Democracy doesn’t require that you agree with or even like the political opposition, but it does require a healthy level of cooperation with them. There is an alarming number of republicans who, through thought and deed, are not cooperating with the side that won the election, as evidenced by these completely baseless lawsuits, as evidenced by the unwillingness to honor what was until very recently the common practice of acknowledging the opposition’s democratic victory, and as evidenced by the unwillingness to confront conspiracy theories that are quite literally endangering people’s lives.
The idea that what republicans have done is inconsequential is complete horse shit, and you know it.
Exactly. Saying the ends are going to be ok (Biden is in office in Jan 2021) so all this is meaningless is the wrong way to look at things. The seeds of this will fester. Biden will be seen by 10s of millions of people as an illegitimate, stolen President and they will push the Republicans in Congress to not even acknowledge his victory. Not only that but there is a sense among those people that our election process cannot be trusted and especially mail in voting is inherently flawed (already there are bills in states like Georgia to severely limit it). And there is serious considerations among 10s of millions of voters, that if you feel there is fraud (because you can’t fathom that the other guy one), it is perfectly ok to toss out millions of votes.
As long as Republicans control a majority of state legislatures, voting rights are going to be an issue. The efforts to suppress blue leaning voters are only going to increase and it’s an area that the current Supreme Court has already signaled that it will be hands off as far as they are concerned.
Red controlled battleground states will probably end easy mail in voting and registration. They’ll continue to decrease the number of voting places in urban areas. To have a chance of winning, Democrats will have to somehow bring their greater numbers into play while laboring under increasingly shitty rules.
Can’t the DNC help local Democrats work on winning control of more state legislatures, especially in off years? I know they can’t fund everything at all levels. I thought Dems had realized by now that state level elections are mission critical.
It frustrates me that states like TX, where I live, are left to flounder with these asscracks like Abbott, Patrick, and Paxton in charge. Nobody helps us with better candidates. I don’t think citizens can do it alone.
We should not take the radicalization of conservative lawyers lightly. The attorneys general backing Trump will not disappear from the political scene alongside Trump. Nor will their aides, many of whom are fellow Federalist Society members with aspirations for higher office. (A large number of Trump’s political and judicial nominees spent time in a GOP attorney general’s office.) These lawyers represent the next generation of the Republican Party, and they have no qualms about disenfranchising 80 million Americans to seize the presidency. Trump will leave office in January. But the attorneys general who are aiding his failed coup are just getting started.
Dems had amazing turnout last month. I’m not sure what more they/we can do – turnout was historic, like best in 100 years. Maybe there could be some better tactical messaging on the margins, but for the most part, I think this is about as good as it gets. The problem is that Republican turnout also went way up.
The country is very, very divided, and unfortunately, gerrymandering and the structure of the Senate mean that 50/50, or even 53/47 or so, still gives the GOP more power. I think all we can do is keep pushing and voting. Maybe demographics and aging will help, though we can’t remotely rely on this alone.
Yes they did – across the country, including downballot, Democratic turnout was historic. Even higher than 08! The problem is that Republican turnout was also higher than usual, if not to the historic levels on the Democratic side. But that was enough for red states like Texas to stay red, downballot and otherwise.
I think we are looking at the United States too much in isolation. In fact, there is already pretty strong illiberalism taking root in much of Eastern Europe, which only decades ago was awash in the optimism of Western liberal democracy and capitalism. What’s important to understand is that Viktor Orban didn’t just dial up the Hungarian military and the Law and Justice Party didn’t just use local militias to take over the country in Poland; these were majoritarian takeovers of democracy that is, in essence, quite anti-democratic.
What’s even more important to understand is that these ideas spread beyond borders, and if authoritarian-minded republics were looking to spread a perverse spin on democracy, they have found no better friend than the Republican party in the United States of America. They have done more for their cause, and more against the cause of the very things Ronald Reagan supposedly fought for, than Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Putin, or even Xi Jinping ever could have dreamt achieving on their own.
We need Dem candidates that will appeal to some of the “lean Republican” voters then. I don’t know how to do that. And also need to appeal “lean Dem” voters who still didn’t vote, enough to motivate them to get out there.
We also need a way to motivate voters for Dem candidates in off years. TX governor will be voted for again in 2022. Are we gonna get another forgettable Dem gov candidate in 2022? Barely any advertisements? No concise, catchy slogans by advertisers who actually know what they’re doing?
ETA: I just saw a Vox video about the crap going on in Poland re abortion rights. It’s scary. They’ve stacked their court, which is supposed to be independent, with super conservative judges that will always rule ultra conservative.
