I have been preparing for a while to live life without their help. I've voted for them pretty consistently with a few gaps (most of them a long while ago, because Daria is scrupulous about reminding the whole household to vote.) I actually placed a bet on Kamala Harris, and lost money I could ill afford to lose. It was my last drop of faith that they were on a better track now.

And that drop is long drained away.

The Democratic Party and its members need to remember why they bear that name. I haven't given up on #democracy. Democracy actually seems pretty sensible to me. So why have both the Republicans and the Democrats betrayed democracy?

~Chara of Pnictogen

And this brings me to one of the most painful issues in the last few decades of Democratic corruption and disintegration: the fact that they don't believe in #democracy any more.

Why did the Democrats never make political hay out of overt Republican tampering with the electoral process in 2000? Why did they meekly accept the astonishing decision of an unelected body of judges to cut the 2000 election short? Speed should never have been an issue—due process takes as long as it needs to take in order to come to just decision, so all arguments on the basis of "we gotta wrap this up before CEOs react by crashing the U.S. economy" should have been rejected a priori. In the 1980s there might have been enough spirit left in the Democrats to make a fight of it but the 2000 Democrats let the Republicans cheat away the election and de facto ratified an extralegal coup d'etat.

The United States of America was no longer even a broken democracy, after 2000. Nine old people took over and selected a President, and both parties went along with it.

(cont'd)