Increasingly dominant on the internet — particularly social media and the podcast sphere — the fan fiction left imagines an alternative universe where the Republican Party, with its embrace of Trump and his authoritarian tendencies, is not the main problem of American politics. Instead, in this view, the only hindrance to the enactment of just and beneficial public policy is lack of will within the Democratic Party.

Far worse than teenagers writing an extension of their favorite anime series or video game, the fan fiction left encourages its audience, which depending on the writer or podcast often rivals those of mainstream publications and programs, to act in accordance with its weird delusions. Hallucination is central to their magical world of make-believe. Enter that world, and you will learn the following

• Bernie Sanders would have won the 2016 and 2020 DNC primaries if not for intraparty rigging. He also would have easily won both presidential elections. The fact that in both races he earned millions of fewer votes than his respective opponents is insignificant to the fan fiction left, who have cultivated their own big lie.

• Even though powerful Republicans believe in the neo-Nazi "great replacement theory," voter suppression and racist gerrymandering are prevalent, and many states are passing legislative assaults on women's rights and LGBTQ rights, concerns about racism, sexism, and homophobia are only bourgeois "identity politics."

• Trump supporters, regardless of how hateful, irrational and violent they become, are merely misled members of the proletariat class...

(There's a bunch more boring stuff I don't care enough to copy all of it)

Observable reality is irrelevant to this faction of the left. The only thing that matters is that President Barack Obama and the Democrats did not codify Roe v. Wade as federal law when they controlled Congress from 2009 to 2011. But this argument ignores that Obama and Democrat lawmakers spent those two years pushing through a massive stimulus package in the middle of financial collapse and then passing the most consequential expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s, the Affordable Care Act, which enabled more than 20 million Americans to receive health care for the first time.

^This is not as impressive as the author thinks it is lol

Last month, the US Senate attempted to codify Roe. All but one Democrat -- West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin -- voted in favor. Every Republican voted against.

Of course, the women's rights crisis wouldn't exist if Hillary Clinton won the presidential election of 2016 and appointed three Supreme Court justices instead of Trump. But many prominent left wing leaders gleefully called for people not to vote for Clinton.

:hillary:

The fan fiction left is not without precedent. George Orwell, a socialist, (lmao) came to believe that the left of his era had no real desire in holding power and for them political thought was nothing more than a "masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters." Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1925 to 1933, believed that the center left presented a greater danger than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Needless to say, that analysis didn't turn out so well.

:1984:

The Democrats certainly have flaws. They are rhetorically passive, disorganized and seem to base their strategy on how not to lose rather than how to win, which usually guarantees failure. The party is also worthy of harsh criticism for taking a bashful approach to punishing Trump and his allies for insurrection. Despite sizable weaknesses, they do have the advantage of not being racists, sexists, homophobes or hostile to the foundation of democracy. Residents of the real world should vote accordingly

:vote: