Sure, the first few elections would probably end up with “McCain-style politics”, because at least at first, you’d have to choose the least crazy of a pretty crazy bunch. While that would still be a huge improvement, how many election cycles would it take before some actual good candidates register for the primaries? If you know it’s the only game in town, you play that game.
Imagine the look on Moscow Mitch’s face when AOC is sworn in as a GOP Senator!
I agree. The foe was the godless commies, so everything had to explicitly reference god. In fact, most commentators were marveling at the relatively decreasing power of religious groups in the 1950s, mostly the Catholic Church. It wasn’t until later that evangelicals began their ascent.
It seems to me (and let me know if I’m missing something, this kind of analysis isn’t my strength) that gerrymandering only gets you so far.
It gets you the state congress of every purple state. It gets you the House of Representatives in perpetuity. But it doesn’t get you senators and governors and it doesn’t guarantee you the Presidency… So the playbook involves, on the state level, stripping the executive branch of as much power as possible and on the federal level it involves stripping the federal government of as much power as possible, returning it to the states.
The playbook does seem to favor vesting as much of the federal power that is left in the federal executive branch, probably because the electoral college systems favors Republicans.
Now there are other concerns, the other voter suppression laws, that are concerning - but they really aren’t as concerning as the first drafts of some of those laws. I believe that’s because of corporate pressure. The corporate world has been a little half-hearted in their objection to the final version of these voter suppression laws - but I think they deserve some credit, because if it hadn’t been for the threat of corporate pressure - these laws would’ve been much worse, eliminating no excuse mail-voting and weekend early voting altogether.
And I’m pretty sure if states start invalidating elections and installing their own candidates, there will be intense corporate backlash. The corporate world isn’t as reliably conservative as it used to be.
And even if it was reliably conservative, it realizes that directorships and civil wars are bad for business. While they may approve of a limited levels of corruption such that a campaign contribution here and there can grease the wheels to tilt legislation in their favor, they don’t want the system to be so corrupt that those in power can shake them down with impunity.
Problems for U.S. politics started more than a century ago when the rich took control of money supply.
You two may have a point here, but I prefer to overreact and become hysterical at the thought of Trump coming back to power and finish crushing everything good and decent about these (one time) United States!
There are states that have passed laws to the effect that suspect votes can be discarded and new electors selected (I am quite certain-- did cable news deceive me?). Next time, the coup d’etat will be legal – the law of the land. Evil and corrupt, but legal! The Republicans adding one single voter – for that matter, the Republicans not shedding even more voters every week is frightening to me! I will be back after breathing into a paper bag for a while.
I did not mean to imply their problem is their whiteness, although . . . .
In the last administration it WAS pretty Caucasian-- there was Herman Cain, but they killed him off at a super-spreader event. But Romney, Bush Jr., Bush Sr., none of them were awash in minorities. McCain managed to get a female in the mix, but like Romney after him he agreed to play to “the base” (not the base for either of them) and it cost them both.
I do not believe the problem with the right is that they are too white. I believe the problem is no matter how moderate and how much crossover appeal their candidates may have - - they have to play to the worst elements in not just their party, but the entire nation!
If they ever have any candidate – of any stripe who is decent and human and not full of hate and bile and evil, I would not avoid voting for them just because of the R after their name. I believe in this case you may have inferred what I did not mean to imply. Apologies if I was unclear.
If you take a look at DuMez’s book Jesus and John Wayne, she makes a pretty good case for today’s Republican Party being the result of efforts started before and during the war. She is a historian and academic (and I thought there might be ONE thread where I didn’t link to her most famous work).
And while I am at it (these women should pay me for all the promotion I do for them!), the most famous work by the author of the article in the OP.
This was recommended to me by Mahaloth right here on the Straight Dope. Really opened my eyes to the depth of the effort.
Your choices are your own. I’m just commenting that the Republican Party as a whole is not merely overwhelmingly white but publicly prefers to broadcast their whiteness (and often maleness) as opposed to the Democrats who are racially and sexually mixed to a much, much greater degree. The Republicans will not offering non-sexist, non-racist candidates because they have none to run. It’s possible, certainly, that the black and Hispanic participants at Reed’s event are being groomed as future candidates, but excuse me if I fail to believe that any groomed evangelical will display an acceptable level of tolerance.
And the numbers will exacerbate that.
I actually wonder if one day some major players in the Democrat Party are going to call the Republicans on the straw-manning bullshit they pull and go:
"Oh, you guys keep saying that we’re socialist, marxist extreme lefties? When we are clearly a centrist party? OK then. We’ll BE FAR LEFT. Here’s some single payer insurance for EVERYone. Don’t like it? Tough shit. You came up with nothing for decades, so we had to do the work. You didn’t have much say in policy? That’s correct, because you refused to work with us, you obstructionist, useless, know-nothing, anti science, anti knowledge, anti everything idiots. "
At some point they’ll have to do something like that, because it’s been clear for years now that the GOP has no actual interest in governing, all they want to do is oppose anything the Democrats propose.
