Thanks for your input. I certainly think you're correct about both parties "best laid plans" being train wrecks, but believe your missing a key point I tried to highlight within the article: they were catering to different sectors of the same monied class. Once you understand that, analyzing policy in a material way, you'll see that there's not too much dividing the parties at all outside of aesthetics. Lenin wrote about how "liberal democracies" have always been preferred by capitalists as a way to project values such as freedom and democracy while denying it from the majority who can't participate in political life without capital (which rules).
A few other things:
1. The Taliban were willing to hand over Osama directly after 9/11 and Bush denied it, claiming he thought the terms were unfair. The terms included a cease fire of the bombs raining down indiscriminately in the Middle East. This war was never about nation building, retribution, or any of those ideals we projected out to the world. Transnational capital interests were threatened by rising sentiment in the Middle East towards sovereignty, that's why we were in Afghanistan in the 80s fighting Soviet influence and funding the mujahedeen that ended up seeding extremist activity that came back to bite us.
The reason for us to stay after Bin Laden was because companies like Rand Corp, Boeing etc were profiting billions and trillions off the war. Take a look at the annual holdings of "defense" contractors from 2001-today).
2. Biden's withdrawal was necessary and even angered the ruling class, but he quickly pivoted entirely to several other illegal, paramilitary conflicts in Syria and predominantly the areas around China to threaten them (not for human rights as they like to say, but because China is an economic threat and about to leave us in the dust). This revealed he fundamentally lacks the will to challenge capital in any real way, and is another military hawk, even more efficient than Trump because he doesn't even draw a fifth the media criticism from the correctly described "gaslighters".
3. The Democrats co-opted and stomped out legitimate revolutionary spirit in BLM (which was fractured and not particularly focused but a threat to power nonetheless). Their job was to materially do nothing, but woo BLM with phrases and symbols, and taper their ability to get anything done, and they did it with haste and urgency never seen when it comes to addressing working class issues. No police defunding has even occurred, in fact Biden increased funding to the police and military in 2021.
4. I won't get into the inflation and budget conversation too much (its a long one as I'm sure you know), but a balanced book isn't actually a necessity for countries to hold to. Only a few countries even have a debt ceiling. Managing inflation and keeping the economy from overheating is indeed important, but government spending being the primary driver of this is a total fallacy. The simpler answer is that capitalists raise prices to maintain profit margins, and we have very few regulations to keep this in check. Take a look at the Military Industrial Complex's budget if you want to whittle down on spending, because human services, public infrastructure spending and social safety nets have been austerity-murdered over the past fifty years. There's nothing left to take from that coffer.
5. Finally, Biden was the candidate because he was shoved to the top by the DNC's corrupt donor-driven leadership. Bernie was sidelined because he actually stands to threaten power, even with his imperialist foreign policy voting record and inability to challenge capitalism outside reformist lines. Calling Tulsi a centrist means on a global scale she is at best center-right, and we can see that Biden is equally as conservative as Trump and just better at giving the occasional hand wave to the progressives while doing nothing materially progressive.
As I mentioned, the task of the American left, and I mean truly left, not reformist "Nordic model" types content to continue relying on capitalist exploitation in the Global South, is to break firmly and completely from the DNC and reconstitute a left opposition at the minimum, with eyes on a systematic overhaul.
