Drew Magary, late of Deadspin, wrote a thing in Medium, mostly trashing Pete Buttigieg. I don’t agree with every criticism Magary makes of Buttigieg, but these lines about the case Buttigieg and others make for bipartisan unity jumped out at me:
Do you wanna know something about partisanship? Partisanship is good. Partisanship is the whole reason we have a democracy. I have no interest in finding common ground with fucking Trump voters or with other assorted white supremacists. I have no interest in making sure those groups don’t feel demonized. I have no interest in making them feel COMFORTABLE when they have made so many Americans, and the world beyond, feel the precise opposite. I’m allowed to be angry at the state of things and I’m sure as hell allowed to loudly call out those responsible for it.
Will we ever again have the sort of America where Democrats and Republicans have civil disagreements over tax rates and the scope of the social safety net? I honestly don’t know. It’s not impossible, but I believe it will take the utter defeat and rebuilding of the Republican Party before we get there.
It’s sort of like how the Western allies from WW2 were able to establish ties with post war-Germany and Japan. We stomped the fascism out of them first, at great cost on all sides. Then they rejoined the family of democratic nations.
You can quibble with HOW we defeated them, and I’d agree with some of those quibbles. But engineering their utter defeat was necessary. We can’t skip that step with the Republican Party. Anyone who says we can is lying to you.
Now, I suspect Mayor Pete, Joe Biden and other pols who say we can move forward as a nation past the Trump era by entering some mythical state of unity are just angling to peel off the unaffiliated. Maybe they sincerely don’t believe we can engineer Republicans’ utter defeat without winning a conventional-style election and then incrementally shoring democratic institutions up to withstand the next onslaught from a Republican demagogue.
Could they be correct? It took decades for the Republican Party to become the type of organization that rallies around an openly corrupt, leering, sneering, lawless, incompetent demagogue, and maybe it’ll take years to walk its rank-and-file back. I don’t think it works that way, though. I think we’re better off being post post-partisan and asking the swing voters who decide elections to pick a goddamned side.
People who voted for Trump to “shake things up” or out of economic anxiety exist, IMO, but not in the numbers pundits assume, and in any case, Democrats have no responsibility to offer them absolution for supporting a racist, sexist xenophobe, and I’m not convinced there’s anything to be gained from doing so.
Coddling those voters is an insult to the people harmed by Trump in a thousand different ways, so while paying occasional lip service to bipartisanship is one thing, making “unity” a central feature of a 2020 campaign misses the moment. Trump voters can choose to help defeat Trump this go-round or continue supporting him. That’s the choice, and the sooner we find out how large our plurality of fascists is, the clearer our future as a nation will be.
Baud
Amir Khalid
The Republican party has shown again and again it doesn’t want to deal fairly with any Democrat. At this stage, trying yet agan would only make the latter look like patsies.
JPL
Every democratic candidate should be running against the asshole of a president. Kamala is doing a good job at that and Joe does at times. Love him or hate him, he does point out trump’s weaknesses. The biggest problem I have with Warren is she is talking solely about her policies. Hillary constantly talked about her plans, and guess what the voters wanted a fighter. By the time Hillary started fighting back it was to late.
zhena gogolia
Here’s my nonpartisan statement of fact — Nikki Haley should STFU and go away
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nikki-haley-claims-top-aides-tried-to-recruit-her-to-save-the-country-by-undermining-trump/2019/11/10/f92bac88-0267-11ea-9518-1e76abc088b6_story.html?wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
Baud
@JPL:
That’s seems a bit revisionist to me.
debbie
@JPL:
Good point.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Good point — the only room for that sort of debate today is inside the one party that’s interested in governing. That’s unhealthy for a democracy.
Citizen Alan
PREACH! As I’ve said for years, the number one thing I’m looking for in 2020 is a Democratic candidate who understands that the GOP is the Enemy and it must be Defeated if our democracy is to survive. That’s why I support either EW or KH* and then everyone else. Appeasers like Biden and Buttegieg need not apply.
*Wilmer’s not an appeaser, he’s an unwitting collaborator, which is worse, IMO>
JPL
@zhena gogolia: I just read that. Well bless her heart but she is quite full of herself.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: She’s not dumb enough to believe Trumpism is sustainable, so she tries to play both sides. I hope it blows up in her face.
JPL
@Baud: Early on during the primaries CNN would be streaming Hillary and break away to cover trump’s rallies. Hillary’s were not exciting enough for them.
lollipopguild
You not only have to burn the GOP to the ground you have to burn Fox News to the ground. I do not see how our country stays together as a democracy when you have Fox and the GOP doing their level best to turn the country into a one party kleptocracy.
Ramiah Ariya
I think the GOP does not exist without Fox News. It is clear that almost every angle tried out by the GOP since this Ukrainian scandal broke has been mainly to give enough juice to Fox News, so that Fox can then propagandize it to its audience. When Trump and allies try to unmask the whistleblower, it is simply so that information can then be used to smear him/her on Fox News.
The GOP, at this point, is simply the Fox News Party, and its core voters are the Fox News audience.
