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The claim that the afghanistan withdrawal was botched has been subject to some criticism. It's certainly true that the (presumably) intelligence based assessment of what the Taliban would try and be able to do and how quickly was disastrously wrong. But compared to other large scale troop pullouts, it was actually remarkably smooth, especially for it's size and scale. The morality of leaving behind so many US collaborators is appalling, but the idea that the Biden administration had some total fuck up over there really isn't correct from everything I've read about. It's a POV widely held by Republicans, I suspect in part because a Republican president failed to even initiate the withdrawal, despite talking about it.

Anyway, I think that's largely orthogonal to the original point, which was more about what happens when you have one party whose political philosophy more or less dictates a smaller, less functional state and another that actively seeks to use the power of the state to accomplish things. "Lack of Democratic support" for Trump's spoken intent is real, but not really the same thing as, for example, the idea that public education is a mistake (widely held view among Republican primary voters).




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