A Republican party who pretended for years that Democratic attempts at impeachment were to overturn an election, are strangely supportive of a Republican president who is overtly calling for overturning an election.
I HATE that, because even if Trump was removed from office, it would make Pence the president, not H. Clinton.
Brian
The impeachment process is in the constitution as a legal remedy for a president’s crimes. Nothing shady or illegitimate about it. What the Republicans are currently doing is literally an attempted coup.
I think that’s on the right track, but you are underestimating the depth of the division, which is driven in large part by fundamentalist and evangelical churches,
These churches and the families communities that surround them are based on a highly authoritarian power structure. They like that kind of structure. They think the country needs “strong leaders” that impose their will on the majority. They think that things like self-esteem and critical thinking are bad.
It’s more than just growing up with different beliefs.
When I was six, I figured out that Santa was a fiction. My parents used to tell the story of how, that Christmas Eve, I came to them and announced “I’ve figured it out” and I laid out my reasoning.The reaction of my parents was highly positive. I had proven myself to be a smart kid.
But what if, when I announced that I didn’t think there was a Santa, my dad had beaten me for contradicting him and told me that those thoughts were the work of the devil? That would’ve been about way more than Santa. That kind of lesson, repeated, would’ve fundamentally changed the way I thought, the way I processed and analyzed information, the way I made decisions and developed beliefs.
Now, not every Trump supporter grew up inside that extreme of religious authoritarianism, but it’s a matter of degree. And the fundamentalist and evangelical communities were explicitly for Trump. There is nothing about Trump that gives evangelicals pause, nothing they have to justify. Trump is their perfect leader.
So many liberals don’t freaking get this. They think that Trump’s cruelty and misogyny should cause some sort of cognitive dissonance among the religious. But these people like the cruelty directed towards liberals and minorities. They think “those people” need to be marginalized and put in their place.
Trump is the leader, the alpha. He’s not held to the same standards as everyone else. That’s why, when Trump calls some random public figure something horrible and that public figure calls him something not quite so horrible back, they can criticize the second person with a straight face. It’s simple to them. Trump is allowed to do that, much like a parent is allowed to spank their child. But the second person wasn’t allowed to do that, it’s like a child spanking the parent.
While liberal thinking people generally think that a person in authority should hold themselves to a higher behavioral standard, conservatives think the opposite. They think the authority figure gets to say and do what he wants and he doesn’t owe anyone an explanation for his actions.
That’s why he gets so nasty when a debate moderator asked him a tough question. They aren’t supposed to be allowed to talk to the President that way.
So it’s not just that these hard-liners grew up with different beliefs, but that they process information differently.
I have no doubt that this thought process is true for the religious fundamentalists who support Trump. But so many of his “fans” (to go back to my sports analogy) aren’t even religious.
My wife and I have ended contact with two couples who literally would not shut up in our presence about how Democrats were destroying the country. One couple were lifelong atheists, the other came from non-religious backgrounds and were not churchgoers. Their “arguments” were little more than catchphrases they’d learned from Rush Limbaugh and D’Souza conspiracies.
Yet we’d known them long enough to see these mindsets forming. One husband was the #2 at a small family-owned industrial company. Over the years, his reasonable, conservatively based economic point of view deteriorated into “unions suck, regulations are killing us, cheap immigrant labor is killing us, etc.” And he associated all those with Democratic policies.
The other couple both lost their jobs and were scrambling for years after the 2009 crash. The worse their situations became, the more their racism and xenophobia emerged – and they saw Democrats as “going too easy on those people.”
They were all GOP “fans” going way back, but the echo chambers of Fox and social media hardened that fandom into literal hatred of the other “team.”
I just don’t understand what people are seeing. Everything I was worried about has not come to pass, starting with election day and the vote counts and certification, etc. This “coup” has been stopped overwhelmingly by Republicans. Over and over again Judges, elected officials and representatives have stepped up to the plate, a lot of them open Trump supporters or appointees and shut his shit down. Where are we failing? what has gone wrong? at this point you should be as optimistic about the state of our Democracy as you have been in a long time. The system has worked exactly the way it was meant to everyone’s shock.
The thing is, I keep asking them to place a wager on it. I even offer five to one odds. No one has taken me up on it.
Where you are failing is that a huge percentage of the population doesn’t want any of that to happen. They want democracy to fail, and their numbers are growing. They have enthusiastic agents in government, and THEIR numbers are growing.
