In Reply to: A standard criteria for recognition is . . . posted by BluBlood on April 22, 2024 at 13:44:24
I bring years of life experience to the table, a pretty good understanding of what living under an authoritarian government looks like, and more importantly, a view of American governments that is cynical enough to not expect too much on the up side and to know that there is no real bottom on the down side. So my expectations have been pretty dulled by now. I am old enough to take any day that doesn't end in a disaster to be a win. So I understand my role in the national political scrip and I know what needs to be happen.
That said, you can't deny that there are plenty of people who don't have not have idealism and optimism for a better future not having beaten out of them yet, who truly believe that a better alternative will emerge once Democratic Party is defeated, and can't quiet imagine how fascism really works in real life. They are naive only in the way idealistic young people can be. Give them time (if we have any left) and they will be ground beaten down like the rest of us and will know not to complain before voting democratic. That may not happen before November though. (As a side note, my son, who has just turned 30 this year is clear about the need to vote for Biden. If he had been the same person he was 4 years ago, he would have very well been voting for Bernie as write in. So his dulling has begun.)
And then there are people (Arab and Muslim Americans, mostly) who probably feel betrayed by Biden because they had somehow bought into the fantasy that the Democratic Party had their back. (They seem to have confused absence of the cruelty component to be the same as being welcoming or supportive. The brightness of the Obama years strengthened that illusion, I believe.) They will also be beaten down by the American political system, but the anger they are feeling now is just as unlikely to subside by November unless Biden makes a serious and sharp course-correction, preferably last month. (Older Arab and muslim American generation? They are probably freaked out by "the drag queen story hour" in the same proportion like the rest of the older Americans.)
Biden's mistake is that he thinks "it's me or Trump" will work for those two segments of the voter base even though we saw how that argument fared with their counterpart 8 years ago, espcically the progressive
My job here is to emphasize that that's a potentially catastrophic miscalculation that no amount of patronizing attitude by the Olds or name-calling by dyed-in-the-wool Democratic faithful is going to fix.
Biden has been working the Middle East for 50 years. He knows all the players personally. He knows enough to know Hamas is not Palestinians and Natanyahu is not Israel. The problem is not Israelis and Palestinians but their terrible leadership. I think Biden senses an opportunity now for that leadership to change.
I still don't get the sense that he grasps who's the David and who's the Goliath in the region these days. I believe he suffers from the particular form of blindness that politicians of his generation and probably some of the Gen X kind suffering from. IOW, he may know the players, but I don't think he can read the game well.