Politics has been the bane of humanity from its beginning. The desire to lord it over others is a mental disorder that really needs to be treated, not given a lucrative outlet for its perverse expression. But I suppose it is too late for that, and now we sane people have to deal with Republicans and Democrats and all the bullshit that entails. The Republicans are now the worst, however, because they claim to be "conservatives," and why the hell do we need or want conservatives in a our quickly changing technological world? We can't stay the same or go back to some mythological "golden age," like Trump and his MAGAts babble about. Time moves forward, as does global social currents, we cannot go back and it's folly to try. Its all lies, hypocrisy, and greed. The fact is, Republicans aren't just useless, they are actually damaging. Their inclination towards climate denial is going to eventually kill us all if they have anything to say about it.

Of course Democrats aren't great, either. They, at least, are aware of such things as climate change, and claim to care a little bit about the welfare of the people in this country. But overall, politics in this country is terrible: couple the systemic greed and racism upon which this country was founded with our modern corporate capitalist economic ideologies and the resulting picture isn't pretty.

We have progressed, however. When the country was founded, probably 99% of the population was racist, and now, after 250 years, we have that down to about 50% of the population being either racist or willing to overlook a racist president (based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump in 2016). That's not very good! And on top of that we have all the MAGAt assholes who have no problem with Trump trying exceptionally hard to overturn the election results he didn't like -- I was always told that fair elections are a requirement for democracy, and besides, it's the only bone the government has tossed to us to allow us to have a tiny controllable part in their political system -- without that we can't truthfully speak of "democracy," and might as well live in Russia, or Belarus, or North Korea, or any of the other autocrat-loving nations.

I started out as a Republican, but I didn't know any better at the time. My dad was from Arkansas -- the Ozarks, no less -- and my mom was from a little town in Idaho so they were both Republicans, and I thought that was normal. My big mistake was I went to University and then to graduate school, and everyone knows that the universities are hotbeds of liberalism. So, after reading Marx and Proust and Michael Harrington and Emma Goldman and Guy Debord and the Situationists and all the other anarchists, and socialists, and Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," and Noam Chomsky, and lots of other stuff, I realized that "wow, capitalism really sucks and our country isn't very cool!"

I lived through the Vietnam War, Watergate, El Salvador, the so-called "freedom fighters," Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair, many other very disappointing incidents involving this country -- all the way down to Trump being elected, which was the icing on the shit-cake (so far). Through the 80's and 90's I professed to be some kind of anarchist, but anarchism has ideological and practical problems, not least of which is that a government with no laws makes for a very bad situation, just read George Orwell's 1984!.

During the decade of the 90's I never voted in the federal elections, when asked about it I always replied: " I don't vote, it just encourages them." I believed (and still do), that our two-party system is a joke, leaders of both parties have the same ultimate goal: which is to funnel all wealth out of the hands of the actual people and into the coffers of the corporations. It is just that their approaches are a little different: the Democrats give lip-service to the welfare of the people, whereas the Republicans don't give a fuck about the common people and would remove all social programs if given a chance(why anyone who isn't wealthy would want to identify with the Republicans is beyond me. I think it is because of the myth that if you work really hard, pay all your taxes, follow all the rules, ignore the plight of your fellow humans, you too can become wealthy and not give a fuck about the common people -- which is, of course, not true, but greed is a very powerful motivator!).

So I eventually morphed over to socialism, Democratic Socialism, that is, ala Michael Harrington, and in these more modern times, Bernie Sanders. I consider myself a Socialist even now, because, of all the political and economic belief-systems, Socialism has the most potential for individual freedom. However, the republicans have spent decades lying to the people, convincing them that Socialism is the same as Russian Communism, and that the Democrats are Socialists, and therefore Communists -- even though none of these people seem to actually know what Socialism is and they don't seem to care about their ignorance -- it is very pathetic!

The main problem why Socialism doesn't ever seem to work, is because Socialism cannot coexist with capitalism. For Socialism to work the socialist government has to be "non-profit," with all profits going towards the welfare of the people. The greed and narrow-minded outlook of capitalism corrupts Socialism and creates monstrosities like Soviet Communism and China's modern hybrid autocratic government.

But people in this country are too dim and too corrupted by corporate greed to perceive the potential of Socialism. Now Finland and the other Scandinavian countries have developed what they call the "Nordic Model," which is a form of Democratic Socialism combined with democratic capitalism, which seems to work so far, but we'll see as time goes on.

So in the meantime -- in this ridiculous country -- I vote to try to keep Trump and his junior MAGAts out of power, but what is depressing, is that if we succeed in the next couple of years of suppressing that movement, any feelings of victory will quickly fade when we look around and see that "oh, we got rid of these extremists, but we still have the same old two-party pseudo-democratic capitalist country to live in," a system which seems to provide fertile ground for the creation of the next batch of autocratic-loving, democracy-hating politicians.