It’s down to one issue on the ballot. It’s not taxes, it’s not abortion. The one issue is: do you believe in democracy, or do you believe in authoritarianism? That’s what we should be voting on.
⭐️
It’s really this simple. One issue.
— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) October 31, 2023
⭐️
TOTALLY OPEN THREAD.
West of the Rockies
So damn true. But let’s also push the abortion, voting rights, climate change (etc) issues.
Villago Delenda Est
Mike Johnson is a jeebofascist git.
Alison Rose
It’s a good statement from Kinzinger. The only quibble I have is that I don’t see how we ever get back to a “healthy” Republican Party, considering they were never actually that to begin with, even decades ago. They might have been better at putting on a normal face for the public, but it was always a mask.
Brachiator
If people vote for Republicans, they are voting for authoritarianism. If people vote for Trump, they are voting for authoritarianism headed by a madman.
Geminid
@West of the Rockies: We also need to push good economic news. I think the economy and abortion rights could be the two most salient issues next year.
The other issues will still be important, especially as motivators for base turnout.
WaterGirl
@Brachiator:
Absolutely true.
WaterGirl
@Geminid: But not democracy itself? You don’t think that should be one of the big messages?
If someone is going to be a single issue voter in the US, then democracy has to be that issue, because otherwise, the rest won’t matter. All protections will fall, and it will be ugly.
teezyskeezy
@Alison Rose: True, but it’s probably somewhat more persuasive rhetoric to at least pretend to take the idea of a “healthy” GOP seriously (even though Kinzinger is probably not pretending he probably means it).
teezyskeezy
@Geminid: They do push the good econ news, but it just doesn’t seem to budge the tired “Biden is too old” hangup out there. Let me be optimistic for once though and imagine that once Biden becomes the nominee, and people have to come back to reality and drop their delusions that some other nominee is or was possible, that his approval ratings and support might rise. I think a lot of people are quite foolishly imagining they have some other choice when they don’t and they allow that to affect their sense of approval/disapproval. Hoping so, anyway.
MattF
Republicans are all in on authoritarianism, and Kinzinger knows that. I guess it’s not a violation of any particular law of nature for a ‘healthy’ conservative party to exist… but show me an example.
Rusty
Authoritarianism is a good umbrella for a group of unpopular Republican positions. It covers voting rights (you should get less), Ukraine funding (we won’t support democracies but do support authoritarians like Putin), abortion and LGBTQ+ rights (we want to meddle in your personal decisions and behaviors even when they have zero effect on others) and a number of other issues. This election really is that stark.
teezyskeezy
@MattF: Some center right parties in Europe are at least not total dumpster fires, I guess. Low bar for the definition of “healthy,” though, I know.
catclub
Yes. “I want a younger, better Biden-like candidate. Also a pony.”
Cannot name a prominent Democrat they would prefer.
Matt McIrvin
@WaterGirl: There have been surveys consistently saying that people literally do not care as much about democracy as they used to when we were kids. They will tell you they don’t value it that highly.
I think there are a few things going on here. Conservatives have been pushing this “we’re a republic, not a democracy” line for decades that I think partly has to do with the arbitrary names of our political parties (“Republican” vs. “Democratic”), but also began life as an anti-civil-rights/Great Society thing. Even when I was a kid, I remember lots of people, especially conservatives, saying they wouldn’t mind a dictator if the dictator was benign.
But also, I suspect that a lot of the reverence for “democracy” of the Cold War era was a Cold War thing: the USSR was the great enemy and “do you love democracy?” parsed as “do you hate Communism?” for patriots. Not so much now.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: This certainly should be a very important issue. I don’t think many votes will turn on it though, except insofar as it energizes Democratic base voters.
I still think the economy will still be the detrrmining factor. It usually is. This time, abortion rights will also be a first tier issue.
Alison Rose
@teezyskeezy: True. And more diplomatic to profess to believe it still exists somewhere. There’s a reason I’m not a politician ;) (Many reasons TBH)
Jeffg166
@Alison Rose: So true. They have hated and opposed every thing ever but forward to help the average person in this country from the 19th century to today. It’s all been about money and getting as much as they could and keeping it forever.
MattF
And WSJ says that Biden must find a new VP. I guess the argument is that the one we have is too… [something]. Didn’t read the article, so I can’t say.
Eduardo
Yes, it is that fucking simple. Problem is that most of the people that are supporting the authoritarian party (ethno-nationalist populist, aka fascist party) do not realize or do not want to admit even to themselves that this is what is in the ballot.
Lots of people of the “I vote on the gas prices” wagon still.
