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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI do not want to "move forward" after this era.
Sharing this from a friends FB post. It says exactly what Im feeling.
I do not want to move forward after this era. I want to salt the ground. I had coffee with a Democratic friend who still talks like November is a cure and policy is a balm. Win the midterms, take back the presidency, pass better laws, move forward. That language is how rot survives in America. That is how the worst men in this country learn that no matter what they torch, some clean-suited moderate will eventually bless their crimes as history and call it healing.
Americas core bipartisan religion is forgetting. Republicans light the match, Democrats sweep the ash, and everyone in the press room starts whispering about unity before the smoke has even cleared the rotunda. No. We can win elections and prosecute the people who broke the republic. If you do not do both, your policies are just expensive wallpaper on a burned-out house, and the arsonists are already circling the block with a bigger can of gasoline.
History is a bill we keep dodging. The North won the Civil War, the South won the memory. Reconstruction was left for dead, white terror became law, and Jim Crow swaggered in through the breach. That was a political decision to walk away before the work was finished, to protect comfort over Black lives. America pays interest on cowardice, generation after generation, and the bill never shrinks.
The Supreme Court just gave the game away in the Louisiana Voting Rights Act case. They are willing to let states manipulate maps for partisan gain, even when everyone with a functioning brain knows race is braided through the whole thing, but the second the law tries to remedy racial exclusion directly, the Court recoils. White comfort survives. Black political power gets told to wait. Again.
Power always protects itself in this country. Nixon walks free. Ford tells America to calm down and turn the page. January 6th is followed by Merrick Garland dozing through history while the plotters host podcasts and prep for the next coup. If you do not punish an attempted authoritarian takeover, you are not restoring order. If you treat a coup attempt like a zoning violation, you are begging for a second draft.
Every time Democrats claim policy alone will save us, I want to throw something. I want universal healthcare, labor rights, climate action, all of it. But if you let a movement vandalize the country, loot the courts, and terrorize the public, then hand the next administration a mop, all you have done is build your future on poisoned ground. Policy on top of impunity is wallpaper over black mold. That rot never stays buried.
Hope gets weaponized in America. Hope without truth is a sedative. Hope without memory is a drug. Hope without accountability is a country sleepwalking into its own erasure. I do not want slogans that make frightened liberals feel spiritually exfoliated for six minutes. I want a politics that names the crime, shows the receipts, and refuses to look away.
Kings warning about the white moderate was a police report. The people begging him to slow down were respectable men in suits who loved order more than they hated segregation. That disease is alive every time a liberal pundit calls Trump divisive instead of criminal and tells the country to be patient while donors process their feelings.
Blunt voices are oxygen right now because the country is choking on euphemism. Democrats talk like clarity is rude, like naming the threat too directly might upset the donors. Republicans scream their desires with a sledgehammer until the language seeps into the drywall. I want Democrats who can speak with that same force about democracy, civil rights, memory, law, and the price of letting fascists slide.
I want Democrats to win, obviously. But I refuse to clap for another era of polite restoration draped over unpunished evil. I refuse another cycle where Republicans commit crimes against the republic and Democrats are told to show emotional maturity. If this country wants a future, then memory, accountability, and consequence cannot be optional. If we skip that again, the next strongman will not bother with fake electors. He will come with the army.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DNrUvPJxQ/?mibextid=wwXIfr
LearnedHand
(5,557 posts)Says exactly what Im feeling too. And I fear most of the party is walking right down the middle of that look-forward road. I fear receipts wont matter. Evidence wont go anywhere. That itll be Merrick Garland on steroids.
Goonch
(5,503 posts)
calimary
(90,607 posts)Solly Mack
(97,221 posts)Yep.
People said with the Bush Regime - allow them to escape justice and the next republican president will do worse.
Same could have been said about allowing Nixon to get off without accountability.
Being allowed to resign is NOT punishment.
I've been thinking about the same thing today. (Letter From a Birmingham Jail)
flashman13
(2,548 posts)One item that was left out of the post. The DOJ under Obama failed to arrest and prosecute the criminals that pointed guns at Federal agents during the Bundy Mini-Rebellion in Utah. They never collected any of that owed lease money from Bundy either. And his crazy son went out and did the same thing all over again.
This is what I'm talking about:
Not this:
Solly Mack
(97,221 posts)So-called/Self-styled "Constitutional Sheriffs" need to be brought down too.
flashman13
(2,548 posts)maxsolomon
(39,099 posts)They didn't have "coffee with a Democratic friend who still talks like November is a cure and policy is a balm."
They made up a straw man so they could write a little fantasy.
paleotn
(22,600 posts)bluesbassman
(20,387 posts)Do you think accountability is lost? Do you think if and when Democrats take back the power they should just follow the same path as their predecessors and forgive and forget? How do you think we got to this point were at now? I dont understand your hostility towards what was written, please explain.
