Really interesting window into the deliberation within the GOP about the party’s future. One unexplored tension/contradiction here had to do with the role of the grassroots. Everyone seemed to think they were the solution, but what if they’re the problem? https://t.co/7oElEFcTNT
— Seth Cotlar, mostly now at the other places (@SethCotlar) April 10, 2023
Or take Christian Nationalism, for example. The GOP wants grassroots activists who are willing to “fight for America?” The 17% of Americans certainly fit that bill. The only problem is, most in the other 83% find such people terrifying. pic.twitter.com/0blRmWqAzj
— Seth Cotlar, mostly now at the other places (@SethCotlar) April 10, 2023
Speaking of epistemic closure. This feels like a variant on the ‘If you let Nazis drink at your bar, pretty soon you’re known as the Nazi bar’ problem…
The Oregon GOP struggled with this tension in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A far right activist named Walter Huss led an insurgency that took over the party from a more moderate establishment. https://t.co/iInlFh4dv1
— Seth Cotlar, mostly now at the other places (@SethCotlar) April 10, 2023
This resulted in a wave of new grassroots activists investing energy in the OR GOP. These were mostly far right evangelicals who were anti-tax, anti-abortion, and anti-LGBTQ. The end result is that the OR GOP drove itself into an electoral dead end and it’s still there.
The things one needs to say to win a GOP primary these days are things that’ll make most folks outside the 30-40% of the population that comprises the GOP base recoil. And the fired up GOP base has a low tolerance for the nuance (or waffling) necessary to win a general election.
Put another way, over the past 20 yrs (but really it could be traced back to the late 1950s) the GOP has incubated a political culture that is critical of (if not hostile to) some of the central tenets of modern, religiously pluralistic, multi-racial democracy. This is a problem.
I mean, if you listen to right wing AM radio the J6 rioters are political prisoners, the 2020 election was stolen, Marxist Democrats want to abolish your church, the Covid vaccine kills people, and George Soros is the puppet master who controls the whole thing. This is bad.
If one believes the things one hears on right wing media, then of course you should be fired up & ready to fight to save the country! The problem is, when you step outside that bubble and try to convey that urgency to others you sound like the ranting kook at the end of the bar.
In the 1980s the GOP establishment in Oregon tried to land the plane…they tried to keep their new fired up base in the fold while not turning over the reins to the delusional people like Huss who thought everyone would agree with him if they could just hear his “truths.”
This more moderate (though still fairly conservative and business-friendly) GOP establishment in Oregon failed to keep the far right insurgency in check. That failure produced an ever more radicalized OR GOP post-1980s that also became ever less electorally viable.
As someone who thinks one-party dominated polities are generally not a good thing, it gives me no pleasure to recount this history. How the GOP in OR (and elsewhere) reinvents itself to become less toxic to voters outside their base is far beyond my pay grade.
Thoughts?
PJ
Thoughts? Fuck ’em.
Baud
A one-party system isn’t great, but the Dems really aren’t one party.
Ksmiami
Their policies mean literal death for Americans and our Allies. Fuck Republicans and I hope we bury their fascist, grifting shitty party.
Matt McIrvin
They plan to double down and control the US with a minority through restriction of the franchise, procedural Weird Tricks, wild judicial rulings, and violence.
One of the big ones is to entrench control of state legislatures through gerrymandering and then insist on state legislatures as having supreme power, to the point of being able to overturn presidential elections.
Citizen Alan
Well, I’m not a Marxist, but (at the risk of summoning Eversor), I’m kind of coming around to this view. You know, ever since Evangelical Christianity revealed itself as being a Satanic death cult.
Cameron
It’s not just that they believe nutty stuff – it’s that, more and more, they’re realizing that they can’t enact nutty stuff through representative government. And we’ve seen what their solution is to that.
PJ
I mean, they’re the dog that caught the car, they’ve gotten much of what they set out to do when they realized Brown v. Board of Education was going to change everything, and, given the Supreme Court, they are likely to turn back the clock even more in the next few years, but the fact that their politics is toxic to the majority of Americans is not a “me problem”, it’s a “you fuckers problem.”
