As a guy that’s done almost 100 of these, this kind of reception would have me very worried https://t.co/9ruOVS7TjJ
— Adam Kinzinger #fella (@AdamKinzinger) December 5, 2022
They know who she is — if they don’t watch television, the van in front of her is prominently labelled — but her constituents are not impressed. Well, it’s a deeply (R) district… at the moment.
As a number of people have already done, I recommend Elaina Plott Calabro’s new Atlantic article, “Why Is MTG Like This?”.
Apparently MTG always had the sort of uneventful middle-class life to which Americans are supposed to aspire. She grew up in a small, very white community north of Atlanta, only daughter of a prosperous real estate developer, and is remembered by her high-school classmates for being aggressively average. She was a business major at UGA, married a classmate who would eventually take over her daddy’s increasingly prosperous company, raised their three kids.
Despite her ‘blessed’ lifestyle, though, even if there’d been a Real Housewives of Alpharetta franchise, nobody was recruiting her for it.
But then, eventually, came CrossFit!
What Greene found at the gym (or “box,” as it is known) was community. The coaches, the members, the stragglers who popped in “just to see what this is all about”—they loved her. This is something many observers in Washington and elsewhere do not appreciate about Greene: that she can be extremely likable, so long as you are not, in her estimation, among “the swamp rat elites, spineless weak kneed Republicans, and the Radical Socialist Democrats who are the demise of this country that we all love and call home.” She has a sugary voice and a personable, generous affect… “The softer side of Marjorie Taylor Greene is what her friends, neighbors, and the people who elected her know,” Jamie Parrish, a Georgia Republican and close friend of Greene’s, told me. Her supporters back home can seem genuinely confused by her chilly or hostile portrayal and reception elsewhere…
In 2013, she set out to become a businesswoman again. Partnering with Travis Mayer, a 22-year-old coach and one of the top CrossFit athletes in the world, Greene opened a 6,000-square-foot box called CrossFit Passion, on Roswell Street, in Alpharetta. Two years later, they relocated to a space nearly twice the size. In 2016, however, Greene sold her stake. She no longer blogged about her WODs or anything else related to CrossFit…
New narrative arc!
… Greene may now have felt free to speak, but it was not clear what she wanted to say. It was clear only that she wanted to say something. It was as though she spent the first six months of Trump’s administration gathering up the scattered feelings and dim instincts that informed her attraction to his brand of politics and examining them under a microscope, twisting the knob until the edges came into focus. By July 2017, Greene was ready to start posting about politics…
The Republican base was in the market for a Marjorie Taylor Greene—a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA….
Greene would later trace her decision to run for office to the frustration she’d felt during that trip: No one had paid her any attention. That would have to change. As she posted on a website called The Whiskey Patriots just after the Hogg incident, and just before she launched her bid for Congress: “Let the war begin …” …
What Marjorie Taylor Greene has accomplished is this: She has harnessed the paranoia inherent in conspiratorial thinking and reassured a significant swath of voters that it is okay—no, righteous—to indulge their suspicions about the left, the Republican establishment, the media. “I’m not going to mince words with you all,” she declared at a Michigan rally this fall. “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” Greene did not create this sensibility, but she channels it better than any of her colleagues…
I think often of Greene’s blog post from July 26, 2014, and the question she posed to herself during her crisis of confidence. “Why not me?” she had written tentatively, trying it on for size….
Among many reasons the rest of us have had a hard time comprehending the descent of so many Americans into mass psychosis is a belief that anyone who embraces such nuttery must have traumatic reasons for doing so. But it's affluence and plenty, not trauma, that led us here. /1
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 6, 2022
This was a reason I was blocked for a time trying to write “Our Own Worst Enemy.” I wanted, very much, to take seriously the economic and social arguments about decline and hardship and all that made by both the right and left about why people were turning against democracy. /2
I read, with great care (as a working scholar), several works about liberal democracy and why it wasn’t working. It took a while before I just put them all down and realized most of them were basically hooey, especially the ones about “the elites” and yadda yadda yadda. /3
Because the problem staring right at us was that the threat was from people who were part of the dominant economic and political class. They were not part of the cultural “elite”, but never had been. And revisiting Hoffer and others, I realized we had our answer but hated it. /4
The danger was not some unemployed guy on opioids, it was from a bored woman named Marge who was tired of being married to a rich guy and having affairs at the crossfit gym. But to realize this is to realize that the problem is huge and perhaps impossible to solve. /5
Americans love problems we can fix. If only we cared more about the empty towns! If only we spent more on addiction! If only we could bring back good jobs!