People get their ideas about anti-democratic leaders from movies. In movies, the bad guy rules entirely through fear. He takes what he wants through force. Sometime late in the first act he personally murders one of his henchmen for some minor offense just to show how evil he is. All who live under the bad guy’s rule quake in fear and seek escape, vengeance, or to work for the hero.
In real life, dictators are almost always skilled politicians who have a lot of popular support. Saddam Hussein rose to power in part because he was good at providing his constituency with stuff they needed and wanted.
Hussein was good at using terror, but he didn’t survive on just terror alone. When you consider that he led as a member of an ethnic minority for as long as he did, it’s actually nothing short of impressive. Without question, he was brutal - as brutal as they get. But he was as skillful at using rewards as he was it using punishment. Those rewards also extended to the population - at least to some degree. Iraqis were fairly well educated, including women. The country, capitalizing on its natural resources, was fairly prosperous.
No, it won’t, and what the Slate article is essentially saying goes beyond the radicalization of lawyers; it’s the radicalization of mainstream American conservatism. Simply put, there is no place anymore for conservative centrism - if you identify as such, you’re an independent or a Democrat.
Some might say, well, okay then - that’s good, right? Fewer people in the Republican party is a good thing, right? In one sense, yes. But consider what that means: you have a political party, with all of its massive fundraising resources, its ability to organize politically, and to concentrate its resources and focus into the political, legislative, executive, legal, and judicial machinery that make this country function the way it has.
And I fear that their motto is increasingly, if it first you don’t suppress the vote, then sue the winner. And if you can’t sue the winner and win in court, then use whatever means are necessary, including the threat of violence if not violence outright. Keep in mind, they can radicalize the police as well, which they seem to be doing with alarmingly frequency as of late.
“Oh come on! They haven’t done that yet. Biden is still going to take the oath of office like every president has since time immemorial.”
Yes, but democracies don’t just end with a single shot; they get sick, they get old, the wear down. People turn on democracies or simply stop caring whether they have a democracy or not.
Democrats need to deliver the goods - period. They have to find a way to do more than just not being Donald Trump or George W Bush. They have to really put the pressure on the rich to pay their fair share of taxes, and they have to push for economic support for the most vulnerable.
People like Bill Gates are hoping that Biden will be pro-Wall Street without the crazy. I don’t want Biden to label himself a democratic socialist but I want him and the democratic party to start getting some spine and really fight like hell for things we’ve been demanding for the last several decades. The American middle class has been backsliding since about 1973. He has to go to war for the middle class.
And it will be interesting to see how they try to do that in the next two years, with the GOP positioning themselves to stonewall, ignore and fight
Every.
Single.
Thing.
Democrats.
Try.
You think the obstruction was bad under Obama? You ain’t seen nothing yet. This is what these idiotic court cases are really about. They know that they don’t have a snowballs chance in hell of winning, and they know that all of them are actually embarrassing pieces of fiction.
What they are doing is preparing their useful idiot voters to accept the complete and total GOP shutdown of government to damage the country as much as possible for the next two years.
Here’s my question, though: for all the talk about Democrats need to fight hard for the middle class, I’m not sure I’ve seen evidence that said middle class will know about, acknowledge, and/or appreciate such efforts in ways that positively affect the polls for them.
I agree with this, but I would just take from it that Democrats need to stop worrying and learn to love the executive order.
I don’t letting the executive branch run the country is good governance, but if people have a worse recovery from covid than they did from the 2008 financial crash, more and more people are going to turn to a Trump-like brand of nihilism. If I were Biden I would even be willing to declare an emergency to give people checks. I wish there were another way out of this but I just don’t see it.
The alternative is that the Dems manage to take the senate by a single vote in the runoffs and leadership somehow manages to twist a lot of arms into nuking the filibuster. Also even if the Biden admin embraced a strategy of governing by EO, the senate is guaranteed to be a roadblock to restoring the VRA which might make all of this a moot point.
It’s not going to be easy. One thing they need to understand is that they really need to develop a grassroots communication strategy, but that’s going to be hard to do if they’re not sure how they want to proceed.
In the past, during more ‘normal’ times, the fear was that we couldn’t let the democrats go too far to the left, and I worry that a lot of people are forming that conclusion now. I’ve read a number of articles suggesting that Democrats lost because they supported “socialism”. It might be true that the Democrats need help with branding, but there is absolutely a market - a desperate need - for economic support of the middle class, and if the Dems cannot figure that out, and fast, we are doomed.