You have to understand the backing behind these parties and how that informs how they operate. They both are largely funded by capitalists, often the same capitalists. So there are a core set of interests which they both protect. There are issues that don’t fall within that space where they can be different, some issues that affect different donors differently, and they have different strategies for managing to achieve those shared interests, but when push comes to shove they are still going to do what will be good for the capitalists and the power of the state to represent those interests.
For a narrow example from this meme: Most US presidents have presided over truly awful crimes, some actually illegal, some merely morally criminal, or perhaps criminal on the world stage but not for the US. A just society based on rule of law, as the US claims to be, would prosecute these people for their crimes, whether that be for war crimes, abuses of power, corruption, etc. Ideally while they are in power in order to stop them, but at the very least you’d think that after they leave power there ought to be more political will to go after them, if not for legal or moral reasons, at least for cynical political ones.
But they basically never do this? Why not? Because those crimes help uphold the interests of capitalists and/or the state. They are mostly part of the set of things that the parties agree on. The next president would like to be able to continue to get away with those or similar crimes, so holding the previous president accountable for their actions risks setting a precedent that would come back to bite them.
There were criminal proceedings against Trump, but they were for things that are small in the grand scheme of things. Obama didn’t go after Bush for lying to get us to go into an illegal war, or for using torture, or violating civil liberties, etc. because he was doing the same things. Trump didn’t go after Obama for any of this because… he kept doing the same things. Going back to the most famous example of this, Nixon literally did what Trump did in terms of trying to subvert the “democratic process” and Ford pardoned him.
Basically if you’re president, you can get away with whatever the hell you want as long as it’s for rich people and/or the next guy wants to be able to do the same thing.
You have to understand the backing behind these parties and how that informs how they operate. They both are largely funded by capitalists, often the same capitalists. So there are a core set of interests which they both protect. There are issues that don’t fall within that space where they can be different, some issues that affect different donors differently, and they have different strategies for managing to achieve those shared interests, but when push comes to shove they are still going to do what will be good for the capitalists and the power of the state to represent those interests.
For a narrow example from this meme: Most US presidents have presided over truly awful crimes, some actually illegal, some merely morally criminal, or perhaps criminal on the world stage but not for the US. A just society based on rule of law, as the US claims to be, would prosecute these people for their crimes, whether that be for war crimes, abuses of power, corruption, etc. Ideally while they are in power in order to stop them, but at the very least you’d think that after they leave power there ought to be more political will to go after them, if not for legal or moral reasons, at least for cynical political ones.
But they basically never do this? Why not? Because those crimes help uphold the interests of capitalists and/or the state. They are mostly part of the set of things that the parties agree on. The next president would like to be able to continue to get away with those or similar crimes, so holding the previous president accountable for their actions risks setting a precedent that would come back to bite them.
There were criminal proceedings against Trump, but they were for things that are small in the grand scheme of things. Obama didn’t go after Bush for lying to get us to go into an illegal war, or for using torture, or violating civil liberties, etc. because he was doing the same things. Trump didn’t go after Obama for any of this because… he kept doing the same things. Going back to the most famous example of this, Nixon literally did what Trump did in terms of trying to subvert the “democratic process” and Ford pardoned him.
Basically if you’re president, you can get away with whatever the hell you want as long as it’s for rich people and/or the next guy wants to be able to do the same thing.