The Feckless vs. The Fascists
Taken from r/Pics. This is how fascism starts.
Sometimes a picture truly is worth a thousand words.
The photograph above depicts outgoing President Joe Biden on the right. He’s smiling that naïve old smile of his as though his predecessor and successor, Donald Trump (left) isn’t about to destroy the country and make it a living hell for even his own supporters.
It’s often been observed that the Democrats are not willing to partake in the same tactics as Republicans in getting what they want. To some extent, I’m not saying they should. I certainly don’t think it would be wise to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2025, even if it worked out just fine for Mango Mussolini in the end. But take another look at the picture above and tell me that this is okay. Then take a look at the picture below and tell me that this is still okay.
Now, I think Trump shouldn’t have been allowed to run this year after he’d incited an insurrection. He tried to stage a coup and remain in power, and that’s totally disqualifying. But nonetheless, he was allowed to run, and he won the election. He even won the popular vote. And for the record, I believe he truly got those votes. As much as I hate the man, he did not steal this election except insofar as he shouldn’t have been allowed to be a candidate in the first place. We have to contend with the fact that half the population truly wanted him to return to power.
Given that context, I understand that there’s only so much the Democrats could do to stop Trump from taking the Oval Office again. Really, there is nothing they could do short of calling in the military to perform a coup. Biden could technically do that due to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, even if he really shouldn’t. But he shouldn’t be normalizing it, because this is not normal!
Look at the top photo again. It looks like Biden is Trump’s best buddy, like they’re reminiscing on the good old days. By “good old days”, I am of course referring to when Trump lost to Biden and incited a mob to kill a bunch of members of Congress to stop Biden from taking office. I’m referring to the times Trump threatened to prosecute Biden on trumped-up charges (no pun intended). If the shoe were on the other foot, if Trump had lost the 2024 election, I have little doubt they’d be doing another January 6, but now Biden’s playing patty-cake with this fascist.
In hindsight, it’s clear that Biden was the wrong President at the wrong time. I voted for him in the 2020 general election, but that was mostly a vote to get Trump out rather than to get Biden in. The biggest problem is that Sleepy Joe’s an institutionalist at a time when the GOP was (and is) taking a jackhammer to this country’s institutions. Admittedly, some of our institutions remain deeply rooted in racism and should be improved, but if you think the Republican Party is going to remove this rot from our institutions, I’ve got some oceanfront property to sell you in Kansas.
Political cartoon taken from Politico. Thanks, Cocaine Mitch.
Of course, let’s not pretend that Biden’s the only Democrat who has shown his fecklessness. Take Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House. In May 2022, after it was leaked that the Supreme Court would strip women of their bodily autonomy, leading to many deaths and other horrific outcomes , the Democrats had a choice to make. They could use the trifecta they would still have for several more months to pass legislation codifying Roe v. Wade into law and keep abortion rights safe from the GOP.
Alternatively, they could sit on their hands and do nothing. Given the subject of today’s article, I don’t think it takes a genius to realize what they did. Not only did they not codify abortion rights while they still could, but they fundraised off the overturning of Roe v. Wade!
Tens of millions of American women lose their right to bodily autonomy. Nancy Pelosi reads a poem in response. Taken from Slate.
Speaking of the Dobbs decision, it was only handed down because the Democrats did not persuade Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire prior to the 2014 midterms. She could have been replaced by a 40-year-old who would very probably still be on the Supreme Court today. Instead, Ginsburg “left the court” in 2020, and now we’re all screwed in more ways than one. And abortion rights are just the beginning. When it’s 2034 and the still-MAGA Supreme Court rules that AI-powered police drones can kill you without a warrant, you’ll know who to thank.
As bad as a 6-3 Supreme Court is, it can always get worse. Sonia Sotomayor seems determined to repeat Ginsburg’s mistake. She refused to retire under Biden even when the Democrats looked very likely to lose the presidency and Senate in 2024. If she dies under Trump and a Republican Senate, we’re going to have a 7-2 GOP majority on the Supreme Court. While Alito and Thomas are probably going to retire on day one of Trump’s second term and be replaced by 30-year-old far-right bloggers, Sotomayor did not learn her lesson. That’s Exhibit Number 547 in how the Democrats won’t play hardball. So we’ll have even more Supreme Injustice.
Biden supports abortion rights; at least, he claims to. But when push comes to shove, is he really going to fight for them? Consider his buddy Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of the magically sane land known as Canada. I have no doubt that if Canada had a right-wing Supreme Court that overturned abortion rights, Trudeau (a member of a center-left party by Canadian standards) would not take that lying down. He would not let that stand, and he’d find some way to overturn that ruling.
Then again, as a tankie YouTuber known as Second Thought once said, Iceland’s banana production has more Wikipedia coverage than the individual members of its Supreme Court. So who knows if there’s even such a thing as a “right-wing” or “left-wing” Supreme Court up in Canada. Besides, abortion rights (and many other things we might consider basic human rights) are not up for debate anywhere else.
Remind me how Democrats lost to this guy twice? Imagine taken from the feckless Democrats on Xitter.
All of the above is to say this: I don’t subscribe to the notion that both parties are the same. That’s clearly not true, and we’re about to find out just how untrue it is. But the fecklessness of the Democratic Party, particularly when it’s against the fascism of the Republican Party, only gives more ammunition to the people who would say such things. When the only thing standing in the way of your country becoming a total fascist state is such a broken-down, dysfunctional disaster of a party, the future looks very bleak indeed.
