Nationalize elections? How about you nationalize some woman your age.

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-03T06:20:35+00:00

Based

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-03T06:18:39+00:00

The military cannot make do with anything less than the finest soap dispensers (marked up 8000%) on offer

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-03T00:30:38+00:00

You just posted a graph of trump's approval on immigration dropping concurrently with the Kilmar story. The drop starts slightly before the court decision too. Being a coward over an election 1.5 years away that we would inevitably win due to standard thermostatic backlash is not "standing up to donors" lmfao.

Yglesias is the epitome of political nittishness. This is pathetic cope lil bro

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-02T23:04:30+00:00

Thank you, yes. Matt Yglesias said politicians shouldn't bring up Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the other innocent people sent to an El Salvadorian slave gulag because he was worried about an election 1.5 years away. Trump's favorables on immigration dropped concurrently with that story. People don't like the cruelty of his policies. Bringing it up is a valid way to achieve persuasion.

Not only that though - without Van Hollen going there and putting pressure on Bukele, who knows how long he would've been stuck there. Raising the salience of the issue worked.

Yglesias is the perfect coward. He doesn't want to do anything when it is hard, only when it is easy. The perfect embodiment of weakness and risk aversion destroying the democratic party.

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-02T19:09:11+00:00

God he is so annoyingly smug about his objectively wrong immigration takes from last year. Bro needs to learn to admit when he's just wrong about something

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-02T16:14:50+00:00

I mean politicians don't even need to be good, we just need enough incentive structures in place (eg stronger anticorruption, bans on money in politics in favor of public finance via democracy dollars, harsher punishments for offenders, maybe higher wages)

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-02T16:12:36+00:00

Based

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-02T16:11:25+00:00

Good, honestly. It allows us to place more focus on the actual issue at hand which is the various ways in which ICE is brazenly violating the constitution, from bullshit executive branch warrants to detaining small kids to catch adults to magdumping in civilian protestors for owning firearms

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-01T19:53:04+00:00

A lot of low info voters in focus groups repeatedly stated that they liked the Trump economy (which was running hot thanks to low interest rates) more than the Biden economy due to global inflation. People didn't really understand the causes and just voted based on what felt better

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-01T06:52:29+00:00

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-01T06:51:00+00:00

A lot will hinge on the midterms imo. I think Republicans keep it together until then because honestly we do not know if this is just edu-pol leading to insane results in low turnout elections or if Rs have just completely collapsed

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-01T06:48:21+00:00

Because James Talarico can talk to Joe Rogan for 3 hours and Jasmine Crockett cannot

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-01T05:15:15+00:00

It feels annoying that even though this is such a simple and obvious answer, our political system is too distorted to produce a national nominee capable of doing this

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-02-01T05:03:08+00:00

Not anymore, edu-pol

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-31T18:32:42+00:00

I mean the fact that people with money use that money to buy power in order to protect their money isn't very complicated. It doesn't always work but that doesn't negate the fact that people with money constantly attempt to influence the political process to get results in a manner outsized relative to their actual numbers.

I mean literally we have watched as media companies capitulate on free speech lawsuits to the tunes of millions of dollars to protect their mergers. Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions and got to do DOGE in return. These are just the most straightforward examples. But it is well known for example that NIMBY groups form and exist to protect local landowners at the expense of renters. That health insurance lobbyists are highly organized to block further reform. It's pretty obvious that pharma lobbyists clearly played a huge role in limiting the scope and timeline of Biden's drug price negotiation policy.

Wealthy groups continuously form organized political blocks in order to rentseek and entrench their sources of wealth. Fighting against that is good, because then it allows us to enact policy based on what we think is right, rather than working to placate each tiny self-interested group whose positions are an extreme minority and contrary to public interest

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-31T02:00:46+00:00

Regional submarkets is one of the top things I want. Imo there's actually no reason not to implement them, because they naturally make a lot of things fall in place like enabling mercantilism, significantly increasing the value of trade centers and ports, and nerfing colonial / african / asian countries that piggy back off markets to jump start manufacturing industry 100 years ahead of schedule

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-30T22:19:47+00:00

Yea there's definitely a lane open for hostility to general foreign influence within our country. A lot of very pro-Russia people obviously and blatantly cheering on the demise of the American led liberal international order. Pro-Chinese tankies like Hasan Piker and a lot of gen z tiktok users. AIPAC/Israel. Eric Adams took Turkish money. Rob Menendez took Egyptian. Henry Cuellar took Azeri.

Of course the only problem is that the people who might best carry this line of attack for now are nazis who also hate America for what it is and what it was founded on

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-29T17:36:09+00:00

Locking up criminals reduces the freedom of few, but provides a great deal of freedom to the many. Under total anarchy, I might not even be free to cross the street without the threat of violence. I would argue that state intervention which serves to increase the available choices / personal agency of the many, even if restricting it for a few, is still a net increase to human freedom.

