Kamalaheads... Don't read this post...
I think the longer from the debate I linger with it in my head, I feel like Kamala is a bit worse and I don't know if the debate will age that well. I think the debate will play well with most people, and I still felt pretty libbed-up in the first half of the debate, but like...
Trump made some actually good critiques of the Democratic Party, frankly. This doesn't mean I think he's any better at all, but as I've always, always said here: The Republican Party is evil, but they are also good at being evil. They actually get things done for their constituents pretty frequently. Trump saying "Okay but how much of that stuff are you actually going to do, like for real though" was a pretty cutting remark because he's literally right.
When Trump said "it doesn't matter because you won't be able to sign federal abortion", I gotta be honest, he's spitting. I don't think the Democratic Party will actually get Roe v Wade, because while Kamala said Trump would rather run on fixing things, that is literally her (and Biden's before) entire campaign.
There'll be Joe Manchins that cause the bill to not be able to pass and then in 2026 it'll be "Vote harder, bucko!" and in 2028 I still think abortion rights will be a talking point. The moderators grilling Kamala on basically giving up every progressive position she took, pushing her to basically say "I'll be the greatest oil tyrant, baby!" with other things such as "I love private insurance", she's actually going to be tough on the border, committing to an entirely-impossible two-state solution in Gaza, etc. Kamala's not going to be a major progressive at all, and yet she's still gotta say "we're not going back", "we're not going forward", and she's running on policy, not fixing problems.
I want to remind the crowd here: Hillary Clinton funded Donald Trump's campaign because they thought he would be a weak candidate, and that they would destroy him. Since then, the Democratic Party's motto has been almost exclusively "cleaning up the mess". It was calculated that if the Republican Party was pushed fascist, it would scare everyone into voting for them, making them win automatically; and frankly, it worked to an extent, just after the first round of seeing a shitshow. But with them for the second election in a row playing the same card?
If Kamala wins, in 2028 there will be people shitting on every time Kamala said that they would be bringing us forward, not bringing us back, while the party's basically trying to bring us back to "normalcy"; which is great in the sense that, since 2015 American politics have fucking sucked, but that's still a conservative position. That is conserving us to the past, bringing us back to a time that wasn't sunshine and rainbows.
Look, I get it. I want to believe that if Trump loses this election, the Republican Party will shift the Overton window left, bringing a more centrist candidate that gets the Democratic Party to play ball a bit more leftward too. But I just don't see it. I just don't. As a Bluesky user now, I remember seeing this post during the debate half-time that was like: "Well, where's the articles gonna be calling for Trump to step down as nominee?!"
Well, I don't even think you can legally do that at this point first of all, but secondly: The media was helping the Democratic Party. I don't know if some Liberals really need this help, but like. The Media. Was. Helping. The Media is biased liberal, generally, and that is why they, alongside leadership such as Nancy Pelosi seeing disaster if Biden kept being the candidate, was on board with a campaign to, yes, deliberately kick Biden out as incumbent.
The media doing that was helping the Democratic Party be stronger in the race. Why doesn't conservative media do this, then? Besides the fact it's actually too late now, the reason they weren't doing it earlier was simple: Joe Biden did not actually have a base of people who joined the party in order to be a Biden Guy. That is a big reason why Democratic leadership thought kicking Biden was a good idea in the first place. Trump is not like that. Trump has like, last I checked, 30% of the Republican Party by the balls; if he wasn't there, there'd be no fervor. I do not think the Republicans can shift more centrist without losing a good amount of their current voter base, and trust me, it's not because they like Trump. When Tucker Carlson was prosecuted, they found text messages of him being happy Trump lost in 2020! But frankly, they kinda need the populist fascist rhetoric at this point. Even if Trump was cut out, a good portion of the party is MAGA; it'd take a complete reconstruction of the party to turn more conservative-centrist.
We can say "we gotta appeal to the moderates and then you can do good policy", but Biden still locked up those kids at the border, and Trump was objectively correct in saying that the Biden administration took some of Trump's policy and just never repealed it. And okay, I want to be clear: Trump literally was saying bullshit the entire time. I don't want to come off like saying Trump had good arguments, god no, this was the most unhinged he's ever been; when it wasn't just talking points, he was getting baited into even worse points because he's a fucking idiot, literally showing what Kamala said, he's extremely easy to manipulate. Imagining another world leader talking to the Trump that basically wasted 80% of his talking time doing shit like defending Charlottesville and January 6th makes it more clear than Kamala could put into words how dangerous him being the President is for foreign policy.
But this kind of thing, pointing out contradictions in liberal politics, is actually the reason people like him can actually gain prominence in the first place. He can lie and bullshit his way through 90% of his talking points, but when he points out the 10% of truth and hypocrisy in the system, he's right; and people know it's right. What happens when we get a Trump figure that's actually smart, and doesn't bring up Haitian immigrant bullshit, doesn't have JD Vance as a VP, doesn't have the baggage of a terrible first-term? IMO, that'd be a disaster for the Democratic Party. Trump is, despite all I said earlier about bringing that fascist fervor, ultimately a kind of weak candidate. There will be more iterations of Trump that are not as easy to win against, and I don't think the Democratic Party is ready for that in 2028. This election, already, should be light work for any competent political party, and yet before Kamala I was already basically accepting that Trump was going to win.
Well... Alright. Enough grilling.
For now, the debate did what was needed. Kamala Harris is, in my eyes, going to be the next President of the United States, and this is a good thing compared to the alternative, a fascist. But this is giving me big 2020 Biden vibes, just with a fresher face, and I also don't see a future where I'm actually materially better off. I just see the status quo, but shinier, with a younger face.
