General Discussion

If you want basic human rights (food, clothing, shelter, education, health care), you can get a job and pay ever-inflating prices for them like good rich people do, you lazy bum. It's extreme Calvinist Protestant (a.k.a. "Evangelical" or fundamentalist) Christianity in practice: the poor are poor because it's their fault and they're not going to heaven because God doesn't shine upon them - so why bother worrying?

While nothing is sure yet, it's a good. bet that Democrats will cave on the budget "for the sake of the country." Which is to say for the sake of the wealthy people, investment funds and corporations. That's what we get for electing"moderates." The whole "vote blue" regardless thing has gotten us here, where all the moderates want to do is get (re)elected, bipartisan with their friends across the aisle, do insider trading without penalty and get some sinecure position on a corporate board if they've arrived at the point of feathering their nest enough (see Kristen Sinema). Anyone can call themselves a Democrat, and lots of right-wingers run as Democrats because of history or media-encouraged perception. See Hawai'i for a worst-case example. The current party leadership's notions of government resembles Nixon's GOP more than anything else (perhaps with a bit less megalomania). Saying "we don't have ideological parties" is, perhaps, the biggest sleight-of-hand (a.k.a., con) that anyone's been able to pull of since the invention of religion.

The push to take the party further and further right that began with Carter and reached nauseating proportions with Clinton and Obama got us right here. That's allowed the GOP to move ever further right, too, and leads us straight to Trumpism. The elite is delighted at seldom having to worry about things like "socialism," however much they're presently losing their shit over Mamdani; and all power rests with the elite in our system where money is "free speech. While folks rightly say Schumer is A problem, he's hardly THE only problem. For example, almost everyone on this site has been celebrating the "big wins" in the NJ and VA governors' races. Both those women were Blue Dog Caucus before having a very public falling out with Jared Golden - not over policy, but over the name. They are the far right of your party and are running to crucial states. Big wins, those. We here at DU love elephants in jackass costumes, unless it's Schumer's good friend Joe Manchin, apparently.

Electing "moderates" is why we can't have nice things.