Wow - I had somehow mistaken you for a much younger person. Although having a youthful attitude tempered by older wisdom and no cynicism is IMO the ideal combo. It’s what I strive for.
You may well be right. In addition to the ordinary pendulum swings there’s the
larger arc of history and we may actually be seeing it in action. Literally not a moment too soon if true. 2020 came a LOT closer to being the end of the USA than it should have.
Very similar to my path to being a recovered conservative/libertarian. I fell for the same bullshit that many ‘centrists’ do now, believing that bipartisanship was a paramount value, failing to realize that bipartisanship requires that both parties actually value democratic principles of compromise and acting in good faith.
When a party is committed to making it harder for people to vote and to have their votes count, then fuck bipartisanship; you have to defeat the other party. You have to take away the tools that they are using to undermine democracy: the filibuster, the gerrymander, and other procedural shit.
I am reminded of my daughter’s father-in-law, who was a member of his local Democratic Socialists despite him being in his eighties. He would joke that if you added up the ages of everyone else at the periodic meetings, they still wouldn’t surpass his own.
I think the problem democrats have is they simply cannot put together a single message. They are not and cannot be about one thing. Republicans march in lockstep. Their racism and a few wedge issues (abortion, LGBTQ rights and guns) and a weird motivation to make liberals cry is all they need. There is little to distinguish one over another beyond who is the most strident.
Liberals, on the other hand, are all over the place. People talk about a big tent but the liberal tent is huge. It covers so much ground that it is very difficult to get them all pulling in the same direction at the same time. We have seen it recently where some Dem lawmakers vowed to oppose Biden nominees unless he appointed people of Pacific Island descent. This is not a rift you would find among republicans.
This allows the conservative minority to wield power out of proportion to their size. They may be small but they are united and all march in one direction.
Republicans have multiple interests, but since those interests are best achieved with the electorate being brain dead or apathetic, they know their first mission. It wasn’t always this way. I remember when they could credibly speak about deficit reduction, international trade, and national security - I still thought they were wrong on those issues but they could at least appear to be engaging in good faith arguments once in a while. That was a long time ago, though, and more importantly, they don’t even try to compete on those issues; they compete with issues like “foreigners are scary”, “liberal women murder babies,” and “only pussies worry about catching contagious diseases”
Perhaps but when was the last time you saw a republican lawmaker break rank? It happens on occasion but they almost always vote in lockstep (and, usually, when one breaks ranks it is with the approval of the republican leadership because they know they can afford one…see: Susan Collins).
Dems break ranks as a badge of honor. They do it all the time.
My take is slightly different. My take is that Republicans have very few interests that differ from those of the Democratic party platform. With communism no longer a viable boogieman, and Libertarianism a failed ideology, Republicans realize that in a global economy and China being an extant threat, a “small government” is a weak government. America has to protect its interests and economic supremacy. To do that, large initiatives are required to avoid economic domestic disasters like in 2008. The Covid corporate stimulus handouts drove the point home even further by ensuring the stock markets would remain prosperous even as tens of millions of low wage jobs were lost almost overnight.
So while social issues like immigration, abortion, voting and mask-holery reliably rouse the right wing rabble, there is nothing else they can really offer that is different from what the Democrats offer. They don’t have “new” or “better” or even “good” ideas to counter the Dems. They have nothing except gulling the rubes.
That’s because preparing for the future is more complicated than pining for the past.
There are many different solutions to the problems that face us, some can work together, some are even synergistic, but some are exclusive. There is no one right answer as to how we should move forward, and no solution is going to make everyone happy, no solution is going to be a silver bullet that completely solves the problem and then the problem never needs to be revisited.
There will always be unintended consequences of any action, and part of responsible governing means accepting that that is the case, and solving those problems as they arise.
The Democrats are full of ideas, some good, some bad, that need to be considered and tested out if they seem plausible. The Republicans are only in search of a Final Solution.
No way republicans are this thoughtful.
The only thing that motivates them as a party is getting money for their corporate masters.
That’s it. Full stop.
They may pay lip service to broad ideas like “defeating China” but they really don’t give a shit anymore.
Republicans are no longer interested in a debate on the best ways to run the country. They won’t even agree on facts. Literal facts.
