I was going to let the this discussion of the Dems go by, but this bolded part really made me stop in my tracks? FDR had Japanese Americans put in internment camps. No matter what he may have said about them before or after, this is a ridiculous statement.
I would say the Democratic party has become much more fiscally conservative and much more socially liberal. FDR would recoil from both the civil rights progress and the economic regression championed by Democrats since his time.
I don’t follow this objection. FlikTheBlue clearly said that the progressivism of the Democratic Party “didn’t apply to many groups” when FDR was President, but that by the time you get to LBJ the Democratic Party’s progressive “umbrella” had widened to include Japanese-Americans. Which doesn’t seem terribly controversial; FDR (to his great discredit) put Japanese-Americans in internment camps, but Daniel Inouye was elected to the Senate as a Democrat in the same year LBJ became President.
Not only will the 2022 elections play out conventionally, there is a better than even chance that the GOP will pick up at least two seats, and potentially four. Of the seven senators up for election who won their prior election by less than five percentage points, only three are Republicans and two of them (Roy Blunt (MO) and Ron Johnson (WI)) are virtually a lock despite narrow margins. Short of a massive demographic shift, the Democrats in the Senate should be expecting to maintain their razor-thin majority only for the next two years and act accordingly.
The GOP at large has learned from Trump, and what it has learned is that extremism is not a vice that will hold them back. Individual members may resist the more white nationalist and isolationist elements but as a whole the party has developed enough of a tolerance for this to allow state-level leaders to censure conventional Republican stalwarts like Cindy McCain and Liz Cheney that you can hardly expect the party to actively resist populist candidates with strong support even if they are openly making White Power arm signals or talking about rounding up “suspected immigrants” into detention camps.
The GOP is certain changing, but it is not going away any time soon. Any attempt to siphon off support for a “Lincoln Party” is likely going to draw more from independents and moderate fence-sitters prone to switching parties than to break the backbone of the GOP.
Stranger
[quote=“MEBuckner, post:22, topic:932462, full:true”]
I take Strassia’s objection to be more about FDR as a person rather than about how the Democratic Party treated Japanese American’s during LBJs time. The latter would be an interesting debate. So would the former, but it would be off topic and would be almost entirely speculation unless some of us are old enough to have met FDR back in the day.
I think this is the key demographic in 2022 and 2024. Here’s what I think happened in 2018 and 2020, and what that means for 2022. I think in 2018 the voters that are Trump GOPers but would never support a Bush GOPer stayed home, leading to Democratic victories. In 2020 the Bush GOPers that are never-Trumpers still turned out to vote R in many, but not all, cases. Even as recently as 11/3/2020, it wasn’t yet completely obvious that the Bush GOP was already dead. Now that it is obvious, the two questions are this.
How many never-Trump / Bush GOP Republicans voters are there?
What will they do in 2022 and 2024? Hold their noses and vote for a Trump Republican, stay home, or vote Democratic?
The answers to those two questions are key to determining the fate of the GOP.
You know, I read that twice and even bolded it, but I still read it wrong. I thought it was saying FDR, not LBJ included Japanese-Americans. I retract my incredulity. I do stand by my thoughts on how both LBJ and FDR would react to modern Democratic track record. LBJ would probably be more accepting of the racial progress we have made, but I don’t think he could handle today’s gender politics. We would be having a national discussion on if Twitter should be banning the ex-POTUS for spamming dick pics 
It seems clear to me.
In the R primaries they’ll vote for one of the saner candidates available, or at least the one who best appeals to their single-issue section of the big tent, whether that’s anti-abortion, low taxes on fat-cats, light regulation on small business, strong defense, “stand up to China”, or immigration suppression or …
In the actual election they’ll vote pretty much a straight (R) ticket, but for any given office if the (R) candidate is too wacko (for their personal value of “too”) they’ll abstain. For President they might, just might, vote D. But only for a situation as egregious as Trump.
Zooming out a bit. …
We all talk about the Overton window. Remember there are three of them: the one inside each party that controls how the primaries play out and the national one that controls the national dialog.
Now with the RW mediasphere being so isolationist vs reality, the R-specific Overton window has become completely detached from the national one. And is being driven by profit-motivated media and advertisers and scamsters right over the Far-R cliff.