But what if *none* of that will work? That’s the scary part. So we reject it. /6
There is no bill you can pass, no social program, that will solve the problem of a dentist or realtor who has decided that life is just too goddamn dull and that they’re gonna spice up their week by getting some tactical gear and cosplaying the Second Civil War. /7
This is why I switched gears early on when writing “Our Own Worst Enemy.” If we’ve learned anything since 2017, it’s that the initial arguments about “elitism” and economics were very wrong. This is a civic vacuity that comes from peace, affluence and high standards of living. /8
This doesn’t mean we are hopeless, but we have to stop thinking we can fix or legislate our way out of this by rebuilding the downtown of East Cupcake or by handing out free college. Those ships have sailed. The way out is harder, if simpler. /9
For example:
– Concentrate on local issues as a way to build civic resilience
– Speak forcefully for civic values instead of being intimidated by kooks (and do not argue with their nuttery)
– Outvote them (duh)
– Do all of this in concert with like-minded citizens. /10
Since Newt Gingrich's time in office the GOP using Citizens United have spent decades using grievance, fear, to radicalize Americans for profit & power. This is the end result.
— 2witty4 u🇺🇦💙💛 (@2witty4u) December 6, 2022
NotMax
Would that it were. This is a (not the) result thus far.
What, how and when the end has played out will not be discernible until (to mix figures of speech) it’s visible in the rear view mirror of the ship of state.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
Here at BJ we saw the media arguments about “economic anxiety” for what it was – bullshit.
John Revolta
Let’s also not forget about 40 years of FOX telling these folks how wronged they are and who their enemies are. Uncle Rupert is a fucking monster.
hervevillechaizelounge
I know this is completely off topic, but I’m always about 12 hours behind on the BJ—I start reading the day’s posts around 2AM.
Maybe someone else has already mentioned this and I missed it, but I really want to make sure everyone knows the prisoner left behind in the Griner swap isn’t the patriotic retired Marine he’s being portrayed as in the Fauxverse.
Paul Whelan was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged for stealing money from the Corps. He’s only marginally American. He was born in Canada and also holds Irish and British passports.
Most importantly, before he was locked up he spent all his time on Twitter shitting on democrats and fellating Trump with both skill and vigor. Whelan was a huge Putin fanboy right until the handcuffs clamped shut.
Let Canada arrange his release; or better yet let him rot in the gulag. If republicans gave a shit about Whelan they had four years to spring his thieving ass.
Debbie(Aussie)
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch:
wasnt it a commenter/s here that stated the obvious as ‘racism’ all the way down?
Debbie(Aussie)
@John Revolta:
I would apologise but he very nearly destroyed us too. And still might. He has an outsize influence. Shock jocks on ‘skynews after dark’ don’t even get 30000 viewers but the liberal/national parties genuflect continuously.
‘Bastards, the father and the son (Murdochs)
livewyre
@hervevillechaizelounge: Ouch – if that’s all true, then that explains why Fox and someone here who’s been parroting them have been all over that story. Of course it would be the most scandalous thing for The Hero to be betrayed in favor of The Minority. Especially if said hero was pulling for them the whole time, or still is. That kind of context makes a lot of difference.
oatler
Tom Nichols… that’s the good stuff. Bored affluence, same as presented in Jack Webb’s menacing program intros. “Young folks, looking for thrills. Sometimes they look for them in a small sugar cube. That’s when I beat them silly.”
bjacques
@oatler: maybe projection even then. All those movies about working class juvenile delinquents and thrill killers, when it’s always been solid middle class and rich people rampaging for kicks (and the odd rich thrill killers like Leopold and Loeb). Only now such people get public political and social encouragement.
p.a.
Paraphrase of R W Emerson: don’t mistake being contradicted for being persecuted.
I’ve seen wingnuts buying into the ‘elitist oppression’ bs for decades.
Internet wag: If it’s elitist not to be the stupidest motherfucker in the room, let me be an elitist.
lowtechcyclist
I’m thinking that while the bored, affluent small-town elites might be the backbone of the MAGAt movement, there aren’t 74 million of them. Trumpism also has to be doing quite well with white people, particularly men, whose education ended with their high school diplomas and whose lives are going nowhere.
I don’t know that easing the ‘economic anxiety’ of that latter group would turn that many of them away from Trumpism. I think it’s something we need to do anyway, by ensuring that even the really crappy jobs pay a living wage, just that we shouldn’t expect a massive political payoff from it. They’ll still be pissed at black people and liberals and immigrants, just like the small-town elite types are.
OzarkHillbilly
It is. Most everything on his wiki page I have corroborated thru other reporting.
eta: correction: I can’t say about him being a Putin fan boy, this is the first I’ve heard that. It would not surprise me if it’s true tho.
Matt McIrvin
Nichols is still a conservative and this is a very conservative thesis at heart: it’s a lot like the old right-wing cyclic idea that boils down to “good times make soft men, soft men make bad times, bad times make hard men, hard men make good times”, only for “soft men” he has “crazy people”.
Well, maybe. People need a sense of meaning and mission in their lives; if they can’t find it they’ll grab it from anywhere. There’s a neo-fash wave going on all over the world, so it’s not just a peculiarity of US culture. Pity they can’t get it in a less damaging way.
OzarkHillbilly
Just want to say that people can be economically secure and still feel like, “What? Is this all there is?” Lord knows I worked with more than a few over the years.