Fox is going to exist no matter who gets elected from the Democratic side and so nothing is going to change with respect to the GOP’s virulence.
Bruce K
I’ve been thinking for a few years now that the only way we’re going to get a sane American two-party system going forwards, after the Tea Party, Garland, and the rise of Trump, is if both parties find their origins in the mitosis of the Democratic Party, perhaps into its conservative and liberal wings. The GOP, in its current form, is going to destroy America as we know it, probably within the next ten to fifteen years, definitely by 2050, unless it is destroyed as a political force.
Baud
@JPL:
True. But that has nothing to do with your original comment.
zhena gogolia
@Ramiah Ariya:
I’m not sure if he was the first to suggest it, but George Conway says Bloomberg would do a better thing for the country if he just bought Fox News (and I presume shut it down or turned it over to Al Franken).
germy
@JPL:
JPL
@Baud: Well I am voting for the one that calls the current president a sociopath and his supporters ill formed cult followers. I’m still waiting to see who that will be.
debbie
@JPL:
That’s what makes her a Republican. //
Baud
@JPL:
Trump is a sociopath and his supporters are ill formed cult followers.
B.B.A.
Republicans… can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em.
JPL
@Baud: You have my vote. The GA primary is after super Tuesday so the vote might not help much, but who know
Scott
First you got to realized the Republican Party is not the Republican Party. It is playing host to malignant organism that last manifested itself through George Wallace. The question is, how to you kill that malignant organism?
Mike in DC
1. Beat an incumbent Republican president by double-digits, ala FDR beating Hoover.
2. Win or hold serve in the subsequent couple midterms
3. Have consecutive two-term Democratic presidents
4. Get control of the Senate and of SCOTUS, abolishing the legislative filibuster if necessary
5. Pass sweeping, popular policy changes that improve the lives of most citizens
If you do all of that, Republicans (some of them) will come to the table, and the ones running for office will start to moderate their tone and policy proposals(some of them, somewhat). If they don’t, they will go extinct as a party. I’d like to think we could start the ball rolling next year.
RepubAnon
It takes two to negotiate. Unless and until the Republican Party is interested in negotiation rather than partisan warfare, all that the “post-partisan” folks are doing is looking weak and indecisive.
To my mind, the current state of affairs began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Needing a boogieman with which to scare their voters, Newt Gingrich began demonizing Democrats. Until Republicans stop campaigning on hatred of Democrats, and start campaigning on their vision for the future, there is no basis for negotiation.
Of course, the Republican plan of tax cuts for the rich, and returning the country to the worst days of the Gilded Age won’t win elections if expressed clearly – unless they can stoke up enough fear and hatred in their base to make the alternatives seem more threatening.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
You’ll say anything for a vote, won’t you? You’d definitely have mine if it counted in America.
schrodingers_cat
@Ramiah Ariya:This is too simplistic. Fox News is just an outlet for the exhibition of the underlying pathology. There was no Fox News when slaves were counted as 3/5 human or when the slaves states declared that they were the Confederacy and tried to leave the Union.
There were fucking two soporific TV channels when BJP-Sangh mobs destroyed a 400 plus year old mosque. Blaming TV is much too easy.
West of the Rockies
Fretting over the delicate feelings of people who wears”Fuck Your Feelings!” shirts is ludicrous.
That being said, deciding to never again engage with a swath of 65,000,000 Americans seems ill-advised. Maybe it’s a conversation conservatives need to have among themselves (how to return their party to some sort of decency and intellectual integrity).
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: They also love him for his assholishness and cruelty.
sdhays
Did this America ever really exist? Supposedly, this describes the Reagan era and I suppose the Clinton era, but the Reagan era was powered by an ugly white backlash against the Civil Rights advances in the 60’s. Talking about “welfare queens”, ignoring the AIDS epidemic, committing bits of light treason to get elected and then more serious bits of high crimes to get around Congress. And the Clinton era was horribly partisan; the Republicans weren’t focused on having arguments on tax policy because they actually lost those arguments. They focused on wounding President Clinton, and they eventually did because he couldn’t keep his pants on.
I think if the “post-partisan” era existed at all, it only existed for white, straight (mostly male) people who could focus on the abstract arguments (or simply ignore policy changes because they didn’t directly affect them). And since our media was (and still is too a considerable degree) dominated by those people, that’s what they remember.
MattF
Lately, I’ve been thinking back to the way it was in the 1920s… We now tend to view things like the censorship, Prohibition, the Scopes trial, the urban criminality, the bigotry against immigrants, the proto-fascism, as all rather quaint and amusing. But viewed from the perspective of here and now, they weren’t. Same sorts of conflicts, really– what we’re seeing now isn’t new, not by a long shot.
geg6
You and Magery can come sit by me. Because that’s exactly where I’m at. Fuckem, as a wise man once told me.
CaseyL
@Scott: I’m in favor of radical surgery: destroy all the affected parts. None of this kinder-gentler shit.
Seriously: We have had demagogues up the wazoo many times, it’s not exactly a new or unprecedented thing.
