Sad to say only the last line is mine – that’s why it doesn’t fit so well.
The earliest I’ve been able to fit the first three lines are in a post by one CarlSagan. Since it was in 2016, it’s not the original.
The little minor policy changes that some are quibbling about are changes that will allow a Republican state administration to throw out votes they don’t like, and award all of the Electoral College votes to their chosen candidate who lost the election in the state.
This is what they are doing. They tried to do this before, but were stopped. So they have written legislation to prevent them from being stopped next time. It’s not theoretical - it’s obvious and right out in the open.
I see nothing at the moment that makes me believe it’s out of the question.
Remember the people and systems that stopped the GOP takeover attempt last year? Republicans have ousted those people and changed the systems in case they feel the need to try again in '22 and '24.
Yep, and they’re going to be able to redraw their own political districts as well.
At which point the courts will tell them to go pound sand and declare Biden the winner. he Supreme court may be willing to entertain Jim Crow Lite (now with computer aided precision), but they haven’t given any indication that they are partisan enough to overturn the popular vote. Listen no one except the most loyal/scared Republican law maker actually wants a dictatorship. Polls show that 46% of Republicans say that legislatures should be allowed to shift Biden electors to Trump. That is waaay higher than it has any right to be, but it still means that 54% of Republicans don’t feel that way.
If the Dems can mobilize well enough to overcome the disenfranchisement blocks put up by the GOP, and win the popular vote, then we will just see a revival of 2020, with Trump and his Cronies pissing into the wind. If Democrats get discouraged, and don’t show up, then we get to see how well the civilian and military bureaucracy can hold on against an assault from the top.
I will also say that a lot can happen in three years, and the issues and the issues and political landscape of 2024 election may be very different from what we see today.
They’ll say the individual states have the right to run elections as they see fit.
I hope you’re right. But I fear that 46% of Republicans are willing to admit that they want to steal elections and a number of them also want to but won’t admit it to a pollster. I don’t think it means that 54% don’t really feel that way.
I actually think that one thing that’ll work against Biden is his surprisingly left-wing agenda thus far. There were a LOT of people out there who specifically voted against Trump because he was Trump and an unmitigated disaster as a President as well as personally abhorrent.
But… those people are NOT Democrats or progressives. They do not like Biden either, and implementing a more left-than-advertised agenda pushes them a lot closer to thinking “Maybe Trump wasn’t so bad?”, and probably will push quite a few into holding their nose and voting Republican.
That’s what frightens me; it’s like Biden has taken his election as some sort of mandate as something other than “Don’t be a giant inflamed asshole like Trump”, and I think that’s got a lot of potential to backfire on him.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider to be “surprisingly left-wing” about Biden’s agenda so far?
My impression is that most of what Biden has spent his time and political capital on so far seems to be pretty popular with most of the electorate.
If someone voted for Biden hoping for “Trump’s policies in a more decent package” they might be surprised, but I don’t think anyone who was paying attention would have anticipated that on Election Day 2020.
Based on the assumption that the Rs will continue to be successful in their Liberal BAD! rhetoric. If the average person looks at Biden’s agenda and is neutral-to-positive on it, they might get this vague, elusive feeling that maybe, just maybe, the Rs have not been 100% forthright with them,
Which is to say, maybe he, with Individual-ONE’s assistance, could be able to convince the country that Left is not the siamese twin of Lucifer, after all.
I’m not holding my breath.
And quite a few of those disparage him publicly(but not too much) but support him privately, and will kiss his ass if he wins. The Republicans that honestly oppose him are rarer than most would suppose.
One would be inclined to infer that, from the RW point of view, Individual-ONE added some fun-ness to the stodgy old political process, so they support, or at least vote for, him because he amuses them. And, given that the election system is structured very much like a sporting event, it should be no surprise that mentally-minimalist-RWers perceive politics as a game and want it to be more fun.
You could be right but I think Biden is trying another strategy, and I think it is a strategy that may work.
Looking at it broadly, as I understand it over the last decade or two a significant body of working- and lower middle class people have seen their economic situation deteriorate. Obama probably would have liked to do something for them but he didn’t perhaps because he was hamstrung by not having control of the legislature, and perhaps because he was too moderate and too timid. Trump appealed to those people because he promised to help them - albeit that he had neither the intention nor the executive ability nor the support of the legislature to do so.
You are suggesting that Biden’s best course is to stay moderate-to-right-wing so that he doesn’t lose Republican moderates. I think there is a real chance he has thought through that strategy and realizes it is at best a slow road to ruin. Memories are short. By 2024, moderate Republicans who were horrified by the Trump shitshow will have calmed down and the Republicans are already doing a thorough job of rewriting history and pretending Trump wasn’t so bad after all.
