Sorry, I wrote it in haste. I mean that the loss of industrial manufacturing jobs was (to some extent) offset by growth in technological and service jobs.
China - or someone - was inevitably going to catch up to the West’s technological advantage. What the West, particularly the US, is learning the hard way is that market economies don’t necessarily equate to free societies. But this lesson has fuck all to do with self-loathing, octopus.
Maintaining national and strategic advantages in a world full of competitive nations means that self-loathing is counterproductive. Furthermore, it’s highly exploitable by foreign agents. Political ‘forgiveness’, which is a ridiculous concept to begin with, isn’t going to happen because fundamentally there is a schism in western societies.
So the proper way to deal with the issue of racial bias in law enforcement is to just lie to ourselves and pretend it doesn’t happen? Or maybe we should take a more proactive approach and round up all the BLMs and put them in re-education camps like the Wegers? I agree that blind nationalism can have economic and political advantages, just look at how quickly the nazis brought Germany from the brink of economic collapse to domination of greater Europe, but I would rather settle for being second place than to lose our soul as a country.
Some “western societies” are doing a lot better than others, socially and economically, so clearly your “western self-loathing” hypothesis isn’t explaining what’s going on internationally.
So who’s responsible for self-loathing? Wait, let me guess – SJWs! After all, they’re the ones who invaded the Capitol and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th.
Oh, wait –
Not at all. There’s nothing wrong with multiple (consistent) arguments and I’m not interpreting “everything you can” as “everything under the sun”.
My position is that cooperating with Republicans (to get things done before the midterms) and bad faith tactics are the only ways to keep Republicans out of power. If Democrats don’t do at least one of the two, they will lose power in the midterms no matter how good their ground game is, IMO. I laid that out in #137 if not earlier, and neither you nor anyone else has rebutted it by showing me another way to keep Republicans out of power. Therefore, when you argue that Democrats need to keep Republicans out of power without cooperating with Republicans and without bad faith tactics, your argument reaches a dead end. As far as I am concerned you leave no ways to keep Republicans out of power, which is a contradiction.
~Max
Assume the ‘Republicans’ are marginalized successfully. The right play for conservative leaning politicians would be to join the uni-party and run as Democrats. There are enough dissatisfied Republicans that could switch over and change the make up of the Democrats.
It’s an option, and while I think most Americans won’t care in the least about obscure parliamentary procedure, I don’t like it and consider it a form of bad faith. Especially after Manchin & Sinema gave assurances. I also think it’s a real risky move, if you pull this off and fail to prevent midterm pushback in 2022, it’s going to hurt 100x worse as Biden is forced to veto, veto, veto. If you don’t restore trust in government for those millions who still question the 2020 election, you’ve just alienated them even more. Biden will get a lot of flack on the right for going where McConnell wouldn’t, and for shutting out Republicans despite his campaign promises to work with them.
I would much rather see potential obstructionism countered by strong executive actions and budgetary acts where possible, plus constant good faith outreach and a focus on more local and tangible issues. If the filibuster must go, I would rather it go back to being in-person. That will be a gold mine for campaign ads (good and bad), what with C-Span footage these days.
~Max
…well it should have.
My multiple consistent arguments are fine then. Thanks for letting me know.
My position on your position is that you have made your position crystal clear here. But bad faith tactics won’t keep Republicans out of power. Getting elected over Republican candidates will keep them out of power. Do you not see that?
IMO looking to co-operate with the people who did all the bad faith things you’ve listed in this thread (and worse) will lose the trust of the Democrat base. And the same will happen if they act in bad faith. For example going from $2000 stimulus payments to $1400 and lowering the thresh-hold is the sort of thing that will make the ground game harder and the worst thing is its an own-goal. Many Americans believed in good faith they were going to get a $2000 check. Then the Democrats essentially negotiated with themselves to decontextualize that original promise.
Others actually have dealt with the filibuster. But that misses the point that I’m not just talking about the Senate.
Nonsense. This is simply a failure of your imagination. You keep them out of power by getting voted into power. In most (but not every case because America is at best functionally disfunctional) cases that means getting more votes than them.
What part of that don’t you understand?
