100% agree on this. The actual passing of legislation can be done extremely quickly, a couple of minutes per bill. What takes time is the negotiations of what exactly the bills will say and who will support it with what language. But that can all be done before the Congress is actually seated. You can do all of it as soon as the elections are over and you know who won, and most of it just based on guessing who’s going to win.
Be the Congress who Gets Stuff Done.
Assuming Democrats get rid of the filibuster. I think that would be a great idea, but I have my doubts that enough Democrats will be on board to get it done.
Wear a mask at a MAGA rally? I thought MAGA was anti-mask. Or do you mean wearing something like a camo bandanna over your face, like a member of ICE? That would probably be acceptable to them.
Anyway, speaking of social media, I think if the left could somehow win the social media war, or at least try to keep up with the Russian bots flooding the zone with right-wing propaganda, it might help. I can’t believe how much absolute BS right-wing propaganda is out there, like FB posts saying stuff like 'God bless President trump, who left a comfortable billionaire lifestyle to toil away day and night making our country great! And he even turned down the Presidential salary, working for us for free!" If your only source of trump knowledge is from Facebook, as far as you’re aware, he’s half saint and half superhero.
QFT.
If you look at the exceptions to the filibuster - budget reconciliation, executive branch appointments, judicial appointments - they are the parts of government that Republicans want to have work, so that they can cut taxes on the rich and stock the other two branches with ideologues. In terms of the regulatory functions of Congress, they are in practice made impossible by the 60-vote filibuster requirement.
If you look carefully at Senate votes, Republicans are careful to set up their unpopular votes so that their most vulnerable members don’t have to vote for them, but they still have enough votes to pass their priorities. With the filibuster, it’s similar, but senators can vote for bills that they don’t want passed due to unpopularity, knowing that the filibuster will prevent them from having to make a potentially career-ending vote.
If Democrats have the more popular positions, they should be ready to force up-or-down votes on those issues and make the Republicans defend their unpopular positions. Frankly, the filibuster allows careerists, time-servers and the moral cowards to do as little as possible to keep their privileged positions. They should be made to stand up and be counted!*
* Note that the prevalence of those in the senate makes it unlikely that filibuster reform will be done. Sigh.
Democrats could do this? A tiny problem with this approach: Democrats are not listened to by them for the most part, and what they say is immediately labeled a lies.
Simple action [re the bus thing] call the police, explain the bus driver has in fact kidnapped an entire load of people, and has detoured off the expected route and they need them to stop the bus.
It was $1-million per year so the poor guy wouldn’t starve after the money ran out.
I’ve mentioned this but it bears repeating. When FDR created the new deal, he had to make agreements with southern democrats (aka southern whites) that black people wouldn’t benefit from the new deal. So things like social security were designed to exclude black people by excluding agricultural workers and domestic servants (which were 2/3 of black jobs in the south, these were only added to social security in the 1950s). Also a lot of the new deal programs were designed to be administered on the state and local level so that southern whites could exclude black people from benefitting.
Irrelevant of whether they are democrats or republicans, southern whites will always vote against the well being of black people. So yeah any attempt to expand the social safety net that benefits black people will face massive pushback from southern whites.
You’d have to find the values and ‘strengths’ of MAGA and make sure the insults attack those strengths directly.
MAGA values a patriarchal christian ethnostate, masculinity, strength in a dangerous world. But a lot of MAGA adjacent also value doing something about high economic prices. I guess if the messages targeted those things it could work.
Like having business leaders thank Trump for his tariffs, which put billions of dollars into their profits and passed the costs onto consumers.
Or a rich black person thanking Trump because his tax cuts allow him to spoil his harem of white girlfriends
Or a rich Muslim thanking Trump because his tax cuts allowed him to build another mosque and fund more efforts to convert people to Islam
Or a rich woman thanking Trump because she took her tax cuts and donated them to planned parenthood
But also messages undermining MAGA concepts of masculinity and strength. Things like ‘real men don’t beg makeup covered orange pedophiles to protect them and keep them safe because they’re terrified of black people and need someone to protect them from all the scary black people’
I think any kind of infiltration idea is every bit as delusional as the group you’re trying to infiltrate. It’d be like trying to infiltrate scientology to undermine David Miscavige.
Cults don’t operate in a way that they allow their minds to be changed by other cultists, that entire part of their mind is firewalled off. The groups that still support Trump are completely numb to cognitive dissonance. They do not see the things they experience, and the ‘ideals’ they ‘believe’ in with the same eyes. Nothing they presently believe is alterable by their actual experiences because they’ve outsourced their critical thinking and morality.
I’ve heard this explanation many times in the past, and undoubtedly it’s a contributing factor in what makes MAGA what they are. But I think there’s something else that plays a big part, something that is a fundamental part of human nature, at least for some fairly large fraction of humans. That is that they don’t just oppose things that would benefit them because those things would also benefit Black people. They also oppose those things because they hurt wealthy white people*. Why do I think this? Because poor and working class people the world over demonstrate the same behaviors. That is they oppose things that benefit the poor and working class when those things will hurt the wealthy. Why that is the case is something I don’t understand, but it’s definitely there, and not just among poor and working class white people from the American South.
*. I think that the wealthy people in question are white is incidental to this phenomenon. Here in Corpus Christi desalination is the hot topic of the day. I see many working class white people opposing desalination with discharge into the Gulf of Mexico because that would hurt the interests of wealthy Latinos and Arabs, even though they would personally benefit.