They are on their way to being a troublesome but regional ethno-nationalist party. The solution is easy; they could just jettison all the hate and oppression, and get back in the game – there will always be a huge number of people who, as long as they are doing fine, have no issue with injustice and just want low taxes and to make sure their own personal gravy train doesn’t dry up. But the GOP would have to cut loose the 17- 27% of seething chimpanzees* they’ve made all these promises to, and they have proven themselves to be a bunch of amoral cowards.
*apologies to chimpanzees everywhere for the analogy
Suzanne
It isn’t difficult. They just do not want to.
So…. as efgoldman would say…. Fuckem’.
bbleh
The CN Scale (which I assume means Christian Nationalism) “Adherents + Sympathizers” totals 29% which I’d wager is statistically indistinguishable from the Crazification Factor.
Also, can we please stop calling them “Christian”? They’re “Christianist” — like “Islamist” (not Islamic) — terrorists. It’s all form (very public form) and no substance.
Otherwise — popcorn!
Mike in Oly
We need to crush the republicans into irrelevance and then let the dems split in 2 between the center-right and the lefty-progressives as it should be. They’ve gone so far out to the fringes of the right-wing they are alienating everyone to their left. And that encompasses more and more people every year.
Ksmiami
@PJ: definitely Chimps are asshole Republicans and Bonobos are sweet, tolerant dems
Baud
@Mike in Oly:
Republicans are too large for the Dems to split. Even in California where the GOP is essentially defunct and there’s a jungle primary, the Dems haven’t split.
bbleh
@Baud: TRUE THIS
The Dark Avenger
@Baud: I do not belong to an organized political party. I am a Democrat.
Will Rogers
Spanky
I see the WaPo article about Chinese spy balloon info in the Big Leak includes images of S/FVEY and TS/FVEY data.
Fuuuuuck
Eta, I assumed this was Open Thread, so apologies offered.
Baud
@Spanky:
Explain.
pacem appellant
ibid. CA.
C Stars
@Cameron: more and more, they’re realizing that they can’t enact nutty stuff through representative government
Yeah, I think this is it. And there’s also some formula for the various parts of their nutty stuff. Like, in order to get the uneducated rural folks to go for insane tax giveaways to the wealthy, they have to also persecute trans people, or do away with abortion, or whatever.
Spanky
@Baud: The WaPo is printing secret and top secret Five Eyes data. Five Eyes, as some may not know, means it is off limits to foreigners excepting Britain, Canada, Australia, and NZ.
bbleh
@Baud: S = Secret, TS = Top Secret, FVEY = “Five Eyes” = intelligence-sharing Anglophone countries.
Baud
@Spanky: This is the stuff that that douche kid leaked?
kindness
Republican strategists thought they were co-opting the Evangelical folk to get their votes back in the day. Well that table has turned and now it’s the Evangelicals who co-opted the Republican party. Their theocrats who are fine with theocrat (friendly) dictators. If the current Republican party ever has a trifecta on the Federal government, I’m not sure we’d ever have another honest election.
Thankfully the cult members offend the other 65% of the country. They’ve voted for Democrats instead. I’m really thinking the messaging we’re seeing in the christian/fascist group will help us in ’24. I think it will.
Spanky
@Baud: Yep.
pacem appellant
@bbleh: It’s hard when they call themselves Christians, command an entire political party, and don’t get denounced (enough) by non-Christianist Christians.
Baud
@kindness:
I think the number of possible GOP presidential contenders who are dropping out is telling.
@Spanky: Thanks.
MattF
It’s grassroots crazy + Trump crazy + FOX crazy + gun crazy + … The old GOP let the thugs take over, and the thugs aren’t going to let go any time soon.
Cameron
@kindness: It will help as long as complacency doesn’t set in. “Nobody will vote for these wankers ’24” is a tad too much like “Nobody will vote for this orange-topped swine ’16” for my taste.
Sister Golden Bear
Republicans have been politically irrelevant in California politics for years, and they’ve not moderated, they’ve gotten even more bug nuts extreme. So the odds of them moderating themselves….
Particularly since with gerrymandering and voter suppression they’re unlikely to pay any consequences with their extremist. And with the Senate imbalance giving Red states outsized influence why should they? Especially as they’ve shown they’re quite comfortable with minoritarian rule.
Republicans have already chosen power over democracy.
pacem appellant
@Citizen Alan: I don’t want to eliminate your church, but I want to tax it (into oblivion in some egregious cases).
