Some towns need to be burned to the ground, is what I'm hearing.

This was probably almoat 20 years ago, in a small rural (like 5k people) Illinois town I used to love in. We were outside doing some yardwork, and this guy comes door to door selling some kind of cleaner.

Black guy. Which I mention because its relevant.

We chat for a bit, he demos the cleaner, at one point his friend calls so he takes the call.

The friend, also clearly a black guy, is basically saying he is done and ready to leave and basically half the houses threaten to shoot him and keep calling him n***er.

This is rural America, in general. This is MAGA.

Anyway, we bought some cleaner, it seemed to work on the outside mold spots on the house.

Centrists voted for Trump in 2024, thinking egg prices would go down. (Or just terrified of immigrants and trans folks.)

I have little confidence in centrists. (Or what counts as centrist in the United States.)

But I do know that a lot of the progressive platform is popular:
~ Universal healthcare
~ A jobs guarantee
~ Higher education for all
~ National action on the climate crisis
~ Women's reproductive healthcare access (including abortion)
~ Housing as a human right ~ Abolishing ICE and police reform
...and so on

All that isn't centrist according to the Overton window. In fact, the far-right propaganda machine is asserting any one of those is a slippery slope to communism. So the majority of Americans who take polls are communist.

I think that running on an actual platform is a winning move. Doubly so if candidates present a blueprint on how to implement it.

I also think that none of this is enough. We're going to have to address the democracy crisis and capture of the federal court system. Ultimately, according to Nobel laureate economists, we're going to have to redistribute the immense wealth at the top. (That may be impossible, and if so, the entire industrial world may be doomed to capture and decline.)