Seems to me they’ve found it. Turns out it’s as simple as saying, “NO”, to every Democratic proposal.
I agree in part. I would add that there’s another fundamental issue. Some people in the Democratic tent are there only because the Republicans pushed them out of the Republican tent, not because they want to be in the Democratic tent. This was demonstrated by the gains Trump made in places like Miami and the Rio Grande Valley here in TX. Let’s take a hypothetical Latino man from say, Zapata TX, who is in his 30s, works in the oil fields, was raised Catholic and in the machismo culture. He might have voted for Clinton in 2016 because his parents always voted Democratic, or maybe even on fears that Trump would send people to deport him even though he was born in the US . Then 4 years passed and Trump didn’t do that, and maybe this guy starts to think that he personally won’t be hurt by being a Republican, so he voted for Trump in 2020. If Republicans can keep the racial animus somewhat limited, they may very well succeed in attracting more of those types of voters in the future.
True but they are embracing it more and more lately. Indeed, they aren’t even really trying to hide it at all these days.
Georgia voters might end up having some well-heeled friends after all:
And yet Georgia Republicans aren’t backing down. The Georgia House voted to repeal a tax break Delta had previously been granted just hours after the statement by the CEO criticizing the new restrictions. No word on whether the State Senate will take up the bill but still it shows the Georgia GOP is a bunch of assholes.
Full article here.
Until about 5 years ago, Atlanta was a slam-dunk, no-brainer place to relocate a major international or regional headquarters; politics probably took Atlanta out of the running for its 2nd HQ (I thought Northern VA was the favorite all along but that’s beside the point - Atlanta was definitely competitive) and this will probably only scare off more of corporate America.
Republicans have taken one of the largest employers and poked them in the eye with political partisanship. Moreover, it’s a business that serves as a backbone to so many other businesses in the region. Ask other airports (and their local economies) what happens when an airline abruptly breaks up by text. Thinking of you Memphis, Cincinnati, and St. Louis
If, by chance, the Georgia Senate votes in favor of the bill, what are the chances Delta would move its HQ to a more voter-friendly state willing to give it a tax break? And how badly would that hurt Georgia?
Moving Delta’s HQ would be a symbolic gesture. A potent symbolic gesture, but symbolic nonetheless.
It’s the air operation at Hartsfield airport, and their large internal and for-hire maintenance operations there that generate the economic benefit to GA’s economy. Even if they decided tomorrow to decamp all that to e.g. Cincinnati (one of their former hubs), it’d be the work of a decade to move even half of it. At tremendous expense and considerable loss of revenue efficiency both during and after.
To be sure, if that started a stampede of major businesses choosing to loudly put their HQs elsewhere, pointedly shelving their existing plans to move to Atlanta, there might be a bandwagon effect. But I bet it’ll be small; ultimately CEOs and Boards answer to the shareholders’ relentless demand for greater profits, not for better politics.
I think it would be more than symbolic; there are hundreds of thousands of travelers who visit Atlanta each day. Granted, many of them travel on to other cities, but this is why Atlanta has been a venue for things like Super Bowls, national and international conventions, and corporate restructuring.
Some might say, “Pfff, another airline will just come in” – not necessarily. There’s nothing magical about Atlanta’s geography; in fact it’s not in the center of the country like Chicago, St Louis, DFW or Denver. It’s not really on the coasts like SeaTac, SFO, or LAX, or Miami, IAD, or JFK. It’s just a really crowded airspace in the interior of the US. What happens to all of that hotel space once a major airline starts using another city’s (Nashville, Charlotte, Tampa) air transit infrastructure? What happens to those jobs? What happens to the corporate energy that pumps through the city on a daily basis? Losing a major airline, even losing its status as a hub, is a big deal. Atlanta and Georgia shouldn’t kid itself.
To follow up, I agree that Delta wouldn’t just leave to make a point. But when politicians start screwing around with tax breaks to make a point to companies like Delta, that gets their attention. Delta wasn’t asking for controversy; it was provoked.
You misunderstood me. The HQ is 150 exectives and 3,000 clerks. Moving that would be symbolic. And is readily doable.
The hub operation is at the airport, is huge, and can’t be moved without crippling Delta. But it would totally cripple Atlanta and by extension most of Georgia’s commerce if it was moved.