Sorry – too late to edit – I missed that this had been replied to already.
But I don’t think it necessarily takes “red” states to sign on. It takes purple states. And the states with the most to lose are the ones with the smallest populations, which are overrepresented in the electoral college. The biggest states have the most to gain, so there’s incentive to embrace a change to popular vote.
The remains of Officer Sicknick are lying in honour in the Capitol Rotunda tonight. President and Dr Biden made a short appearence to pay their respects. Various law enforcement officers are filing through to honour Officer Sicknick.
Officer Sicknick is only the fifth non-elected individual to lie in honour in the Rotunda.
Once blue states representing 270 electoral votes have voted, the election is won and the Dems are in.
What use is the compact, I ask again? You dont need a compact if you get 270 EC votes.
And in any case, if it does happen and the Compact matters- which is extremely unlikely- then it will be thrown- quite appropriately- to the Supreme Court, which now gets to elect the President.
The Compact is dumb on two levels.
Sure, but none have signed on.
In Nevada, it passed both chambers, but was vetoed. It’s passed at least one chamber in multiple swing states.
And I am willing to accept that sometimes it won’t work out in Democrats’ favor, because the electoral college is stupid. There’s no good reason for us to elect a president that way. We should push for Democracy. If Republicans want to stand up for a stupid and undemocratic system, let them.
I am not worried about a theory that it’s unconstitutional from a professor at a bottom of the barrel private law school in Alabama. And even the Supreme Court has limits, and needs to be careful what they do as far as overturning results of elections. (As we saw in 2020.)
That wouldnt be overturning results of elections in fact just the opposite. The EC rules, not the Popular vote.
In one important way, they didn’t know what Trump was really like.
The biggest delusion these people have had for the last four years is that Trump loved them back. They’re discovering that while they were willing to throw their lives away for Trump, he has never had any loyalty to them.
For anyone who has studied violent radicalization in terrorist groups overseas, this is not at all surprising. As I have previously noted, it’s not the poor and desperate who wind up in guerilla training camps learning asymmetrical warfare; the poor and desperate work long hours just keeping themselves fed and housed and don’t have time for that shit. No, the people in those camps, to a large extent, were previously college students and young middle-to-upper-class people, who have the means and freedom to follow the news, browse the web, gather socially to talk politics, and so on. The US is experiencing the same thing with its own home-grown radicals.
It’s often people who have some level of further or higher education, often in a more technical subject (so maybe more likely to expect right/wrong answers rather than context-related or grey areas?), who (for whatever reason) feel they aren’t getting what they consider their due, or that they are or may be about to be in a more precarious position, socially and/or financially, than they expected.
I don’t agree, but I’ll stop the hijack here.
I’m willing to bet if you interviewed all these guys with good jobs and businesses that took off work and used their credit cards to buy plane tickets and book DC hotels so they could help Trump wage an armed attack on Congress, you would find that each and every one of them came home from work each night and turned on Fox News. Or listened to Rush on the drive to and from work. Or NewsMax or OANN or something worse, some noxious Bannon or Guiliani podcast.
But they all started with Fox and/or Rush, even if that was a “gateway drug”.
That’s why they truly believed that if Joe Biden was allowed to take office, mobs of black people or “antifa” would attack their neighborhoods and burn down their houses, and if they called the cops the phone would just ring and ring because the Democrats defunded and canceled them, but someone would show up to arrest them for complaining about their house being destroyed by leftist mobs and take their guns and put them in a re-education camp. Also, something about having to call AOC a man if she told them she was.
The radicalizing force is fear, and this is how it’s being spread. These are not men that are aggrieved because they’ve lost their jobs to immigrants or their house to the fires of leftist mobs. These men are, for the most part, securely employed in good jobs, living financially secure lives in stable neighborhoods. The only reason for their grievance is the self- inflicted brainwashing of right wing media.
Yes, of course that’s all true. My point is to observe the comfortable class of people who have time to sit and drink the poison spewing from the right-wing noise machine. If I’m working three jobs at starvation wages, I don’t have the bandwidth to sit through Fox & Friends every morning.
Which is why I dislike the tongue-in-cheek labels for these radicals, like “Y’all Qaeda,” that carry connotations of hillbillies and poor country folk, because it’s a fundamental misunderstanding and destructive misrepresentation of who these people are, where they come from, and how they got to be this way.
(“Vanilla ISIS,” by contrast, is fine.)
Great posts, @Cervaise, @PatrickLondon, and @Ann_Hedonia. I think you’re all on to something.
I remember when I was living overseas during the War on Terror, I picked up and skimmed through a book that was titled something along the lines of ‘Most Dangerous Places in the World’ (or something like that). I believe the author was America or maybe Canadian. Anyway, I remember a quote from the author who was trying to dispel the notion that many Americans had about terrorists - he’d actually encountered terrorist groups in his travels while writing the book. As he put it, most of them aren’t from an insane asylum; they’re more like ‘rich kids with issues.’ And when you look at Osama Bin Laden and his followers, for instance, that seems to be true. Obviously, that’s a simplification. A lot of terrorists and radicals do have fairly long rap sheets, so there are often warning signs that someone isn’t fitting into society, such as was the case with Al-Qaida in Iraq’s leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but many terrorists or radicals had fairly stable childhoods and early adult lives.
I think this accurately describes what a lot of the protesters must apparently feel, which is that they fear they are about to lose something or already have lost something. In this case, they believe that they’re losing status and power. That explains why so many former and current police officers participated: recent movements by anti-Trump protesters represent a direct challenge to their status and power. And I would consider former and current military to be of a similar mindset - many law enforcement officers have spent a few years in the Army Guard or other branches, so there’s some crossover.