The problem is, in the previous times we’ve had them, it usually took a major convulsion to get rid of them. At the very least, assassination (Huey Long). At worst, organized armed conflict (Civil War, and WWII – which quieted, for a time, the US’ domestic fascists).
I don’t see another organized armed conflict anytime soon, since the problem is too diffuse: it doesn’t effect enough people horribly enough on a daily basis for enough people to throw away their daily lives and take to the barricades.
Low-intensity warfare… well, we already have that, via stochastic white nationalist terrorism. But, again, so far that hasn’t radicalized/mobilized a critical mass of the population.
I do see an increase in low-intensity warfare once climate change makes continuing our ordinary lives impossible. Sometime in the next 10 years, probably, when potable water becomes scarce and the entire Southwest becomes essentially uninhabitable.
boatboy_srq
@Scott: Still the party of Reagan, and before him Nixon, and before him Dulles, and before him Harding. The recent racist Xtianism swing only puts a lily-white Gun-Totin’ Capitalist White Jeebus veneer on the sexism, greed, fraud, xenophobia and isolationism. They have not left the rest behind, they’ve merely added to it.
Mandalay
@JPL:
My recollection is different.
I (incorrectly) believed that she would win easily, and (naively) thought that she was spending way too much time nit picking his antics, and attacking Trump instead of trying to win over voters with her policies. I saw her approach in attacking Trump as seriously flawed – condescending, and sadly shaking her head when she should have been gouging his eyes out and stomping on his nuts – but I’m pretty sure she fought back all through the campaign.
More fool me, but I’m still confident that there are plenty of accounts of Clinton attacking Trump throughout the campaign.
sdhays
@Bruce K: The only way this works is if all the people who currently vote Republican leave the voting electorate forever. There’s really only one way that happens reliably, and it’s too ugly to speak of.
schrodingers_cat
Buttigieg has cornered one constituency, the media bot and pundits. I think he is bored as a mayor, he will probably graduate to being a TV know it all who will criticize elected Ds for not being bipartisan enough.
Citizen Alan
@JPL:
Hell, didn’t they once cut away from Hillary speaking to an empty podium where they were waiting for Shitgibbon to show up?
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
Should have done the same thing with the Confederacy. I get why that wasn’t done, and even if Lincoln lives and finishes out his second term (so, no President Johnson) something like Reconstruction probably happens anyway, since white supremacy was and is not just a Southern thing. But if we had…
boatboy_srq
@BC @top: To kill off the GOTea aka God’s Own (Pwned?) Party will take not only the party’s ignominious defeat but a sustained propaganda detoxification effort and removal of dark money from campaigning. They would not be where they are now without their own propaganda arm, now in its third decade of brainwashing. And they could not get where they are without wealthy fascists funding their campaigns and think tanks and other skullduggery. The whole machine – election mill, Newspeak Press, false reaearch mills and all – needs to be taken down if we are to be successful.
JaySinWA
@zhena gogolia: I found her admissions somewhat helpful in confirming the messiah complex of Kelly and Tillerson. Most of it was self serving, of course, but having an insider chip away at the Trump support group helps, I think. Let them all run their mouths.
Uncle Cosmo
@zhena gogolia: If Faux Noise were broken up or bought out, Stinklair would suck up the bazillionaires’ pocket change & metastasize into the Global Oligarchy Project’s mouthpiece.
The biggest problem for the forces of sanity is that not only do we need a rout at the ballot box that will send the fascists slithering back under their rocks, we will need to post guards with shotguns over those rocks for the next generation to blast them into component atoms if they so much as stick a forked tongue out.
Good luck with that. The bulk of our voters will (just like in November 2008) cheer loudly on Election Night … & go home & fire up Netflix figuring they’ve done their duty. And two years later we’ll get Tea Party 2.0. Great wealth never dies, never stops seeking more power, & stoops to whatever depth of dishonesty & depravity is required to get authoritarian-follower types to goose-step to their tune. Our voters are mostly allergic to politics & will always find something better to do with their time until the wolf is at the door.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: * bots
Bill Arnold
Been looking at a recent hive of papers on information warfare attacks on democracies by autocracies, a subset of links below.
So far I haven’t seen any of them point out that autocratic elements within existing democracies might/could/would use these tactics to transform their democracy to an autocracy. Including actively wedging existing divisions, creating new divisions, and attacking election apparatuses (both legally and illegally) to make people lose confidence in democracy. The civilian sector (that wants democracy to continue) in the US needs to take the lead on this IMO. Maybe this is old ground for political scientists, using different vocabulary (I am not one).
Toward an Information Operations Kill Chain (Bruce Schneier, April 24, 2019)
Seven Commandments of Fake News – New York Times exposes Kremlin’s methods (November 21, 2018)
Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy (Henry Farrell, Bruce Schneier, October 2018) (direct pdf link)
Protecting Democracy in an Era of Cyber Information War (PDF, Joseph S. Nye, February, 2019)
Russian Information Warfare: Implications for Deterrence Theory (Media Ajir, Bethany Vailliant, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Fall 2018)
justawriter
Mayor Pete and Old Joe should ask Grover Norquist what he thinks of bipartisanship.
