I think that undersells how uninformed most folks are, and how weak critical thinking skills are, on average. Too many people were credulous when trump said he didn’t know anything about project 2025, and many people currently getting deported believed they’d only deport “hardened criminals”. So I don’t think it’s even being fine with these terrible policies, I think a lot of people were simply ignorant.

The ignorance is by design of course, so I’m not trying to pin the blame solely on individuals: the disinformation landscape is a huge boost for right wing extremism, and of course the Democrats themselves just constantly shit the bed. The Dems aren’t Left enough to galvanize support from people who want real change in the system (so they say “fuck it” and either sit out, or become accelerationists), and even the policies they do tout that would help at the margins don’t get any attention - in part because they’re consistently bad at messaging, but also because nuanced, calm reasoning isn’t as attention grabbing as hate and fear.

Well sure, the Democrats could kill the filibuster with a simply majority (if they could get 51 senators on board) but they filibuster a lot as well, to prevent some Republican legislation. So I can see why they’re too pragmatic - or cowardly - to remove it. Not the best source/graph, but a source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-are-so-many-democrats-considering-ending-the-filibuster/

As for the parliamentarian: they haven’t been removed in a while, and the one before that also served for a pretty long time…I think the Democrats (again, cowardly or pragmatically) are simply trying not to escalate and make the parliamentarian a puppet of the current simple majority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentarian_of_the_United_States_Senate

I’m all in favor of nuking the filibuster, mind you: which would make the whole budget reconciliation thing a moot point. but I can understand the desire for some in the party to retain it as a tool. Fat lot of good it’s doing us now, of course.

the Democrats technically controlled the chamber.

Correct - technically, but not practically - because they absolutely can’t get anything substantial done with the Republicans and right-wing Democrats, as they didn’t have a filibuster proof supermajority.

However, there was one brief moment when Biden’s party had a 60th vote, which occurred after Senator Al Franken resigned and was replaced with Senator Tina Smith in 2018

That…just isn’t true though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/115th_United_States_Congress They had at most 47 votes, right? Also…recall who was president in 2018. Certainly not enough congressional control to override the inevitable veto.

At best their ‘accomplishments’ you mention were limited, while vastly more dammage was done in other fields.

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that many of the accomplishments were limited. I’m not saying they are going to save us, and while I want to wrest control from the right-wing leadership in the Democratic party, I’m not terribly optimistic that it’ll happen in my lifetime. IMHO we need more coordination and cooperation on the Left to organize enough to do what the Tea Party did on the Right with the GOP…the major difference is that the folks in power in the GOP weren’t ideologically opposed to the Tea Party, unlike the corporate Dems v. the “Actual Left”, so maybe that’s a fool’s errand, especially given the power structures in place, and the inherently anti-democratic system of government re: SCOTUS, Senate, Electoral College, etc.

Look: I don’t think we disagree all that much: I’m just trying to acknowledge nuance and correct misinformation. So…what do you suggest we do about the Democrats being at best speed bumps to real progress?

That movement goes beyond aggressive vandalism: there were literal murders (and attempted murders) going back to the eighties and mostly during the nineties. So it’s absolutely not true to say no one was hurt by those acts. Likewise, the bombings and arson that were inflicted were indeed meant to cause terror on a large scale, and was specifically targeting medical infrastructure, which is war crime level bad. So yeah: terrorism.

If it was only the vandalism, or walking around with dumb signs…then it’s more arguable, even though I’m vehemently against them. IMHO violence against people is what crosses the line. Likewise, when anti-abortion groups are bombing literal medical clinics - that definitely goes beyond vandalism and into territory that causes harm to folks, even in the cases they didn’t kill people directly with the bombs. Blocking people from entering clinics - trying to intimidate workers and patients…also more “grey”, but can arguably cause direct harm/violence.

So to the case from the OP, IMHO vandalizing teslas isn’t harming civilian infrastructure, or otherwise harming people directly, so…I don’t think it crosses the line. Until it does, I think at best it’s reaching to call it domestic terrorism, and at worst - it’s just being bandied about to justify locking up political enemies and chill protests. I fully acknowledge it’s a fairly morally grey area to be discussing, so thank you for a good exchange.

When they have a supermajority, like they had not long ago, they are in trouble.

The last true supermajority I’m aware of only lasted 72 days, back in 2009. It’s when the Fair Pay act was signed, Affordable Care Act, and a few different attempts to reform Wall Street. They were certainly not as life-changing as I’d like, but I’m admittedly pretty far to the Left of the average US voter.

The even stronger supermajority before that was in 1965, and that got the creation of Medicare & Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, Freedom of Info Act, etc.

The Dems are a weak centrist party, and the leadership is center-right at best, but even so - those two times where they had a supermajority in the Senate gave us some good to at least quasi-good stuff. I’m totally on board for bashing the Democrats, but it’s hard to convey the amount of damage the truly undemocratic Senate has done over the decades, and I think we can’t avoid the reality that there was a lot that got done in that brief period when the Republicans couldn’t stop them. The ability to block legislation in the Senate is just incredible. Things just can’t get passed, unless it’s something the Republicans will agree to - so it’s far easier for shitty stuff to get passed. Unfortunately, there are enough right wing democrats that will go along with the shitty stuff the Republicans propose, in no small part because their constituents actually like it. We’re losing the propaganda war, because those with capital have far more power to wield.

So there’s a lot of problems to fix - deeply undemocratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College, the entirety of the GOP, weakass right-wing Democrats, and the voters themselves. Unfortunately, yeah…the interests of Capital have intervened and made sure to cripple Education and control the media landscape, so to get back to my main point, since I’m losing the thread here - I’m agreed that the Democrats are shit, but we can’t ignore reality that when they’ve had actual full control of the Federal government, things were at least going in a decent direction.

The thing is: nearly everything can cause harm, in some small, indirect way. And everything is political, even if only some small, indirect way.

So taken to the “logical” extreme, me eating oatmeal for breakfast is terrorism. It harmed the people in the fields working for low wages, and it’s a political choice to eat less meat for a meal.

This is why it seems silly to meant of us to call burning Tesla dealerships terrorism. Does sitting bud light cans count as terrorism? Do boycotts count as terrorism?