This is interesting because it fingers one essential difference between the "moderates" and the "progressives", which is that the former seem pretty much unwilling or unable to analyze society in any systemic way. Treating the behavior of the parties as given is an abdication of analysis. It's typical of the structure-blindness of liberals that drives the left insane. If you really don't think it's possible to understand why the parties "are a certain way" then suddenly the absolute refusal to reckon with certain arguments made by the left (e.g. the argument that Biden represents a return to the status quo that brought us Trump in the first place) makes more sense.
If you are serious about fixing the country you will have to reckon with the fact that, yes, there is a "they," that the Republican Party being fascist and the Democrats being wet napkin fake opposition serves "their" interests very well, and that "they" have engaged in a multi-decade campaign to subvert democracy wherever possible, and to shift the terms of political debates so as to make it seem that "There Is No Alternative" to make what democracy we have less meaningful.
Just to be clear, it is absolutely in the interest of the big capitalists (and, frankly, also of many of the "small business" capitalists we like to pretend aren't capitalists for some reason) for the right in the US to be fascist and the "left" to be Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden.
I owe you a fuller response to this than I can probably dash off just now, but I would make a few notes.
1) The "they" you identify here absolutely does exist and absolutely does profit from the two parties existing in the way that they do. But I don't think that's Graeber's "they" in the video (I mean the actual referent of his pronoun).
2) I don't regard the parties-as-they-exist as an absolute given--just practically speaking the only mechanism by which any sort of change is likely to occur. So, one thinks about the Democratic party's hope to get single-payer health care. Not even a particularly progressive aim, but for the US, progressive. And one watches what Obama was able to achieve, and how even something so meager as a public option disappears if you lose even one vote, and for me, that's a marker of what a
load left-leaning people have to move to get anything done. One doesn't even have to characterize the right as Nazis to see how hard a pull they exert against any meaningful reform.
Even as a centrist, I can
see all of the goods that would come from a more authentic progressive movement. I just can't
see it happening in the country in which I've lived out these fifty five years of my life.
So when a guy in a video who chooses to present himself amid all the trappings of that "mishmash of bureaucracy" he so derides (comfy sweater, comfy chair, stylish lamp) lectures me on how Obama stands for nothing, it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe this guy has progressive bonafides (had); I suppose I could go look him up. But the video itself wasn't the trenchant critique of centrism that
@Ironsided prepared me for. Hell, the average
@Lexicus post on this site represents a more impressive critique of centrism.
Every day I wake up and sip my morning coffee... I look at 538... and every other day the chance that Trump wins has gone down with 1%.
Trump's down to 13% today.
I've been meaning to say something and these posts are as good a prompt as any. Starting about a week ago, any increase in the
gap in polling is meaningless. Trump is looking like a loser and people aren't going to tell pollsters that they intend to vote for a loser (except the fanboys, of course).