Geoduck
The same thing happened here next door to OR in WA state. The local GOP party has slid further in crazy irrelevance: in the last gubernatorial election, their candidate was a guy whose “political experience” was being the sole law-enforcement officer in a one-stoplight town in the far eastern boondocks of the state.
bbleh
@pacem appellant: but when writing / commenting about them, just for the sake of accuracy if for no other reason, I think they should be called what they are rather than as they style themselves, in the same way as we don’t call violent ethnonationalists “patriots.”
It’s certainly harder to challenge them in religious forums, where arguments over who is “truly Christian” are meat and potatoes, although I think in some situations it might be worth the effort. But I see no barrier to using it as an adjective or a noun; it is, after all, true and accurate.
Ksmiami
@Sister Golden Bear: which is why we need to destroy them. There cannot be any compromise or appeasement of fascism.
bbleh
@Sister Golden Bear: I think large numbers of them have chosen fealty to the Tribe of the Most Loyal over anything, power included, many because they really aren’t thinking clearly, but some because — oh the irony — they have chosen purity over power.
Ksmiami: I’m happy merely to remove them from power, without denying their humanity or what they deserve because of that — eg access to healthcare — as much as they would like to deny it to us. The Cal solution works for me.
Chetan Murthy
@bbleh: Two things:
There’s no good reason to grant them the title of “Christian”, regardless of what they call themselves. Just as they call us “groomers”, call them what they are: rapists, pedophiles, and their enablers. Not Christians. Not Christianists. Rapists, pedophiles, and their enablers.
Redshift
@PJ: i don’t think “cowards” is the right idea. It’s not that they’re afraid to do it, it’s that with 20% fewer voters they might save the party long term, but at the expense of their careers.
Baud
@Sister Golden Bear:
.
Part of it, I think, is the nationalization of politics associated with the nationalization of right wing media. CA and other west coast Republicans don’t need state power because they can live vicariously through Republicans elsewhere. It’s not clear that will scale up of Republicans are a rump party at the national level.
pacem appellant
@bbleh: We may not call them patriots here, but the WaPo has no problem doing it (per yesterday’s WTF paean to the AF leaker).
But of course, here, we should call a spade a spade. It’s the jackal way.
bbleh
@pacem appellant: “patriot” 🤬
Bill Arnold
First, re-upping this, an easy read. (The speculations at the end about breaking echo chambers are a bit weak but are at least an attempt.)
Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles (C. Thi Nguyen, Episteme 17 (2):141-161 (2020)) (pdf download button at link)
Re the political damage that echo chambers/epistemic closure can cause to a political party or movement, from above:
Exactly. When your political opponent is intellectually hobbled by their echo chamber(s), attack without mercy (that can include ratfucking like reinforcing their echo chamber), or at least take full advantage of their mistakes.
Also, escapees from an echo chamber are often tireless fighters against their previous belief system.
BruceFromOhio
@Suzanne: This. “I got mine, fuck you” is a poor starting point for being an engaged citizen or a sustainable policy platform.
sdhays
@Baud: Fuck you, Baud. Here I was trying to think of how to convey how “1 party rule” doesn’t necessarily devolve into tunnel vision and corruption in less than 3 paragraphs, and you blurt out one short sentence that does it all.
Damn you and your pithiness.
Balconesfault
GOP:. White Christian Nationalists … can’t win with them, can’t win without them.
Mike in NC
Per USA Today, there are a couple of groups in Florida standing up to Ron DeFascist’s over-reach there. “Equality Florida” and the “Florida Immigrant Coalition” represent more than 65 organizations, and are advising outsiders to avoid the state because it is unsafe. They’re warning about the attacks on womens’ reproductive health, gun safety, public education, and the LGBTQ community by the governor and GOP legislature. Florida Republicans have filed more than 18 bills targeting the rights of citizens, especially trans people.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Very perceptive observation
TheOtherHank
Also, as a Democrat, it’s not my job to fix the Republican party. If they want to drive themselves into the ditch, that’s on them
Dan B
@Baud: I see part of the problem is we have no Fairness Doctrine plus we need one for the web. That’s a huge undertaking but Democracy is at stake if you have nearly half the country getting fake news and conspiracy theories.
Baud
@TheOtherHank:
It’s my job to fix the Republican Party by beating them in elections so they are forced to reform.
bbleh
@Baud: or we could just beat them in elections while they keep doing what they’re doing (and, y’know, losing elections). Just a suggestion…
Baud
@bbleh:
I’m not sure we can handle that much happiness.
catfishncod
“How can the GOP save itself?” is the wrong question; the built-in assumptions prevent a solution.