Dev Null
@Amir Khalid:
Nice burn! :-)
trollhattan
Magary’s right, full stop. This shit started with Nixon and even Goldwater before that, and we now live in the culmination of their dream Republican Party. Fox is their enabler but aren’t specifically responsible for the current mess because it predates them.
In they-get-all-the-fun news, spouse and kiddo both met Nancy SMASH last night and she apparently was really sweet. They also met our congresswoman and chatted with her a good long while. They were volunteers at a DNC fundraiser and are pondering which of the old people present were the Moneybags.
sdhays
@schrodingers_cat:
That doesn’t seem fair. The pivot towards being more bipartisan seems more tactical to me than anything else. Of course, I really don’t pay him that much attention because I still can’t bring myself to believe that we’ll nominate a mayor of some tiny city in Indiana. So what do I know? But I think you’re right about him being bored. He could be a great governor for Indiana, but he didn’t think he had a chance, so he had to jump to the only truly national contest. My hope is that when he does not win the nomination for President, he takes his name recognition and donor list and makes a big run for a statewide office in Indiana.
Biden, on the other hand, scares me more on this score – I think he truly does believe, to some degree at least, that his friends in the nihilistic death cult we call the Republican Party can be saved, and they can’t. I think he’ll waste time trying to save them and throw them life preservers when he should be throwing them anvils. They need to be metaphorically stomped on the electoral curb for at least a generation in order to draw them out of the cult.
trollhattan
@JaySinWA:
It seems vaguely possible they fear getting caught in a whirlpool of Trump team convictions, having been at a minimum witness to myriad crimes and criminal conspiracies, if not actual participants.
sdhays
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: I really do wonder how much different the country might have been if Lincoln had been able to finish his second term.
opiejeanne
@JPL: they broke away from Hillary to cover TRUMP’S EMPTY PODIUM!
How exactly is that Hillary’s fault, when the MSM can’t be fucking bothered to show her on tv?
laura
We have generations of people who willingly allow hate radio and faux to take a dump in their heads all day, every day.
Legions of grandparents riled up, scared angry and horny.
They won’t give it up voluntarily. There’s no common ground with that lot.
Major Major Major Major
The Marshall Plan aimed to prevent communist or fascist states from forming in the countries in question by preventing the economic conditions that made people authoritarian-curious and susceptible to demagoguery. I believe it was a success. I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to claim that the same might be true for Trump voters! We don’t have to grind them into dust first. They’re fellow Americans, I don’t understand what the sentiment even means?
More likely they are channeling Obama, who said this sort of stuff all the time, it was central to his 2008 campaign.
ArchTeryx
@sdhays: I speak of it all the time. They’re the ones issuing “liberal hunting permits” and speaking fascist eliminationist rhetoric. If it comes down to cleansing the rural parts of the country of the malignant rot, I’m down with that. If they won’t accept our offered hand up, throw them into the meat grinder. It’s what they want to do with us. It’s what they’ve been trying to do to ME all my life.
ETA: I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I keep a rifle around for a very good reason. I live on the edge of rural New York State, an area full of Trumpanzees and gun nuts. They come for me and mine, let the bodies fall where they may.
Sister Golden Bear
I feel no obligation to play nice to people who — at best — want me, and people like me (including Mayor Pete), eradicated from public life.
Fuck ‘em. And curb stomp ‘em at the ballot box.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat:
I had no idea that 20% of Iowa caucus-goers were media bots and pundits.
johnnybuck
@RepubAnon:
It truly is the party of Gingrich, opportunistic, craven, devoid of ethics or grand strategy. It will not be fixed, it must be overcome.
Betty Cracker
@Major Major Major Major: You’re right — Obama did say similar stuff in 2008, and I bought it back then. IIRC, he couched it in terms of finally healing the American wounds of the Vietnam era, no more “hippies vs. squares” bullshit in 2008. I was so ready to hear that in 2008, having lived with the political fallout of a decade I barely remember for my entire adult life.
Well, guess what? Obama was wrong about that. The Republicans he reached out to again and again tried to chop his arm off every goddamned time. I believe one of Obama’s former senate colleagues, a Republican whom he appointed to his cabinet in the spirit of bipartisanship (name escapes me — Judd maybe?), ended up trashing Obama and throwing in with the deranged tea party loons.
That said, I take your point about the Marshall Plan, and to put that in the context of my post-WW2 analogy, I’d definitely like to see Democrats defeat Republicans utterly as a political force and then invest in red states — all states, but including red states — in the form of broadband, better education, healthcare, etc. As you noted, they’re fellow Americans.
