My apologies for assuming.

Agree that we should criticize him. It's just important to understand that context so that you can do so accurately. You can't blame a guy for not passing a public option when his own party's conservative wing (and Lieberman) refused to vote for it.

In those 8 years he faced a Congress that, for most of his tenure, and especially after 2010, filibustered or refused to move on nearly everything to the left of neoliberal.

Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate for about seven months, that's the window the ACA came through, watered down to get the 60th vote they needed for it to pass

When the legislative window closed in 2010 (because in midterms Republicans won more seats), the record shifts to executive actions like; DACA, the Iran deal and the Paris Agreement because that was the lever he had.

Republicans used the filibuster at unprecedented rates to produce the appearance of failure, then campaigned on "he got nothing done." McConnell was explicit that the goal was a one-term president.

Kimi K3.1 pro, had reverse engineering information pulled from its training data. So at least some of them are.

I'll concede that I may have been scapegoating centrist politicians when they are a symptom, not an origin. Concentrated wealth shapes candidate pipelines, party apparatus, and the media environment. Donor networks decide who can mount a viable campaign, party machinery is responsive to the same funders, and media ownership concentrates alongside both. Conservative policies are the observable surface of that capture, not its source.

The actors doing the capturing intend the outcomes they directly want (deregulation, tax cuts, weakened labor bargaining power, weakened regulators). They are indifferent to, or welcoming of, the downstream authoritarian coalition, because that coalition serves those same ends by weakening the same mediating institutions. Both want the administrative state, the regulators, and the credibility of mainstream institutions diminished. They don’t need to share goals to keep ending up on the same side. They need only share enemies.

Eroded public services, stagnating wages, visible regional decline; these are the concrete grievances that outrage media has to work with. The media environment matters here, and it isn’t a static backdrop. It’s part of the same captured structure. Voting-age citizens, especially older and less-educated demographics, increasingly get their news through social media, and the medium is the message and that message is outrage, anger, and fear. Identity politics, scapegoating, and demonization are what the feed rewards. But outrage needs something to be outraged about, and the material conditions supply it. That’s the interaction, cultivated grievance plus an amplifier optimized for grievance.

So I'm not saying BC conservatives are the anti-Christ, and I'm not saying they'll be personally engineering fascism. I'm saying the levers they pull are connected to actors with a project, the project benefits from the ground being fertile, and the ground is being made fertile in a structure where the beneficiaries are identifiable. The vulnerability isn't an accident of boring policy. It's the predictable output of a structure where the people pulling the levers profit from the conditions fascist movements exploit.

You were right that structural factors set the odds and agency determines the outcome. I'm saying the odds are being shifted by actors who profit from the conditions, and those actors don't need to intend fascism to keep producing its preconditions. That's a vulnerability, not a fate, which is exactly why the collective agency you named is the thing that has to reverse it. Equilibria can be broken, which is why this is a claim about odds rather than destiny.

It's never good enough. Anything that challenges their narrative is dismissed. It's true that establishment Democrats have definitely gotten comfortable being Republican-lite, but that is not the entire party and it is shifting a little bit at a time. And people who are jaded or have an agenda want to dismiss it but we are seeing progress in real time.

Preach, if you don't like it, change it. And if you don't think you can, educate yourself.

I think when she proposes, actually investigating and trying to hold them accountable is actionable work that if Democrats get enough of a majority could actually work with, rather than another impeachment hearing that will likely be dismissed by the public and stonewalled by the current congress.

Every time the Democrats tried an impeachment and failed, they lose credibility in the public eye.

I agree with you, but this is not what she's saying. The article title is misleading. What she's actually saying is she doesn't think the Democrats have the resources to do anything with an impeachment hearing right now and that Republicans would stonewall so they should spend their limited time and resources on investigations and accountability.

Yep, this is why managing speculative investor expectations is as much a part of managing a modern publicly traded business as actually running the business.

Oh no. Anyway.

This is a really misleading headline. To be frank, what she actually said was she doesn't think they have the resources to properly entertain an impeachment and that they should spend their limited resources on accountability and investigations, something they had the resources to entertain.

I'm no fan of Harris, but let's actually be accurate.