Trump can just have them executed. It’s an official act - per the Supreme Court’s ruling, there can be no review of a core executive power like that.
You can’t tell if I’m being sarcastic or not, can you?
You know how they say that when someone tells you who they really are and what they stand for, believe them? This is all the shit the far-right wing of the GOP has been coyly implying they want for decades? They’ve now just laid it out for all to see, and they have the control and access to do it as long as they can keep Trump distracted in Twitter wars or pretending he’s a fire truck driver. Which is “Super easy, barely an inconvenience.”
You don’t see Susan “I don’t think I will vote fo…oh, yes, ‘Aye’” Collins will back Trump’s play as long as she gets something juicy out of it? She’s just second to Joe Manchin in talking a good game about how independent she is and then backing Trump anyway. If she is the keystone securing the arch of democracy, we are all so very, very fucked.
Stranger
Considering the DOD probably has contingency plans in a file cabinet somewhere for an invasion of Canadian zombie beavers, we’d be remiss not to plan for its possible passage (or passages, if everything happens in separate instances).
But if we’re just going to use the assumption to bitch, moan, and doomsay, then yeah, it’s not useful.
…I’m unsure if the OP is talking about the Democrats, or people on the “actual left.”
Because I don’t see how the “big tent” can survive. There needs to be a reckoning. Decades of malaise at the heart of Democrat institutions with “focus grouped messaging” and kowtowing to the donor class have lead to this.
What I argued back in July:
Summary
I honestly don’t think I was wrong back then. And even if the Democrats did everything I suggested I still think they would have lost. But they would have gone down fighting.
It was simply the wrong strategy. And listening to some of the rumblings since then, and even reading some of the responses here, people think “Harris was too far to the left, and the Democrats need to move more to the right.”
I don’t think the progressives can settle for that. They largely kept quiet during this campaign. But the divide between the progressives and institutional Democrats is getting too deep. In the interest of keeping the big tent together the progressives have made major concessions. And they will be looking at the result of the election and asking themselves: “what was it all for?” They lost the Senate, and the Presidency, and the Supreme Court, and probably the House. The social media infrastructure, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all captured by the right, and the institutional Democrats have no idea on how to combat it.
There will be a split. That…won’t be good for the next elections. However, I’m not so bold as to assume that there will be “next elections”: not fair and transparent ones anyway. I think the blue states will increasingly be in conflict with the federal government. And the fight between progressives and the institution will largely play out at the local level.
There seem to be two broad schools of thought about possible outcomes of this election.
One is that everything will be normal and that Trump won’t do anything too weird. It’s almost like the expectations of a Trump “pivot” in 2016.
The other is that this could possibly go full-blown authoritarian catastrophe with any range of awful outcomes.
Over the last few weeks I have wondered if there are two broad populations:
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One comprising people older enough and/or educated enough that they are well-versed in Western history to the extent that they know what happened, and how it happened, in 1920s and 1930s Germany; and
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The other comprising people who, for whatever reason, have little to no grounding in, or knowledge of, history, and how fragile civil society can be.
I’m in the first group with a father who was in WW II; and I minored in history. I strongly believe that we could find ourselves in an “all bets are off” situation because of this that could have unimaginable and terrible consequences.
What can people on the left do? I have no idea what can be done at this point. I have, in the last month or so, been watching a lot of Meidas Touch network, and The Bulwark and today I was watching a Mary Trump podcast. And in all three shows, the term “resistance” was used.
Anyway, scary times.
It’s ludicrous that anyone would say Harris was too far left. All of her positions were very squarely within the Democratic mainstream. I think that’s just a euphemism for “she was a black woman”, which is fucked up on many levels.
If someone wants to argue that Dems need to only nominate white guys because the voters are racist and misogynistic, I think that’s a defensible position at this point. But don’t frame it in a way that suggests that only “the left” finds racism and sexism objectionable, or that all women/POC are automatically part of the “the left”.
Keep in mind; Trump is stupid and lazy. He doesn’t actually want to BE president - he just wants attention and cheering fans and to see his name all over the place. He had the same level of control from 2017-2018 that he’s about to have and he accomplished almost nothing - he didn’t build WALL, he didn’t jail Hillary Clinton, he didn’t end the ACA.
Being a dictator involves a lot of hard work, and Trump would rather tweet, play golf, and watch TV.
His cabinet and appointees, though, may be hard working. Then again, they don’t care about Trump’s grudges or whether he remains president, so “enemies” are generally safer. They’ll “merely” be enriching themselves with national secrets.
But you do bring up a key question: does Trump want to be president for life? I’m not sure he does. We’ll see.