It’s not Trump. Trump has been a huge exacerbation of the problem but the problem started before him.
Sure, and it didn’t matter how much they wanted it they still failed. That’s a good thing.
Policy!!! Ha! These people think Trump is MORALLY superior to Joe Biden. I kid you not – they post photos of Biden sniffing kids hair and point out how creepy he is. I like to respond with photos of Trump getting a lapdance from his teenage daughter, which they ignore. These people are genuinely unreachable through any sane means.
You are correct as to the ultimate question of who will take office as President on January 20. And that is, indeed, a good thing. But you’re neglecting to pay attention to:
- How close the actual election was (in an electoral sense). It is not a good sign that 70+ million people enthusiastically signed up for 4 more years of Trumpism
- How complicit and silent the GOP is in the face of an attempt to steal an election.
If the system were truly functioning properly, 98% of all GOP politicians would, at the very least, be acknowledging Biden’s victory (I use that number because there will always be a few whackjobs). And really, if the system were functioning as it should, they would be denouncing any attempt to steal this election and disenfranchise the majority of the country. Because if the system were functioning, they would be punished - rhetorically and electorally - for not standing up for their supposed ideals of freedom and democracy.
Instead the opposite is true. They are being rewarded for endorsing this insanity. They are afraid of speaking out against Trump and Trumpism.
Our systems relies on norms, checks and balances. Those norms have been abandoned and the checks and balances left behind in a partisan race to the extreme. The mushroom may look tasty to eat, but just underneath is a rotting corpse.
What we’ve learned is that every layer of these checks and balances is swiss cheese. Yes, it’s mostly solid, but there are gaps where a rogue certification board member, secretary of state, justice, senator or representative, president, etc. can let something slip through.
The system has “worked” to the extent that none of the holes have thus far been aligned, so every attempt has been thwarted. But we’re now noticing these gaps, and recognize that if we do this often enough, eventually they’ll line up.
You’re right, and there’s another subset - I’ve estimated that about half of the Trump supporters are fundamentalist or evangelicals of some stripe, but that doesn’t account for the rest. There is another factor, a big one.
The former friends you described, I bet they started out by watching Fox News and listening to Limbaugh. That shit is poison, it’s more dangerous than heroin. It hooks people and eats their brains. It sometimes drives them to harder stuff, like OAN and NewsMax.
It literally drives people insane. Look at Guiliani, he’s a freaking PSA for the dangers of right wing media. He was always unpleasant but he used to be a competent, He was a renowned prosecutor and got elected mayor of a large liberal city, twice. And now look at him. He’s an enraged raving drooling moron who staggers around with his fly unzipped, so lacking in self-awareness that he doesn’t see what a fool he is.
I just wonder what Trump is going to look like 4 years from now.
Meanwhile, these “failing” efforts are succeeding in convincing tens of millions of voters that they’re being robbed, that the system is corruptly stacked against them and that the Biden administration will be evil and illegitimate from day one.
That doesn’t worry you?
They would have thought the same thing no matter what. Those people cannot be reached.
Is this all going to turn into some later ‘no smoke without fire’ argument? i.e. ‘surely not all of those lawsuits can have been frivolous and unfounded - there were so many of them’
What I would give to find a recording somewhere of Trump on audio/video saying "Can you believe these suckers? They think I wont the election. Bunch of idiots. I keep filing lawsuits and they keep giving me money. I love it.
No matter what?
If Trump had said by November 6th that he had lost the election, and conceded and acknowledged Biden as president elect, if Republican legislators had also done the same, you still think that there would be nearly as many claiming that the election had been stolen?
Meanwhile, millions of people are convinced that they are being cheated, and they are more and more willing to demand extralegal, extrajudicial, and extra-constitutional remedies. A membe rof the Republican leadership in the Pennsylvania legislature said that she signed on to the bogus pro-Trump letter because she feared for her life from retaliation from Trump supporters.
This is becoming a persistent force in our politics–threats of violence by anti-democratic pro-authoritarians who are emboldened to disregard and disparange our instiuttions.
Maybe, we will escape an actual coup this time. But it leaves us more vulnerable in the case of a subsequent attempt. This is a thing now. It’s no longer unspeakable.
One definitely did. He started out in the 90s telling me how this Limbaugh guy was full of shit but he was funny and “at least he doesn’t care about being politically correct.” By the time Obama was elected he was quoting Rush like the gospel.