The system is broken because it was built that way.
First off: Book Club will return next month, because I am traveling!
Second, a little rant about civics:
If it seems like it’s really hard to get anything progressive done in America, that’s because it is—because we live under an intentionally regressive system of government designed originally to protect the institution of slavery and hinder majority rule. Our system of government and in particular the system of the electoral college and the Senate are intentionally weighted toward reactionism and maintaining the status quo. Moneyed minority interests have spent literal decades reinforcing that divide, which is why modern Republican presidents so rarely win the popular vote.
To fix that, we need to abolish the electoral college and convert the Senate to proportional representation, which won’t be easy at all.
The reason for all of this engineering was to preserve slavery, despite the fact that slavery was a terrible idea to begin with not just on an ethical but also on an economic level. All it ever did (all it was ever meant to do) was support an American aristocracy comprised of younger sons (“the Cavaliers”) by suppressing the power of labor—which was gaining traction and eroding the power of the nobility in Great Britain at the time.
Slavery was not only morally corrupt on every level, it was never even the engine of economic growth its proponents claimed, which is why the North was more prosperous than the South before the Civil War.
But it did sustain a class of petty wastrel lordlings—when they weren’t busy shooting each other over imagined slights to their honor.
Anyway, that’s what Progressives are up against.
The next time somebody tells you that the Left never accomplishes anything, remind them that stopping fascism, and even slowing down its advance, isn’t “nothing.”
If you don’t believe me, ask the people of Ukraine.
Best,
Bear