“How can we salvage as many supporters of democracy as possible from extremism?” is a better question, but still not quite right.
“How do we remove institutional and structural support for minority rule?” Now we’re getting somewhere. The entire discussion both at (FTF)NYT and here takes the dysfunctional two-party system for granted, but it’s only an artifact of the combination of primaries + FPTP + gerrymanders + nationalization of politics.
Don’t try to save the GOP. Make it possible for the center-right to save itself, and in so doing, save our democracy. The tools that could do so are known: instant runoff, jungle primary, fusion ticketing, multi-member districting, independent districting commissions, a formula to expand the House, judicial reform, enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment.
What we need to do is bundle it, package it, sell it, and get it done.
Then we can stop worrying about stealth autogolpes and rule by One Weird Trick, and do productive things like treating domestic terrorism as the violent criminal conspiracy it is.
Ksmiami
@Bill Arnold: I’m reminded of the scene in Animal House when Stork leads the marching band into a wall…
SiubhanDuinne
O/T, for which I apologise: I know Adam has his hands and brain full with the daily War on Ukraine update, for which I am thankful; but is there any way that he, or some other reliably knowledgeable commenter, could talk about the military coup going on in Khartoum? I’d like to know more, but don’t know the best sources. Thanks.
Snarki, child of Loki
‘If you let Nazis drink at your bar, pretty soon you’re known as the Nazi bar’
…and “if you fuck ONE goat” also, too.
Equally applicable to the MAGAts.
RepubAnon
@Baud: We could also push for “cafeteria style” cable TV options. The Fox Network’s main revenue source is the fees it extracts from cable TV outlets. If individuals could subscribe to only the channels they want to see, they could unsubscribe from Fox “News.”
This would hit Rupert in his pocketbook – which would hurt him.
For AM Hate Radio, perhaps attending license renewal hearings would help.
Bill Arnold
@Ksmiami:
Thank you for that:
Animal House Marching Band Scenes
(I quit marching band as a high school freshman; not willing to be so obedient.)
bbleh
@Baud: I will undertake that as a service to humanity. (Donate to my gofundme here.)
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
I just read about that, and the Ethiopian dam situation.
Anoniminous
Lee Atwater – Southern Strategy
“You start in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘Nigger.’ That hurts you. It backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff and you get so abstract. Now you talk about cutting taxes and these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that’s part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. Obviously sitting around saying we want to cut taxes and we want this, is a lot more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than nigger nigger. So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”
[Emphasis added]
GOP purposely tried to attract racists and bigots and now they are the grassroots.
Glidwrith
The OR GOP has lost for years and they still haven’t pulled themselves out of the ditch. As motivated as they are to win, but haven’t found a way to be less extreme, there may not be any solution for the Party, except lots of jail time for the fraud, pedophilia and terrorism.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud: Man, you’re way ahead of me. Will have to bring myself up to date on the Ethiopian dam situation. I’m shockingly uninformed, but would like to remedy that as best I can.
Ksmiami
@Snarki, child of Loki: they are all definitely goat fuckers…I mean have you seen what Maga boys look like?
twbrandt
@Geoduck: The same thing is happening here in Michigan. After the Dems won all the top state offices and flipped the legislature, the MI GOP elected a lunatic as party chair. Kristina Karamo, an election denier who got clobbered in her bid for MI Secretary of State, has in the past compared abortion to pagan child sacrifice. The wealthy traditional GOP donors, like the DeVos family, have snapped shut their purse strings, and individual donations have slowed to a trickle as well. So the MI GOP is, I sincerely hope, on its way to irrelevance.
One reason for the turnaround here in MI is that a redistricting commission ungerrymandered the state (mostly), weakening republican hold on the state legislature.
Gvg
The structural problem that keeps the corrupt GOP in the game is the corrupt Supreme Court that is not shooting down what should be illegal voting restrictions and gerrymandering plus allowing bribery, I mean free speech of unmonitored corporations not to mention probably foreign influence. We need a couple of honest Supreme Court judges at least either by death/retirement/impeachment or expand the court. We need them soon. I think the revelations about Thomas help the public see the need.
