I hope we’ve all learned enough from the last few days, weeks, months and years not to kid ourselves that the Trump phenomenon was just an anomalous blip on the screen and the Biden administration will automatically constitute a “reset” to normal standards of responsible governance.
As this blog post quoted on a concurrent thread explained, it’s clear now that Republicans/conservatives as a group are thoroughly committed to undermining democracy. Not just via voter suppression, but via a large number of dishonest strategies, from outright falsehoods in their media to gerrymandering to treating the concept of bipartisan compromise as treasonous to ignoring multiple conventions and protocols designed to make democracy operate more smoothly and transparently.
Republicans still have the same problem of not being able to win elections or create policies on the basis of sincerely public-spirited governance aims that will actually benefit Americans as a whole. So they’re not going to give up on the large-scale attempts to undermine democracy so that they can continue governing as a crypto-oligarchy (even assuming that they’ll be backing off for the time being from blatantly seditious insurrection instigation so they can govern as an open oligarchy).
This is not normal two-party politics, and is not going to become normal two-party politics when Biden is inaugurated, and is not going to become normal two-party politics as long as the Republicans are still committed to deceitful anti-democracy shenanigans to prop up their elite-enriching, science-denying, bigotry-pandering, resolutely minoritarian agenda. And there’s no end in sight to that.
And honestly, octopus, I can’t see how you imagine you have a tentacle to stand on when it comes to complaining about “hyperbole” and “hypocrisy”. For Pete’s sake, you’re a self-identified 2020 Trump voter yourself. You deliberately pulled the lever for this shitshow of made-up alarmism about fictional “anarchist takeovers” and “stolen elections”, and deliberate incitement to violent riots, and Republican politicians voting on the basis of zero evidence not to accept the results of fairly conducted elections, and an actual mob invasion of the Capitol while Congress was in session. And you sit there sneering that our anger and disgust about this shitshow is “hyperbolic”?
No. As much as any other conservative Doper, octopus, YOU did this: you and all your fellow Republicans/conservatives who imagined you could ride the tiger of Trumpublicanism while condescendingly pretending to Democrats/liberals that this is all just fine and normal and legitimate. You were lying (or perhaps just idiotically credulous), you and Bricker and all the other conservative Dopers who tried to normalize the anti-democracy machinations of the current Republican Party.
You are fooling yourself if you think you can fool us that it’ll all be over on January 20th and we can stop worrying. We may not all be “thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet” as advertised, but Jesus Christ, we’re not that dumb.