Just When I Began to Breath Easy Concerning the Future of Politics in America . .

Worse, gerrymandering will make it such that those who get elected will have to run on the platform of “the forgotten rural white man”. It used to be that Republicans held the advantage once we started counting votes outside the city lines of major cities. They used to consistently hold serve in the suburbs. Not so anymore - the suburbs are diversifying, not necessarily with AOC liberals, either; just with people who reject ethno-nationalism and the idea that we have to be living in the dark ages.

Now the Republicans are down to waging war against the diverse and blasphemous cities, county by county. And they’re going to have voting blocs that are ever-more extreme, to the point of outright urging more extra-constitutional measures to wrest power from winners in a majoritarian system.

And if that’s not bad enough, consider the fact that the dynamic I’ve described above is the product of mostly perceived scarcity at this point – the perceived scarcity of losing cultural and political capital. But with global warming, there will come very real, concrete scarcity, and that is going to make for a combustible mix.

We’re getting into feedback loop territory, and that’s scary.

Does the name Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) ring a bell? Granted, she’s never been a Republican, but then again she’s never really been a Democrat either. I feel like she and Kyrsten Sinema and Jill Stein are all of this same mold. They’re operating as Dems with the intention of blowing up the Dems, for reasons I don’t feel confident enough to speculate aloud.

To Horatius’s point, I think this kind of subterfuge (in the opposite direction) could potentially become a strategy if Repubs really ended up engineering a bulletproof majority. But it fails to consider the way that Republicans are extremely comfortable with tribal purity tests and are wired for intruder-detection. Splitting the Republicans is going to take a degree of finessing and abasement that I don’t think I’ve witnessed yet. How are things going for Mitt?