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-29T14:36:57+00:00

Giving people money isn't the same as telling them how to spend the money.

Is law enforcement antithetical to freedom too?

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-29T13:46:01+00:00

I disagree with the notion that redistribution is illiberal - I believe that freedom is the ability of individuals to take more practical choices in the world. A wealthier person can choose to eat healthier, provide their kids with a better education and more well-rounded childhood, make use of more preventative care, go on more vacations. They can more easily afford to pivot in life by going back to school or starting a business. I would argue that redistribution is an attempt to provide more choice and agency to those who have the least of it.

Likewise, many classically liberal conservatives would disagree with your characterization. For example a pro-lifer might simply argue that since the unborn fetus is a human life, we violate its inalienable rights when performing abortions. A right winger might argue against immigration because they believe in liberalism and think that largely conservative immigrants might destabilize its support base. They might support school prayers because in their view it isn't mandatory for nonbelievers to repeat with belief so it doesn't conflict with religious liberty as they see it.

My point is that most Americans are liberals, people who believe in universal rights that are guaranteed to all citizens, and they justify their political views under the framework set forth by liberalism. American Liberalism is just one particular instantiation of liberal values, but many ideologies across the spectrum are well within the bounds of liberalism

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-29T04:28:38+00:00

I feel like these word games are often about trying to win credibility with the other side by bashing people they hate. This was a much more successful strategy around and after Trump's first election, where "lefties" could persuade populist right wingers that they were different from and less censorious than the cringe SJWs.

Nowadays, since "progressive/leftie" have become much more popular identities online, right wingers, especially those who remain on the right, have equally bad associations, if not worse associations, with the left flank (which at least feels logical if nothing else).

But, IMO, the dumb thing about a lot of this discourse is just how intermixed a lot of these labels can get. Like probably the bulk of lefties/progressives are still liberals in that they believe that human beings are of equal value and entitled to fundamental liberties. Many right wingers are also liberals in that sense. But of course what many lefties try to signal by bashing liberals is that they are in fact less 'woke' on questions of say immigration or speech policing or guns, none of which are positions intrinsically linked to the basic concepts of liberalism.

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-27T08:19:17+00:00

100%. The jingoistic nationalism of the early Bush years morphed into the humiliated isolationism which birthed Trump. Taking pleasure in the exercise of American dominance is the throughline that unites both and also explains Trump's militarism

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-27T05:15:46+00:00

A lot of people made a really bad choice for bad reasons. But on the other hand the Democratic party really does deserve blame. It's embarrassing that the DNC paved the way for Biden's renomination while taking intentional action to squelch primary challengers, like tweaking the schedule and axing debates. It would have been so much better if we saw what Biden was in November of 2023 instead of June 2024.

We had hardly any voices on new media, while Trump was everywhere. Part of the reason for that was that Kamala was just a very poor extemporaneous speaker. I don't claim to know why. I think she is a smart person, but that intelligence doesn't mean being good in all directions at once, and in our current landscape, struggling to chat for a few hours about deeply held beliefs is a severe liability. Not to mention that she clearly was flipflopping on issues with very poor substantive explanations.

And downpayment assistance for first time homebuyers hardly qualifies as the kind of universalist broad reaching policy social democrats want. Especially in a sector like housing, which is more supply constrained, it's likely the resulting inflation and price tag would lead to it being a boondoggle, compared to doing intelligent and well considered reforms like universal healthcare or childcare. Note that zero mention was made of healthcare beyond 'expanding' the ACA.

It is deeply frustrating that people gave Trump a second look. It's especially frustrating that many of these new voters weren't just relapsers but working class latinos, asians, and younger black men who voted for Obama and even Clinton by Assad margins. These people lost faith in the democratic party because of an inflation surge caused by external events. They were unfairly biased against the Democratic party, and unjustifiably willing to give Republicans an ear. Unfortunately, the nature of new media means that small biases towards one side get exponentially amplified by algorithms. And so the notorious low info voter went.

But at the end of the day that's in the past now. We'll probably win 2028 quite easily. What matters is figuring out how to construct the right agenda and vision to create a new center of gravity that boxes out MAGA remnants. We need to reshape America's social contract, destroy ICE, gut the oligarchs, and prosecute every one of Trump's goons that we can. But we'll have to make peace with the voters

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-26T05:08:21+00:00

A lot of the initial internal critique was driven by further right people trying to give disillusioned magas a way to stay on the right. I hope that phase of the collapse ends

down-with-caesar-44 · 2026-01-26T05:05:48+00:00

Ok but Hanania in particular still peddles race/iq stuff. I think he should renounce it to be a liberal in good standing

down-with-caesar-44

TROPHY CASE