Tom Q
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: I’d argue that where we are today is precisely the same place we were at the time of the Confederacy — the actual states of the rebellion (now excluding VA, saints be praised) have aligned with their Northern sympathizers to hobble American society ever since Andrew Johnson and his successors let them slip accountability (culminating in the corrupt bargain of 1876, where Republicans allowed the South to institute 90 years of Jim Crow simply to grab one more presidential term). The influence of this coalition has waxed and waned over the centuries, depending on the county’s overriding needs — the Depression enabled FDR to submerge the Confederacy’s agenda (to a degree) in the name of the national good. But the passage of true Civil Rights legislation by a Democratic president enabled Republicans to form the most unholy of coalitions — the greed of the robber barons hitched to the racism of the Jim Crow South; basically, the worst of each party welded together. And Trump is the apotheosis of this coalition.
So, to Betty’s point: while I understand the Biden/Buttgieg tactic of trying to appear the reasonable, “we can get along again” candidate to appeal to that bipartisan niche, I don’t think it’s possible now — the GOP coalition, like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, has been fed too often, and its appetite is out of control. It’ll have to be thrashed in repeated elections, till it’s forced out of all but small, ineffective regional spots.
If you look at the history of America through the 1840s and 1850s, you see a whole bunch of presidents (8 in the 24 years between Jackson and Lincoln) all basically trying NOT to fight the Civil War. But the Confederates made that, finally, impossible. I think we’ve been, symbolically/intellectually, trying to avoid the final battles of that war over recent decades. Trump and the party he heads have forced us to the point where the battle must be engaged. I only hope the victory consists of mostly the electoral sort, not actual bloodshed.
.
Robmassing
I’m old enough to remember 3 months ago when Mayor Pete was saying we can’t go “back to normal” because “normal” led us to this moment of crisis
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Not everyone can grow corn.
scav
Compromise (and thus bipartisanship) is a tactic, not a goal. “I’ll meet you halfway.” is not a destination unless you’re tryin to go nowhere. And that’s even under the ideal conditions of meeting up with someone willing to work with you and likely to uphold promises made.
Beautifulplumage
The trumpies I know are black/white thinkers who hate the gray area of decisions based on ethics. I suspect they are “law & order” types because they don’t trust their own moral compass. They are also more into religions that tell them how to think and emphasises the “us versus them” dichotomy rather than personal spiritual exploration & growth.
Elizabelle
No time to read the thread just now (sorry!), but I don’t think you make any progress until you take Fox News and the worst of rightwing media out of the mix. Break up Facebook and dial down 24/7 cable, too. It’s way more a hurt than a help. Commercial interests should not be allowed to overtake public interest like this.
Fox and Rush, etc. brainwashed and radicalized these voters to be ready for a Trump, and whatever worse follows him, and RW media’s continued existence makes communicating with Trump voters that much harder.
You cannot have a democracy with brainwashed zombies, but that is where we find ourselves. Think how much more progress — or just holding steady — we could have if we could engage in a productive conversation. But — no.
charon
@sdhays:
Father time and the grim reaper, this is a pretty elderly demographic.
Elizabelle
@Tom Q: The Weekly Sift blogpost, from 2014: Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Amir Khalid: It works. I write Baud in for everything in all elections.
mrmoshpotato
@JPL:
Hell, CNN broadcast hours upon hours of an empty Trump podium. Sometimes they’d have Hillary’s or Bernie’s speech in a window with no sound if one of them was giving a speech at the time, but CNN literally showed hours of an EMPTY FUCKING PODIUM across several of Dump’s campaign stops.
Kent
Honestly, this isn’t about the MAGA folk and their ilk. They are mostly just powerless followers who are jumping on the bandwagon.
As others have noted, it’s about FOX news, but also Sinclair Broadcasting, and Koch Industries, and ALEC and the Federalist Society and the Southern Baptist Convention, and Facebook, and dozens of right-wing billionaires, and every other damn moneyed right-wing group that is pushing forward its own interest and power ahead of that of the country.
I don’t have the answer but I know it has nothing to do with going door to door in MAGA country trying to convince simple folk to vote a different way.
Citizen_X
@Mandalay: I distinctly remember Hillary saying that something less than half of Trump’s supporters were “deplorables” (understating the problem, it turns out), and the media had a collective fainting spell in response. So yeah.
Another Scott
A few things, after reading some of the comments. (I haven’t read the Medium piece.)
1) Gingrich was after Democrats for a very long time. He was elected to Congress in 1978. Georgia Republicans loved to demonize people like Ted Kennedy (and Kennedy didn’t mind being a punching bag for southern Democrats because he knew how the game was played).
2) It’s up to the Republican party to figure out what it wants to be going forward.
3) Politics is tribal for most people. It takes a lot to get people to change their voting habits. It’s not a level playing field or a debating society where people weigh the evidence and vote. Most people don’t have time for the nitty-gritty of politics and position papers. Those tens of millions of votes that Donnie got weren’t for his contradictory positions on just about anything…
4) Most people don’t form their political views based on logic and reason. “George Washington could not tell a lie.” Etc. We need to have the facts and the science and the logic and the laws and the norms on our side. But we also need to have a compelling American story to tell. The GOP has been masters at good stories for a long time. We’re getting better, but we need to be better still.
I said too much about my present views on Mayor Pete earlier today, so I won’t belabor them.