I just wanted to add is that, for the most part, no one has really lost any status or power. These people only think they are losing status and power is because right-wing media says they are. They aren’t hurting because of immigrants and job-killing regulations and liberals and they don’t know anyone that is…they believe that these things will hurt them and theirs soon because right-wing media tells them that it’s just around the corner, it’ll happen if Biden becomes President.
The only grievances they gave are the same ones we all have, all of us (even billionaire Presidents) think we work too much and don’t have enough. We all think we are under appreciated and give more than we get. Phone psychics have been exploiting this for years but right-wing media took it to a new level.
There’s certain little evidence to show that they’re losing the ability to climb up the socioeconomic ladder; however, in the case of the police, I can understand why some might see liberalism as a threat and a direct challenge to their culture – because it very much is. Since about 2014, more and more people have been telling police that their militarist culture needs to change and that they shouldn’t have qualified immunity to do whatever the fuck they want to do to control a suspect. No question, reasonable people agree that shouldn’t be even up for debate, but from their point of view, you’re asking them to give up special privileges and power – people typically don’t just give up power without some resistance.
I think you can to a certain extent apply this analysis to the Anglo American socioeconomic class in general. White progressives or moderates value fair play; we don’t expect or demand special treatment. That doesn’t mean we don’t on some subconscious level appreciate the privilege that we have - I think we do whether we’re aware of it or not. But on a conscious level, we expect to compete with other individuals who are black, brown, Asian, male or female, gay or straight, older or younger, on the basis of merit. Not that we expect to live in a perfect meritocracy or that we don’t appreciate getting a leg up from someone in our social circles, but that we don’t expect these sorts of advantages and we accept when good things happen to other people and when bad things happen to us.
By contrast, I think white conservatives view the world they live in a little differently. There are certain unspoken rules, traditions, and customs that we just agree to live by. One of those conventions is that there’s a certain kind of ‘America,’ and everyone needs to understand what that America means – because that America, not the one we live in now, was a much better version of America – at least it was for them. America changed, and they did not consent to these changes. They did not consent to allowing tens of millions of illegal immigrants in addition to the millions upon millions of other legal ones we’ve taken in over their lifetimes. They didn’t consent to a world in which they have to compete with women, non-whites, and foreigners for good jobs. They did not consent to gay rights and gender-of-your-choice bathrooms. All of these changes, changed their America. And it was all changed without their consent, and they’ve got a message…for all of us. And if that message can’t be delivered at the ballot box, then they might have to resort to other means of getting their point across. I think that’s what is driving this radicalism.
It won’t solve the problem of violence, but to the extent that democracy remains, demographics will solve some issues. It’s very difficult to distinguish between a 60%-40% split in a population when it’s so easy to find counterexamples, and which side the 60%-40% split occurs is not even that important when you are talking supporting treasonous behavior.
But a political flip from 60% to 40% does have major implications.
Look at cannabis. You can look around and call boomers hypocrites because a lot of them grew up to be against legalization, but even though it was hard to see on the ground, their support really was a big break from the “reefer madness” generation. It took the previous generations dying off to produce real change: it wasn’t the gen x-ers and millennials views compared to boomers that made the difference.
MAGAts are such delusional snowflakes. Detaining you for allegedly committing sedition against the United States becomes “cancel[ing] me because I stood up for what I believe in.”
A suspicion has been growing on me is that one thing which draws many of these people to Trump is that like him, they see the world as zero-sum; so if “other individuals who are black, brown, Asian, male or female, gay or straight, older or younger” gain — even in such intangibles as decent treatment and basic respect — then they, who are not these things, must lose. A modicum of reflection would suggest that this is not so, but they seem to prefer reflex to reflection.
As noted, this is a suspicion (or WAG, if you prefer). But it would seem to explain their behavior, at least to an extent.
I think you’re exactly right - I think they do live in a zero-sum world.
What I’d also submit is that they don’t view themselves as the radicals; they see themselves as righteous heirs to a great legacy, preserving a system that they were born into, and that they see really nothing wrong with this legacy, even if it’s tilted in their favor.
Some people don’t even necessarily regard themselves as racists; they don’t believe that they are being racist in their attempts to save ‘their’ America; it’s the America that their great grandparents founded and passed along to them, or it’s the great grandparents that their European ancestors immigrated to, paid their dues to like everyone else, and helped build for posterity. And they view themselves as torch bearers of a proud American legacy.
I think they view liberals as being unnecessarily antagonistic and iconoclastic, and this all started with these beliefs and policies that they didn’t agree to -and that’s the rub. It’s as if liberal politicians - and even ‘back stabbing’ centrist globalists - brought a Trojan Horse into their Fortress America, and now it’s being ruined.
They’re determined not to let it be ruined without a bitter fight. They’re not going to let their version of America go quietly into the night. Not a chance.
Of all people, the police and the military see themselves as the guardians of this legacy. Indeed, the police and military have been associated with the idea of America as a white nation. This country didn’t integrate the military until 1948. The national guard was often brought in to shoot non-whites fighting back against white oppression. The mostly white military expanded the American nation and its global influence by massacring non-white peoples, engendering notions of white and American supremacy which persist even today. Police departments were often responsible for policing black citizens and enforcing racist state statutes and municipal ordinances, and most departments didn’t integrate really into well after the civil rights era began, and many aren’t well integrated even today. In both the military and law enforcement, there is absolutely a culture of white (male) supremacy that persists, and in the last 20-40 years we’ve seen a growing questioning of their special status even as a deferential counter-narrative deliberately competes with such skepticism.
This is true to a great extent. I think a lot of people’s opposition to gay marriage is based on this.
“If 2 gay men are allowed to get married, this damages MY marriage.” It makes no sense whatsoever, but this is firmly entrenched in their minds. If you ask them to explain specifically what harm they suffer, they usually pause, and then tell you to fuck off.