Save America.
Rise up & Save America
Hi, it’s US, We the People.
I think I’m describing the actions I think we should take rather than what to call it. I’m feeling more desperate every day.
Using the first word to mean “concerted effort” rather than “political demonstration”:
Rally to Restore Sanity
Love it. I was going to say ‘A return to sanity’. Sanitation is much cleaner though.
When Biden was last elected, there was The Great Unclenching.
I like the word reconstitute for this - it’s both rebuilding in general, and a reference to the constitution. But it isn’t very flash.
When it comes to how the Democrats label their project to reverse the stuffing of government with Trumpers, pledging to quickly establish Truth and Reconciliation commissions, empowered to fire military and government ideologues, may be the way to go.
But I do not think Republicans go as crazy over the metaphorical shade of red at Starbucks as they would over using something from post-apartheid South Africa as a model for the U.S. My argument was to carefully pick when to trigger them, not to never do it.
An alternative is to pledge having the transition team come up with a list of people to be fired on day one. But I think having a list would sound worse, to median voters, than truth and reconciliation. MAGA is already crazy over South Africa, what with declaring the Boers the only acceptable refugees, and I’m fine on leaning into that.
Of course, another alternative is to try to ignore the issue. That’s what Kamala Harris would do. Maybe we can get away with it should MAGA lose so decisely in November 2028 that MAGA generals refuse to make another, stronger, coup attempt
If they hangs on for an additional four years, there will be no way to ignore that MAGA took over the middle layers of government,.
As Operation Enduring Freedom is already taken, I suggest Renormalization. It gets rid of infinite corruption and cheeckily implies that there was a time the USA were normal.
That was my first thought, but was he a good example in himself?
Certainly needs a word that doesn’t sound like invented jargon, and the simplicity/familiarity of which would resonate with the widest range of people and the different reasons for their discontents. “Normality” might just do it, or “common sense”.
Yes, Spoons’s reasons for Return to the Rule of Law are just the same as mine.
My pros and cons skipped around between policy and politics. Backward looking is better as policy than politics. But, sure, the Democratic nominee will have to pledge Return to Rule of Law in a speech or two.
It’s not me. It’s the voters. I eat spinach, literally and metaphorically.
The Great Cleansing
Make America Smart Again
Democrats will need to not just win back the presidency, but also to win it with a mandate to reverse the MAGA takeover of government. By itself, Normality gives no mandate for doing that. Replacing all the two star and above generals with supposed Trump loyalists, as Hegseth is doing, is not normal. Is it a return to normality for the Democratic administration to do another round of the same, in the other direction? I do not think so.
So many politicians proclaim “Common Sense” that it must have the virtue of doing OK in focus groups. Will it be common sense to fire Federal Research Chair Scott Bessent?
I don’t think that the South African model really works, and not because it hurts the feelings of Republicans, but because the situation in the US isn’t really analogous to the situation in South Africa.
Before Apartheid ended, black people in South Africa couldn’t vote. So there was one system of government that only existed because the only people with voting power were a small minority. Once the much larger majority got voting rights, advocates of apartheid were never going to be politically viable again.
In the US, if we win in 26 and 28, we Democrats will have secured power for now, but we would not have fundamentally changed the rules of the game such that the other side can never win again.
South Africa could do Truth & Reconciliation the way that they did because South Africa’s anti-Apatheid faction had won a complete and total victory.
If the next Democratic candidate sweeps 50 states in an electoral landslide, then that would be the kind of victory we need. But short of that, we just won’t be nearly secure enough in our victory to go down that path.
Instead, I think the “return to the rule of law” narrative is the one that makes the most sense to push. There are already existing laws against many of the things the Trump admin and MAGA movement have done; we need the balls to enforce those laws.
I think the best encapsulation of what Biden did wrong and what we need to do better next time is Merrick Garland and the way he dragged his feet to charge and prosecute Trump. I understand his motivation - he didn’t want to appear political - but he of course was accused of political prosecution anyways, and he utterly dropped the ball on actually getting Trump in any sort of legal trouble.
The next Democratic president needs to appoint a prosecutor who moves their ass QUICK.