I’ve already told you I’m not making a big thesis statement here. My intention was never to make some sort of a grand statement, a blueprint for America. You’ve taken a simple sentence and blown out of complete proportion. 45% of Republican voters supported the insurrection at the Capitol. 3 out of every 4 Republicans believe that there was widespread voter fraud at the last election and 49% opposed Biden’s inauguration. 74 million people voted for Trump. 57% of all white voters voted for Trump. Those 74 million people voted for a party that dramatically stripped the rights of transgender people and on the way out the door tried to strip the rights of all LGBT people. That administration gleefully separated children from parents at the borders and threw up their hands when those same children went missing. The Trump administration was a revolving door of sycophant’s and loyalists but the one person who was there from start to finish was a self-declared white supremacist responsible for the cruelest and depraved decisions around immigration policy (Stephen Miller). During his term as President Trump told an estimated 30,000 outright verifiable lies. He directed hate at black and brown people and Muslims and anybody that crossed him. They literally stole PPE supplies from the states, those supplies somehow ended up in the hands of private organizations who then on-sold them back to the states for higher prices and bigger profits.
My question to you is how could you even bring yourself to negotiate with people that did all of this? Forget the bad faith tactics for a minute. How about the depraved acts of cruelty? AOC said it best (in response to Ted Cruz)
To quote Sarah Kendzior the Trump administration was a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government." They were cruel, they were incompetent, they were fundamentally corrupt, they were racist, they were transphobic, they were white supremacy incarnate.
Do I have all the answers? No I do not. Have I ever pretended to have all the answers? No I have not. Do I think that if America lets these people get supreme power again it will be much much worse than anything we saw under Trump? Yes I do. What is the best way forward? That’s for you Americans to figure out for yourselves. Most Americans will thrive under a white supremacist regime. They probably won’t notice any difference. They might even do just a little bit better.
But if that isn’t the future you want for America? Then you are going to have to fight for it. And that is all I’ve been saying.
This is a long one, I have a lot to unpack.
I’ve read your analysis and I just don’t agree with it.
I think the Democrats are in a really good place. A year ago, I would’ve never dared to dream that Democrats would be in as good of a place as they are now.
A year ago, Trump was getting a post-impeachment bounce and the Democratic primary field was in shambles. I though a second Trump term was all but inevitable. Frankly, if I had any inclination at all towards religion, if I was at all susceptible to the belief that there is a hidden force for good guiding the course of human events, the events of the past year, the turnaround, would’ve locked me in.
But we didn’t need a God. We just needed to stand back and let Trump be Trump.
I don’t think the Republican Party is dead or on life support. I think they are alive and kicking, having a civil war in a battlefield filled with quicksand and sinkholes, while a raging forest fire bears down from one side and threatened by a massive snow ledge above them. And yet they are still such creatures of habit that they’re still wasting energy threatening Democrats. Now, I don’t know which of these things will get them. It’s possible they could evade them all and emerge stronger than ever, but I don’t think they will.
Cooperation isn’t possible. You can’t mediate an abusive relationship. The Republicans have no interest in anything but limiting the amount of time the Democrats hold power and they’ll do it by any means necessary. I’d love it if they’d become partners in our quest to retain all three branches of government past 2022, but if you think they are interested in doing that you are naive, disingenuous or else your thinking is clouded by desperation. It’s a ridiculous idea.
That’s why I favor the strategy of marginalization. We can collectively use our freedom of association to cut them out of polite society.
Here’s how I see it. By summer, the pandemic will start to wind down and the economy will come roaring back. I think there’s a lot of pent up demand and a lot of the pandemic driven changes will make the post-pandemic economy leaner and more efficient.
The Republicans will have trouble getting their base to send money to stop the radical socialist Joe Biden from burning their cities in the face of all this peace and prosperity. Joe has turned out to be the perfect choice. He is his own kind of Teflon, not the mafia Teflon of Trump. It’s really hard to make hate stick to him. Trump tried for well over a year and failed to whip up a fraction of the hate he whipped up for Hillary.
In the meantime, the business community will unify behind Democrats and any sane Republicans that want to help, even unlikely allies like the Chamber of Commerce. Of course, we will still have mainstream media and the tech companies firmly on our side, helping us drive our narrative and suppress the world of alternative facts. Fox News ratings are dropping, CNN’s are rising.
Thanks for your concern…I guess…but we’re good.
But even if we weren’t in a good position, stooping to Republican level trickery is not an option. It hurts people. All the law enforcement agents Trump maligned, fired and attempted to prosecute for doing their jobs were hurt. Immigrant families that were ripped apart were hurt. Everyone Trump unfairly blamed for his misdeeds were hurt. All the random citizens that were unfortunate enough to be in a place where it was advantageous for Trump to hurt them, got hurt. The contractor whose was attacked after his van was run off the road got hurt, simply because he’d been doing work at a building where people voted. The families of Seth Rich and Joe Scarborough’s intern are real people that suffered real harm, not some sort of cardboard political targets.
