the uniparty - how much do the establishment democrats and establishment republicans truly differ
the administration claims to have deported 605k immigrants in 2025. we don’t have official numbers from the dhs yet for any year past 2022, but comparing the administration’s claim to the years we do have provides some interesting insight. that is ‘only’ 21% more than his first term. obviously, the terror instilled by ice in the general population (and especially the most affected and most vulnerable populations) has ramped up under this administration. it is important to note, however, that the officer who killed renée good had worked with ice since 2016 and border patrol before that since 2007. the officer who killed alex pretti had been with ice since 2015. it is also important to be aware that the biden administration’s number of average yearly removals was 1,404k, 132% higher than the number of deportations last year. even the obama admin removed 656k per year on average. if you only listened to talking heads, liberal podcasts, or reddit you might not realize that the main difference between republicans and democrats isn’t the evil that is done, but how loud and public it is.
housing is another issue that democrats and republicans agree on in practice. they agree we can’t actually fix the housing crisis (even while they talk about how urgent it is that the problem be fixed). we can’t fix it, because neither party will ever allow real estate to be anything other than a commodity nor will either party prevent the price of that commodity rising consistently over time (so that it can continue to serve as an investment). that is directly antithetical to making housing affordable in a truly irreconcilable way. it’s almost amusing when people like harris say “Many Americans work hard at their jobs, save, and pay their rent on time month after month. But they can’t save enough after paying their rent and other bills to save for a down payment – denying them a shot at owning a home and building wealth.” while pitching the standard democrat plan to throw a few thousand dollars at ‘first time home buyers’. who exactly do they think they are fooling? ironically, (using numbers from 2022) for less than the 10 billion harris proposed to use to help get 400k people 25k closer to their first house we could instead house every unhoused person in the country for a year - offering a new lease on life to 882k people. you will notice that neither party even entertains the idea aloud of doing anything like that, though. without the coercion provided by the fear of being unhoused, the capital class wouldn’t have /as/ much leverage over workers and that is, of course, wholly unacceptable to the uniparty.
it isn’t just housing and immigration. fisa has passed under both democrats and republicans - both loudly pretending they hate it when it isn’t their turn in power and it’s time to extend it again (but it always gets passed by the party in power at the time). the list could go on and on. obviously the parties differ in key ways. for republicans cruelty is the point; democrats just insist that a better world isn’t possible (while voting consistently in the interest of capital to make sure it isn’t). democrats at least argue about if the smart play is to throw trans people under the bus - the republicans drive the bus. still, if you have two parties where one always makes things worse and the other staunchly refuses to make them any better (other than the occasional performative, incremental patch-job), things only go one way.
democrats taking control of part or all of the legislature is merely short-term damage mitigation
having a majority or even a super majority of democrats is not enough. for our trajectory to improve, rather than simply pause, there must be enough representatives who are willing to both make a strong case to the usian people for how we fix our system for the working class and also follow through on those policies in the face of push-back from the capitalist class. the party affiliation doesn’t matter. obviously republicans aren’t proposing real solutions to the poly-crisis, but neither are centrist democrats. so long as there are enough centrist democrats that ’the party’ can play the rotating villain [1,2,3,4] game, real change will never happen via congress.
it is important to stop seeing the political spectrum as democrats vs republicans. instead there are leftists/progressives, centrists/liberals/moderates, and right-wing/fascist representatives. the big trick of the usian political circus is to distract you with the seam between red and blue, which ultimately makes no sense as a division in ideology or policy positions. ‘centrist’ democrats and republicans alike vote nearly exclusively in the interest of capital and the status quo. they do not, and never will, support any of the reforms needed to meaningfully address the poly-crisis.
to this effect, only 40 representatives (including independents) voted to prohibit the sale of $295 million in massive caterpillar bulldozers to isr. these bulldozers are famously used by isr as part of the ongoing genocide. the outcry has been loud and consistent about the unimaginable horror of how isr uses these machines by human rights groups across more than two decades (for those who care to listen). a representative being a democrat isn’t enough. seven democrats voted in support of the us financing the perpetuation of this horror. of course these massive bulldozers are only a small part of our country’s financial support for the genocide in pse but even that small slice of the total funding, specifically for the bulldozers, would have been enough to cover the entire budget spent on services for unhoused people in new york during 2021. those seven senators, and not just them, can not be counted on to make progress towards a better world.
i hope you and i, dear reader, can agree that chuck schumer is so centrist as to be truly useless for moving the country in a positive direction. even if we draw the line between centrist and leftist at him just for the sake of amusement, 21 of the 47 democratic senators are /more/ centrist than schumer according to voteview. do we really think that swinging four or even eight more senate seats from people with an r in front of their name to people with a d in front of their name is enough to see, for example, a bill to raise the minimum wage in line with where it would be now if inflation was taken into account since the last raise? do you think that picking up even 53 in the house will result in single payer healthcare passing? no, of course not, and that is because having a d in front of your name means next to nothing when it comes to actually supporting progressive policies. a nominally blue wave won’t save us - only a wave of progressive representation that drowns out even the establishment democrats will avert ratcheting deeper into fascism.