So, what do we do? Fight to get every vote we can for every seat that we can via tailored messages. If that means rhetorically burning down the GOP in Lefty McLeftishland, then do it. If it means holding hands with the GOP on some issues and singing Kumbaya in Wyoming, then do it. It’s a long slog, but it’s important.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
At one point they sorta did want to compromise.
It was a long, long time ago and it wasn’t unanimous but the concept was there. But you are correct that no longer exists. They spent too many years making out every program and idea that democrats came up with to reasonably legislate and govern for all the people as against everything they believe in. Which as we see, it is. Because they believe, not in bettering mankind but bettering some few of mankind’s bank accounts is the highest form of responsible governing. They believe in exactly what vlad has done with Russia. Selective capitalism I believe it’s called. And it’s what billionaires do everywhere.
mrmoshpotato
@RepubAnon:
They’d need a vision for the future first. Mocking Obama for wanting spicy mustard on a burger or screaming about desperate migrants and abortion and “Democrats want to give all your tax dollars to brown people!” is no vision.
mrmoshpotato
@Amir Khalid: You don’t think Baud! 2020! is active in Malaysia? :)
Another Scott
BTW, there was an excellent Fresh Air episode a couple of days ago. “How the Fugitive Slave Sct paved the way for the Civil War”.
The sound-bite thesis is that the Constitution stitched together two very different countries, so there was an inherent conflict whenever slaves escaped to the North.
In a way, we’re still two different countries today. We need to find a way to move forward even with our differences. As satisfying as burning down the national GOP would be, it won’t solve the problem of our divisions. We need to work on achievable goals.
Cheers,
Scott.
Anya
You know who else thought Trump presidency was a good idea because Trump would “shake things up”? Robert Gates – Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense. I feel like someone should shove a microphone right into his face and ask him to tell us what he thinks about how things are shaken up now.
JPL
@opiejeanne: It wasn’t her fault and I should have been clearer. MSM owned it . What frustrated me was after her loss they complained that she didn’t speak about her plans and ideas. I’m still mad but at least I have Baud to vote for this time in the primary.
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: IMO it should be prophylactic as well as reactive—we should fight to defeat right-wing authoritarianism as a political force, as well as implement policies wherever we happen to get said power that improve economic and social welfare for everybody. People hate to hear it but there really is an economic component to people’s willingness to throw in with authoritarians… not everybody, of course, and many authoritarians are just evil, but it’s fairly well documented that lack of economic opportunities in other countries makes terrorism more seductive, for instance.
It feels unfair and it is unfair, but hey, helping others is the right thing to do anyway, innit?
JPL
My son just sent me a video. His neighbor rented 50 goats to clean his backyard.. They set up wire fencing that directed the goats to the location and then they munched away.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
I went and read that bit you posted about mayor Pete. He talks about an all volunteer military. I was in the navy, no one was drafted into the navy (as best as I could tell then) but of course the draft helped form the decisions of many if not most at the time, still everyone I served with was a volunteer. His idea that we came together is bullshit. We worked together because that’s what we said we’d do. Our political views, our world views didn’t change. A shallow look would say we worked as a cohesive group towards a single goal. It was not acceptance of a single political view it was acceptance of military order, that we would suffer if we didn’t go along.
That is not in any way a reasonable compromise, it is not compromise on political views, on life styles, it was forced, and there was no compromise. And a number of officers were like him, had the idea that we went along because we thought it was proper. We went along because it was the path of the least resistance and we could do that for a limited time because the alternative was far worse. It’s acceptance of position, of propriety, not of equality and it’s anything but democratic.
Vhh
@charon: My recently deceased parents (died in their 90s) rose from poor WV to professional success and riches in MA thanks to FDR, WWII, the GI Bill, and Cold War tech expansion. Their 3 sons went to MIT, Harvard, and RPI, hold adv degrees and have been successful in STEM and finance. In the 1990s they went hard right with Newt, then became became Fox addicts, gave big $ to W. By 2010 they were accusing Obama of starting a race war. At least they never went for Trump, who is considered scum in the Northeast. Then as their health failed, their 24/7 caretakers and household help were Southern Blacks, Haitians, immigrants from French Africa and Brazil, and lower middle class Boston Irish—who they would never hv associated with before. And now they’re gone. This is the future of the Trumpers many of whom live unhealthy lifestyles and won’t make 90. Generation chg sez it all. The Soviet gerontocracy failed when it had ots first leader (Gorby) who was too young to serve in WWII.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
I’ve managed to grow corn, and if I can do it, anyone can.
Betty Cracker
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t disagree with that at all. I’m in favor of economic policies and social programs that would help everyone, including my shitty MAGA neighbors. I don’t personally know of any Democrats (or Democratic Party candidates) who believe otherwise.
frosty
@trollhattan: But you got to stay home with the dog, right? IIRC.
PsiFighter37
Mayor Pete is way, way out of his depth. I will be glad to see him crash and burn.
trollhattan
@frosty:
Yup, we’re besties now! Or until the next time somebody else feeds him.