I was hoping the Biden era would be when they finally admitted this, and acted on it, but so far, it seems it isn’t.
When you’re trying to organize a birthday party, and your spouse is on the floor kicking and screaming, “no, no, NO, NOOOOOO! YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!!”, then sometimes you just have to go ahead and organize the party yourself.
I could not access the article you linked because it is pay-walled. From the headline it looks like demographics are not favoring a Republican revolution of acceptance and toleration for all of mankind.
I will readily admit that the Republican Party has not been trending in a comforting direction of late. Tim Scott does not diversity make in this poster’s opinion, but like an encouraging parent of a challenging child, I trying not to pre-judge and continue to encourage the right to keep trying to be reasonable. (Okay, or start trying to be reasonable.)
Those Republicans who still speak to me after renouncing their LORD and Savior – and leaving the Republican Party routinely accuse me of being a liberal Socialist Chinese agent of Satan. So I try to remember I once thought like they do (well not how they think now!) and perhaps they will move toward cooperation and acceptance.
I am not holding my breath waiting for them to swing back toward sanity. But history indicates they may actually return to mean eventually (of course, the other option is for them to continue growing ever more racist etc.). Because I encourage them to listen to Biden and consider the idea without regard to where it came from – just the merit it holds intrinsically, I try to do the same. If they present a reasonable solution to a problem, or a reasonable candidate – I hope to be open to it and not reject it before I even understand it just because it came from those people!.
If everyone did that, I think it would fix a lot of disagreements. Every new bill should be presented to the full chamber of Senators or Representatives by a hologram of Alex Trebek. No one is allowed to know who wrote or worked on the bill- all any member is allowed to know is that someone from their party has reviewed it if not written it. Then they play the Jeopardy! theme for thirty seconds (so they have to think for at least that long before acting) and all voting members go back to their office and read the damn thing. (Not the summary of some flunky- they read the bill themselves.) Then they reconvene and discuss possibilities. After that, pairs from opposing parties are assigned the task of writing in the corrections; something that would encourage cooperation rather than rat-fuckery. Only three bills max in an entire session (they are weeks or months long right?) will not be laws eventually-- once they have rejected three bills, everything else WILL pass automatically at the end of the season so try to make everything acceptable instead of poison pilling it.
Mitch McConnell will have to stop being any part of the process for them to stop being anything except spoilers and poisoners. That is what he has built the machine to do and the machine is efficient if unjust, and it only has one function – obstruction!
Have to admit I like the image of the Republicans and the Democrats as long married partners.
I certainly would, unless the entire party was decent. People have talked about the ‘good republicans’ like McCain or Murkowski or whatever for years, but as far as I am concerned, none of them are good so long as they continue to associate with the Trumps and the McConnells and the Boeberts, etc. If you’re willing to have the same organization label applied to you as those people, much less support them in any way, I could never support you regardless of whether you, personally, did or said anything horrible or not.
At this point, the only way I would vote for a Republican is if they managed to assert control of the Republican party and purge it of these people, because if they’re actually working together with them, then they’re complicit in what’s going on. Now, if some group of Republicans wants to do that, great! I fully support the idea. But I’ll never support them actually taking any offices until they have actually done it.
I prefer not to be scared unless I’m in a situation where genuine fear would be helpful….and I dont think we’re there, not yet
First, I think Trump will be batshit insane by 2024 ( those links go to a couple of my posts in another thread on that subject ).
Then you have the whole “hearts and minds” issue. I think a lot of the reason for the desperation is that the religious right knows it’s lost the battle for hearts and minds. You aren’t going to turn public support for racial equality and gay marriage back around. It’s like trying to turn back time.
If Trump runs in 2024, there will be a lot of soft opposition. If that comes to pass, I bet October 2024 becomes Insurrection Month on network and cable TV. There will be dozens of documentaries examining the insurrection from every angle, biopics of the victims, TV dramas set against the background of the insurrection. I bet even the Weather Channel can whip up 90 minutes on weather and the January 6th insurrection. Maybe they’ll even have a big celebrity benefit concert in remembrance of January 6th the weekend before the election.
That’s what I mean by soft opposition. Don’t wear out your fainting couch now, we’ve got over 3 years and you may need it down the road.
That’s like saying “I think the sun rose this morning” after the sun already rose this morning.
If you read Ann’s links she speaks of going off the charts. Personally, I disagree.
I contend that by 2024, the charts that measure insanity will be to today’s charts as today’s home computer is to the original Tandy home computer or the first Apple before they introduced Mackintosh.
That 2024 insanity charts will be to current level insanity charts as . . .
covered wagons are to a current year Tesla.
a smooth bore musket is to a modern sniper rifle
the Republican Abraham Lincoln is to the Republican Donald J.