But that doesn’t necessarily need to be what we run on. I think campaigning should focus on a positive message - what will the candidate do to make life better for Americans? There’s plenty to talk about.
And then once elected swiftly and ruthlessly prosecute any Trump admin goon who broke the law.
What if there’s a round of last-minute pardons?
What do you mean by “in the other direction”?
The Democrats replacing all two star and up generals with supposed Newsom loyalists? That would not be a “return to normality”.
The Democrats replacing all two star and up generals with relatively apolitical military professionals? That would be a return to normality.
I am for the Democrats doing the latter, not the former.
Then we are probably fucked.
Obviously we could do some idiotic trick like Trump tried - “uuuh those pardons were signed with, a, uhhhh, auto pen, so uhhhh, no pardon!”. That’s not “rule of law” - as someone mentioned upthread, that’s quite literally the government making it up as it goes along.
Unfortunately in our system there is no way to undo a pardon (unless you can prove a straight up quid pro quo), so if Trump pardons a bunch of admin personnel there is no way to legally prosecute them within the system.
Now, there IS one thing that we can AND SHOULD do, but the only way this happens is if Democrats win the kind of crushing victory that would let us do the “truth and reconciliation” thing anyways. So I’m not sure it’s practical.
But the one thing you COULD do is hold hearings in Congress and declare “yes, this person did/did not aid and abet an insurrection”. No legal charges have to be filed, but - per the courts’ review of the arguments that Trump shouldn’t be allowed to run after Jan 6 because he participated in insurrection - a Congressional decision like that would disqualify someone from ever holding public office in the United States ever again, per the Insurrection Clause of the 14th amendment.
You could target anyone whose office required them to take an oath, and as long as Congress found that they aided and abetted an insurrection, they can never run for office again.
That’s what should have been done after Jan 6; but Democrats have never had the votes to get something like that done, and it would take a staggeringly crushing victory in '28 for that to happen then.
Other than that, yeah, a pardon fucks us over, and as long as we are trying to protect the institutions, there isn’t anything we can do about that from within the system. Maybe amend the constitution to reduce pardon power or give some congressional oversight, but again, we would need far more support than we are likely to get to make that happen.
We run into the same issue as the truth and reconciliation idea above: the South African model relied on a total anti-Apartheid electoral victory, which could happen because so many newly enfranchised people were voting against apartheid. We will not have such a strong anti-MAGA majority, so deMAGAfying the country is a lot harder (than the truth and reconciliation part specifically, ending apartheid obviously had a lot of effort go into it before black people were enfranchised - but that’s exactly the point: anti-Apartheid had a “win condition”, enfranchise everyone; we kinda don’t, because half of the possible electorate actually does support MAGA)
The Great Rebalancing
A sane Congress needs to do more than just roll back MAGA abuses, it needs to eliminate the supremacy of the executive branch that has been creeping upward for the better part of a century. Things like executive orders and declarations of emergency need to be extensively defanged by law and Congress and the courts need to once again zealously guard their prerogatives and duties and not just deligate them willy-nilly to the president…any president.
I don’t think that model can ever be quick enough to address Environmental Protection Agency and and Bureau of Land Management executives who oppose the laws they supposedly enforce. Such have to be fired. Then they go back to conservative think tanks to trash the Democrats as they may.
In terms of the thread, if someone really thinks lock 'em up is the way to go, and is serious about doing more than one or two prosecutions, the answer to the thread title is to go with denazification. I’m against it. As already noted there will be pardons, so prosecution means destroying the rule of law.
What about firing executives? Would that be legal? It partly depends on whether SCOTUS upholds Trump’s firings, but probably yes. Then the Democratic administration should try to shut the door by expanding civil service protections. If we are very lucky, such bills pass.
Agreed. The best you can do is to fire known Trumpers and add (or bring back) a fews questions about democracy, racism, and sexism to the promotion board process.
“Normalcy” is a familiar word in.American English because of Harding, though less common elsewhere. I don’t like “common sense” precisely because it’s overused by so many politicians of all political stripes in support of anything they like that it ceases to have any meaning. Here in Ontario it was used years ago in the campaign of the worst right-wing government we’ve ever had.
“AGAM” - “Against Gross Asshole Management”