“If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022.”
Democratic Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, whose 7th District House race has yet to be called although she leads in votes, did not hold back on a caucus call Thursday.
Spanberger, who was first elected in 2018, is a moderate Democrat in a district that is traditionally Republican.
In audio obtained by The Washington Post, Spanberger decried the party’s focus on socialism and defunding the police.
Thank you both.
Bit of a catch-22, innit?
Not exactly. You can be very deliberate and disciplined in what you do while your Minister of Propaganda ensures a very entertaining show of loud posturing the appease the cheap seats.
In each case what you want is aggression; the difference is aimed aggression that delivers results, while loudly spraying tracer fire around entertains the rubes. They lurves them some fireworks!
Given that the rubes are already eating up what’s essentially a fantasy story delivered by their chosen propaganda outlets today, there’s no reason the same kinds of fantasies can’t be spun while actual effective tradecraft is going on at the same time. Whether the “trade” is military adventurism, police state ops, diplomatic foreign affairs, or clandestine ops or …
ACA was actually an adaption of Mitt Romney’s plan for Massachusetts. What Romney’s plan - like others at the state level - revealed is that it’s really hard to finance a government healthcare option at the state level, because it takes tax dollars that companies don’t want to pay and they can just move across state lines, as individuals can. They can even commute from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, or Maine and still work in Boston. It’s harder to evade the taxation if it’s a regional or nationalized scheme. Moreover, the federal funding apparatus just works better than anything states can provide, which is why Obamacare is still with us despite the GOP’s endless attempts to sabotage it. Both the GOP and Dems knew then, and know now, that the longer this plan is around - even in a mediocre form - it will become the go-to healthcare option for people, and trying to eliminate it may carry political consequences. Imagine what we could have if Biden is able to really dress it up.
The whole thing about blaming the left in the party is dumb. If they really think they cost them votes, then the worst thing they can do is piss them off and make them feel unheard and angry. They need to be trying to come together so that they could credibly say something like “Yeah, we get what you mean, but the optics of ‘Defund the police’ looks bad. Why don’t we workshop a different equivalent statement?”
As is, they’re going on the attack, and that’s going to further alienate voters. They do get that the left is the only reason they can get young people to vote, right? The Right, if they’re smart, won’t just keep running Trumps that scare the left into supporting the liberals.
The only reason why I as a progressive can vote liberal is that I have been led to believe we are on the same team, but the liberals are just more practical about how much can be accomplished at once. If they become my enemy, everything changes.
No I don’t think it is. Donald Trump got the messaging right. He just has no concept of how to effectively exercise power or how government works. The next Trump will have a textbook lesson on how to spew hatred to rule up the masses and how to avoid missteps based on ignorance or poor impulse control.
It will be far more dangerous.
(I think what I mean is “what LSL Guy said”)
It looks like some of the GOP grandstanding is being done because individuals want some kind of political cover. They want to be sure that it’s okay to throw in the towel, lest they receive the kind of treatment that election officials in PA and Georgia have received. I wonder what it was that made Republicans in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania strong enough to withstand the onslaught from Trump’s machine at the national level. Georgia’s Sec of State seemed to indicate he’s observed evidence that Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots might have cost the party, and may continue to do so in senate races, and maybe he’s trying to be the guy who finally stands up and tells the party, “Look, his shit has expired. It was fun while it lasted”
Of course, when it’s TRUMP voters who say they feel unheard and angry, the media runs story after interview after story about how Cletus in Centerburg feels unheard and angry and how the Democrats need to listen to Cletus.
But when people on the left side of the Democratic Party feel unheard and angry they’re seen as the problem… by the Democratic Party.
Qwhite interesting.
It seems like they’re all afraid to go against the crowd. So on the national level, where only a handful of GOP politicians have admitted to Trump’s loss, you don’t want to be one of the tiny group of RINO’s who also admits it. But the officials actually in charge of certifying the results see 49 other states all handling this normally and don’t want to be the one that starts to go in the other direction (although there’s at least some foot-dragging in Arizona which is worrying).
It’s a good thing that (knock on wood) it seems like Trump has utterly failed to actually get anyone with power over this process to overturn the results, because I’m pretty worried that if one domino fell, many others would fall and we would end up in an electoral/constitutional crisis.
Trump is not Vladimir Putin - he doesn’t have the understanding of how to use Stasi techniques to control people. What he is, is a populist, but he has been pretty effective as far as populists go. Make no mistake: he entered politics as a total amateur, and he ended up taking over the entire fucking party - on his first go. That oughtta tell you something about his instincts. It tells me he can sense weakness. He knows how to play to an audience.
I was thinking about what made Trump ultimately as successful as he was just the other day. One thing that occurred to me is that there was a pivotal moment right after his infamous escalator ride, a moment at which Trumpism could have actually died. He was confronted very early on by an array of outraged citizens, pundits, and folks in the entertainment field. In fact, initially, he wasn’t even taken seriously by pundits; it was Jorge Ramos and people in the NBC orbit who confronted him. Trump could have shrunk. He could have had a moment at which he thought to himself “Man, this is a real backlash. What if I lose my brand? Maybe I’ll walk this back.” He could have backed away. I’m sure he was tempted to. But, he didn’t.
And that was the moment that Trump went from being a failed developer/casino guy/reality TV jackass to quickly rising in the polls and taking over the party. He must have known on some level that backing down, as much as his advertisers and network producers put pressure on him to do it, would have killed his political adventure. He knew he had a message that no other Republican he was running against dared to speak, and moreover, he knew it would make him popular. He is anti-intellectual and has little to no business acumen, but he knows how to scheme when it comes to dealing with people.