Alison Rose
@WaterGirl: I think the issue with this (“it’s about democracy”) is it’s harder to get normies to understand what we mean and to believe it. Specific, concrete issues — abortion access, health insurance, tax cuts, gun control, etc — are easier to get people to care about because they’re almost tangible and likely have an immediate and noticeable impact on a person’s life. But a more amorphous “we could lose our whole democracy” is too unwieldy for some folks who don’t pay close attention to politics. And some of them might roll their eyes because to them, it’s like, well we had four years of Trump and the country is still here and still functioning basically the same way, as far as they can tell, since they aren’t as sunk down into political news as most of us here are.
trollhattan
“If I’m on the winning side, then I love authorahtah-ism.”
Thus endeth the thought process.
Matt McIrvin
…There’s also the smarty-pants tendency even among liberals to believe that actually democracy is bad because people (or maybe just Americans) are too stupid to be trusted with governing themselves. Not you or me, of course, all those other people.
The interesting thing is that so many of our worst political phenomena of the past few decades have been thrust upon us by counter-democratic means. If the people are stupid I haven’t seen any evidence that the mechanisms intent on thwarting their power have been any smarter.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: They take it for granted. Those people would be shocked to find out how it would go if they lost it, though. They always think that things would still be OK.
lowtechcyclist
@Eduardo:
Well, gas prices here are in the low $3.30’s, which is down 40-50¢/gallon since summer. But no telling what they’ll be like a year from now. The Saudis would love to put TFG back in the White House.
Geminid
@teezyskeezy: I think we just have to keep pushing good economic news: the economy in general; the many factories being built; transit projects of all types; expanded WiFi in rural and urban areas; clean energy projects, etc. Everything, all the time.
This would not get in the way of pushing other issues, but would rather be complementary I think. A general theme of, “We are moving forward together, and we not going to let extremists take us backwards.
Ed. And not let what media entities talk about discourage us. The American Recovery Act, Infrastructure bill, CHIPS+ bill, and the “IRA” are producing tangible results that people can see with their own eyes if we draw their attention to them.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
Not one lie told
Matt McIrvin
@MattF: Biden is ooooolllld, therefore he must get rid of his not-particularly old VP!
RevRick
Instead of authoritarianism, I would call it fascism. MAGA, after all, is a fascist movement. The fascist movements of the 20s, 30s and 40s all based their appeals on the claim that they would make Italy/Germany/Japan great again. Embedded in those claims were assertions of racial/ethnic superiority.
By making the 2024 election about fascism or freedom, we can connect it to the struggle against fascisms in the 40s, and hence that a vote for the GOP represents a desecration of the graves of the 405,000 Americans killed in the efforts to eradicate it.
Eduardo
@Matt McIrvin: My intuition is that liberalism is an amazing system compared to all others but it is not something that people value too much until it has been a while after they have lost it and they can see the consequences.
Also, that people would love their authoritarians while they are taking freedoms from the wrong people until –as it always happens– they start taking those liberties from them.
It is a miracle that it exists.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: They kind of assume the tyrant would be basically a decent guy and on their side. I don’t entirely understand it but I’ve seen it for a long time.
Alison Rose
LOL sorry, this is OT, but Hillary posted an old photo of herself in a witch costume with the caption “Witches get stuff done. Happy Halloween!”
gvg
@Alison Rose: They were the party of Lincoln really so yes, they were normal, sometime back when I was a child. I think the split happened with the Civil Rights Act. Looking back, I think both parties had racists and people who tried not to be back then. As I recall there were some significant differences in both parties between different regions and both had real jerks and exceptional good guys.
Johnson said the Democrats had lost the south for a generation, but they did it anyway. That means they thought they had enough other votes that they could afford to do what is right. No point otherwise. It would just get repealed if they were going to lose the majority overall.
It turns out he underestimated the backlash. Probably didn’t foresee things like the fundraising scams and advertising scams.
The parties started to sort then, and now we are not as much alike as we were then. They didn’t think they were that alike then, but compared to now, they were.
The problem that I see is that there is no path to change and win for them. If they moderate on race, they lose a significant part of their voters and they barely win now, so even if they gained some, they would lose more. And they would NOT gain some for years. They have too long a record of hate for many to trust them enough to vote in significant numbers for them. They would have to prove they mean it for years before black Americans will vote for them. Yes, there are individual exceptions, but on the whole, they have alienated that part of the electorate vote for a long time. Other races may be easier, but not all that easy.
Women aren’t as dead set against them altogether, but quite a few are. They would have to prove reform to me.
