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Yep. The fundamental issue at play here is the sense amongst all average people that the United States is broken and can no longer accomplish anything constructive. We can certainly bomb the shit out of other countries but aside from that? Nada. We don't have a functioning national legislature and thus we cannot solve problems democratically, which is part of the reason why the Republican Party is radicalizing against democracy.

Trump is a sideshow, not the real issue. People responded to him because he's funny and entertaining, not because he actually contains any useful ideas for how to govern the country. He's horrifying, but whatever. He didn't do a tenth of the damage to this country (at least in concrete terms) that GWB did, and anyone under the age of 30 has been convinced he's a kindly old grandpa making bad paintings in his retirement.

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Gridlock is a perfectly natural outcome for a country that is evenly divided fifty - fifty. In fact if one side were able to advance an agenda as though they had an actual majority that would be acutely undemocratic.

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This country isn't evenly divided 50-50. The popular vote was quite different but the senate remains 50-50 with a veto for any party with at least 41 votes. This country was decided as an acutely undemocratic nation, disenfranchising those in many states. It is not a system that works for anyone except a vaucus culture warrior.

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Who are these people? Holy cow, I don't know anyone under 30 who thinks Bush is super cool. I don't know anyone of any age who thinks Bush is cool. Where are you seeing this? Is it from people in the media? Who buys Bush's paintings?

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There was a big Bush rehabilitation effort in the MSM a couple months ago https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/george-w-bush-cant-paint-his-way-out-of-hell.html

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Yeah the media for sure pushes this. But I don't know anyone in the real world who has a sudden reverence for W.

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I'm not a sociologist or anything, but I have multiple friends in their mid-to-late-20s (I'm 40) who basically have no conception of GWB other than "he was the president when I was in grade school and he seems pleasant."

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