Gvg
@hervevillechaizelounge: sources?
raven
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
Sinema announces she’s going to run as an independent in 2024.
She must have had polling showing she couldn’t win a primary. The problem is do the Dems run a candidate. Congressman Ruben Gallego was going to run against her. If the Dems run a candidate, the vote gets split (even if she gets 4%) and a cretin like Blake Masters gets in.
SiubhanDuinne
From Politico, just broke:
OzarkHillbilly
A distinction I glossed over in my head.
geg6
@SiubhanDuinne:
That fucking bitch. I hate her fucking guts.
p.a.
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch:
How much does a statewide race in AZ cost? Who will finance her besides reich-wing groups hoping to split the Dem vote? That can be an effective Dem attack against her when the time comes.
raven
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
@SiubhanDuinne: She has to caucus with someone in order to get committee assignments and caucusing with whom ever holds the majority always brings home the most bacon.
I mean even independents as cantankerous as Bernie and as resentful as Lieberman had to caucus.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly:
If I were black I probably would have gotten one.
Aussie Sheila
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch:
Any chance that her candidacy could split the republicans vote if a trumpy candidate is nominated for the seat?
This is why preferential voting is so important. Christ, what a cluster ..ck.
piratedan
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch:
She’s changing her current registration, and declaring herself as an Independent, …. likely to caucus with the Democrats. So, she’s managed to leverage herself into Manchin’s position of being theoretically for sale, depending on the issue.
So her timing, is impeccable and so for at least two years, instead of just making her bank, voting for the things that she’s nominally been in favor of all along and allows herself to be the total focus of attention when she chooses to be so.
Hoping that Schumer has seen this coming and has planned accordingly. At this point, I would get as many judges passed thru the doors as possible because we’re only one bad diagnosis away from being back in the shitter again.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
She was already doing that.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@SiubhanDuinne:
I thought she wasn’t going to run in 2024, WTF?!
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
@Aussie Sheila:
it’s possible.
piratedan
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch: for reasons unknown, I was being polite.
and while I loathe what she’s doing, I still understand that she will vote with the D’s the vast majority of the time (or so she has publicly stated).
I hate that she has this pathological need for this kind of behavior and attention. She just as easily could have remained a Democrat and still behave exactly the same way by going what has to be in her mind, the “full McCain”, somehow thinking that a couple of John McCain moments of decency (as he explained to that SC voter that Obama was not an evil man and his shivving of DJT on fucking over the ACA), actually translated to him being fully independent.
MagdaInBlack
@OzarkHillbilly: As have I “worked with quite a few over the years.” Most of the people I know who went Maga are doing just fine economically. Bored and looking for “meaning” makes perfect sense to me. They have everything they are “supposed to have and having more “stuff” didn’t fill the emptiness
Eta: and I’m in affluent suburbia, not small town USA
OzarkHillbilly
How can they learn from each other when they aren’t free to speak their minds?
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: If I had been in any branch of the military I can almost guarantee I’d have gotten a BCD.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
As an independent, Sinema still has to caucus with one of the parties for committee assignments. This is no different than Bernie and Angus King, both Independents who caucus with the Democrats for committee memberships.
She’s currently has nice fat assignments on Banking, Commerce, and Homeland Security. She’s even chairman of the Border Management subcommittee. She uses those assignments to raise money to finance her campaign and if that doesn’t work to become a lobbyist in the future. Which is why she will still caucus with the Dems.
The only way this hurts is in 2024, where a three way race would likely help the homogeneous republicans.
OzarkHillbilly
@MagdaInBlack: We have more than a few of the militia types out here. They feel threatened by the rising political power of people who don’t look or sound like them.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
@piratedan:
I hear ya.
Nelle
So, how does that affect the committee membership? 51 D’s was going to give D’s more seats on the committee, right? Awfully early in the morning to steep in such loathing, but here i am. Can’t even bask in Warnock’s victory for a week?
Nelle
She goes on the list of people I wouldn’t rush to give CPR to, if she fell over in front of me.
PST
@Matt McIrvin: Nichols is onto something, in particular in noting that we have to acknowledge that many of the worst MAGAts are privileged and affluent. But he doesn’t explain why their search for meaning in their lives takes the turn it has. I don’t think he takes adequately into account the force of racism in shaping their world views. Catching up this morning on yesterday’s BJ, I noticed that @Kent (if I recall correctly) had some insightful things to say about how abortion and guns emerged as obsessions among people who previously couldn’t have cared less when they were needed as cover stories, so to speak, among those no longer comfortable in admitting that they support the white peoples’ party. That rings true when I think of my Trumpy relatives.
Chief Oshkosh
I don’t agree with Nichols’ thesis. Yes, MTG is as described, but she’d be nowhere without the system that Nichols and his fellow shitbirds created over many decades. MTG as problem child exits because of the systemic problems created by having one party entirely in thrall to monied interests. The ENTIRE purpose of the GOP is to ensure more power and wealth is secured by the currently wealthy and powerful.
