I actually laughed. Thank you.

We're obviously long past the days when people's politics could be mapped on a nice normal distribution, with some outliers at either end and a big group of moderates in the middle who vote differently depending on the election. Today the distribution is not only bimodal: there's almost no overlap at all.

Your politics are part of your identity now. It's part of how you define who you are, and according to the research, over 95% of people are completely entrenched and will never vote for any candidate from the "other" party. (This the highest since right before the Civil War.)

That said, while nobody's changing sides any time soon, people _do_ stay home on election day, and we're going to see that next election.

The races for the next couple decades will be won by the candidates and the parties who can drill up enough enthusiasm from their base. Preach to the choir so the choir sings, etc.

It would help if they actually ran a candidate that leaned more moderate than extreme. They seem to choose candidates specifically to rile up the Republican base. That makes sense if this is actually a football rivalry or something but if they want to get elected they need to appeal to the middle, which doesn't seem (at least from my perspective) to happen very often.

I hope we get to the Idiocracy timeline before the one you describe

You are painting with extremely broad strokes here.

I didn't make that claim, you misread what I said. I explicitly mentioned a functioning Congress because that's a necessity, a functioning executive branch is not enough. We are in agreement.

I agree, it was a great move.

However, it's generally hard for me to give Biden much credit for anything, however, given his own and his party's general complicity with decades of genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Same for Harris.

That and oversight of many more atrocities also carried forth by his predecessors really puts a damper on any good deed and make it hard to buy into any narrative of authenticity when it comes to politics that benefit human beings.

I also generally think Bernie would have played hardball on antitrust and given what we got with Biden, I'd prefer to have seen what Bernie could have done with the time.

Which candidate would you have preferred?

Some argue gridlock is a feature, not a bug. I'm of two minds about it, but I understand the appeal.

I love Lina Khan as much as the next guy. But as you've already pointed out, it's kind of pointless if the fundamental problem is a malfunctioning executive branch (and a federal government with far too much power). But I'm going to need receipts on your claims about eight years of Sanders.

>The man has virtually no political talent.

More unique individual people donated to his primary efforts than any other candidate in history. Wouldn't this be indicative of some large amount of political talent?

Hyperbolic.