One other factor that plays into IMO the evangelicals overpowering the establishment republicans is how completely the establishment discredited itself and failed to come up with new ideas or points beyond cutting taxes after communism fell. The new American century or whatever just was totally wrong and a terrible plan, worse than the Cold War fuck ups in that it had no success and collapsed immediately. And cutting taxes can’t go on forever and didn’t deliver the promised results to most republican voters. I think that probably helped the religious right get control.
Where as democrats had spent the last few decades working out a lot of ideas, including that they liked things that worked.
Another Scott
@SiubhanDuinne:
AlJazeera and DW seem to be covering it.
HTH a little.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@SiubhanDuinne: Do you mess with Twitter? Laura Rozen is a national security reporter who has retweeted and linked to Sudanese and regional reporters. I look her up as “laura rozen twitter.”
Rozen is a good source for foreign affairs generally, and seems reliable in her sources. I found her through Cheryl Rofer.
This seems basically a fight between two armed power centers: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a paramilitary entity called the Rapid Support Force (RSF). The issue seems to be the long term independence of the RSF from the SAF, within the framework of a future civilian government.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
Many thanks!
Not sure I’ve ever said it, but I really value your comments and links and useful information. I’m very glad you’re an active part of the BJ community.
lowtechcyclist
@pacem appellant:
As one of those non-Christianist Christians, I suppose I could fill threads here with my denunciations of them, but y’all would get tired of it almost as fast as you got tired of eversor. (Quite frankly, they piss me off way more than eversor does.)
SiubhanDuinne
@Geminid:
I’m not a twitterer, but on your recommendation will check out Laura Rozen. I know her name, I think — at least, it sounds familiar— but can’t set a context. Anyhow, thanks — I’ll look her up.
twbrandt
@lowtechcyclist: same.
Almost Retired
The Republican super-majority states are becoming increasingly dystopian for most people as they march in lockstep to advance their Falangist agenda. This isn’t happening in Democratic super-majority states, where much of the legislation that provokes Red State Republicans is broadly popular in the Blue States that enacted it. There’s no crazy Marxist overreach.
And that supports Baud’s point about the Dems not being, in effect, one party. Here in California, some moderation is supplied by what are known as the “business Democrats” since the CA Republicans are irrelevant. There’s no similar check on super majority over reach in the Republican Party in red states as far as I can tell. And that creates Justins, which is a very bad thing for the GOP!
Urban Suburbanite
@Geoduck: Semi Bird, the guy who’s looking like the next candidate for governor, and his accomplishments include getting recalled from a school board (because he and a couple others on the board are riddled with antivaccine brainworms), and complaining about teenagers to police (There’s at least one incident where he pulled a gun on some kids). BUT he didn’t protect a pedophile cop, so he has that over Loren Culp.
The GOP leadership seems to be freaking out about the capital gains tax that went through, because the wealthy weirdos who make up their donor base might start pulling stakes and taking their money with them.
Urban Suburbanite
And just to log my required both sides-ing, the Democrat apparatus in Washington sucks a whole lot in its own way. Especially in Seattle.
mvr
This made me try to remember Oregon politics when I moved there in 1978. I was pretty left wing (still am) but not crazy about lots of Democrats back then.
Senators were Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield. Both Rs. Hatfield was actually OK iirc. Packwood kept his seat by supporting abortion rights while sexually harassing people until he had to resign. Hatfield was anti-Vietnam war, bad on abortion, good on civil rights. Governor was Bob Straub, who I got to know personally when the lawyer I worked for represented him in a DUII in Bend after he was out of office (we won and I take some credit). Was a one term governor replaced by Vic Atiyeh (whom I did not like at all). Bob Duncan (a formerly pro Vietnam war D, who lost anti-war Democratic Sen. Wayne Morris’s endorsement to Hatfield over that) was in my house district and was soon deposed by Ron Wyden who had founded Oregon’s Grey Panthers chapter. (I remember being pressed into service to go to lunch with Wyden when I was in college and he came to campus. Those of us so pressed were a bit difficult in that we had more radical views than he was willing to espouse at the time.)
My memory of city politics was that the races weren’t officially partisan though some figures were very partisan in how they ran. Frank Ivancie was a law and order myor elected in 1980 and I truly despised him. He was replaced by Bud Clark, a local bar owner who was decent but probably also in a bit over his head. (Bud’s admin included various Citizen’s Party figures who I knew and liked, but the PPB made his life difficult.) He was followed by Vera Katz who was a Democrat and sensible.