Philbert
@JPL: One day in 2016 I was watching Hillary start to give a policy (heaven forbid) speech but they cut away to show an empty Trump podium with his airplane behind it, for 30 minutes straight, until he showed up.
Can the candidates call the media on this shit, or will this get them flushed down the memory hole? haha
Uncle Cosmo
@mrmoshpotato:
They have a vision for the future, FFS: Global Oligarchy. Capital moves at the speed of light, jillionaires jet wherever & whenever they want, obey no laws they choose to disregard, with no penalty. (IOW “global capitulations.) Ordinary people are the only ones who pay taxes, which the oligarchs routinely steal while telling the plebs their taxes are going to strangers on or below their economic level. They retreat into their tribes, demonize everyone that doesn’t look like them, talk like them, love like them or worship like them, & battle them for whatever crumbs the plutocrats let fall from their tables d’hote.
TL;DR version, courtesy of Orwell:
“
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus:
I served in an all-volunteer military. It was a very different place from the one you, raven, and other Vietnam era vets describe.
mrmoshpotato
@Uncle Cosmo: Let me revise that then.
They’d need a vision for the future first that would help the American people.
(Don’t hurt yourself laughing.)
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: people seem to object when one says it would tamp down on republican extremism, though (and we certainly have commenters here who are not on the “helping red states” bandwagon)
ETA: People were shitting all over any sort of “economic anxiety contributed to this” analysis for a long while, many still are
206inKY
@Mike in DC: One of those five items on the list is not like the others. #1-4 are necessary to utterly vanquish the party of sadism that is rotting our democracy from the inside.
But all too often, re: #5, I see people casually calling anyone who disagrees on the merits with the *policy* prescriptions of the social democracy movement as parroting “republican talking points.” Which, these days, is tantamount to calling anyone who disagrees on policy a fascist. I sense a recognition from the social democrats that the nation’s balls are in a vise. Trump is so awful that anyone with even a ounce of decency would vote Sanders over Trump, so it’s a once-in-a-lifetime shot at power. It is a maximalist response that probably will work for eking out a win since both Warren and Sanders are great campaigners, but it is certainly not the foundation for the crushing blue wave necessary to achieve #1-4.
I see a stark difference between the unity and bipartisanship message of people like Pete and Biden, and the clear-eyes targeting of moderate voters by people like Klobucher and O’Rourke who recognized that uniting against fascism doesn’t require agreeing on policy. Indeed maybe we need to step back from maximalist positions and agree to disagree on policy in order crush the pussy-grabbing, democracy-destroying common enemy. I know a lot of people who hate Trump and also don’t want a $20 trillion tax package with $800 billion in military cuts. Pass that shit when crazed fascists aren’t beating down the gates and see if you have a real majority for it.
J R in WV
@Citizen Alan:
Hell, NO… they did it repeatedly for the whole election cycle, Empty podium while Hillary was making meaningful speeches no one ever got to see.
Jim Parish
@Tom Q:
That’s not entirely fair to President Grant. He worked hard to push a hard-line Reconstruction, and did break the back of the first Klan. (Side note: it was that effort that triggered the establishment of the Department of Justice, to provide him with tools for the fight. There’d been AGs, before, but no DoJ.) He did face resistance within his own party, but he tried.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
I fully believe it was different.
What I’m talking about here is the concept that I saw between people in for a short time, 1 maybe 2 enlistments and lifers. And while I know that officers didn’t all make a career of it, it seemed that a greater proportion of them did.
And I believe that most officers had a different view of the military and their lives/positions than enlisted did. Maybe they actually learned from that, that the old ways didn’t actually accomplish what they thought they had, that unwavering obedience isn’t the same as unwavering acceptance and a change was necessary in even the basic concept.
Please understand that I fully understand the concept of structure, including military structure. It is required to be there it is an operational necessity. But there is room for individuality within command/control, and the old military didn’t understand that at all. That started changing in the navy with Admiral Zumwalt, we called it the end of Captain Bligh. I imagine that concept was carried on, because it actually worked. Or maybe not because it took something away from command structure, the total control of every aspect of life.
206inKY
And to be clear, I’m not talking about pandering to Trump voters. I’m talking about moderates like myself who voted Hillary in both the primary and general, have actually identified as Democratic my entire adult life, and saw the election ripped away by Comey, the electoral college, and all the other fuckery that brought Trump into power.
Major Major Major Major
@206inKY:
Ah, but we need a majority.
206inKY
@Major Major Major Major: Yes but that is my point. There is a huge difference between the “holding-hands with Republicans” bullshit that Pete and Biden are offering, the billionaire tears of Bloomberg, and the substantive Democratic policy goals that were put forward by Klobucher and Beto. The latter are/were trying to find the common denominator among a majority of voters and then fight for it, and their perspective was shaped by practical experience building wave-style coalitions in purple states like Texas and Minnesota. Pete couldn’t even come close in a State Treasurer race.
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
I was also in the USN, but I tell folks I enlisted at the point of a gun, after receiving my draft board notice. When the choice was be drafted into the infantry or marines in an illegal ground war in SE Asia, or serve in the more technical Navy, or go to jail… well it wasn’t easy but it was the choice I made.