If Biden just pursues a defensive strategy of being a “small target” moderate who doesn’t scare the horses, in the end the disaffected working and lower middle class people are still going to be disaffected and are still going to be an easy target for Trump’s wild empty promises.
I think there is a real chance that Biden has decided on a “damn the torpedoes” approach in the hope that within four years he will have actually produced some results that might convince the disaffected that he is on the right track. Historically, and despite what ideologically driven right wing economists would have you believe, massive government infrastructure spending does tend to do things for the working and lower middle classes and I think that’s what Biden is betting on.
Maybe so… I’m just not so sure that the disaffected lower/working class people are reachable by this. But the middle class/upper middle class voters are, and they may not like it.
What worries me is this setting up a choice in their minds between more Biden progressiveness and Trump, and Trump looking more attractive than before as a result. I think that’s a real threat.
I think this is the most important point. Three years is a long time, especially in Trump years.
And while I don’t endorse complacency, I don’t understand the depth of the pessimism in the wake of victory. You know we won, right? And now the other side is fighting back. It would’ve been nice if they didn’t, but that’s not a realistic expectation. And we’re only scared because we’ve seen the playbook. It’s not that the playbook didn’t exist before, but now we know what’s in it. It’s better than not being scared because we don’t know.
I think Trump might run in 2024. This is scary. The idea of him winning is really scary. I think the 2024 version of Trump will be really scary, too. I think Trump will be batshit insane by 2024. I mean, he’s batshit insane now, but I think it’ll be off the charts by 2024.
Trump is living in an alternate reality, one he began constructing, crazy brick by crazy brick, on November 3rd. Back then, you sometimes saw chinks in the walls, Trump might slip and say something that indicated he was aware he’d lost the election, and everyone would say……look, look he’s going to accept reality soon! The wall that separates Trump from reality is coming down! I would say……no, no, you’re seeing these chinks because the wall is still going up. Soon they will be gone. Thinking that Trump just needs time to accept reality is a mistake, one that you are only making because, after four years, you still think there is a normal person inside Trump waiting to come out. But there’s not.
And the wall that separates him from reality has grown into a town, a crazy town that Trump inhabits inside his head.
His only thought is an obsession. He has all day to think about it, and he’ll think about it all day every day for the next three years. This is the man who is still obsessed about someone calling him short-fingered. In 1987. He sees himself as not just a victim, but THE victim, the victim of the greatest crime in the history of mankind. In three years he will make Guiliani and Sidney Powell look sane. And he must be restored to power to avenge that crime.
If he runs, that will be his platform. His entire platform will revolve around his victim hood. His platform will consist of the list of people he’s going to arrest and the upcoming draconian punishments he wants to inflict on them… He’ll give off the rails campaign speeches about executing Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr. He’ll campaign on declaring war on Italy because they helped. He’ll campaign on nationalizing social media and cable news and arresting every reporter and the officers of every social media company that helped steal the 2020 election from him. He’ll totally derail any Republican that tries to talk about anything else.
I firmly believe that he is that crazy, but I’m not sure whether to hope for the scenario of described above, or to fear it. But I’ve got three years to figure it out.
Very nice analysis as usual. You got me convinced. I’m now moving to this as the most likely scenario. Particularly when you add in another 3 years of, if not dementia then at least general age related mental decline, it will likely to become impossible even for the most partisan to ignore the fact that he is unwell mentally.
Don’t we know it. November 2016 through November 2020 seemed like a lifetime. A miserable, hopeless lifetime.
And the Republican party - and too many others - will go down the rabbit hole with him, as long as the votes are there. The classic example, of course, is:
But few so far are actively discouraging the president or his campaign from pursuing all legal paths to contest the results. Only a smattering of Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory, and there has been little coaxing on the part of senior GOP lawmakers to help Trump come to terms with his loss. Some said there is value in ensuring the integrity of this year’s results, while others described a chaotic and scattershot operation that they hoped would eventually push Trump to cooperate in a peaceful transfer of power.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
Emphases mine.
As long as the centripetal force of absolute opposition to the Democratic Party is still the hallmark of the Republican Party, we’re not out of the woods.
As long as Les Moonves and folks like him in the media figure “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for [us]”, we’re not out of the woods.
As long as the electorate feels that any Republican is better for the economy than any Democrat, and there’s a chance that the country could have a recession in 2024, we’re not out of the woods.
As long as the people who know better see no harm done in putting Donald Trump into the most powerful job in the world as long as it gets them what they want, we’re not out of the woods.