It has become an article of faith in Very Online corners that Democrats and Republicans are functionally indistinguishable. Two heads of the same capitalist hydra. The party of Wall Street with two mascots. Etc.

It’s an easy position to hold loosely, especially when the alternative means confronting the fragmentation of power, complexity of trade-offs, and inconvenient necessity of compromise in any functional democracy. To say both parties are the same is less an insight than an escape hatch.

But like all comforting myths, it only works until it collides with reality.

2025 has been that collision. And the wreckage is everywhere.

The idea that Democrats and Republicans are identical has always required some selective blindness. It starts from valid grievances: bipartisan support for corporate interests, the military-industrial complex, immigration enforcement, and surveillance powers. It builds on frustrations with the Obama years - drone warfare, Wall Street bailouts, cautious incrementalism masquerading as bold vision. It flourishes most among the disillusioned, the online, and the very young.

It appeals because it flatters. If both parties are equally corrupt, then your refusal to engage is principled, not passive. If every outcome is rigged, then disengagement becomes a form of moral clarity. You are not checked out; you are above the fray.

But the map of American politics was never flat. It was distorted. And those distortions have only grown more grotesque.

Joe Biden is and was a centrist. That’s not in dispute. But under his administration, the federal government delivered the largest climate investment in U.S. history. Passed a child tax credit that cut child poverty nearly in half until Republicans refused to renew it. Lowered insulin costs. Forgave billions in student debt through administrative channels. Appointed the most diverse federal judiciary in American history.

Was it enough? No. Was it revolutionary? No. But it was real.

Compare that to Trump, whose second term has discarded even the pretense of policy in favor of power for power’s sake. Who governs by threat and vendetta. Who dismantles regulatory systems not out of ideological conviction but because accountability is annoying.

When you claim they’re the same, both the material differences and the moral difference between imperfect governance and gleeful demolition.

The 2000s birthed a kind of reflexive false parity in leftist analysis. It hardened after the Iraq War, expanded during Occupy, and calcified during the 2016 primaries. The idea that Democrats are merely softer Republicans gave intellectual cover to purism. It justified disengagement from electoral politics. It made every compromise a betrayal.

This is not analysis so much as an aesthetic.

And aesthetics are poor substitutes for power.

The contemporary right knows this. It doesn’t care about being intellectually consistent. It cares about winning. And it is reshaping the country (and the world) accordingly.

The left’s insistence that centrism is just fascism in a friendly suit has left it rhetorically sharp and institutionally weak.

Cynicism is easy. It's faster than thinking, cheaper than organizing, and safer than hoping.

The cost comes due later.

When Trump flirts with jailing journalists, and the left’s instinct is to respond with "Well, Biden didn’t protect Julian Assange," that’s both fragile whataboutism and disarmament. It is the refusal to distinguish between harm and annihilation.

Moral calculus requires proportionality. If you think a food bank and a concentration camp are both bad because they both involve state power, you are not a radical. You are a nihilist.

George Orwell knew the danger of false binaries. His socialism did not blind him to the crimes of the Soviet Union. Nor did it lead him to romanticize powerlessness. His politics were uncomfortable. Because reality is uncomfortable.

To believe that engaging with flawed institutions means capitulation is to misunderstand how anything gets done.

None of this is an apology for Biden’s shortcomings. Or Obama’s, for that matter. The Democrats have failed, repeatedly, to meet the moment. And many criticisms are valid. Their messaging is timid. Their legislative strategy is often incoherent. Their donor base is too comfortable, their leadership too old.

But they are not the same as a party that builds detention centers in the Everglades and calls it patriotism. They are not the same as a president who uses AI to fantasize about turning Gaza into a resort, or who threatens mayors with arrest on live television.

To say otherwise is delusional.

You can oppose neoliberalism and still reject authoritarianism. You can demand more from Democrats and still vote for them to prevent catastrophe. You can walk and chew gum.

To the social media activists who claimed Democrats and Republicans are the same: do you still believe that?

Or is the distinction finally sharp enough to pierce the myth?