@orlbucfan

of herself. When Pelosi was first elected, she was a true progressive firebrand. Now, she's just a growing-senile old lady with a bad face lift and plenty of coin. Please retire, Nancy!! Rec'd!!

@Lily O Lady Great comment!!!

Hillary promised a brighter future and so did Trump

An article in The Guardian about the New Optimists

But first, a book linked in that article published in 2013

The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present by David Runciman – review Frustrated with the short-termism and complacency of democratic politics? This is a compelling, highly original guide to how it all works

I have been caught in the Confidence Trap which is the belief that democracy will do a course correction and right the ship of state.

Enter David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge, with a lucid, wholly original book that says those fears were, if not wrong, then embarrassingly familiar. The Confidence Trap charts a century of similar moments, when the public intellectuals of the day were seized by the fear that democracy had reached the end of the road. In chapters on 1918, 1933, 1947, 1962, 1974, 1989 and 2008, he reveals a pattern of repeated mood swings, in which complacency about democracy's supremacy and inevitable triumph gives way to despair about its limitations and inability to meet the challenges of the age. In 1933 HG Wells predicted that democracy would soon be discarded as "altogether too slow-witted for the urgent political and economic riddles, with ruin and death at hand". The sentiment is not that far off the report published by the Trilateral commission in 1975, whose eminent authors, anxious that inflation, stagnation and Watergate-era scandal posed an impossible menace, gloomily titled it "The Crisis of Democracy". Those worries echo, in turn, those voiced by Mason and others (including me) in the last two or three years.

For Runciman, that pattern is itself part of a larger phenomenon. Democracies develop confidence in their long-term resilience, based in part on their ability to adapt (in contrast with rigid autocracy). This confidence that all will end well leads democratic states to be complacent, allowing problems to fester, safe in the knowledge that, when it really counts, they'll solve them. Those problems eventually come to a head in the form of a grave crisis. But confronted with such a crisis, democracies usually do adapt just enough to survive. Confidence returns, which eventually turns into complacency and so it begins again. This is the confidence trap. Democracy, says Runciman, can never escape it.

Pelosi was standing on the confidence trap.

That review came from a recent article in The Guardian

Is the world really better than ever? The headlines have never been worse. But an increasingly influential group of thinkers insists that humankind has never had it so good – and only our pessimism is holding us back.

give the appearance of a two party system. Finally some honesty! Too bad the message is so awful.

it is hard to let them go. We can and should work on building options and beating this mule into submission. Plan A with a Plan B is the way to go.

@Lookout

Both Pelosi and wall street Chuckie are the appropriate face of the failed democrap party. Forget them - make them obsolete and just move on past this sad excuse for a political party.

At least from my view, people are spending way too much energy fretting about the dems. I think we would do better using our energy in other ways...educating the people about our senseless wars and how that money could pay for all our pie in the sky medicare for all, free college tuition, solar conversion, high speed electric trains, and so on.

Medea Benjamin is so correct...

You would think it would be easy to form a united front with activists from different movements who want to redirect our tax dollars. Students fighting for free education should understand that stopping just one weapons system, the expensive and unnecessary Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, would fund the education of all college students for the next two decades. Nurses fighting for universal health care should understand that if we cut the bloated military budget, we’d have plenty of money for a national health-care system like the Europeans have. Environmentalists paddling their kayaks to block oil-digging ships should understand that if we dramatically cut our military spending, we’d have hundreds of billions of dollars to propel us into the era of green, sustainable energy. Unions should recognize that the military is one of the worst creators of jobs in relation to money spent.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/mass-movement-stop-mass-killing?akid=15...

Think the dems will talk this way? I don't. Leave them in their pile of contributions. We have to drive this conversation.

@Lookout

Both Pelosi and wall street Chuckie are the appropriate face of the failed democrap party. Forget them - make them obsolete and just move on past this sad excuse for a political party.

At least from my view, people are spending way too much energy fretting about the dems. I think we would do better using our energy in other ways...educating the people about our senseless wars and how that money could pay for all our pie in the sky medicare for all, free college tuition, solar conversion, high speed electric trains, and so on.

Medea Benjamin is so correct...

You would think it would be easy to form a united front with activists from different movements who want to redirect our tax dollars. Students fighting for free education should understand that stopping just one weapons system, the expensive and unnecessary Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, would fund the education of all college students for the next two decades. Nurses fighting for universal health care should understand that if we cut the bloated military budget, we’d have plenty of money for a national health-care system like the Europeans have. Environmentalists paddling their kayaks to block oil-digging ships should understand that if we dramatically cut our military spending, we’d have hundreds of billions of dollars to propel us into the era of green, sustainable energy. Unions should recognize that the military is one of the worst creators of jobs in relation to money spent.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/mass-movement-stop-mass-killing?akid=15...

Think the dems will talk this way? I don't. Leave them in their pile of contributions. We have to drive this conversation.

@Lookout

Democrats for the same reason a number of caucus99percenters post about Daily KOS."

Maybe leaving is not enough. Maybe processing and/or purging is necessary.

In addition, though, a large percentage of voters still vote Democratic, even if they consider Democrats the only slightly lesser of two evils. (I consider them a greater evil than Republicans, but that is another story.) It's only a relatively small percentage of voters who refuses to vote for one or the other of the two largest parties. I don't have to try to dissuade the left from voting Republican, but at least some of them have to be dissuaded from voting Democratic. Not that I think posting will do that. Which brings me to my next point.

Since those of us who refuse to vote Democratic or Republican don't have a media voice, where are we driving the conversation?

Both Pelosi and wall street Chuckie are the appropriate face of the failed democrap party. Forget them - make them obsolete and just move on past this sad excuse for a political party.

At least from my view, people are spending way too much energy fretting about the dems. I think we would do better using our energy in other ways...educating the people about our senseless wars and how that money could pay for all our pie in the sky medicare for all, free college tuition, solar conversion, high speed electric trains, and so on.

Medea Benjamin is so correct...

You would think it would be easy to form a united front with activists from different movements who want to redirect our tax dollars. Students fighting for free education should understand that stopping just one weapons system, the expensive and unnecessary Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, would fund the education of all college students for the next two decades. Nurses fighting for universal health care should understand that if we cut the bloated military budget, we’d have plenty of money for a national health-care system like the Europeans have. Environmentalists paddling their kayaks to block oil-digging ships should understand that if we dramatically cut our military spending, we’d have hundreds of billions of dollars to propel us into the era of green, sustainable energy. Unions should recognize that the military is one of the worst creators of jobs in relation to money spent.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/mass-movement-stop-mass-killing?akid=15...

Think the dems will talk this way? I don't. Leave them in their pile of contributions. We have to drive this conversation.