Mostly
https://t.ly/LwXtm

Everything surrounding this shows that there are people in the so called “winning side” that still do not get it.
And they are all career politicians.

Congressional Terms limits.
No one was meant to serve in elected office for life.

NY Times yesterday reporting on republican desire to cut the Medicaid program.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/health/medicaid-cuts-republican-congress.html
“… States and the federal government share the program’s costs, which totaled $880 billion in 2023. …”

I like that Dr. Oz will be the medicare and medicaid administrator. But who are the republicans in Congress who specialize in health care policy? How do we govern without policy ideas? Put a cap on malpractice lawsuits? Now that AI knows everything, possibly allow nurses to diagnose and treat patients without physician oversight. Maybe put in place something like the VA, where there is a government run clinic or hospital within travel distance of poor people.

The Republicans played rearguard for decades. After all, it did take almost a century to go from FDR fighting the court in 1937 to Obama simply ignoring it in the 2010s. Anyone who expects the Democrats to put up less of a fight has not been paying attention.

The “trick”, which is not very tricky, is to get the trendline moving in the other direction. It’s not to get the government headcount and budget back to sane levels in four years. That’s just not possible.

“And this cycle and process we all are currently engaged in is in search of some new balance which in time and immersed in those concepts cemented into reality regarding individual freedom and protection from the abuse of power from authoritarian government and tyranny by the Constitution ensures we will find it. ”

https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/prediction-looking-for-new-job-soon

Agreed. The changes need to be substantial, not just rhetorical. Trump’s first-term policies were a down payment on this; Congress needs to back him up to produce lasting, substantial change … and we need to keep them all honest about that.

But make no mistake. Changing people’s minds in this fundamental way will take many years and many battles. To push for change, the right now has to do what the left did for the past century, never give up, never give in, and continue the fight on all fronts and at all times.

Continue the fight, including developing our ability to do more than treat the symptoms … the ability to articulate to our neighbors WHY the societal paradigm of our Progressive elite is incapable – despite the best of intentions – of delivering both liberty and security: it leads people to sell their own experiences, insights, and common sense short, in favor of delegating their decisions and actions, in total trust and obedience, to an elite few on the basis of surface appearances as though they are gods.

It boggles my mind at times to consider that millions of us, even myself for years, put so much trust in mere humans and made ourselves VULNERABLE to their inevitable human failures … but we were led to do so by our society replacing respect for wisdom wherever it appears, with a blind worship of those surface appearances: formal education and its derivative credentialing, the attainment of high position, cultural popularity, polished-and-articulate presentation, and even demonstrated, substantial successes.

In fact, we could say we are victims of our success, for we learned the wrong lessons from some of the greatest successes from the last century. In particular, during the three decades after we won WWII and found ourselves in a position of global economic dominance as the rest of the world literally rebuilt from the rubble.

During those thirty years, the collectivist approaches of the New Deal sunk deeper roots into our society, because not only did we see government succeed in winning WWII, ending Jim Crow, and putting men on the Moon and begin to think that the little intellectual elite in the far-distant capital could solve ANY problem … that economic dominance provided such an abundance of resources that we did not accurately perceive the costs of that collectivism, until the rest of the world caught up with us in the 1970’s.

We began to think that all we had to do was go to work or school, and the elite – our business leaders, our unions, our great minds in academia, and particularly that “winning” government …. would solve our problems and secure our future FOR us, even if we didn’t go beyond the minimum of effort and initiative in our own lives. Then, when the elites failed to deliver what we “deserve”, we looked for others to blame – very often, those that did not buy into this passivity paradigm and were better off for it – instead of seeing that it was our passivity that left prosperity and security on the table for others to pick up.

That is the attitude that has to change, if this opportunity to reverse Progressive governance is going to produce lasting change that will reverse our slide into decline.