scuse me? Continue to lead?
The alpha lemming is a leader.
The American electorate is the problem. A huge hunk of them anyway.
Those of us who are screaming daily that “this is not normal” do so not because it’s working, but because we have no choice. Our grandchildren will probably ask us one day why we didn’t do more.
If there were a level electoral playing field with regard to districting and unsuppressed voting rights, I would like to think 2018 would have been as big a swing left as 2010 was a swing right. But I don’t have cites or stats to back up that notion, and it probably isn’t even true.
So, sadly, I will acknowledge your point that, insofar as midterms reflect what Americans believe to be “normal,” we’re more comfortable with a lazy, racist, sexist, immature, ill-informed bully than with an eminently decent man promoting left-of-center proposals.
I’m not contending that the whole of America is refusing to normalize Trump, as there is clearly a solid 35-40% of the country that seems content with the new presidential norms, or at minimum, they see nothing particularly destructive about it.
But Hurricaneditka posed a question about how should people go about refusing to normalize Trump when it seems as though there’s not much that can be done. And I somewhat agreed with him. Using the media as an example, it’s difficult for the media not to normalize Trump. I mean, what do they do - not cover him? Everything he does is big news. Do his political opponents ignore his outrageous tweets, his lies, and his tactics? They can complain in public, but before the elections this past November, there wasn’t much they could do to stop him, either.
I think when people say they don’t want to normalize Trump, they mean resist him. And that’s been happening since day one. Some forms of resistance are more obvious and more effective than others. The ultimate resistance, though, has to come in the form of popular uprising through the ballot box, which has been happening.
No it didn’t. The absolute number of switched seats was lower, but the circumstances limited the possible total. Gerrymandering meant that fewer switches were feasible. Most of the analysis of the election rates it as significant a repudiation as any of those earlier elections.
In addition, the number of women and minorities and members of minority religions was at its all-time highest. Since the Republicans are determined to turn Congress into an all white and male bastion for them, this is devastating. It’s impossible to imagine this trend not continuing in 2020.
That’s right. And Democrats (newly elected and otherwise) are working at both state and federal levels to undo the mutilation of the electoral process that is gerrymandering.
So the “100 to 200 seats flipped”—and more— will happen. It’s just having to happen over two elections rather than one, because of the gerrymandering.
Remind us about the $6.1 billion Obama swiped from the Department of Defense to fund DACA…can you?
Oh, wait: that never happened.
Then could you remind us of the $1.375 billion Obama swiped from Homeland Security to fund DACA?
Gosh, that never happened, either.
Guess the DACA action isn’t so similar to Trump’s Wall-funding plan, after all.
As that lefty publication The National Review* put it:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/trump-emergency-declaration-contemptuous-of-rule-of-law/
*That’s sarcasm, by the way, for any unfamiliar with NR.
My emphasis in the quote; stats from:
Yes, Trump has obviously been normalized.
Regarding the declaration of the national emergency it was done in a meandering free style off the cuff speech in which he justified his actions entirely with bald faced objectively varifiable lies followed with declarations that the only reason the opposing party might disagree is that they want to destroy America.
If any previous president had declared a national emergency in this way it would have been a huge scandal. But it’s what we’ve come to expect from Trump so it didn’t warrant more than maybe a cursory mention most news organizations. Its just like any other day. So they talk instead about the probability that he could get it through the courts completely ignoring that the entire policy is based on lies and animus, without any serious planning or gravitas.
Yes.
Behavior that was outrageous and unthinkable b.t. is now normal. Behavior like this.
Grandpa has worn his underpants on his head to the family dinner table again.
And all anyone can talk about is which ones he wore, and “What does that mean?”
It means HE IS FUCKING NUTS. But nobody wants to say that, because they all hope Grandpa will give them money in his will.
I, and at least half of the country don’t see him as normal. Nor does any respectable media organization.
Such a racist asshole would never be allowed in my house, or on my property.
What you folks a talking about is - “Is it acceptable to have a traitorous moron ‘run’ the country.”
In some ways, Trump made some things less normalized. His unapologetic and blatant behavior has created backlash that may not have happened if a better behaved and less blatant President were elected.
Sexism was always a problem. Partly because of Trump’s blatant displays, the #metoo movement gained momentum.
Racism was always a problem. But now more people are aware of it, and racist behavior is getting called out, both in politics and on phone recordings.
The popular vote margin was 6 points in '94 and 7 points in '10. Democrats won by 8.5 points in 2018.
Democrats were defending many more seats in '94 and '10 than the Republicans were defending in '18, which is why the turnover was so different.