Conversely, the D window is still mostly moored to the traditional national one.
Interestingly, FDR might have been more accepting concerning modern attitudes on sex/gender/relationship issues. It appears AFAICT that Eleanor Roosevelt was tolerant of, and even facilitated, his extramarital affairs, and that he in turn was aware of, and okay with, lesbian relationships among Eleanor’s friends (and possibly one on her own account as well).
So I think the modern progressive attitude of “consenting adults can identify and love how they choose, and secular society has no business policing individuals’ sexual lives and characteristics to make sure they’re all using the ‘right’ equipment and partner(s) as biblically ordained” might actually sit quite well with FDR if he could see where we are today.
Das war eine ausgezeichnete Rede
Not hard at all… I’m one of the good immigrants that worked hard and earned my position. Those immigrants that came after me? They’re the lazy-ass takers, so it’s OK to fuck them over.
I don’t expect the party to die. But there is definitely a civil war. It may not be mentioned in right wing media, but the actual politicians are treating it like one. There’s a reason why Liz Cheney was not censured as long as they could do it by secret ballot. There’s a reason why McConnell is trying to disown Greene. There is clearly an attempt by the more establishment Republicans to try and detangle Trumpism from the party–but they also know it’s not a good PR move right now to alienate the Trumpist base directly.
They can see that where Trump was leading was not working, even while acknowledging they could capture people. They’re trying to revert back to not saying the quiet part out loud. But this is a hard thing to do, and could fail.
Also, the claims that the Democrats have not courted the progressives is just not true. A lot of progressives lately seem to be in an “all or nothing” mode. But if you look at what the Democratic policies are, they are definitely informed by progressivism. Most Democratic policies are either directly progressive policies or less extreme versions of progressive policies.
That is, at least, my evaluation as a progressive myself. The main thing I think the Democrats drop the ball on is union support and being too beholden to corporate donors. But that’s not the be-all-end-all of progressivism, and they’re still better than the Republicans on that front.
Trump got 74 million votes and republican candidates in the house got 73 million votes.
They’re not going anywhere sadly.
Did you mean McCarthy?
On paper the Republicans are in a much stronger position than 2008. They were not that far from winning it all in 2020; a couple of hundred thousand votes in the right states and seats and they could have controlled the Presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court.
However the Trump-inspired craziness runs deep and will make it difficult for them to act like a normal party and regain the crucial suburban voters they have lost. They have a difficult task of sidelining Trump without alienating his voters.
The Democrats also have problems with their activists who have an uncanny genius for promoting foolish and unpopular positions like defund the police. Illegal immigration will also be a minefield for the Biden administration.
On the positive side the virus should be under control in around six months leading to a rapid economic recovery which is likely to continue through 2022 and boost the administration’s political position.
Overall it’s a complicated, contradictory landscape. My overall guess is the Democrats will be OK in 2022 but their margins are so small that they could have an OK election and still lose the House and Senate.
The US is one of the most binary of all “first past the post” democracies.
You might get one election where the GOP platform is so bonkers that they get utterly trounced. That obviously hasn’t happened yet (I mean it was obviously bonkers in 2016, but apparently not enough at that time to turn off American voters).
The midterms might potentially be such a blowout.
But after that trouncing, the party will shift just enough, and the news will desire a true battle enough, that the framing will be as though there are two equal and opposite alternatives again. They’ll find issues where the country is divided enough, even if they have to invent them.
A heterosexual man being “accepting” of lesbian relationships isn’t necessarily indicative of anything. Do we have any record of how he felt about gay men?
Particularly if it meant he could carry on with those extramarital affairs without issue. Transactional tolerance is better than no tolerance, but it hardly counts as a particularly enlightened view.
It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens with various investigations of Trump over the next couple of years. I can imagine a few scenarios, including:
As best I can tell, it’s going to be quite possible for the Dems to lose the House but actually make some gains in the Senate. Reapportionment plus even more gerrymandering will favor the Rs the House, but the open seats in the Senate will favor the Ds.
Am I a horrible person for hoping this happens? I want every “good” Republican to see what they helped bring about by electing Trump and continuing to enable him by re-electing his enablers. And I want everyone who continues to support the fuckstick to be ostracized to the fringes of society.