I think it is fair to say that the 70s were a time when you could consider Republican candidates (like Hatfield, though not Packwood) when on balance their views were better. But that changed by the time I last lived there in 1987 and it kept moving from there. Oregon had a big urban/rural split and this played out especially over gay rights. Prior to that it was over logging and environmentalism. Oregon pioneered a path followed not too much later by Colorado.
Anyway, FWIW.
Jeffro
The folks who find the anti-abortion nuts and gun nuts to be…nutty…are going to just have to shut up, hold their noses, and vote for Dems for a couple elections until the GOP loses enough races to come to its senses.
Or to put it more directly: the big-money nuts who control the GOP will have to tell their puppets that it’s time to dial it back on the anti-abortion and pro-gun stances for a cycle or two. Better to stay somewhat viable than be relegated back to the wilderness where they belong. The big-money boys and candidates will tell the brain-dead GOP base to do X instead of Y; the zombies will start claiming they were for X all along.
Dan B
@lowtechcyclist: I tried, with a group of progressive Democrats, to persuade progressive Christians to use media to spread their ideas and explain how they differ from conservative Christians. They primarily come from academia and would not give up their 5,000 word minimum for communication. And they were loathe to say anything bad about any Christian, even the most hateful.
Aiiiieeeeeee!
Baud
@Dan B:
Jesus wept.
BruceFromOhio
@TheOtherHank: this, also. I don’t control you, GQP, and don’t pull that abuser “you made me do it” fucking bullshit, either. Homey don’t play that.
Jeffro
Minor note here but important: as the GOP continues to shrink (all too slowly, but still) and lose power, it’s clear they are leaning hard into every possible way of subverting Democratic politicians, whether it’s Sinema or the NY Dems or even that wacko who “flipped” in NC.
To say nothing of running ‘ghost’ candidates with the same name as Dems (like they did in FL) and funding No Labels. It is a full-court (pun possibly intended) press and it’s because their nutcase billionaire donors have the funds to do it.
So…taxing the shit out of rich folks is not only good for the budget, and deficit, and national debt, it’s also an absolute MUST if we’re going to disarm these people in any way.
Geminid
@SiubhanDuinne: Now I see that Adam Silverman has some material on the Sudan conflict at the end of his Ukraine post.
pacem appellant
@lowtechcyclist: I assure you, I would never tire of it. What tires me is the constant stream of scamming mega-church pastors just hoovering up dollar after dollar of vulnerable people’s money, of Charlie Kirk and his ilk (Shapiro and Prager being especially egregious), and of pedophile scandals galore. A little righteous denunciation from the religious would be a welcome change.
pacem appellant
@Dan B: By their deeds, you will know them.
Citizen Alan
@pacem appellant: No objections on my part, as long as we can compromise and also have a confiscatory top marginal rate on all income over $10m a year.
BlueGuitarist
@bbleh:
Chrinos:
Christians In Name Only
SiubhanDuinne
@Geminid:
Cool, thx. Was otherwise occupied and haven’t yet looked at his post. Will do so.
Citizen Alan
@BlueGuitarist:
“Chinos” surely! We can link it to the khaki pants that the Nazis wore at Charlottesville.
Geminid
@pacem appellant: If I want to see evangelicals calling out church abuses like financial and sexual exploitation, and patriarchy in general, I check out the Wartburg Watch blog.* Those ladies are fed up!
Russell Moore and Beth Moore (they are unrelated) are both critical of the Southern Baptist denomination they both left recently. They mainly get covered in religion-oriented publications.
* the blog is named after Wartburg Castle, in Thuringia, Germany. That’s where a sympathetic Elector stashed Martin Luther when the Church wanted to put him on trial.
PJ
@Redshift: sounds like “cowards” to me.
artem1s
Honestly there is the ‘one weird trick’ that will reverse all their losses pretty quickly. They just need to go back to NOT saying the quiet parts out loud again. Also,too the problem isn’t so much that they turned the party over the crazy 27%. It’s that they turned it over to the grifters. And as it turns out being able to communicate at the same level as your marks brings in the big bucks. Campaigning has become a profession. The goal isn’t even to win elections. It’s to accumulate a mailing list of donors who will jump every time a text goes out implying that if the recipient doesn’t respond immediately (by midnight, the next filing date, etc) then surely AMERICA is lost.
