But they can. Unlikely for Democrats to stay in power [nationwide], impossible for Democrats to stay in power [at the state level] (because Democrats are not currently in power at the state level).
How?
not appointing Republican congressmen/women to committee chairs - which is normal considering that the Democrats control Congress
not cooperating with Republicans on legislation (?) (don’t you need their votes?)
discounting opinions of people who question the 2020 election out of hand (?) (don’t you need their votes, too? won’t that lead to unrest?)
You are approaching something tangible. But “fighting voter suppression” (in court) will not be very effective because, thanks to President Trump, the courts are stacked against you. From the Supremes down to district level.
What I meant is that normally, when a political party controls Congress, members of that party will chair all of the Congressional committees.
Don’t you need their votes to pass meaningful legislation?
And try to sustain a democracy where a perpetual 30-40% of the population doesn’t trust elections?
The average insurrectionist. There’s a phrase you never heard prior to the Trump so-called administration. Anyway, you said if we only met their needs, most of that would go away. I wondered, specifically, “what needs?” I see there is nothing specific you have in mind.
That may be what you were thinking, but respectfully, that’s not your most recent question.
I can’t guess what specific needs must be met for a specific person unless I know what’s going on with that specific person. At the very least I would have to be able to talk with them.
…I mean, I’m not writing a thesis here. I’ve already outlined the core of what needs to be done.
What part of “fight like hell” are you not understanding?
Yes the odds are stacked against you. They control the courts, the control the states, control of the Senate and the House is on a knife edge. I get that.
But you’ve got one side that has no intention of bipartisanship, that will lie, cheat, steal and gaslight to retain power. You can either look to co-operate with them (which would mean they would steamroll right over the top of you) or fight like hell. Even if the odds are against you. For many people in America: the poor, the marginalized, black communities, they are literally fighting for their lives. One of the last thing Trump did on his way out the door was roll back protections for LGBT people. If Trump had won again he would have rolled back more. If the Democrats hadn’t taken Georgia then they would be stacking the courts even further. They had to fight like hell, fight against the odds to achieve both of those things. And they can’t stop fighting now because the other side is never going to stop either.
I’m not American. I don’t need anybody’s vote.
You cannot sustain a democracy if you pander to 30-40% of people who do not want a democracy. Even if it leads to unrest. You fight like hell to keep them out of power.
Yes. While the 9/11 attacks were frightening, they were never an existential threat to the country. The insurrectionists and their ilk are. For better or worse, the U.S. has a large and well-funded security apparatus. It is going to be brought to bear against the clear threat.
I don’t think this is necessarily true, especially not the last part. Cooperating with Republicans does not mean letting them write the whole law to their liking. Pandering to some Republican concerns does not mean pandering to all of them.
Do you want America to pass meaningful legislation? If so, wouldn’t you need Republican votes in order to achieve that goal?
I don’t think most of the people who question the 2020 election want to do away with democracy.
Unfortunately, if they’re so misinformed and detached from reality that they can’t tell that “questioning the election” is a bunch of fact-free bullshit, then they are not all that different, in functional terms, from people who do want to do away with democracy.
The more deluded idiots you’ve got, the fewer consciously committed anti-democracy ideologues you need.
…I mean you just finished telling me that you wouldn’t be able to do much against voter suppression because the republicans had stacked the courts. Do you not see the disconnect here? When the republicans have power they either move forward with their agenda or block everything else. It’s how they stacked the courts. It’s why Garland was denied a hearing because it was “too close to the election” but Barrett got seated even while the american people were voting.
They ignored the deficit while trump & Co added trillions. But now Biden is president it’s time to close the purse strings. 400,000 americans died on their watch. I don’t think you could show me more than a handful of times they have negotiated in good faith in the last 12 years. Why assume things would be different now?
What we have learned since Obama is that the republicans, almost universally, cannot be treated in good faith. The ones that can, like Walsh that I quoted from earlier, have already left. From Walsh today:
That’s how they treated “one of their own.” A Tea Party guy who all but called Obama a Muslim. They shouted him down for 15 minutes until he had to leave the room. This isn’t the party fringe. This is the mainstream. The party you once knew is gone. It belongs to MAGA now.
Lets go back to how you originally characterized this.
What was there to question about the 2020 election? Every state certified the results. 61 out of 62 lawsuits failed. So can you be specific here about why we should be listening to people questioning the 2020 election? Why should we treat it as anything other than a Qanon Talking Point?
Because the people who “question the 2020 election” are also the people who refuse to admit that Biden won the last election. And those people include many that are now sitting in the House and the Senate. It doesn’t matter if they privately know and acknowledge that Biden won. They pretend that he didn’t to keep the faithful in their camp.
So based on everything we have seen happen since the early stages of the Obama era do you think the Democrats can take any that is said in any negotiations with the Republicans in good faith? Why bother going down that path when we have seen what happens time and time again?
The issue here is that those who question that election do not even realise they want to do away with democracy.
They are hell bent on making changes that provide the result they want, and to them that IS democracy, the right has redifined the term democracy to mean what they want it to mean.
What they are actually seeking, even without knowing it, is the type of ‘democracy’ as practised in Russia - where any oppositions canidadate can be imprisoned on baseless trumped (hehe) up charges and even if cleared by the courts their challenge will be over since you cannot campaign from prison.
Look at Russian version of democracy and then look at the right - what you will see is the ambition of one to achieve the other - there is no doubt whatsoever that the right would change the constitution to exclude competition, they have packed the Supreme Court, and they would absolutely continue to compromise the integrity and independence of the judiciary, they would back this up with compromising the police, any states wishing to challenge any of this would definitely lose all federal funding.
In the end what you would have as the only alternative power to the Republicans is the military - its not a long journey from that scenario to the Burmese model of ‘democracy’ where the results are not convenient so the army takes over.
Well, if they don’t think the person that won ( and once again, it wasn’t a particularly close election, Biden won by large margins) should be allowed to be President, then they do. It’s definitional.
I’m not saying they have to like it. Of course they don’t. I didn’t like it when Trump won. But I accepted it.
I think that there will be some idiotic individuals, and probably some small groups, who kill a bunch of people in the name of MAGA.
It’s not going to overthrow the govt, or start a civil war. It will even probably turn anyone not entirely brainwashed into the MAGA cult against them.
What there is not going to be is a MAGA army marching down the street and occupying or overturning governments.
You really shouldn’t do that, you know why? Because:
They aren’t stupid. They may believe in some delusional things, but that doesn’t make them stupid. That makes them dangerous.
My sister doesn’t think that we’ve been to the moon, is very religious, doesn’t believe in evolution, is pretty MAGA through and through. And yet, she is the General Manager of a pretty major local hotel, with over a hundred employees, and (pre-COVID) hundreds of guests.
Being delusional doesn’t mean that one is stupid, and you put yourself in a precarious position by dismissing them that way.
Those would be good reasons to support the party that wants to reform healthcare and provide jobs for those who can work, and a safety net for those who can’t.
Right, but it is due to the party that they support that those needs are not met, so it’s not really rational on their part.
Or they need to be convinced by the media that they choose to consume that things are broken and radical change is needed.
If there is a civil war between “Republicans vs the entire US govt and the military” I don’t know exactly what it will be about, I suspect it will be about a number of issues, because I think you’d need that for “Republicans” as a group to get behind it. Would it ONLY be because Trump lost? I doubt it. There’s been chatter about civil war II well before Trump lost and republicans had several branches of govt, so who knows? I mean, there’s still a sizeable percentage of republicans (multi-millions) that think the election was stolen, but I don’t know how many of those are incensed enough about that to do anything about it. Probably not many.