Nichols is too steeped in this putrid tea to even begin to comprehend and reflect on this. So, while it’s great that he’s asking these questions, he’ll continue to come up with the wrong answers. Alternatively, he’s fully aware and is cynically tossing out another red herring, just keeping ahead of the general wave of comprehension that the public will be going through as they slowly realize that the never-Trumpers’ most recent oh-so-serious explanation for why things went so wrong isn’t because of the individual miscreants and their personal motivations/backgrounds, but rather the fertile ground that has been spread with GOP manure starting way back to at least the 70s.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: I had no idea, but I didn’t read the NYTimes yesterday. Surely the paper that boasts about its coverage would mention his background.
The Thin Black Duke
Marmot
Yeah, and what books was he dumping as irrelevant? MAGA is straight-up-the-middle right-wing populism with a demagogue and fascist leanings. It’s always this belief that the nation is fallen, decadent, and in need of an ultranationalist rebirth. They always single out ethnic and racial minorities, political lefties—hell, they call Dems “Commies”—immigrants, gender and sexual minorities, and whoever else they believe is not legitimate volk. Anyone threatening the traditional social order.
And it’s always low-level businesspeople and the middle class—nail-salon owners, construction contractors, realtors, CrossFit owners—alongside plenty of people higher and lower on the income scale.
I feel like maybe he’s all “of course society is crumbling because these outsiders are getting too uppity, but poverty didn’t motivate MTG.” But I don’t know the man’s thoughts.
JPL
fkfkfk Sinema
The Thin Black Duke
@The Thin Black Duke: Deleted.
MagdaInBlack
@OzarkHillbilly: In my own small home town ( Sheridan, IL) one of the most out and loud cult followers is retired from Caterpillar. I’ve known him my whole life, and I can assure you he ain’t hurtin’ for $$’s. I can also assure you he’s a straight up racist.
Aussie Sheila
@Chief Oshkosh:
I agree that repugs including Nichols, helped create the toxicity but he is right insofar as the trumpist base is imo, more ‘lumpen bourgeoisie ‘ than ‘wretched of the earth’.
It is the base of every right wing revanchist movement ever. It has money, lots of local political heft, and is politically dominated by ‘serious national money’ while simultaneously being threatened by movements from below.
It is a dangerous class particularly when it is unconstrained by a politically organised and well funded working class movement.
Cultural capital, academia and twitter is no match for these forces. Unconstrained by vigorous honest democratic institutions, this social layer will wreak havoc. Add in guns and it is potentially catastrophic.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Aussie Sheila:
Just wanted to ask, are we cool?
Aussie Sheila
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Sure. Why wouldn’t we be?
Barbara
@PST: Yeah, Nichols doesn’t quite capture the problem here and I doubt if I have the insight this early in the morning to engage. If you looked at people on the left who are likely to get involved in political movements, they probably come from the same class as MTG — educated, at least successful or affluent enough to have money, time and energy to focus on the non-money making enterprise of running for office or working for political party organizations.
Why does MTG’s boredom or need for meaning take this particular shape? Why is she so virulent and threatening to people who cross her? Maybe for the same reason that three civil rights workers were brutally murdered for trying to register African Americans to vote? Because she comes from a background and upbringing where it’s just simply okay to hate certain people and to express that hate without fear of reprisal?
And no, okay, she doesn’t suffer from economic anxiety, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the same zero sum thinking about someone else’s gain being her loss that most conservative thinkers seem to have, everyone from the Federalist Society to the local Chamber of Commerce — an attitude that can be described as, I’ve got mine and I don’t want to share with people not like me.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Aussie Sheila:
Just thought I might’ve been a bit harsh down below in the other thread. Glad to hear I was wrong
Bupalos
I’d really warn folks off the Nichols take. It discards more than it embraces. At least spend a moment with it and recognize its dark side. Get past the eternal distorting lure of “these people are bad” and notice the nugget about “handing out” free college or bothering to make people’s lives better. Notice how MTG is substituted for voters.
Nichols is in a business, and its a business very similar to MTG. He’s finding a space where he can keep conducting his business without his conscience bothering him.
Marmot
@Aussie Sheila: I mostly agree, but they’re so nuts that they can alienate normal people.
I don’t agree with this:
I think fascists and near-fascists are most dangerous then. They feel the “wrong people” are rising and react violently against it.
But maybe you mean a decent social movement can co-opt members from these nutty reactionaries? It’s possible.
Barbara
@Bupalos: Right. Nancy Pelosi comes from the same slice of life that MTG does — she raised a family and started getting involved in party politics after her kids were mostly grown. I bet a significant percentage of female politicians inhabit that same exact trajectory. Affluent people are always the ones who shape politics, even when it isn’t the money saturated enterprise it is in the U.S.
Marmot
Sharp.
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6:
Likewise. Never happy unless she’s creating havoc, mayhem, and chaos.
Aussie Sheila
@Marmot: No, I don’t mean they can be co-opted. I mean their political and social power has to be constrained and curtailed by the threat of a well organised political and social formation that can successfully vye and compete for actual political power.
