“the Democrats have been positioning themselves as the "institutional" party - the idea that the regular and orderly functioning of government provides important services and stability to society that is critical to maintain against those who would tear down the "guardrails."

If that’s the strategy then the democrats are fuqued. “Not Trump” worked so well last November, why not try again? The possum party has nothing to say about the neo-liberal double down that’s going on with president Musk and his sycophant, mostly because neo-liberalism has been the democratic strategy since Clinton.

Frankly the democrats have nothing to offer. The Clintonite third way moderates want to continue to pursue this “not Trump” strategy in the mistaken belief that elections can be won by persuading some imagined middle to swing democratic again. This can’t work without a plan to address the problems facing America and “not Trump” isn’t a plan.

Progressives have a plan, and the oligarchs taking over the state in an undemocratic bureaucratic putsch are ripe for targeting as the cause of what ails us: from the grotesque concentration of wealth, to the eviceration of the commonwealth and the values of human decency and social obligation upon which that wealth was based. Unfortunately for the Clintonite wing of the party, the extermination of the progressives is the only politics worth fighting at the moment.

The Democratic Party divided against itself has no alternative to offer to Trumpism.