I hesitate to say that Biden is better than Trump at this point.

It was under the Biden regime that my home state stopped allowing me to update my birth certificate. He has clearly and obviously not done enough to protect us.

but the Democrats relied on a lot of gossamer-thin legal precedent and social norms to keep everything gkued together- where was the explicit access-to-abortion law, or even constitutional amendment push?

IMO- this is by design. In the US, and across liberal "democracy." It keeps social issues and culture wars at the forefront, and leaves key issues of human rights and vital systems being dangled by a thread in an eternal tug-of-war or "good cop, bad cop" routine between one side of the political circus, and the other.

The realization has deeply embittered me to the system we have here as well TBH (alongside many other countless reasons to be so). For now, the west can be considered socially ahead in certain aspects (IMO primarily due to urbanization, wealth and education having been centered on its regions for the past few centuries, and imperialism and outright coups of countless democracies/popular, secular and progressive governments having been inflicted upon the global south, and the western funding of exceedingly destructive ideologies like Wahhabism and tribalism). But unlike what the west would like the world to believe, progress is not exclusive to western society and westernization- and IMO- within 20-30 years, I highly doubt there will be any issue of LGBT rights, etc. that China will not be well ahead of the west in- other than perhaps expression where that coincides with their extreme notions of what constitutes pornography (but even then- I'd say that China will likely be ahead in this regard as well.

Similarly one can look at the progress of LGBT rights in Cuba, which are exceptional IMO- or even the development of such rights in Angola, India, and Singapore as countries that come to mind in recent years as having decriminalized homosexuality (and in Angola's case criminalized homophobia). Even the progress of women's rights (minuscule in some aspects as it may be) in Saudi Arabia, as a bottom-of-the-barrel example, has been moving forward in recent years to my understanding, particularly as they've moved away from being the exporter of Wahhabism the US set them up to be. IMO- by-and-large, the rest of the world is moving forward, socially (and economically) and will continue to do so at increasing leaps and bounds as the west will continue its back-and-forth faux-progressive culture wars (not that reactionary backlash doesn't happen in global south countries- it does and needs to be guarded against)- and those states whose systems and cultures are such that, vital matters of societal progress are not simply left up to populist mandate every couple of years- those states with the decency to stake out a position- such as that womens' rights are valid and that's not up for debate, or that trans rights, gay rights, etc. are valid- will end up well ahead (obviously, there does usually need to be some societal support before such cultural reform that said, for pragmatism's sake- for instance, Afghanistan cannot be expected to turn into a secular gay utopia overnight or anytime within the foreseeable future).

Permanently Deleted