Indeed. I’m less worried about Trump declaring “Marshall Law” and proclaiming himself God-Emperor than I am what men like RFK Jr and Elon Musk will do with the power he gives them.
Of course, if history is any indication, he’ll fire them the second they disagree with him on anything or he thinks they’re getting credit for something that he wants all the credit for.
Is it o.k. with you if Democrats lie through their teeth about their policies and make promises that can’t possibly be kept?
I believe that the key question is what will the Vice-president do with that power once he takes it?
Loaded language aside, running on student loan forgiveness worked for Biden, didn’t it?
Ehhh, he doesn’t strike me as the type. He has an agenda and goals, sure, but he just doesn’t seem like the most extreme options are something he wants bad enough to stick his neck out for. Could be wrong, but that’s my personal opinion.
He didn’t lie. He was blocked by Republicans.
Try again.
That’s why I said “loaded language aside”.
Biden made grand promises; it ended up being that he couldn’t keep them, but they helped him win.
Kamala’s grandest promise was “We’re not going back”.
That wasn’t a “grand promise”, that was a reasonable promise stymied by jackasses. Try blaming those actually responsible for screwing this country over.
It doesn’t do anything to help the liberal cause, but a friend of mine is holding an Irish Wake this weekend for the Democratic ticket. Or maybe it’s for the country. Food and potables, including whiskey, will be served. If nothing else, it’ll be good for morale.
Maybe we could give Trump a Golden Ticket – he couldn’t resist a Golden Ticket – and while he was on the Wonka Factory Tour he wouldn’t be able to controil his baser instincts, and he’d get sucked into the Chocolate Pipe and get stuck there. Or he’d try the gum and get turned into a giant Orange Blueberry, and not be able to fit into the Juicer.
Not practical suggestions, I realize, but fun to contemplate.
If there is a split the Republicans will nearly certainly control the white house and congress for the foreseeable future.
I think the far left “kept quiet” because the smarter ones know they can’t win on their own agenda. A lot of Democrats, even, would not vote for it. It appears some people that voted Democrat in 2020 might have voted Republican this time. A far left agenda would probably result in many more, especially moderates, voting Republican. Basically, I don’t think the majority of Americans, R or D, are ready for a far left agenda.
And yes, I do think that extreme right agendas would not be accepted by most Republican voters. I agree that Trump is more far right than any Republican candidate I can remember, and a lot of Republican voters didn’t like him but voted for him because he was the Republican candidate. Harris was not a good candidate, imo, and she had a lot of time time to work on immigration and kept telling the public all is well. The inflation during the Biden/Harris term was an issue.
If Trump had not been the Republican candidate I think he might have run his own campaign as an independent. That would have split the Republican party same as a far left split could and probably would undermine the Democratic party.
Split party on either side would not be successful. Not yet, not now.
On first read, I thought this said “food and potatoes” and thought to myself, wow, CalMeacham really doesn’t like potatoes.
As a Liberal, I agree completely.
The Democratic Party has pushed away huge chunks of people who should have been it’s base, because instead of focusing on making life better for working class Americans, we sank political capital into complete and total nonsense.
The Democrats need to stop flirting with illiberal extremists who, when push comes to shove, can’t be relied on to actually vote for us anyways, even if a fascist like Trump is on the other side. So fuck them. Time to cut the albatross from around our neck, and run on issues people actually care about.
We were so afraid of being labeled as racists by extremists who consider us just as bad as Trump, that we completely failed the messaging on the border (even though Biden’s goal, of processing the asylum seekers backlog and deporting those who don’t actually qualify, is exactly what Americans want).
When we refuse to condemn people who trash colleges over American foreign policy, it turns off normal voters.
So, enough is enough. The Democrats need to be the party of the working class, addressing the issues that real working class Americans care about. Not the party of impressing your fellow well off white people with how socially conscious you are while you’re sipping a latte at Starbucks.
As Richie Torres, a Democrat who handily won reelection, explains:
There are Democrats, like him, or like Fetterman, or Slotkin, who won their races because they stuck to the message that everyday Americans care about; and there were Democrats who lost, because they didn’t.
Instead of whining that Trump was racist on immigration, our main message should have been that Biden and Kamala are the ones who will fund our asylum system so that we can deport anyone who doesn’t actually qualify.
The most unfortunate part is that Kamala and Biden, for the most part, avoided this sort of bullshit. But the reek of it is all over the Democratic party. We need to loudly and clearly distance ourselves from that messaging, or we will continue to lose election after election.
It’s time for Liberalism to make a comeback.