4 years later, Trump has assaulted political and legal norms. He has expanded boundaries of what is acceptable in a leader, and again, it’s because he sensed that people don’t really care as much about living in a democracy as we think we do. It’s not that we want to live in a dictatorship; it’s just that we sometimes don’t like the inefficiencies and impotence of self-rule, and the care and involvement it takes to maintain it. Trump figured this out. He just didn’t have the knowledge of a Putin to undermine a fledgling democracy at every possible turn, and to weaponize state resources against people.
Trump knew something about us and our society that even we did not really know. As it turns out, the strength of our institutions - some of which are as old as the nation itself - were strong enough to finally wear him down and stop him. But nearly all of those institutions and mechanisms are considerably weaker now. What worries me is, there is someone out there who now knows how what he can get away with. Not only will this individual or team of individuals know how to manufacture consent, but they might also have the kinds of back-end knowledge of how to weaponize the state against people.
Yep. This Trump episode has left us weak and vulnerable.
Whether Trump had a strategy or not, who cares? He inflicted considerable damage just by being himself, by acting on impulse. Yeah, he’s a clown and delusional. They said the same about Hitler. They said the same about Chavez. Authoritarians don’t usually make the trains run on time; they usually fuck things up and then project blame on others. How they stay in power is a matter gaining consent by pitting different groups against each other just long enough so that nobody knows that they’re gradually taking over the apparatus of governance - which starts with police power.
Future Republicans are going to continue to concentrate police power. They will also probably spend more time thinking about how to centralize party power so that states don’t go rogue next time when they need to cancel an election.
Great post 3 above here Sir @asahi; agree with all of it. Ref this snip:
This also speaks to the tottering nature of the R party at the time. Or perhaps better said as a party whose fissures had widened to the point the whole edifice was creaking and in danger of splitting. Given that big crack, Trump was able to see it, insert a fairly small wedge at the right place and time, then pound the bejeezus out of it until the whole thing snapped in two.
But the way the R party snapped in two was telling. The traditionalists basically shut up, mumbled, or shouted “Yeah! What he said!!” as individuals. They didn’t stomp off as a group in a doctrinally pure huff to form a true faction or even a new party.
Leading me to suggest the party had already become a hollow collection of opportunists who were each separately uneasily astride the fissure unsure how to hold it together or which way to lean until it became obvious.
ETA: And as you say in the post you slipped in just above mine, that way has now become all too obvious. RW police state authoritarianism.
Overheard my Trump-manic wife speaking to one of her Trump-manic friends last night. Before she hung up the phone, she said, “Tell (name redacted) not to worry – we don’t need the Republicans. We’ve got Trump, and it’s all set up. He’s going to drop the hammer and everything’s going to be fine! I can’t tell you when and I can’t tell you how, but the hammer’s going to drop, and everything’s going to turn around, I promise you. I promise you – everything’s going to change. We’ve got Trump! It’ll all change!”
– Excerpt from my upcoming memoir, “My Life with a Cult Member”
As a side note, a couple of years ago, after she had been reading the QAnon boards, she crowed to me that “something big is coming – something that’s going to blow the whole world apart!” I never did find out what that particular thing was. Maybe it happened and nobody noticed.
That’s the whole point, of course. “Q” continually promises that a wave of arrests is coming, or that JFK Jr. will come out of hiding, or that another wave of arrests is coming. Most are predicted to happen on specific dates. Then they don’t happen, but a new promise is made, and the old ones are simply pretended to have never happened. The cult is all about promises that are just beyond the horizon.
QAnon and Trumpism are the same thing, which is why so many people are into both. Trumpist promises that a wave of evidence and court victories are just a week or two away are phrased precisely the way QAnon promises are.
I couldn’t begin to explain why people get sucked into the vortex of conspiracy theories. I suspect that it is on some level partly motivated by a desire to reject expertise, which itself explains the rise of Trumpism.
As someone who still remembers an age before Internet, my own hypothesis is that people gave experts the benefit of the doubt for a while and felt like they got burned by their trust in their subject matter knowledge. Experts didn’t stop terrorism that sucked a generation into two global conflicts. Couldn’t stop the slow hemorrhage of middle class jobs to outsourcing and automation. Couldn’t stop the financial crisis and the millions of jobs across all strata. Experts have presided over a decline of America’s middle class. So it’s not surprising that some might say “Take your expertise and shove it up your ass.”
This is one amazing thing about a cult; They never mind when the promises never come to pass. There is always an excuse. When the promised spaceships fail to arrive to take them to the promised new land, the cult members don’t suddenly realize that they’ve been lied to - they double down.
This is one of the defining features of a cult - the members cannot be swayed, even as they ingest poison to kill themselves. It’s a very powerful thing.
And make no mistake - the cult of Trumpism is strong. McConnell and the rest of the toadies realize this, and they know that even with Trump out of power, he is the cult leader now. They disagree with him at their peril. They are part of the cult now too.
And that’s the insidious thing in this case – if a particular prophecy fails to come to pass, there’s a ready-made villain: The Deep State.* It’s an all-encompassing bogeyman, ready and willing to accept all hand-waving sent its way. Coup failed? Deep State! Not enough votes? Deep State! Dinner got burned? Deep State! By its very shadowiness it is both a perfect excuse and rallying point which indemnifies and validates the ersatz prophet.
*now I want to start making references to The Derp State