That’s preposterous!
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(In the reversed-in-order-or-arrangement sense, of placing last the item that ought to be first.)
Some snippets.
Within the larger narrative of conservative victimization is a specifically racial story: that people who look like you are surrounded, besieged, marginalized and threatened by hostile populations aiming to wipe you out.
That’s why Tucker Carlson, the most popular host on cable news, has been aggressively promoting “replacement” theory, the common white nationalist idea of a conspiracy to “replace” White Americans with dark-skinned immigrants. The country is changing, Carlson asserts to the cheers of white supremacists, because Democrats are importing “more obedient voters from the Third World.” The scheme, he says, is that to “win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country.”
In other words, it’s not just steady demographic change that your children are perfectly comfortable with and you might want to learn to live with, it’s a sinister conspiracy whose goal is the destruction of everything you believe in.
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So the increasing diversification of the United States will give both sides reason to be angry: conservatives because they fear their continued decline, and liberals because they’re locked out of power commensurate with their numbers.
And this article from Slate is relevant.
Mark Muro of the Metropolitan Policy Project at Brookings ran the numbers for me. He found that, in the 1,636 counties that shrank during the 2010s, the former president won a majority of votes in 90 percent of them. (Muro’s team had to exclude Alaska from its numbers because of a technical glitch.) If a corner of America is depopulating, it is almost certainly part of Trump country.
This is not to say that Trump country on the whole is in decline. The former president only received about 19 percent of his 74 million votes from counties with shrinking populations, according to Muro and his team’s analysis. Overall, the counties where he won added 7.8 million people during the previous decade. But Biden counties nearly doubled that total, expanding by 14.9 million individuals. Blue America is driving America’s population growth.
The writer sensibly does not insist that this trend will continue. My thoughts are that despite the pandemic causing people to leave cities and increase the ability to work from anywhere, there is nothing at all that indicates that rural counties will suddenly start to attract incomers. They are hollowing out because they:
are simply remote from the sort of institutions, from government to colleges to major corporations, that tend to generate wealth and growth. The political tragedy of America’s shrinking communities is how that alienation has help led them to embrace a reactionary populism dedicated to waging culture wars and leveraging our outdated electoral structure to make sure a minority of the population can continue to govern rather than, say, taking steps that might actually revitalize small towns and farming communities.
We’d be a better country if we could find ways to generate opportunity and prosperity in our many small towns but I’m damned if I know how to achieve it.
I did notice that right after I posted. I was within edit window but decided to let it ride. As lame an excuse as it is, I was trying to think of obsolete technology because that was the hard part for me-- once I had an idea it was easy to see what it had evolved into. I thought other posters might post their own comparisons that exceed mine in both clever and funny.
I have actually heard Carlson do it. Why would the right observe reality and try to ascertain actual cause when it is so natural to assume a conspiratorial cause that is anti- them? As often as it is pointed out, the fact seems to be that Republicans reveal how corrupt and prone to cheat they are by the suspicions they hold about everyone else is out to due to them. They thought of it first (it seems to me) because they want to do it to someone else- pure and simple truth.
(Sadly, I have to admit that I have retained so far, that trait of being suspicious of “others”. Any “others” are always suspect and to be guarded against- a trait that has been conditioned into me since forever. Realizing how hard it is to shake the habit (some would say instinct), I do not wonder at how tribal right wingers are.
Watching the greater Phoenix area (and specifically Tempe) grow from a mostly agricultural oriented region with some business interests into a business concern with limited agriculture on the outskirts has been interesting. In my youth Tempe was all about attracting business and investment. We had thirty-thousand souls full time and sixty-thousand when ASU was in session. Phrases like: “We almost lured [business] here, they are over the entire West Coast and may go national in a few years!” in the sixties and seventies has given way to: “Great, another rich national company is going to ruin our cityscape and our small town ethic with a gaudy headquarters building – they don’t even have to pay taxes, can’t we get rid of them??”
In my observation urban growth is similar to driver who is very, very short sighted. He or she keeps on accelerating way passed when it makes sense and then at the last second sees the traffic control device and slams on the breaks HARD!
One last word on the Republican Party which I am asshole deep in (in more ways than one) and which seems like a cult of evil intent to me. It is not impossible in my view for them to have a decent one or two members even now. I caught an interview with Adam Kinzinger last night and he seems sane and decent and smarter than the rest of his party by several factors to me. Guilt by association is still a bad thing right? Even in this era of tribalism you cannot paint any large group with the same brush (and be morally ideal) can you?
Probably the only way we achieve it is for modern American capitalism to collapse, which would then give us a chance to replace it with a modified version of the system (socialized or “prosumer” capitalism). Obviously that’s not ideal and it would likely lead to a great splintering of the country first before we could reconstitute the country’s economy.