Unlike the federal government, California has a balanced budget every year - it’s required by law. No governor gets credit for doing so.
It could be that I’m living in a bubble and I just don’t notice them, but IMHO the numbers of voters in the center-right have declined, possibly to the point where they are no longer a significant voting block. If that group still had any relevance, Liz Cheney wouldn’t have been removed from her position in the House Republican caucus, and Mitt Romney wouldn’t have been brought up in front of the Utah GOP to be censured.
Democrats = dog wagging the tail
Republicans = tail wagging the dog
IMHO the reason the remaining center right / moderates don’t trust the Democrats not to be hijacked by the far left is due to projection. They see what happened to the GOP and think the same thing must be getting ready to happen to the Democratic Party at any moment. IMHO they’re wrong about that.
They favour the Republican Party because the current Republican Party is little more than a cult of personality driven by pure tribalism and bolstered by the aforementioned heavily-controlled disinformation bubble. One need only consider the recent case of Liz Cheney, who despite being definitively “hard-right” has been the subject of an effort to cast her into the outer darkness for daring to stray from the approved narrative of the stolen election, or Mitt Romney or Justin Amash.
The Democrats, as you rightly pointed out, are a nebulous and disorganized cluster of groups and individuals ranging from the flaky far-left to the limousine liberals of the center-ish. But Republicans are all about their tribe, and even when it is openly engaged in dubious activity they will circle the wagons to defend it against any perceived threats from outside and will excuse that dubious activity in order to do so. All that is required is that “R” after a candidate’s name to garner the support of the majority of the party.
It’s true that they claim that they fear the Democrats will suddenly swing to the hard-left if in power, but it’s worth noting that they have been making this fearful claim without basis for decades now, labelling every Presidential candidate as “the most liberal ever” and insisting that the decidedly-corporation-friendly Dems are “Communists”, so perhaps a few grains of salt should be applied to that claim.
The budget (deficit & debt) is like the weather. Everybody talks about it but no-one actually does anything about it.
The idea of spinelessness I find rather perplexing, as I’ve never seen one of these “woke” people abandon their principles because some clueless Republicans insulted them. These people are pretty vocal and committed to their principles. And why shouldn’t they be? While I find their tactics somewhere between embarrassing and appalling, if you honestly believe there is a great miscarriage of justice in your own country (and I do), what acceptable alternative is there other than fighting to change it? Seems like the real cowardly thing to do would be back down from that fight. But these people most assuredly are not backing down.
The Republicans OTOH completely jettisoned their principles and all pretense of human decency the moment it wasn’t politically advantageous. It’s harder to imagine a bigger bunch of cowards.
Did those laws exist when Reagan was governor, though?
It used to be called “political correctness,” and I assume before the 80s it was called something else, but it’s been the same bogeyman.
“Bleeding heart liberals”, I believe.
All their insults sound so cool.
Bleeding heart
Social justice warrior
It appeals to the Paladin in me.
Cry more
Fuck your feelings
Trump Derangement Syndrome (though that cuts both ways)
Are also quite good. Gotta give 'em that.
Getting back to the thread topic: If we treated this like a sport for a moment, who would you rather be in charge of coaching to victory, Team Red or Team Blue?
It’s hard to argue against wanting the Team Blue coach position. You have more voters, more soft power in media and entertainment, the young favor you, societies naturally trend liberal over time, the other side is backing itself into a Trump corner and also has the religion handicap. Sure, Team Red has gerrymandering, the Senate and the Electoral College, but that can only go so far.
None of that matters. The key is whether or not the scorekeepers will remain neutral or be successfully recruited by Team Red. If the scorekeepers remain neutral, Team Blue wins. If the scorekeepers switch to Team Red, then Team Red wins, regardless of what happens on the field.
I would argue that Team Red is a lot more organized and driven to win, even if on paper they appear to be a weaker team, and they are much better at identifying means to leverage the power and advantages they do have into winning strategies. Team Blue are only intermittently motivated and terrible at turning their strengths into victories. From a coach’s perspective, Team Red would look pretty appealing.
The Red Team certainly plays like it has more to lose.
Are we discussing the term “woke”, or are we discussing the principals of “wokism”? My view is that “woke” is now nothing more than a parody. People who used to refer to themselves as woke wish that parody would go away, but it’s effective so the right continues to use it. It’s in no way a “false characterization”. But yes, it is insulting. Accurate parody often is.
As to the principals of wokism, are you seriously saying they don’t exist? I don’t read anything more right wing than the Sunday Times, yet I’ve read dozens or stories about social media outrage, campaigns for mass call-outs, cancel culture, and calls for boycotts over trivial or non-exist harms, or self-imposed virtue campaigns over meaningless issues. Apparently, if the story can be read to have an anti-left basis, it’s a politically motivated exaggeration created with ill intent by the right wing. It’s funny how the facts of the story are never disputed, just the interpretation. And despite the frequency of the stories, they’re all rare events brought into prominence by the right-wing media. When in actuality, it’s probably rare for some “woke” incident to be reported as it has to get the attention of someone who probably has little interest in the liberal organisation where it occurred.
Just out of curiosity, I thumbed through today’s paper to see if I could find a woke story. The Almeida Theatre, a very left-wing theatre in left-wing Islington felt the need to publicly apologise and cancel its diversity program because it had mixed up two black writers on its social media account. Rather than acknowledging a simple mistake, it was a self-professed “act of racism”, “perpetuating harmful and discriminatory experiences”. What was that I said about “shallow spineless pretentiousness”?
I agree 100%. Democrats have always been pretty terrible at messaging, and rather incompetent at running campaigns. I don’t follow sports, but I would think if I were a manager, the quality of the players on the team would matter just as much as strategic advantages. Democrats have some people who can hold their own on the court, but they don’t have any MVPs. (Am I doing this right?) Biden has all the charisma of a wilted piece of lettuce.
Sounds right to me. Of course despite all those disadvantages, Biden still won. Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 both had the same problem. Despite that they won the popular vote and almost won the electoral college. The fundamentals have only gotten worse for the Republicans since then. IMHO that’s why they’ve decided they’re going to resort to cheating.
Sure, but Team Blue’s flaws are far easier to fix.
If we continue the sports analogy, it’s like the Democrats are playing soccer with 11 players on the field while the Republicans have only 8. The difference is that the Republican players are more tight-knit and disciplined while the D’s bicker among themselves and don’t exert real effort. But it’s much easier to drill the eleven players into becoming more cohesive, aggressive and teamworked than it is to get eight players to play above their abilities (which they are already pretty much maxed-out at.) Once, or if, a coach gets the eleven to perform to the best of their disciplined abilities, they’d maul the eight.
Similarly, it’s easier for the DNC to get its shit together and get its voters to finally start working like an effective army, than it would be for the RNC to somehow acquire itself twenty new additional million voters.
Simply put, the Democrats have a far higher ceiling and much more potential; it’s just that they haven’t utilized it effectively yet. Any competent coach would drool at such an opportunity. The Republicans, on the other hand, have already maxed out and hit their ceiling.
This seems like evidence of a need to keep the diversity program, not cancel it. Puzzling.
If your usage of spineless is to imply that the theater company wouldn’t have responded this way if they weren’t afraid of public reproval, well, we don’t know that. Chances are good they are pretty sincere.
I understand what you’re saying but GWB was an MVP personality? In the most recent election there was some chirping around here about how the GOP didn’t even have a spelled-out platform.