There's a lot that can be said about this like how we got here, what's really going on and what we do about it but honestly, it's all pretty pointless. Nothing is going to change.

We had 60 years of near-total Democratic control of Congress until, in the 1990s, the Democrats abandoned New Deal policies in favor of neoliberalism. Even this was a culmination of what began decades earlier, specifically that real wages stagnated and the wealth and income gaps grew starting around 1971 [1].

On the other side we have the Republican Project, a 50+ year effort to take over the government and reshape America as a Christian theocracy. Why? White supremacy, never getting over the end of chattel slavery, manifest destiny, all that. And it all started with the end of segregation and the effort to fight that using the issue of abortion as a weapon.

We have a Supreme Court that will go down in history as with the likes of Dred Scott. Citizens United, Dobbs, the historical tradition test, major questions doctrine and of course completely inventing presidential immunity out of thin air. But it's not just them. It's every layer of the courts thanks to pushing "originalist" propaganda (which was invented in the 1980s). Certain judges completely slow-walked prosecutions to benefit Trump directly. And brazenly.

Thanks to the takeover of states in 2010 in particular, districts are gerrymandered to hell to the point where, for example, Republicans managed a supermajority in Wisconsin despite getting 38% of the vote.

But what makes this fatal is there is absolutely no opposition to any of it. The Democratic Party are complicit in all of it. They are controlled opposition. They are more concerned with lining up their post-political lobbying and consulting careers than effecting any real change or opposition. In fact, the biggest threat to the Democratic Party isn't fascism, it's progressives. If the DNC opposed Trump half as well as they opposed Bernie Sanders, we'd be living in a very different world.

In the last election, Kamala Harris offered absolutely nothing to voters. Every policy was vetted by her brother to make sure Wall Street approved. Kamala Harris would rather lose an election to Trump tha adopt any progressive policies, desppite progressive policies doing incredibly well in ballot iniatives (eg minimum wage increase passed in Missouri, a deep red state).

The Democratic establishment will tell you progressive ideas aren't popular despite electroal evidence to the contrary, namely Obama's 2008 campaign, which was an electoral blowout. Sadly, Obama quickly abandoned any such policies.

None of what is happening now is intended to make anything more efficient. It's just destruction of the state that regulates and occasionaally holds billionaires accountable. Food, drugs, health, housing, education... everything is going to get worse. And it's nothing to do with the deficit either. The budget blueprint has $2 trillion in cuts and (drum roll please) $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

These people and the voters idolize (even fetishize) a very narrow window in history: the 1950s. Yet they never look at the policies that were in effect at that time, specifically much higher taxes. Plus, all these middle class families had underpaid help thanks to segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism.

And on the foreign policy front, the administration is destroying the instruments of its own soft power (eg USAID). They keep telling us "China is the enemy" while creating a massive power vacuum China will happily fill.

At least in China you have better infrastructure, public transit, high speed rail, affordable health care and better access to education.

[1]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/