You don’t pacify this layer. You can’t. They need to be constrained. By a more powerful social block. And I know I am preaching to the choir here, but that most assuredly is not the Lincoln Project or Tom Nichols.
Matt McIrvin
@Bupalos: Obviously what we need to do is make people’s lives worse; that will knock some sense into them!
And, yeah, that’s what nags at me about this take–it’s basically Nichols explaining yet another reason why liberal technocracy doesn’t work.
(In a 1980s science-fiction magazine the takeaway would be some kind of revived Turner Thesis conclusion about how the only solution for this middle-class anomie is SPAAAAAACE, the final frontier!)
Hildebrand
I wonder if Sinema thought this was the only chance to get re-elected. She probably has had polling done for a primary, saw that she was completely under water, and so went with the Independent gambit because she knew that Democrats would hate to split the vote in the general because it would elect a Republican.
One more hack putting self-preservation over country.
Barbara
@piratedan: She’s doing this because she knows as we all know that the biggest threat to her continuing position is a primary race against a well-funded Democratic candidate. That’s it.
@Hildebrand: I guess we posted the same thought at the same time — great minds and all that. Yes, totally agree.
Matt McIrvin
Sinema’s another attention-seeker. With a 51-vote majority, she’s that much less important–unless she does something that makes her a threat again. So she did. Now everyone’s talking about her again.
This is much more effective than simply switching to the Republican Party, too, because her future actions are so up in the air.
The Castle
@lowtechcyclist: Except that that’s not how the votes shake out.
In Dem-leaning areas, there is nearly zero correlation between income and voting preference. In GOP-leaning areas, the poor vote Democratic and the wealthy Republican.
This is conflated by race – in most of those GOP-leaning areas, Blacks and Latinos vote Democratic, and they tend to be poorer. But there are exceptions, like Florida Latinos.
Education is a much better predictor of how a white American voter will vote, not income.
So it may be economic “anxiety”, but that doesn’t mean it’s a reflection of their actual material circumstances.
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly:
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
I wasn’t disagreeing with that part, just saying that, in addition, there have to be a lot of people who don’t fit that description, who really aren’t doing so well, in order for Trump to have gotten anywhere near 74 million votes.
We were having that conversation here yesterday about white men without any college dropping out of the labor force. If they vote, who are they voting for? Trump, of course. And ditto all their compatriots who are still in the labor force but just getting by.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Aussie Sheila:
I disagree. It’s been more than a match so far. Though yes, I would prefer a stronger union movement. Unfortunately, quite a few of them vote Republican
Another Scott
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch: Yes and no.
There have been huge changes in the US and world economy since the ’60s. People who grew up watching Leave it to Beaver, and were white males, were told that they could have that life too because they were Americans. Get a job and you’re set.
I blame Dirty Harry, also too.
Change is constant these days, and change is hard for humans. We generally really don’t like it. Economic Anxiety is a thing and it’s real, but it’s a deliberate failure of the GQP that let the finance people hollow out US manufacturing and destroy US R&D and investment in education. They could have guided the changes to a better future, but tax cuts and leasing everything and leveraged buyouts are so much easier…
And everyone who isn’t a white CISHET male has had it harder and is the victim of the monsters who are yelling SQUIRREL to try to save their status.
Others (like our own Davis Ex Machina) have made the point that humans care a lot about relative status – more than absolute numbers. We always need to be aware of that, while being smart and determined to move to a better future.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@PST: Fred “Slacktivist” Clark has been writing for decades about how evangelical End Times and “spiritual warfare” mythology give people who don’t have much else going on a sense of being heroes in a vast cosmic struggle of good vs. evil. But he also recognizes how the specifics of the subculture have roots in white supremacy.
The need for mission is a lot of what drives us here, too. But white liberals right now, particularly, are in this tricky place where a lot of what they have to do is get out of the way and not always take the driver’s seat. That doesn’t offer a role as the big noble hero of the story–we’re trying to get beyond Atticus Finch. It’s a tough sell for bored white people.
Frankensteinbeck
@SiubhanDuinne:
So nothing has changed, and Sinema is still a prima donna who wants Democrats to have to beg her ‘pretty please’ to get anything done. Wake me up when her voting changes, because all I’m hearing is “Waah, pay attention to me!”
Ken
Hmm. Maybe I should rethink my plan — no, what am I saying; the energy budget to get humans into space, the difficulties of radiation shielding, the medical effects of low gravity. No, it’s back to cloning velociraptors. Trust me, no one will be bored after Release Day.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Frankensteinbeck:
It still sucks for terfing her out in 2024. If she had stayed a Dem she would’ve been primaried out. Being an Independent, we risk splitting the vote and allowing a Republican in
Aussie Sheila
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
A stronger union movement is a more progressive movement, that has more money and knows how to organise. Union members voting conservative is nothing special. Happens everywhere. But when the only union locally is the cops, or the prison workers there is a big problem.
