The US had plentiful time to figure out if there could be an enforceable mechanism to make high officials behave like proper public servants, while balancing the reality that Great Power politics involves the ocassional necessity to be able to do some Not Very Nice Things.
Unfortunately, the easy thing to do was to hang on to that the only punishment will be losing office, IF the people are annoyed enough, and we won’t take it against each other personally. All of it secured and guaranteed merely by a gentlemen’s agreement about norms.
That you could one day have people in power who wipe themselves with gentlemen’s agreements and norms, should have been a contingency provided for. But it wasn’t.
It’s been interesting to read a few conservative thought pieces about this subject. Basically it appears that they want to convince more voters of the correctness of the Trumpian agenda instead of moving towards more centrist policies. America first, protect religious freedoms, boys are boys and girls are girls and that’s that.
I don’t think the moderate conservatives will be able to regain control of the party for a while. They’ve got a pretty awful tiger by the tail on their side of the spectrum.
Okay, so we didn’t fix the barn door and a couple of horses ran off. Do we let another horse run off, shrug and mumble “Whaddya gonna do?”. Or…pardon me if this is a radical notion…we fix the eff-ing barn door!!
Here’s an opinion piece, a little short on facts maybe, by The Ringer’s, Justin Charity, where he opines pretty much what I’ve been saying. That the Don will still be a force. How much of one, imo, depends on the actual number of true believers.
From Biden’s inauguration through the 2022 midterm elections, Trump may well project his dominance in GOP primaries for the foreseeable future. He’s yet unrivaled in his singular influence among conservative voters—that’s the subtext to so many questions about Trump’s political intentions should he lose. Trump’s critics, and maybe even his own confidants, would prefer to regard Trumpism as a surreal phase with a decisive conclusion; a nightmare, for sure, but a nightmare punctuated by some proverbial daybreak. But what if Trump never ends? Four years ago, Trump defeated Clinton and even then he kept campaigning against her into the new year. Before he even launched his political career, Trump hijacked the political agenda, railing against Obama and weighing in on every political news cycle in his imperious, all-caps manner. So it’s easy to imagine Trump storming onto the South Lawn and piling into his final motorcade in January 2021, knowing he’ll never surrender the bully pulpit.
He’d have to tone it down a bit, at least. The tone he’s used on Twitter for the last four years would get him banhammered very quickly once he isn’t prez any more.
Agreed with the first priority. What about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to what South Africa did? The higher ups (Trump family, Barr, and other top level enablers) could be left out, but for EVERYONE else, there would be the promise of no prosecution, and forgiveness, as long as they came to the commission and told the absolute and complete truth of what they know.
Let it all play out - those in the lower levels who helped Trump can testify, be forgiven and then move on. Gather all the facts. Make it completely public and transparent.
Then prosecute the higher level toadies.
You don’t even need to go after Trump himself. Just show that his legacy is one of absolute corruption and garbage.
ETA: Just read your post @Senegoid Great minds and all that.
I could easily see an outfit like Fox or somesuch launching a Twitter lookalike whose whole claim to fame is “No whiny libtards; all the Trumply Truth you want in one safe space for you and all other Real Americans!” They’d have 100M subscribers pretty quickly.
Yeah, but they are so out of touch, they will probably call their new services “FoxBook”, and “Yipper”, ending up with a completely different demographic than they were expecting.
No, that is risky. I feel like social media almost hacks the human brain.
My brother screamed at his niece (a young, presumably liberal, woman), calling her a “liberal b***h”. To be fair, he is mentally challenged and isn’t American, but that’s still not okay, and this happened pretty recently. He had little enough to do with his time since COVID hit except watch Tucker Carlson and a large number of conspiracy videos on Youtube. Now he’s going around claiming the United Kingdom is spying on people by forcing them to wear bracelets with tracking chips in them, against their constitutional rights. UK has cameras all over the place, and doesn’t have a constitution, and obviously the story is not true. Also, your cell phone has a tracking function, otherwise Google Maps wouldn’t work, and most people love their cell phones.
As @Kimera757 said. if they just stayed in their bubble and stayed home that’d be fine. But they vote, the protest, they join movements like the Michigan Militia and all the rest.
Arguably the entirely to Trump’s success can be laid at the feet of social media and RW propaganda. RW propaganda got the ball rolling back in the 90s w Limbaugh et al, but social media is what converts a stationary pea into a giant boulder hurtling downhill to smash the village.
As much as it goes against what I’d like to believe (that light is the best disinfectant and all that), Reddit has shown that deplatforming works (they’ve had their own alternate networks, like Voat). The network effect is powerful. Send the nuts to their ghetto and their numbers will dwindle. They have less power to recruit new members, and less ability to retain any that they do get. The ghetto ends up devoid of content other than the extremist kind, which makes it even less interesting. So as you say, the people drift back to the network where all the interesting stuff is happening, but without the continuous radicalization. Maybe some of them even slowly deradicalize due to the lack of constant reinforcement.
And now Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announces that he wrote in Ronald Reagan on his ballot for President.
What does he think he’s proving here? It’s like he’s trying to frame a metaphor for the death of effective opposition to Trump in the Republican Party.
