? The problem is that we are a country where facts don’t matter to half the population. In the opinion polls, people said that Trump would do a better job than Harris on the economy. The fact is that every Republican president from Reagan to Trump has had a recession, and every Democratic president has had to dig out of the hole created by his Republican predecessor. That is also a fact. But then again, facts don’t matter.

Project 2025 is a blueprint for Christian white nationalism. They would like for liberals to feel intimidated by all their anti-
“woke” talk. Some of it on the margins is justified, but that should not stop us from fighting against prejudice and bigotry toward blacks, gays, transgenders, or others who are not white Christians, especially when it turns into legalized fascist discrimination against what Trump call “garbage” and “vermin.”

Liberals believe in capitalism. That is s very serious problem. Capitalism believes in profit and class according to socioeconomics. Warren believes it and so do the Nancy Pelosi types and many other liberals.

If you study all the socialist movements in other nations? They all come into power by defeating pro capitalist right wing freaks. ALL OF THEM. AMLO and Sheinbaum say anti Capitalist statements all the time. Why? Who is in charge of most of the economies that have strangled Latin America and the USA? The Chicago School and Milton Friedman. Neoliberalism. They are neoliberals. It has been an unmitigad disaster for the working class.

Clinton backed it for eight years. Neoliberal economics. Allen Grennspan.

It is about corporate capitalism. Citizens United was harmful. The Democrats were unable to repeal it.

You can say all you want? You got to act and give up this hero worship of capitalism. It has to be regulated and the funds have to be about democratizing the workplace. Not creating new top down corporate capitalism. That has to be discarded. It is creating inequality and the only ones comfortable with that system are liberal elitists who feed off of neoliberalism and so do the Republicans @Hakeer.

The compassionate Capitalism is not happening because Andrew Yang was a candidate for that type of economic system. The other person advocating for some type of rational capitalism was Joseph Stiglitz. Both really do suggest socialism in there. Do they do that in the Democratic party? No, they do not.

That is the big betrayal. Talking shit and not delivering the socialist programs.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador literally got on the mañanera show and told the Mexicans, if you want some pro capitalist neoliberalism that we have had to endure for decades through the PRI and the PAN...vote for them again. Corruption and incompetence. That is who they are. I am a socialist. I will deal with capitalism out of control and I am not afraid of taxing the rich and regulating it all. He started coping with what the Mexicans wanted to happen. Free health care and so on. They voted MORENA in again, after a pandemic. And all that pressure. Why? Even after the corrupt PRI and PAN cleaned out the Mexican treasury after they lost the elections in 2018. They still found a way to get things done. MORENA got it done. Socialism. Spanking the capitalist group with intelligence. They are still moaning. They can't do a damn thing about it because they cleaned up in the senate, the house and the vast majority of the mayors and governors all over the United Mexican States. They kicked ass. Why? The Liberals with greed suck. They need to change their wishy washy stuff. The fascists are strong and racist, classist and discriminatory, love violence. How do you combat that?

I am not happy with pro capitalist liberals. They are weak on working class values. It is obvious. Study what the socialist elements are doing in these market economies. No one backs that CRAP capitalism where they only transfer more wealth to the elites.

IN the USA they have a serious lack of understanding on how bad it is has gotten in the USA.

The neiliberal economics is to blame. Take responsibility. The liberals did not oppose that horrible system because they were getting rich as well.

This next video is an update from the 2017 video above. But in Spanish with more global stats. Latin America had horrible results from neoliberalism. But the capitalist class now is afraid of the fascists who want nationalist economics. They picked the wrong man Trump because even his MAGA hats are made in the PRC.

[Deutschmania]

I took a quiz on political issues and questions and who I aligned with that were running for the Democratic nomination. My score was 91% agreement with Marianne Williamson. The best selling author.

Is this the quiz you took ? If so , here was my result . 100% for three candidates each .

100%
1. Kamala Harris
Submit Views

100%
2. Cornel West
Submit Views

100%
3. Jill Stein

https://www.selectsmart.com/president/2024presresults.html

I rather think that it wasn't very comprehensive , or even accurate .

[Tainari88]

Is this the quiz you took ? If so , here was my result . 100% for three candidates each .



I rather think that it wasn't very comprehensive , or even accurate .

No I did not take that quiz. I am a thinker that is against authoritarian leadership, and I am about equity and also sacrifice for others. Caps on exaggerated wealth distributions. I had a series of people I had similarities to in politics. Nelson Mandela. Who is a socialist from the ANC. He was on the US terrorist watch list. Condi Rice had to take him off. He did not believe in creating an all African elite excluding the white minorities. You had to accept a multiracial society based on fairness and on sharing power according to what was the most humane methods and democratic methods.

Marianne Williamson has socialist leanings as well. But it is based on her idea of spirituality and doing for a better society based on peace. Not war.

So yes. Those are the kind of leaders I like. I do not like the leaders that love greed, authoritarian crap policies and imposing via class, and wealth. It is anti humane in general Deustchmania.

If you dig away at most socialist leaders they wind up outside the system and breaking in. Most establishment politicians are not anti authoritarian socialists. The National Socialists are Fascists. The International socialists are not. Opposites. But since no one really studies socialism and all its variations they make enormous mistakes.

