How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack

Recent win: US Supreme Court refuses to hear challenge to New York Times vs. Sullivan. So less than four justices even thought it was worth looking at this issue again.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-turns-away-ca...

And yet they're being told to say/think/do every single day by Trump, Fox News, and the rest of conservative or alt right media, including people like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan.

They love being told what to think.

>I thought this country was founded on the principles of enlightenment.

I'm gonna be honest, the actual founding fathers as individuals aside, most of the people coming over where arguably running away from the Enlightenment rather than towards it, and a superstitious and fantastical isolationism was the norm, not the exception for most of America's history, while the post WWII leadership role was more of an accident. In some ways, this is old habits reasserting themselves

I've come to realize there's absolutely no reforming the Democratic Party. They are willing accomplices in this. Consider these examples:

- In 2001, an open socialist, India Walton, won the Democratic primary for mayor. The State Democratic Party united with Republicans to fund a write-in campaign to re-elect Byron Brown as mayor, which was successful [1];

- Adam Schiff and the California Democratic Party spent millions to prop up a Republican to get the second-most votes in the California Senate primary. Why? California has what's called a "jungle primary" where the two candidates with the most votes in the primary, regardless of party, are on the ballot in the general election. The Republican has no chance so Schiff and the California Democrats are just making sure no progressive ends up on the ticket;

- The shenanigans in 2016 to make Hilary Clinton, a terrible candidate, the Democratic nominee for president over Bernie Sanders, including withholding funding, the threat of superdelegates and generally just putting the thumb on the scale at every turn;

- Again in 2020 with Bernie Sanders. Jim Clyburn and the DNC arranged for Biden to take South Carolina. Elizabeth Warren stayed in just long enough to peel off Bernie's votes. Other candidates got out of the way (eg Pete Buttigieg) and were rewarded for it with Cabinet positions;

- When Biden finally withdraw his re-election bid one option on the table was to have a convention primary. Instead Biden and the DNC simply anointed Kamala Harris because they were scared a progressive might win;

- Henry Cuellar, Congressman from Texas, is the (I believe) only anti-choice Democratic in the House. He has twice now faced a stiff primary challenge from progressive Jessica Cisneros who ran a grassroots campaign, the last time only winning by a few hundred votes. Democratic heavyweights like Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn went down to campaign for him in Texas.

If the Democratic Party opposed Trump half as well as they do progressive elements in their own party, we'd be living in a very different country.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/elections-buffalo-campaigns-elect...

I've found, since about the end of the Obama admin, a huge gap between the outraged base and the realities of politics on the ground that's made me quite despondent. The base just wants to talk about how outraged they are to each other on every piece of media they can. It's like social signaling; you have to tell every other upper middle class news addicted millennial or GenX how much you hate the current administration constantly.

But there's no effort to convince swing voters to vote against Trump. The midterms will be here before anyone knows it and it's going to be the first big chance to push back on the current administration, but I see so little work that's being done to create a coherent opposition party. Ezra Klein's book on Abundance was a great starting point. In Dem spaces though, reaction to the book was pretty much absent. Most of Dem base temporarily got busy trying to come up with ways that Klein has failed some progressive purity test (centrists are fascists, environmental injustice, etc etc.) Then after that, most just ignored his vision and went back to crying about the current administration.

IMO the Dems cranky, upper middle class news addicted base is its worst feature. They continue to kneecap the Dems from being a real opposition party. Telling people how bad the administration is won't make a good opposition party. It worked just enough for 2020 but ran out of steam by 2024. Dems need to create a vision of the future under Dem rule.

I suspect it's because the coalition that kept the Democratic party together has failed and its current base is just too small to win votes in elections. They've lost their bonafides among the trade unions, they've lost their appeal to the technology class, their strongest supporters remain the social-progress bloc which may be overrepresented online but is just too small of a force to win in elections.