One of the reasons I despised Wilmer and his gang of bros is they adopted the Ron Paul method of fundraising thru vicious attack ads that were particularly attractive to certain smaller, one issue donors. If your only goal is to make money during a campaign, then you don’t care whether you kill the party, your opponent, or the country in the process. This strategy of turning everything into a money grabbing campaign opportunity is the reason why the GOP has ended up in this situation they can’t back out of. And how truly awful, unqualified attention whores like TFG, Bobert, MTG and Santos get into office.
Kay
That’s a new one on me. I don’t recall any other candidate just blatantly lying about how much money they raised.
This will catch on with Republicans. Next they’ll get rid of reporting requirements completely.
NotMax
@Citizen Aln
Crucidickians?
//
Jackie
O/T but worth the laugh!
MAGA faithful tell Don Jr to shut his mouth:
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-jr-bud-light/
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
“Even though Trump Jr. criticized Bud Light for its partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, he also called the beer an “American icon” and noted that its parent company, Anheuser-Busch, donates generously to Republican candidates.
However, many of the MAGA faithful were not happy with Trump Jr.’s call to stand down and they took to social media to vent their displeasure at the former president’s eldest son.”
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Mike in Oly
@Baud: Hence the need to first crush them into irrelevance.
Geminid
@Redshift:
@Redshift: Also, the radicals won’t be thrown out. Anyone who tries to throw them out will get thrown out instead. The party has already hit a tipping point where the radicals have the upper hand.
In Virginia, the Republicans’ tipping point might have been around 2010. One key inflection point was 2013, when they used a convention to choose Attorney General Cuccinelli for Governor instead of holding a primary that Lt. Governor Bill Bolling would have won. A better candidate, Bolling likely would have beaten McAuliffe, who could barely beat the radical Cuccinelli.
The 2014 7th CD primary was another important waypoint. Eric Cantor was the quintessential Chamber of Commerce Republican. That wing used to dominate the Virginia party, and the Bible thumpers accepted junior partner status. But in the aftermath of the Iraq War and the Crash of 2008, a lot of the more secular rank and file turned on the establishment. These “Tea Party” radicals formed an alliance with the Bible thumpers that lasts to this day, and Eric Cantor is now 9 years into his second career as an investment banker.
It’s possible that after getting thrashed for 3 or 4 cycles, some of the radicals will get disgusted and quit politics entirely. Many of them were never that civic minded to begin with, and political engagement is more of a fad for them. Some of the new voters Trump attracted are like that, I think.
Others might take a more pragmatic view after getting their asses kicked repeatedly. Having run the car into the ditch, with the wheels off and the radiator steaming, they’ll be willing to hand the give the steering wheel back to the “RINOs” they’ve despised for so long.
By then it will be a hollowed-out party that will take years to rebuild. That’s one reason I think that if the Democrats can win the next presidential election they’ll win the next 2 or 3 after that.
ExpatchadPutin has become Stalin, the destroyer of worlds
@sdhays: You need your PITH helmet
Carlo Graziani
It seems to me that the GOP has always had this problem.
@Baud: cracks wise about the Democrats not being one party, but the Republicans have been 4 parties since before Ronald Reagan cemented the current party makeup. There’s (1) the Christian theocrats who fear the loss of moral control, (2) the white racist middle class, who fear that their tribe is being overtaken by The Other, (3) the Chamber of Commerce types, who fear government regulation, and (4) the Wall Street Masters of the Universe, who fear higher taxes. The Venn diagram has some overlap, but mostly these people hate each other, and are united only by their fears, and by the fact that they have no active, positive political program that isn’t principally about preventing something that they loathe.
Reagan was the only GOP politician who had the genius (it pains me to use that word in reference to such a cretin) that enabled him to speak to all those people simultaneously, and make them all believe that he had their interests at heart. That is why the GOP sainted him: they’ve been trying to reproduce that trick ever since, without success.
The guys in categories (4) and (3) have been cutting the checks, and were accustomed to running the shop as a consequence—the unwashed loons in (1) and (2) would get lip service, but when the GOP had power, they would use it lagely to secure deregulation and tax cuts. They had no interest in shutting down abortion (they might have had to learn to wear condoms), and they would cross the street to avoid talking to specimens from the trailer park set. They certainly had no interest in reviving their economic livelihoods. So while the voting majority of the GOP were (1) or (2) types, the governing set were all drawn from (3) or (4).
