[malcolmgreaves]

Wrong. Stop both sides-ing this. What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans: Nixon, Regan, Bush, and now Trump.

[deaux]

Wrong. Stop being so brainwashed by party politics.

Corporate dems - which are all of them in the last two decades - doing little for the average citizen, protecting megacorps, accelerating wealth concentration, protecting the billionaires, have also played a big role in maling the average citizen distrust their government.

Do you really think not a single one of them knew about the Epstein files? You can't be taken seriously if you do. And if you don't, their participation in keeping it hidden too builds distrust, even if 20 times more reps were involved. The dem candidate of only 10 years ago must have known. The chance she didn't is so small.

Snowden's revelations built distrust. Everything he revealed was absolutely "both sides". You can say "one side has been much worse", and sure, that's fair. But pretending that the other has been squeaky clean and that their own actions haven't played a huge role in the current situation is just sticking your hand in the sand.

People are tired of having to choose between "awful A" and "even worse B". If the dems stopped nominating "awful A" and replaced then with "decent A" then it'd be a landslide. But they won't. They haven't changed one bit. Mamdani, finally an example of "decent A", was hindered. They didn't want to see him win at all, and only started cheering for him when he finally did. By a huge margin, because he's a "decent A".

Until this changes, until the day that decent candidates of Mamdani are universally cheered on and given the full first choice backing by that party, not a single thing will get better, and it will only get worse, because it means the inevitable next rep winner will be even worse.

I'm not sure how you got this mindset, but it's not great, and I'm sure deep down you're smarter than this. These aren't football teams to cheer for.

[malcolmgreaves]

Corporate dems has suck. They are slightly better than the corporate republicans of the 90s and early 2000s.

Why? Because they knew that stability and economic prosperity were things people wanted. They of course never went far enough and didn’t ever want to rock the boat.

But, importantly, what you’re trying to do is wrong. Trump is not like corporate dems. It’s significantly worse. There’s not a single redeeming thing about this regime.

And all republicans are 100% behind trump. That means the entire Republican Party is guilty and responsible for what trump does.

So yes, it is appropriate to paint the entire group with one broad stroke. They’re all guilty of enabling a criminal to shred the constitution and destroy the entire fabric of US society for the next few generations. (The US has backslid to the late 1800s - blatant corruption everywhere).

[GaryBluto]

The concept of "both-sidesism" is a thought-terminating cliché that attempts to be a more reasonable sounding way of saying that one side is holy and the other is sinful that was invented on social media platforms for propaganda purposes.

> What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans

Many examples have been given in this post's comments alone and are already well-known by the average HN user, such as:

1. The Snowden Leaks (Obama)

2. The Pentagon Papers (exposed under Nixon, describes actions under Kennedy and Johnson administration)

3. The IRS Targeting Controversy (Obama)

4. DOJ Surveillance of Journalists (Obama)

[throwaway173738]

No, it’s an attempt to weigh the actions of either side in aggregate. What you’re doing is trying to argue that everything is awful and so why bother. I’ve seen numerous examples of one group acting well-meaning and sincere, and numerous examples of the other group taking advantage and sewing chaos. If you think they’re both the same you’re either not paying attention to everything or you only care about a very few things. Either way it’s going to be impossible for me to find common ground with you as long as you refuse to try to work with what you’ve got.

[malcolmgreaves]

To the three points you list:

Number 1 was Bush. The republicans crated the NSA surveillance machine.

Number 2 — know your US history. The democratic and republican parties flipped philosophies in 68. Their dems went pro integration and the southern dems went to the Republican Party, which remained segregationist. Nixon was closer to Kennedy and LBJ than Humphrey.

Number 3 is nothing - it wasn’t active targeting. They implemented rules to check all organizations. The republican affiliates ones were skirting the rules. They looked at orgs with certain things in their name, but it was an investigation. No government action came of it. It was not abuse. This is another lie by the republicans.