Major Major Major Major
@206inKY:
Being a gay democrat in Indiana will to that to you. He’s correctly identified that he has to set his sights much higher to advance in the political world right now, which is why he’s running for VP.
I actually have zero problem with candidates saying they’ll try to understand the opposition, and that some of their concerns are legitimate. It’s… true. Right now the Republican Party is a death cult, but there actually are swing voters; maybe this “return to normalcy” stuff polls well with them. It certainly seems to be working for Pete in Iowa.
I do like the Klob, she has strong my-mom energy.
206inKY
@Major Major Major Major: I just saw what you did there. I missed the joke and/or bracing glimpse into the abyss the first time!
Citizen Alan
@Uncle Cosmo:
I’ve taken to saying that it won’t be a boot but a $500 Farragamo slipper.
oatler.
Figures so strange no GOD designed
To be a part of human kind
But wanton nature void of rest
Molded the clay in bitter jest
-Ebenezer Cooke
206inKY
@Mandalay: I do not think Warren has the instinct to gouge his eyes and stomp his nuts. She has buckled to criticism in two major ways: the DNA test and spelling out the $20.5 trillion in vegetables that are needed to pay for her plans. I have much more faith in Klobucher to gouge his eyes with a fork, smile, and go back to eating her salad.
Neldob
Betty Cracker, you totally rock!
Dan B
@Betty Cracker: I flashed back to 1970 when Gay Lib, based at U of Chicago on the south side allied with Civil Rights activists and Women’s Lib. We were a tiny group. Most of us had come up in the Civil Rights movement and the feminist movements so we just tapped into people we knew who would support us. We felt we were too few to succeed on our own. It worked. People on the 98 percent white north side got interested. These well off gsy men wanted nothing to do with blacks and little yo do with women. I thought of Martin Niemoller’s (sp?) “First they came for…”. The pst decade has shown that a majority of people are at least fairweather allies.
Pete may be a product of the two trends. If you are one of the smallest and least visible minorities you have to cultivate allies even if they might view your cause as simply a well meaning gesture or they just want to feel good about themselves. On that score Pete seems to inderstand that a tiny minority can’t antagonize “moderates”.
On the other hand we disrupted the APA convention. We demonstrated against mafia controlled bars and hostile pols. It brought us media and allies from the ACLU to school and church leadership.
There are two approaches for gay people: be nice vs. fight intolerance and injustice. Threading the needle between these two is a delicate balance.
I didn’t agree with Obama’s kumbaya approach to congress but felt he tapped into the distress that middle class, mostly white, voters feel about the partisan clash. The worst thing in their lives is the decline of manners. For minorities it’s existential.
Pete seems to be making a political calculation that the electorate wants to hear from leaders that the anger can be reduced if the approach is incremental. I believe we need someone who can remain calm while undercutting the lawless autocrats. And we need leaders who have a we can do it approach, not that it will be easy but that we can restore America’s moral leadership.
My hope is if Pete, against all indications, becomes President that his AG calmly deploys a fierce rapier with Pete’s full support. A moderate a conciliatory caninet would be eaten alive by the GOP.
opiejeanne
@206inKY: And then there’s Senator Kamala Harris, who is being ignored so much by the MSM that she’s hardly a blip. I have that same faith in her that you have in Klobuchar, plus she’s been the AG of California. She’s more than capable of stomping on his tiny feet.
Uncle Cosmo
@mrmoshpotato: They got them a plan for that too:
Seems to work, sad to say.
Ksmiami
@Amir Khalid: the GOP must be utterly defeated, smashed, purged from the body politic or America dies so no no common ground with fascism 2.0
Matt McIrvin
@sdhays: Congressional bipartisanship in the mid-20th century existed, to the extent that it ever existed, because a lot of Democrats and Republicans agreed on keeping the blacks and the browns down. The biggest, most divisive and deadly chasm in American political life happened not to line up with the party divide.
Now it does.
Matt McIrvin
@J R in WV: My father-in-law did the same thing… though he’d thought he was supposed to have an educational deferment. He complained about it, was told it’d take weeks to process the complaint by which time he’d be off fighting, so he enlisted in the Navy. The next day, he got the letter saying he had an educational deferment. Having already enlisted, he spent the war somewhere in the bottom of a destroyer tender.
cokane
good luck getting any policy victories with that attitude about bipartisanship.
i dunno man, so many of these online writers for these sites have little more motivation than just feeding folks red meat. they’re not actual activists and don’t do any of the work of real activists. nor are they reporters, doing any actual investigations. it’s just feel good tripe that doesn’t actually move the ball forward on getting more equitable policies in place.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Tom Q:
With the Civil War, there were already strong geographic divisions: slave vs non-slave states & territories. Now, it is rural vs urban. As much as I hear people on this blog saying, ‘Oooh! Let them succeed this time!’, that is crap. The south and mid-west are red, because they aren’t as urban. Look in any blue state, and the second you get out past the suburbs, you are in deep Trump territory.