Unfortunately, a modicum of state power needs to wielded by the working class in order to build a strong union movement. The US working class appears to have lost its old TU movt just at the time that it could have expanded and grown past the racially exclusive past , as a result of the brutal restructuring of the 80s and 90s.
All western countries went through this capitalist restructuring . Some have elected outright fascists, (Italy), some nearly did (France), and the UK working class put a gun to its head and pulled the trigger -Brexit and the election of the Bojo Tories.
It remains to be seen if the US manages to prosecute the authors of an attempted coup, and if democratic decline can be sufficiently halted to permit a democratic reordering of its politics.
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: We can have velociraptors in space.
Geminid
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch: I expect Arizona Democrats to run a candidate for Senate in 2024, and a strong one. This is a very different situation than that in Utah this year when the party endorsed Evan McMullin.
And I would not write the Democrat off. I think it will be either Rep. Ruben Gallego or Rep. Greg Stanton, and they may decide privately which one it will be. Both could be strong candidates.
lowtechcyclist
@Chief Oshkosh:
Used to be. If that had continued to be the case, the 2016 nominee would have been Jeb! or Rubio, and you wouldn’t be hearing a thing about ‘woke’ corporations.
The MAGAts are running this party now, and it’s about their hatreds and who they’re going to stick it to, and how. They have no quarrel with the rich in general, but the rich had better dance to their tune.
Honus
@OzarkHillbilly: exactly. That’s all the retired people eating breakfast in those Ohio diners at 11am. They’re not economically insecure, just bigoted.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Aussie Sheila:
I’m confident these things can be done
Frankensteinbeck
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. She’s an independent today, tomorrow she retires, or tries to run but finds she has no base, no organization, and no money and disappears. Who knows? Predicting even the structure of future elections is increasingly proving to be a fool’s game until you get to that year. She knows she can’t get re-elected. That’s all I take from this, and it’s zero surprise.
Honus
@raven: there’s a reason people tend to me liberal when they’re educated. It’s not indoctrination
Mai Naem mobile
@Hildebrand: i just don’t think Sinema’s that smart and I am one person who used to think she was really sooper sekret 10 dimensional chess smart. I don’t think she spends a whole lot of time in the state. I would bet she spends way more time in DC, her triathlons and at lobbyist shindigs then in Metro Phoenix. She also spends time in Tucson which hasn’t changed as much as Metro Phoenix politically. She got lucky with a crappy opponent and the pussy hats in 2018 and got lucky with running in a bluish district before. I was in her district all along.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I think there is a difference between MAGA alone and Q Anon. People can be MAGA while still living mostly in the real world. MTG is full Q. I know someone we is small town, bored, affluent, into woo spirituality and natural health crap, plus kinda racist. She fell hard for Q Anon. That need for community, belonging, and meaning is being fufilled by Q Anon for her. It really is a cult. A lot of Trump voting Republicans think Q Anon stuff is crazy. It really shocked her friends when she embraced the cult.
James E Powell
@PST:
I don’t know any Republicans who adequately account for the racism that defines their worldview or any who will acknowledge that racist appeals are part of every Republican campaign.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch: She says she’s keeping her committee assignments, which suggests she’ll caucus with the Ds. It also suggests she talked to Schumer before she made this public
Anne Laurie
@SiubhanDuinne: There’s already one almost-always-caucuses-with-Democrats ‘Independent’ in the Senate, and he’s made a very nice living collecting funds from ‘like-minded’ purists any time over the last many years.
IMO, even Manic Pixie Dream Senator has realized that she’s aging out of the P(olitician)ILF demographic, and that the Democrats are thoroughly sick of her shtick. So she’s now looking to further market her The party left ME! status with the people who hire for think-tank sinecures. It won’t make her any more popular with her colleagues, but I doubt she’s very chummy with them even now.
Frankensteinbeck
@Anne Laurie:
This does fit an ambition to be a cable news liberal-who-shits-on-Democrats.
Geminid
@Barbara: I would distinguish Speaker Pelosi from Rep. Greene in that Ms. Pelosi grew up in a political familiy, and while she did not run for elective office until her children were grown she was very active in Democratic politics, fundraising and otherwise, throughout her adult life in San Franisco.
A Washington Post article from two Fridays ago, the day after Pelosi announced her intent to step back from leadership, goes over this history.
It also has a very interesting anecdote from Nancy Pelosi’s first days in Congress in 1987, after she won a special election to fill the seat of the late Sala Burton. There was a private Washington dinner to introduce her to a few other Democratic Representatives incluing Chuck Schumer and Richard Durbin, now the Senate Majority Leader and Whip. The host, California Congressman George Miller, introduce the their new colleage by saying, meet the future first female Speaker of the House.
Another Scott
@Anne Laurie: I occasionally watch the senators milling around and waiting for votes to finish. She seems to spend a lot of time talking with just about everyone, and nobody seems to recoil in horror (politicians are great at compartmentalizing), but more time with GQPers than, say, congregating around Schumer and his team. She’s more interested in being an individual than having her team win, and has been for a long time.
