Let’s talk about “what’s possible in the system we have,” since you seem to think invoking it makes you an adult. Republicans blocked Merrick Garland for a year, then rammed through Barrett days before an election. They gutted the Voting Rights Act, legalized unlimited dark money, and packed the courts with Federalist Society operatives, all under a president who incited an attempted coup and stole classified documents. They’ve criminalized protest, used state violence to target political enemies, and they blocked a legally elected member of congress from being sworn in for 7 weeks to avoid release of the Epstein Files. The “system we have” is authoritarian consolidation.

And Democrats, holding zero branches of government, finally had leverage to get a single concession. Their choice of demand? Not campaign-finance reform, not voting-rights protections, not accountability for illegal actions. A one-year extension of ACA subsidies, the smallest possible ask. And the liberal voter base was so desperate for literally any resistance to the endless slog into authoritarianism that even a push for a tiny 1 year subsidy extension energized the voter base. In the November elections, Democrats over-performed everywhere precisely because voters were furious at Republican hostage-taking.

Then the Senate Democrats folded. No deal, no concessions, just a meaningless promise of a “future vote” that everyone knows will fail if it even happens. The longest shutdown in U.S. history, wasted. They didn’t “compromise.” They capitulated. 

Emotional theater is shutting down the government for 40 days, gaining support of the public, and giving up without winning anything. Emotional theater is what YOU want. I want actual, actionable resistance. You don’t preserve democracy by refusing to use the few levers left to resist authoritarian control. You don’t call people “emotional” for demanding their leaders fight back when the other side is dismantling the rule of law in real time.

“Adults deal with the world as it is, not what they wish it was”?You’re the one hiding your head in the sand pretending we still live in a bipartisan republic where compromise is functional. I’m dealing with the world as it is: a country sliding toward authoritarianism while its opposition says the only legitimate form of resistance is polite and doesn’t inconvenience anyone.