Scrivener7
(60,026 posts)JI7
(93,849 posts)is a common thing.
paleotn
(22,600 posts)Burn the fucking bastards to the ground and piss on their ashes. No more making nice. Not after this. And any Dem who says otherwise needs to be labeled an appeaser and promptly run out of the party.
kentuck
(115,544 posts)Too much damage has been done. The mess has to be cleaned up. We have to change the status quo. We have no choice.
OldBaldy1701E
(11,462 posts)Unfortunately, those who will lose their power and prestige do not.
And, people listen to them.... not us.
To do what you are suggesting will require some... effort... to make it happen.
We have already seen the fact that the status quo is not going to allow us to remove the societal model that gives them all of the power. That will not change once the current regime is removed.
Which sucks big ole donkey balls, as we used to say.
Escape
(510 posts)Last edited Fri May 8, 2026, 09:51 PM - Edit history (1)
It IS the most important issue of our time.
I want...and ..we should DEMAND, that EVERY person in the Trump administration who broke the law, be punished to the fullest extent of that law.
No fucking compromises or lame ass penalties. No deals cut and no apologies accepted.
If we have to build bigger prisons for the ICE Nazis and the military fools who followed illegal orders and for the cabinet members and their enablers, we should joyfully build them, with no concern for their cost.
And...every person who was illegally detained, deported or worse, should be fully compensated for every wrong they were dealt.
FakeNoose
(42,218 posts)I want Franklin Delano Roosevelt - or someone very much like him - to come forward with all new ideas and a whole "New Deal." It's the best way to sweep the MAGAs into the dust bucket of history and start over.
Please please please - make it happen very soon!
kentuck
(115,544 posts)That is what America is experiencing.
BattleRow
(2,650 posts)Our ability to read,write,speak..and then create law to provide accountability ...to establish a groundwork for responsibility . individually and collectively.
Bev54
(13,502 posts)punish those who have ruined the country or not. If not, then kiss any close alliances goodbye for a very long time. There can be no half way and that means the supreme court as well.
Buddyzbuddy
(2,825 posts)what's wrong with my party and what we need to do to fix it. At least one aspect of it.
Prairie_Seagull
(4,792 posts)Want a copy.
Bookmarking.
NoMoreRepugs
(12,214 posts)TBF
(37,089 posts)misanthrope
(9,597 posts)if they had given the former Confederacy the Carthage treatment after the Civil War. Because what was tried didn't work whatsoever.
DinahMoeHum
(23,662 posts)PUNISHMENT is what is needed.
Escurumbele
(4,107 posts)forced to make that decision, or maybe, the decision was made for him. Thugs and the mafia have ways of making decisions for other people.
But this time around, Democrats better have their cojones in the right place and prosecute all these thugs, otherwise, like said in the article, these thugs will continue to do their evil because why not? if there are no consequences, if accountability doesn't exist, then why not continue doing the crimes that make them so happy.
Joinfortmill
(21,570 posts)Iggo
(50,031 posts)Gonna have to deal with it.
Ponietz
(4,395 posts)BigMin28
(1,871 posts)Has to reckon with it's crimes . All of them. From the beginning to current events. Until we do so honestly and openly, we as a country will never heal and live up to it's ideals.
lastlib
(28,533 posts)Hunt them all down and take them away. Remove them from society Maybe we COULD use all those camps The Traitor wants to build. As I've often said, Shakespeare had the right idea, just the wrong target: "the first thing we do, let's kill all the billionaires." I'm also tired and sick to death of that "look forward, not backward." crap. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it; I don't want another repeat of the last half-century.
yellow dahlia
(6,389 posts)progressoid
(53,350 posts)Yes and do something about the media and Dem messaging.
IMHO, we wouldn't be in this mess if it weren't for an enabling and complicit media.
JHB
(38,315 posts)Both Clinton and Obama took that attitude with the malfeasance of their predecessors, and Joe was too entrenched in avoiding the appearance of partisanship.
These people have held a knife to our throats and a gun to the heads of out children. They have a track record of political extermination, and they're not going to stop until we meet the same fate as the Rockefeller Republicans: extermination. Initially politically, but it won't take long for them to get around to making it literal.
Go full bore at the right-wing organizations using the Republican Party as their vehicle. The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society should be treated as seditious organizations, as well as all of their funders.
Have you ever read old anti-communist propaganda? From the first Red Scare, about a century ago now? They warned about how the commies would take control here, by using the rules of our system to put themselves in positions of power. And once enough people were in position, especially positions to enforce the rules, they'd start enforcing the rules on their opponents, but not on themselves, and use that leverage to take total control.
The Republicans have turned themselves into the literal Red Menace. Their guiding light to taking total power is Lenin and the Bolsheviks.