Today’s announcement is more of the same and not a surprise to me. I don’t think that it really changes anything.
Cheers,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@The Castle:
I think you’ve lost an argument with yourself. See below:
Well, exactly – race and education. Whites who didn’t go past HS.
But since when have all those white voters with just a high school degree all been affluent? What I said was you need the economic losers in that demographic to get anywhere near 74 million votes: the affluent white voters with just HS aren’t enough.
So that very definitely IS how the votes shake out. You’re getting both the affluent white small-town movers and shakers who never needed college, and the lower middle class small town and rural whites with just a HS degree too.
That’s what I’m saying, and I don’t see any contradiction in anything you said.
Said that too: said what unites them is the desire to stick it to blacks, immigrants, and liberals.
ETA: And also said that relieving the economic anxiety of those suffering from it won’t change their political stripes, by and large.
So no, I’m NOT making an ‘economic anxiety’ argument, in the sense that that’s what causing them to vote R. I’m just saying that you don’t get anywhere near 74 million with just the more affluent class that Nichols describes. Period.
Paul in KY
@raven: BCD or Dishonorable are both very bad, IMO.
Geminid
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes, apparently Sinema has not announced she is running as an Independent. This has always been an option whether she changed her affiliation at an early date or not. She’ll have a year to evaluate private polling on her chances of winning. I still think her running for reelection is a 50-50 proposition.
Paul in KY
@piratedan: I would assume Sen. Schumer saw this coming.
Dave
@Bupalos: Right Nichols has two modes where he worries me; one where I think he’s actually completely right regarding a political issue because the dude is an insufferable scold and that bugs the hell out of me so usually complete agreement means matter has hit the fan hard.
Or where he sneaks a bunch of resentful assumptions in under the guise of reasonable analysis. I don’t think he’s entirely incorrect and a fair number of people in this thread have fleshed out where he has a point and what he is ignoring or distorting to reach that point. I do think a sense of alienation and a sort impersonal convenience does play a real role but it’s not the way he writes about it.
This was kinda meandering to nowhere definitely out of practice writing.
PST
@The Castle:
I would also throw out the thought that among those white people with sufficient affluence and education to have time for and an inclination toward politics that an important predictor is geographic mobility. It is perilous to draw conclusions from the tiny sample of one’s own relatives, friends, and acquaintances, but I think that those who have moved over the years in pursuit of their goals are significantly more likely to be liberals than those who basically stayed put near the place they were born. That’s not universal and it may not be at all causative. Maybe it reflects the fact that people on the move eventually end up in cities where their peers are likely to be liberal. Whatever it is, if I were a NYT reporter looking for Q types to interview in a diner, I’d be looking at the people who never left their little town.
Paul in KY
@piratedan: She obviously is looking towards being re-elected and probably figures this is the only way she can make the general election in AZ.
Josie
@PST:
Kent is onto something here. Racism is and has been the basis for voting patterns since the Civil Rights Act was passed and probably before that.
LBJ (sorry, Raven) knew what would happen when he passed that act, but he also knew that it was the right thing to do. Everything political in this country goes back to racism. They just dress it up with other ideas.
Paul in KY
@Marmot: Goering talked about this many years ago. ‘It works the same in any political system…’
Geminid
@Aussie Sheila: I think the takes of ex-Republicans like Nichols can have value. It may only be relative value but that is true generally of such analyses. I have found that apostates like Nichols, Charlie Sykes and Ron Filipkowski have a clearer eyed view of Republicans than many Democrats. Some of the latter often offer descrjptions of Republicans and their politicions that resemble two-dimensional cartoon characters.
I think of this when I am cautioned on this forum that “Latinos are not a monolith!” while also being told, in effect, “Republicans are a monolith!” Go figure.
Paul in KY
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): If I remember the Lieberman situation correctly (gah), it only works if the Repubs put up a complete loser.
satby
Nichols briefly mentions Hoffer in the excerpt above, but then seems to dismiss him. I think Eric Hoffer’s the True Believer details the motivation for people joining mass movements like the Tea Party, MAGA, and QAnon pretty well (as well as religious cults like ISIS). Belonging, community…
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: nails what Hoffer described: That need for community, belonging, and meaning is being fufilled by Q Anon for her.
Paul in KY
@lowtechcyclist: Alot of these white only-went-to-HSers can be affluent due to sizable inheritances received from parents. Or they successfully deal drugs, or work a good blue collar job (plumber, etc.)
lowtechcyclist
@Paul in KY:
YES I FREAKIN’ SAID THAT
MY POINT IS THAT THERE’S ALSO A LOT OF NON-AFFLUENT WHITE HS-ONLY PEOPLE VOTING REPUBLICAN, YOU DON’T GET TO 74 MILLION WITH JUST THE AFFLUENT ONES
Sorry about the all-caps, but people seem to be reading a few words from my earlier comments, and filling in the rest with words in their heads, and responding to those words from their heads while thinking they’re responding to me. Don’t know if this’ll help, but it’s worth a try.
