your well cum

we def got the bad ending

Part 2 for to the comic! Here’s Part 3:

I’ve learned to not underestimate Trump’s position in his movement. Him dying will absolutely lead to a power struggle as everyone else in the party is weak by design. It’s why Greene is gone, why a charisma black hole is VP, and why so much of his staff are incompetent jackasses. The biggest weakness to the current fascist movement has always been their reliance on Trump.

I’ve always hated this “puppet Trump” narrative. Yes he’s easily influenced by people who know how he works, but he also has great intuition for politics that no one else in the Republican party has demonstrated. He’s also more convinced than ever that listening to establishment types and measured voices will make him weak, and he has few of those around anymore anyways. As he gets more desperate or faces more opposition, he’ll get more dangerous and unhinged.

Unironically, no. The last election was the most important in American history, and this next one will do little to undo the damage. Even if Democrats win every seat in the midterms, all it could do is make Trump tear off that last veil of normalcy and make good on his promise to kill “traitors.” That likely won’t happen because too many safe Democrats will fold to maintain normalcy(corporate interests).

Only local races can affect policy in the next election, and all races need to build a left wing political movement that opposes corporate interests to make any progress. The only enemy that’s reachable through elections are the corrupt establishment, not the fascists. They don’t need to win elections, only have enough foot soldiers to crack faces.

The presidential election won’t even matter as long as Trump’s still breathing because his death is the only way he leaves office. I’ve been saying this all year: liberal democracy is over. We will see years of political turmoil as opportunists pretend we can rebuild on the old system, but the foundation is now too rotten to remain stable. It will never be the same.

I will always turn instantly hostile whenever someone uses IQ as a put down 😡

I earnestly think she was seriously threatened. She was angling to take over the Republican party after Trump dies; a strategy more informed by the time she spent with Kevin McCarthy. However, Trump isn’t just a president or party leader anymore, but a dictator who says opponents should be put to death and is ok with the label of fascism. He’s always punished disloyalty, but now he can use any tactic without fear of reprisal.

Narrator: They Did

You’re entirely right about the importance of context. I grew up the opposite of conservative, yet I’ve learned very similar lessons. When you’re on relatively equal footing with shared goals, most can become your friend. When there are power dynamics and the perception of a zero sum game, most can become your enemy. I’ve long been a person who seeks out those who are most opposed to my way of thinking, and I’ve never regretted being friendly with and understanding those people.

At the same time, getting into such neutral conditions is harder than ever for me, as the barriers get put up long before I show up. It’s not actual conversations that hold me back, but getting there in the first place. Whenever I come across a conservative I can approach, I always make sure to talk with them.

Thank you. It’s always unfortunate when people try to logic people out of positions that didn’t logic themselves into. I used to do things like that, but it’d probably be riskier to try now with my current outward identity. Even if I get them to listen to a brown woman, I’m also trans and bi which could easily shut them out if I conceal it, and would make me even harder to approach if I don’t. I hope others can do it for me.

You’re not wrong and I think a lot of Americans miss that perspective. We’re bottom of list in comparison to “developed” with similarly wealthy economies, but we haven’t reached the poverty of poorest countries, yet. Right now we’re more comparable to an imperial power like Russia, but even then we’re probably falling behind (at least they have a strong labor market thanks to their war killing so many young men).

That said, it is entirely possible for us to reach that level of devastation if the coming depression is bad enough and we enter a prolonged period of war and instability following Trump. I wouldn’t bet money on it, but it is more likely than most want to believe.

You vote for the party first and foremost, not for any individual politician. Instead of voting for a local representative, you vote for a single party to represent you at a national level. That party then gets a certain number of seats based on how many votes it got. As a result, voting for a minor party that only gets 10% of the votes actually makes sense, as it then gets 10% of the seats in the parliament. In such systems there usually aren’t single parties with a majority, but coalitions of parties with varying viewpoints.

There are many mixed systems that use party voting, but also link parties to specific candidates. However, the system the previous comment described sounded more like party-list proportional representation.

For a large federal system like the US that has both local needs and far less regional differences than people realize, replacing the House and Senate with a party-list would both unify the country and destroy the power of duopolistic party elites. At the same time, the state and local elections could use any number of systems that focus more on candidates. It wouldn’t prevent a fascist like Trump from taking over, as Israel is a modern example of a party-list country under fascist control, but it would’ve required him to build a party as a politician rather than take over one of the big two.

Nah, this will not happen. People like Greene are irrelevant, as Trump has bullied far more popular politicians out of office without the power of the state at his disposal. ICE are Trump’s most loyal and will never abandon him; only service members forced to break their oaths would ever turn on him, and I doubt anything outside of impending nuclear Holocaust will build enough momentum to topple him.

The Republicans have done nothing good. Every true thing they brag about is absolutely evil and repulsive. They brag about things that are verifiably untrue that are good, but the Dems would be better served tearing down those lies.

I honestly don’t like this. While there are Republicans who are closeted, there’s no evidence Johnson is one of them and the creepy shit we do know makes him seem even straighter.

It’s calling back to the 1950s era nostalgia that is currently big on the right. That style is not far removed from the constraints and style of 1930s-40s Germany.

The Trump admin trying to kill Maduro is the least surprising news I’ve heard. I see them going to war with Venezuela as all but certain. The government shutdown is really the only snag.

Even the smart people aren’t smart enough.

There is only one, as there will never be another election that can remove him.