Exactly. For example, I have one child. He will have been six-to-ten (or, Zeus forbid, six-to-fourteen) years old JUST ONCE. I will have been granted the wonderful opportunity to enjoy his company at that critical age range EXACTLY ONCE.
If I let the Trump/Trumpistas horror show consume me — in destructive (e.g., angry depression) and/or constructive (local political activities, etc.) ways — I will have blown this opportunity. (I do mean “consume me.” Spending SOME time and energy on these things is necessary, and even an important experience for him). I wouldn’t call putting limits around these things “normalcy,” really — more “seeking a personal balance that includes plenty of time truly detached from the whole shitfest.”
Most of the previous national emergencies involved sanctions. (And in my opinion, the government should find a better way to do that.) Some that were significantly different were a couple declared by Bush after 9/11 and one declared by Obama regarding the H1N1 virus.
The Wall is the first national emergency declared that deals with a controversial topic that failed the legislative process. This is why Democrats are saying that it could open a can of worms.
I can see why some might worry that, in the aggregate, too many of us taking too much time away from confronting the horror show will in effect “normalize” it.
But I don’t think so. Decent folks will still elect decent folks to various positions — including the presidency, ASAP — who will behave decently in office. They just will.
If it means that politicians are treating the Trump administration as a normal presidency, yes, Republicans started boarding that train on day one, and some are still trying to jump aboard as it’s pulling away from the station.
If it means people like me are exhausted from being shocked and outraged about norms being transgressed on a daily basis, then yes, it’s been normalized.
If it means we’re far enough into his term that I’m starting to favor electoral defeat over impeachment, just because it’s more decisive and not that far away anymore, then yes, it’s been normalized.
Just like all of the Nazi excesses had become normal in Germany on the eve of the holocaust, many people now treat Trumpism as normal as a matter of practicality and expedience.
It doesn’t mean any of it is normal, of course. Anyone with a passing familiarity with history knows this is all not only quite fucked up, but it’s a well-known pattern of abnormality that tends to precede authoritarian rule. Just because some people want this to be the new normal doesn’t mean that it must be or will be.
Sure he’s been normalized. Where’s the outrage over his tweet this weekend that “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” ? He can say things that, up to a few years ago, would have brought D.C. to a halt until the speaker apologized. Now it’s just another in an ongoing parade of outrages and insanity. Ho hum.
Yeah, I’d call that normalization.
The idea is to make it clear that what Trump is doing is not normal, and should not be treated as normal. To make sure we keep the bar of decency where it was, rather than accepting this as “the new normal”.
For example, it is not normal for the president to demand a criminal investigation into a family member of a key witness against him in a trial on twitter.
It is not normal for the president to pretend, without evidence, that there was widespread voter fraud in an election he won.
It is not normal for the president to call the press “the enemy of the people”.
It is not normal for the president to engage in what amounts to schoolyard bullying with his political opponents.
It is not normal for the president to shut down the government with his party in control of both houses of congress.
It is not normal for the president to lie literally thousands of time on the public record, often about easily-verifiable facts, for his press team to repeat those lies when called on them, and for the statements of the whitehouse to be utterly untrustworthy both to us as citizens and to our allies across the world.
These are all aberrations in American politics, and treating them as though they’re “normal” is to both undersell the scope of how rotten and corrupt this administration is, and to increase our odds of running into something like it again.
By the way, how do you feel about locking kids in cages, separating them from their families, and then adopting them out and refusing to try to bring the families back together? 
Because that’s another one of those things we need to not be normalizing. We are literally stealing people’s children. For some reason, this isn’t front-page news any more, and not because it’s stopped. It’s because it stopped being “newsworthy”. It became “normalized”. See why this is dangerous?
If you count the seats, it seems pretty normal.
If you count the votes, it’s absolutely not.
The existence of that discrepancy is, in and of itself, pretty fucking disgraceful, all things considered. This election was as clear a repudiation of a republican party as we’ve had in the past 30 years, and they still kept the senate. That’s kinda fucked-up, right?
And that is how democracy can be transformed into something other than democracy, whatever we want to call it.
Let me be clear: I’m not attacking or blaming you, because what you’ve described is the approach to life that any good parent and good citizen would take. At the end of the day, what goes on in our lives ultimately wins out over the behavior of political figures who, despite having very real power to influence our lives in noticeable ways, are still hundreds or even thousands of miles removed from us.
But that’s how authoritarian leaders are able to disrupt, wear down, and eventually break not only political norms but also social and cultural norms. There’s a climate of meanness that has to pervade in order for someone like Trump to succeed politically. Authoritarians necessarily play a zero-sum game, because they are not in the business of cooperating with anyone; it’s pure, cut-throat competition all the time, and competing means ultimately driving people into corners so that enemies become easier to identify and eliminate.