I phone banked on two Sanders campaigns. This didn’t start with Trump or even in most of our lifetimes. Both parties, and yes most voters of both of them, would rather set the country on fire than have anything resembling economic equity or someone having their basic needs met without a subjective judgement of “deserving” it. We could have ended homelessness inexpensively at any time under any administration, we could have made prison rehabilitative, it would have literally saved the country money to invest in both, yet I’ve heard more Democrats and Republicans speak of such desperate populations as the problem instead of the society that put them there.
This collapse was a choice we made over and over again.
I live in a caucus state.
Till the day I die, I will never forget sitting in a classroom during the caucuses as the small number of leftists made our cases and pleaded with the Neoliberals there to ordain the DNC’s chosen bribe taker to just stop and think.
Not a single neoliberal in any caucus I attended ever said a word beyond their bribe taker candidate’s stock statement. They scowled at us like WE were their enemy there to inconvenience them, voted for their corrupt stooge, and left.
And I still voted for their bribe taker out of harm reduction in the general out of harm reduction, as I did with Harris, the latest meet the Fascists in the middle let the poors die in the streets or when they get sick hey here’s Liz Cheney endorsing me “good guy.” We did this to ourselves. And the capitalists on Wall Street are the main villains, but we by and large had to be receptive to “well you could be rich someday too!” for their confidence scheme coup to work.