A Man for All Seaonings (formerly Geeno)
I wonder how the emphasis of job-useful education over broader humanities based education in colleges fits into this scenario. It seems that those who are adrift don’t feel connected to the greater culture and see their own narrow concept of the culture as threatened.
ETA: #100 for the thread kill
Barbara
@Geminid: There are no doubt differences, and I am lazy so Nancy Pelosi is the easiest go to example. Nonetheless, the point still stands — affluence is not the cause of political hate. Nichols is affluent. I’m affluent, as are most of the people in my county, along with, say, Marin County, California. The fact that people have time and money doesn’t preordain their inclination to (for instance) spend both participating in a pro-MAGA flotilla with their own pleasure craft. Money may be necessary but it sure isn’t sufficient to explain this phenomenon.
Another Scott
@A Man for All Seaonings (formerly Geeno): Maybe, but I think it’s more complicated than that.
I got a very broad liberal education in college – Far Eastern Civ, Russian Lit (in English), Ecology, German, Physics, Math, etc. I was a contrarian libertarian leaning guy until I was around 25, but I mostly kept to myself until then.
I think it’s more a case of “where you stand depends on where you sit”. If your daily interactions and reading and “media consumption” don’t change, then you won’t either. Or you’ll get resentful as the larger world changes and you seem to be left behind.
I’m a huge fan of liberal education. But it has to continue throughout life, via thinking and interacting with fellow humans. Believing that one knows enough, or has figured things out for all time, is dangerous for progress (look at Jacob Rees-Mogg and BoJo – world class educations and can probably throw out clever Plutarch and Shakespeare lines all day, but garbage humans).
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@lowtechcyclist: IT HELPED :-)
Sorry I misread.
Marmot
@Paul in KY: Thanks—I know the thread is dead, but I just looked up this quote and found a decent Reuters fact check about it.
Asked how Goering thought people in a democracy could be easily led into war, given they have some say in the matter, he responds:
So basically Fox News.
Edit: Added link.
lowtechcyclist
@Paul in KY: ;-)
dc
@PST: He manages to avoid racism as even one of the explanations he rejects.
ceece
re: Sinema : doesn’t the Governor appoint replacement senators in AZ? Katie Hobbs will be in that chair soon, so maybe Biden should figure out what ambassador gig is best for triathlon training and lobbyist $, and offer it up to the new indy senator. She could be the center of attention somewhere, and it wouldn’t have to be the senate. It’s not like she does any public events in AZ anyway.
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: oh, my god, what a dick. (Yes, I know she’s a female. But that, right there, is a dick move. “What, you think I’m going to made irrelevant? Well, I’LL show YOU!”)
Kent
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Sinema has no path to re-election in 2024. Josh Marshall has laid this out clearly.
She can’t run as a Democrat.
She can’t WIN as an independent unless Democrats clear the field as they do in Maine and Vermont where they don’t field any candidates against Sanders or King. That won’t happen in Arizona.
She can’t run or win as a Republican. There is zero chance she could get through a GOP primary as a Republican when there are plenty of real Republicans gunning for that job.
All she can really do is retire in 2024 with some semblance of honor. Or try a useless 3rd Party/Independent run which will likely flip the seat to the GOP.
Kent
@ceece: Or give her a cabinet position where she can grift. Like Secretary of Commerce or something like that.
ian
@hervevillechaizelounge: The idea we shouldn’t try to free Whelan because he is a Trumper is both abhorrent and incredibly short sighted.
He is an American citizen. That is why we should continue to try to free him (and others like Marc Fogel). Our government shouldn’t assess partisan political affiliation when viewing foreign situations like that.
You should think really hard about your political views if you think “votes/advocates for my domestic political opponents” becomes a reason to accept “locked up in dungeon in foreign dictatorship”.
livewyre
@ian: Last I heard, we are still trying, and I haven’t seen anyone advocate otherwise. It’s just that the background throws the veracity of his plight into question and the (Fox) claims of his being snubbed into sharp contrast.
At this point I have no way to tell what he’s really doing there or what to do about it, so I just have to leave it in the hands of the administration. They’re equipped to make the appropriate decision and I’m not.
Geminid
@Barbara: Kari Lake is an example of a Republican woman switching careers to ride the MAGA wave. As a TV anchorwoman Lake was politics adjacent in a way Greene was not. But acquaintences say Lake had no special ideological lean. Greene, though, sounds more sincere than Lake, who looks motivated by raw and cynical ambition, a would be Elmer Gantry.
compassrose.pdx
Good points made about our current right not driven primarily by economic anxiety and etc., I would like to add on:
Shomjka
RE “Among many reasons the rest of us have had a hard time comprehending the descent of so many Americans into mass psychosis is a belief that anyone who embraces such nuttery must have traumatic reasons for doing so. But it’s affluence and plenty, not trauma, that led us here.”
Right. It goes deeper. What’s behind “affluence and plenty”? Collective human insanity — study the theory of the 2 married pink elephants in the room
“Separate what you know from what you THINK you know.” — Unknown