Did you watch the speech Arnold Schwarzenegger gave after the insurrection? If you didn’t you really should. One of the points he made was about the psychological damage you suffer when you inflict pain on others. His description of men, broken by the violence, the pain they inflicted on others, beating their wives and children night after night, was extremely compelling.
You can’t decide you are going to be a bad person politically or professionally because it’s expedient and a good person in your personal life. That’s why we call it corruption, it’s more than just being dishonest. It’s about how those small bad acts inevitable lead to increasingly larger bad acts until they change your essential nature, change who you are.
I live in this country and I want it to be a good place to live. But more importantly, I live inside my own head, and that is a really good place to live. Frankly, it’s awesome. I approach life with kindness and compassion, strength and resolve and humor. I’m good company for myself, if I have any emotional weakness it may be that I can’t grasp the concept of loneliness.
You might be able to destroy the world around me, but you can’t take away the world inside me. That world is under my control And I’m not going to be coerced into destroying it. I’d rather be a good person in a corrupt world than a corrupt person in a corrupt world.
(jumps up to give standing ovation)
Seconded.
Thirded.
We can and will win this one. As long as we don’t get stupid, or let stupid set the agenda.
I don’t believe that is a fair assessment for the majority of the Jan. 6 invaders, nor the Republicans in general. They believe they are the defenders of democracy. They have been lied to for so long, they believe voter fraud is rampant, that Democrats rely on voter fraud to win by all the nefarious tricks we’ve all heard about. They honestly believe that people are systematically voting multiple times, stealing identities to vote, not reporting dead people and using their voter ID card, that illegal immigrants are voting, etc. They are so disconnected from reality that they cannot accept when even Republican government officials tell them it isn’t true.
They won’t listen to Bill Barr tell them the election was not rigged, because Donald Trump says it was. That fits their preconceived ideas, and it comes from their cult idol. It must be true, no matter what anyone else says.
The bulk of the crowd at the Capitol believe the big lie. If democracy really is being stolen, what would you do to “stop the steal”?
This is unnecessary. Clearly Max_S means Democrats, not you specifically. I mean, unless you think he thinks you are a congressman.
Yes, but the way to deal with them may be different. Bring them back to reality about voting, and they stop being part of the problem.
I know, that sounds like I think it’s simple - I do not. I fully understand the root is a distorted information bubble that reaches back decades. The right wing media machine has been systematically creating an alternate world. I do not know how to go about reaching them. But reaching some of them is necessary if we want to reduce tensions. We absolutely have to restore voter confidence.
Unfortunately, the Republicans will sell that as more disenfranchisement, more obstacles to voting, especially in minority communities. We cannot let the need to restore confidence rest on the idea that fraud is rampant. We absolutely need to break that idea. Because of we don’t, it s doesn’t matter how much voter suppression there is, conservatives will still believe any Democratic wins are suspect.
I agree, the Republicans are not good faith participants. The few that are, that have integrity, are being chased out and overruled by the power-mongers like Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, and by the ideologies like Greene. And the state level is worse.
It truly and demonstrably was in Georgia. We didn’t storm the state Capitol.
But yes, they have abandoned democracy. Democracy means that you accept the results of the election. The said that they weren’t going to ahead of time, and convinced themselves that it was stolen.
It’s easy to say that they believed it was stolen, but why is that? Not because of any evidence, not because of any sort of actual factual basis, but simply because they couldn’t believe that they lost.
If someone is going to mount an insurrection solely on the basis that they didn’t believe that they lost, then that is not democracy, and they are not defending it, they have abandoned it.
Something else that should get far more attention: democracy also means that all participants agree to fair play, not just in counting and certifying the votes, but also in terms of not obstructing the vote to begin with and not trying to interfere with the votes of others, out of fear that they might against you.
The insurrection on January 6th actually found its footing in the voter suppression efforts that have long been tolerated, encouraged, and normalized by Republicans up and down the party, including people like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. When a party begins supporting voter ID requirements based on baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, it begins making the case for an insurrection to stop voter fraud, regardless of whether they intended to go that far with those claims or not.
This is something that all Republicans own, IMO.
Before the election a few of us were observing how confident the Trump supporters/voters were. Despite there being little basis for being so. I wonder how much of that mentality factored into the disbelieving rage that erupted in the aftermath of Nov. 3.
There is no “both sides” in the “looking at reality” comparisons. The right suffers from it far worse and it is a viable threat to the nation.
Exactly, the Republicans have been doing their best to subvert democracy for decades. They stopped believing in it far before the 6th. The 6th was not the beginning of their rejection of accepting elections, it was the culmination.