As a Congressman, Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has shown he’s more interested in “communication”, instead of legislation, which in practice means he’s using his position to foment violence and do all kinds of awful things.
He’s not only a conspiracy theorist and a likely 1/6 insurrectionist sympathizer, but he’s claiming that people going door-to-door to get people to vaccinate are really coming for your guns and your Bibles, and has encouraged conservative mothers, literally: “If you are raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster.”
How’d we get to the point where members of Congress are actively encouraging people to get violent, and everyone who’s sane is either just allowing them to do that, powerless to stop them, or kicked out of the Republican Party?
In answer to OP’s question “How’d we get to [this] point?” : 40+ years of Republican lies, conspiracy-mongering, and right-wing rabble-rousing, done very successfully.
We got there by allowing insulated, homogeneous places with low poulation density to have a disproportionate voice in this country, when compared to the voice given to diverse, populated places.
So, they’re haven’t actually beheaded one another yet, but they’re contemplating it. At least one of them is, and a lot of the others don’t seem to have a problem with that. (And some of them seemed comfortable with the idea of hanging the vice president, not too long ago.)
Members of Congress don’t even engage in fistfights anymore,
And I don’t think this will change. Presence of women members makes it less likely.
However, Cawthorn inviting Rittenhouse to be an intern seems a true innovation in congressional domestic violence promotion. (Not to criticize the verdict, which I respect.)
My point is that this is at least the thousandth thread on this subject. Asking how we got this far has beaten deader into the ground than the moderate or even rightist wing of the Republican Party.
We all know what the GOP is like. The only possible question is how we stop them. And that too has been beaten into the ground.
The answer is door-to-door networking and building from school board level up, just the way the right has been doing for decades. Stop looking at the Presidency as the only election. Stop expecting that it can be turned around in one election cycle. Treat it like global warming and do a thousand little things as well as a few big ones.
I wonder that Cawthorn is so confident that the violence he is fomenting would never be used against him. Or if some unsuccessful attempt were made on his life, that he would almost certainly be outraged about it. “See, this proves my point!”
Thank you for this. The moaning and groaning should be over, replaced with steely determination.
Allowing? This is all in the constitution, and believe me the last thing we want at any time in the foreseeable future is a constitutional congress to try to re-write any of this stuff, unless you don’t care about the bill of rights.
Harpo is right, we (Democrats and allies) need to do the hard work that the Republicans have been doing for 40 years or more. Don’t count on time being on our side, or for people to do the right thing. Do the work or else quit complaining.
Unfortunately, the steely determination just doesn’t seem to be there, in the big collectively picture, with Democrats/liberals/progressives. Thus the moaning and groaning will continue.
Poll after poll seem to show that Democrat/liberal values and policies are widely preferred by the majority, yet we can’t seem to find candidates with just the right fire to get us rabble off our asses and out to the polls when it matters.
Sadly, if democracy dies because potential Democratic voters were just too complacent, then Churchill will be proven right: In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
The bigger picture problem is the same difficulty as is highlighted by the old saying that:
“One should never argue with a pig for they will drag you down into the mud and beat you with experience; and pretty soon you will both be covered in mud and onlookers won’t be able to tell which is the pig.”
The problem is that - to continue the metaphor - once a country’s politics has reached the situation that US politics has reached, failing to argue is not an option but arguing is playing into the pig’s hands. From here on it is going to be a near impossible balancing act between doing something firm about the pig, and not turning the whole thing into a pigsty.
You forgot one important aspect; quit looking at it like it’s about issues.
It’s not. The whole game is really about getting and maintaining political power. That’s what the Republicans are doing, and the Democrats are largely not doing.
I suspect that if they get that idea centered in their minds, the steely determination will follow. After all, we see plenty of it in all the disparate ideas that fall under the party’s umbrella- some are dogged in their championing of racial equity. Others are about wealth inequality, and still others are about environmentalism. But few are centered around getting power and keeping it first, and worrying about the issues second.
But it is, in a way that the left doesn’t think of.
The right have been steadily taking over school boards and attending school board meetings en masse and getting principals and teachers fired for decades, over issues about what gets taught in schools, what rules the school have, what student behavior will be allowed. The left looks at teaching actual history, reading challenging books, and protecting gay kids as matters of fairness and reality, rather than political issues.
The left also thinks of masking and vaccines as rational precautions to take in a pandemic. The right thinks of them as issues, and wants to elect governors and mayors and health commissioners who will defy mandates.
Immigration? That’s an issue. Abortion? That’s an issue. Guns? That’s an issue. Defending the police? That’s an issue.
It’s issues all the way down. The left doesn’t see them that way so they can’t fight them politically. The Green New Deal isn’t an issue; it’s an amorphous set of policies and ideals. Infrastructure is the same. Build Back Better is not only terrible as a slogan, it’s not even applied to infrastructure as the name suggests. When the left boils down its goals into issues, then it can send people out to fight for them. Little tiny bullet point issues. And then defend them en masse the way the right does so the intimidation of public officials is, shall we say, cancelled.
Right- but what’s the point of all these goals? Political power. That’s why they flip-flop on stuff like cap & trade, Romney-care, and so on.
The Democrats actually care about the issues themselves, and one of the problems that the Democrats face, is that each Democrat cares about their own specific issues- one may be about wealth inequality, another about environmentalism, a third about immigration reform, and a fourth about racial equity. And a fifth about women’s rights.
So, because they’re looking at it as actual issues to be solved or ameliorated, and the party has this sort of big-tent approach, the party looks scattered and doesn’t seem to ever mass their strength to make a concerted attack on the GOP anywhere, much less where they’re weakest.
I feel like they need to boil the goals down into a handful of issues- literally. Like 5 main issues they’re going to fight about, and then make EVERYTHING about those issues. Take the rhetorical initiative from the Republicans by bringing everything back to those five issues and the proposed solutions to them. And the lack of such on the GOP side. Essentially try and make the GOP’s reflexive anti-Democrat stance be a liability by pointing out that they don’t have anything other than opposition in their quiver.
Destroying voting rights for Others is about political power. Eliminating abortion is about religion. Political power is needed to achieve it, but that’s not the issue itself.