A Democratic Socialist and a Christian Socialist is not the same as a National Socialist or a libertarian socialist. A scientific socialist are Communists. Do people know these categories? No. They never study it because socialism is the boogie man for the Americans studying that. They usually get it in some introductory course for the first time in either Political Science 101 course or a Social Studies 201 course and some economic theory and or philosophy about x or y course.

Never in high school.

No one likes reading Das Kapital by Karl Marx in German. Too long and boring for most. But it is necessary literature to understanding 19th century capitalist structures. The stateless society is still controversial.

[Unthinking Majority]

@Potemkin I think Marianne here has a good plan for the Democrats. Do you think they will obey her? No.

But that is the crisis. A value system crisis.

Democrats when from moderate liberals to identity politics wokesters. Trump lies about everything but so do the Democrats. These 2 parties are trash.

[Deutschmania]

Exactly ! This is more than anything , why I who voted for Biden in '20 ended up voting for Jill Stein in '24 , because of the ongoing wars with not clear cut end in sight . It was a matter of conscientious conviction for me . And although I certainly do regret the outcome of the election , I don't however regret my vote . Come what may , at least I can still live with myself .

Last October, Joe Biden made the most significant address of a presidency defined by war. Sitting in the Oval Office, he asked Congress to approve $106bn in emergency aid mainly to arm Ukraine and Israel in their ongoing wars. He barely attempted to explain what the US was seeking to achieve in either place, or how the fighting would come to an end. Instead, he claimed that American allies, and freedom itself, were under attack, and the US had to help because of its very identity as a nation. “We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, ‘the indispensable nation’,” Biden intoned. Albright had served as secretary of state in the late 1990s, at the apex of America’s global dominance.

The next day I attended a meeting of “outside experts” convened by the national security council. The group, in fact mostly composed of seasoned national security hands, showered praise on the administration for Biden’s soaring speech. If the attenders had made up the US Congress, they would have rubber-stamped the aid that afternoon and probably added billions more. (The actual Congress balked at the request, approving it only after five months of uncertainty.)

I thought to myself, I must be living in another country than these people. The president just asked the American public to pay $106bn – almost double the budget of the state department, and on top of about $1tn in annual national security spending – to supply multiple overseas wars whose consequences for ordinary Americans were abstract at best. Not only that: the president seemed to imply that Americans had no choice in the matter because, as all right-thinking people knew, we are the indispensable nation.

I was so close to the priests yet so far from the priesthood.

I felt less alone, but more uneasy, when I recalled what Jake Sullivan had written in 2019, a year before Biden appointed him to be national security adviser. Back then, Sullivan had urged Democrats to retire the notion that the United States was the world’s indispensable nation. “By itself, indispensability is more wearying than energizing,” he wrote. “It speaks to fulfilling others’ needs, not one’s own. And it comes with no limits.”

Leaving the meeting, I realized that the process of political learning and policy adaptation that Democrats had attempted after their loss to Trump in 2016 – an effort that informed Biden’s campaign and first year in office, when he denounced “forever wars” and withdrew US troops from Afghanistan — was over. White House officials evidently believed that they had made the necessary changes and were back in command of American politics and now could proudly defend the system and tout its most orthodox of orthodoxies.

So when Biden and then Harris ran for president in 2024, they did so as the candidates of the system, right down to campaigning with Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz. They touted her moral rectitude even as most of the country knew the Cheneys for sponsoring foreign policy disaster.

Little wonder Trump relished the opportunity to talk about foreign policy in this election, just as in 2016. Foreign policy helped Trump to make his central pitch: that he was the outsider who would upend a failing system, dispense with self-referential elite pabulum, and resort to all manner of methods to bring change. The Biden-turned-Harris campaign, remarkably, accepted the role Trump cast for it: high-minded defender of the status quo. In her lone presidential debate, Harris did not even state an intention to try to bring the war in Ukraine to a close. She chose instead to express offense at Trump’s willingness to deal with dictators. America must stand, she said, as a “leader upholding international rules and norms”.

As in 2016, the Democrats permitted Trump to be the candidate who at least recognized that the wars should end sooner rather than later, who at least recognized that Cheney-era military interventionism was a major failure (and a bipartisan one), who at least recognized that the specter of what Trump constantly called “World War III” was a real danger and must be avoided through realistic thinking, not wishful platitudes, and not only by deterring adversaries through military strength but also by being unafraid to seek diplomatic accommodations that serve America’s best interests.

Of course, it wasn’t foreign policy that caused American voters to give Trump the largest victory for Republicans in decades. As singular issues go, inflation and immigration mattered more. But elections have multiple causes, and foreign policy was one of them. For starters, the Biden-Harris administration’s sponsorship of Israel’s devastating war cratered Arab-American support in Michigan and elsewhere. More broadly, foreign policy distills something that does determine elections. It is the essential terrain for expressing what America’s identity as a nation should be, where the country has been and where it should go, who is to blame for its ills and who deserves power now. In depicting the US in the world, political candidates tell the story of the nation.

You don’t have to attend national security council meetings to tell that putting “America first” was the stronger message than upholding “international rules and norms. In fact, being among Washington’s foreign policy elite is more likely to blind you to that fact.

As Democrats reckon with the future of their party, foreign policy must be part of the reckoning. The Guardian