And for years it seemed it would ever be so. But then, in the space of one year, Trump gave a voice to to the (2) yahoos by dropping the dog whistle and shouting ugly racist tropes at the top of his lungs. And he was actually willing to put theocratic monsters in the courts, so category (1) discovered that making deals with Satan could be profitable, irrespective of what their Book said. Suddenly, the GOP ruling class lost control of the party! They still had to cut the checks, but they had to wheedle and lick shoe to be heard, and they were the ones feeding of the crumbs falling off the dinner table of power now.
And that’s where we are today. The unwashed are united, have voices, and cannot be discretely ushered off-stage. Meanwhile, the (3)-(4) types, who barely ever had enough popular votes nationwide to elect a Governor of Rhode Island, still run the Senate, some moiety of the House, and a bunch of Governorships and State Houses, largely because you have to be a decamillionaire at least to have a shot. They are still the Governing side of the Party. They just can’t get much governance done anymore, because they answer to the Yahoos now.
This doesn’t strike me as a problem they can solve this decade. They somehow need to evolve into a European-style center-right party, economically conservative but socially normal. But it doesn’t look as if there is any way there from here, at the moment.
RobArt
…enough time has passed that I can drop in and talk crazy talk, I think.
If I had magic or money or influence I would start up some kind of democracy promoting foundation with two main goals:
I know I’m not the only one who feels just so saddened and shellshocked that millions seem willing to embrace fascism over democracy if it means getting their way on certain pet issues. I was 28 in 2000. Before then I believed a lot of wrong things about my country. During the 23 years since then the scales have not stopped falling from my eyes. It’s hard to believe I could have had so much scale buildup! But then we are not taught very well. Or, rather, some of us are schooled very well in delusions. Without doubt I believe the primary reason for the awful situation the United States is in is the obscene amounts of money devoted 24/7 to right wing bullshit. The money machines never stop and infect everything.
I said that I would start a pro-democracy movement if I had magic or money or influence. Since I think the design of our system rewards the worst behaviors, I’ll put my hope in magic.
Soprano2
@Mike in NC: They should add Missouri to that list. It’s already not safe for pregnant women here, and the GOP is trying to make it unsafe for Trans people too, plus the guns are rampant here.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: Even the Republicans who find the far right insufferable still believe the stories about how the Democratic Party has been taken over by terrifying monsters who are going to turn the US into some Communist dystopia with forced re-education camps. I don’t know how you break them of that.
OFFS
@Geoduck: Dude, no. Eastern Washington has been locked out of state government for 25 years, and let’s just say Seattle / Bellevue / Redmond interests have been *far” from sufficiently benevolent wrt taking care of taxpayers outside the bounds of King County. You can’t do that to your own people and then clutch your pearls when anger fuels the crazy.
lowtechcyclist
@Dan B:
That part shouldn’t be too hard – you just start with ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ and work from there.
I mean yeah, the evangelicals will say that’s what they’re really doing with their gay and trans neighbors because Scripture says yada yada yada, but they’re turning the meaning of ‘love’ into a pretzel in the process, and that shouldn’t be at all hard to point that out to anyone outside the white evangelical bubble.
Not sure what the 5000-word minimum is about, but I can understand one constraint of academia: you can challenge someone else’s ideas, but you can’t attack the person.
But ISTM there are Christians who are publicly going after this crap: it’s pretty clear where Sen. Warnock is coming from, or Rev. Barber. My WAG is that there are nearly as many Black Christians as there are White evangelicals, but that the MSM doesn’t take Blacks in general very seriously.
It would help if White mainstream churches – Episcopal, Lutheran (ELCA, not Missouri Synod), Presbyterian (PCUSA, not PCA), etc. spoke out about this regularly. But again, maybe they do but are ignored by the media. Certainly when your membership has been declining for half a century, it’s easy for others to ignore you.
J R in WV
@Balconesfault:
I call them what they are: “Christo-Fascist monsters” !! I have good friends who are real Christians, one is an Episcopal Bishop and clearly live according to the teachings of her Christ. The calvinist perverts are no more Christian than Hitler and his storm troopers were.