The Republican party waited too long to face the need for change. They are in kind of a trap.
And what else do they stand for? Tax cuts? That just doesn’t attract as many voters. They aren’t fiscally responsible and don’t manage the economy well which a lot of voters have noticed. They don’t have any issues.
West of the Rockies
@Geminid:
For sure! Let’s celebrate the tremendous accomplishments of the Biden/Harris administration.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: “Fascism” has been used as a hyperbolic attack by so many people for so many purposes (very often by conservatives who say liberals are fascist–Trump is doing it now) that it’s been robbed of power even when applied to people who really fit the bill.
Eduardo
@lowtechcyclist:
That’s my #1 fear. The Saudis, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. If they can manufacture crises to raise oil prices and create a sensation of uncertainty they will.
Matt McIrvin
@gvg:
Politics has to be for something. And the Pundit’s Fallacy, that what is good will also be popular, is far from necessarily true. If you’re not willing to sometimes do the right thing even if it means you lose, your movement doesn’t stand for much.
Ken B
I thought it was interesting that he very deliberately said ‘Democratic’ repeatedly. Not ‘Democrat.’
I think he’s given up on the GOP and either doesn’t want to admit it (even to himself), or maybe he’s hoping to pull a few folks that might be having doubts.
I wonder if the ‘ic’ might become some sort of tell.
Cameron
@Alison Rose: Certainly the last Republican I would have considered voting for for President was Mitt’s father George. And that was a long time ago.
zhena gogolia
@catclub: I got the answer “Sherrod Brown” once.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Americans really do not believe that fascism could take root here. Also, the people who might vote for fascists don’t believe that they themselves will be affected.
rikyrah
It’s democracy vs. fascism.
there is no in-between.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
Because, it’s going to be THOSE PEOPLE.
THOSE PEOPLE will be stripped of their rights. And, that’s ok with them.
They don’t believe in democracy (little d) in the first place.
rikyrah
Project 2025.
One of the FrontPagers needs to take it on as their project. Do a deep dive on every section and just present it out .
Project 2025 is real.
And, folks need to know about it.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: Authoritarianism is a gobbledygook word with zero emotive oomph. Saying a vote for Republicans is a vote to piss on grandpa’s grave hits home.
Matt McIrvin
@Eduardo: It’s a hard sell in part because everyone knows that the majority often supports things that are bad or wrong. Republicans and Democrats both know that–they just disagree on which things those are.
So there’s a certain leap of faith involved in believing that democracy is a system worth preserving. What I always come back to is, if the people aren’t ultimately in charge, who is? Do you really think you have something better–someone suited to have no accountability to the people at all? All the proposals I’ve ever seen are terrible.
EarthWindFire
@teezyskeezy: Agreed. I got the Biden is old jazz from a union organizer, loyal Dem voter the other day. So I asked him who he’d vote for. “Pete Buddigeg” “Well, he’s not running.” “Then Biden.”
HumboldtBlue
In a party filled with the shittiest people on earth, there is no one shittier than Josh Hawley and Sec. Mayorkas just told him politely to go fuck himself.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: Come to think of it, the one time I told a “white nationalist” that the ideology was what Grandpa had fought against at the Bulge, he did get really pissed off.
Went on and on about how dumb liberals were for lazily equating people like him to Hitler. The fact that Hitler lost was the thing that really seemed to be upsetting him.
Chief Oshkosh
@Alison Rose: Yep. There hasn’t been a “good” US Conservative Party in my life time. And I’m old.
Brachiator
@Alison Rose:
Very cool. I like how she plays with negative images of witches (and crap about her) and turns it around. Well done!
Alison Rose
@gvg: Yeah, they definitely careened down the shitspiral around the CRM, but it had already started on its way there beforehand. David Corn’s book American Psychosis is a terrific analysis of this.
T-Bone
@rikyrah: thank you, people seem to be ignoring this fact (they don’t wanna read it because tldr?) and it is out there in.plain sight. Dems should be shouting about it from rooftops!
Cameron
@Matt McIrvin: Indeed – there was in fact a book, Liberal Fascism, by Doughy Pantload, Phd.
Bill Arnold
@rikyrah:
Yeah, it is a detailed, deeply disquieting neo-(Christian-)Fascist manifesto. And long. Here’s a PDF link for anyone interested. Search on keywords of interest. Their belief system presented as obviously true is false in many respects.
Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Promise – Project 2025 – PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION PROJECT (920 page PDF, The Heritage Foundation, 2023)
Brachiator
@RevRick:
Partly disagree here. Yeah, authoritarianism is a big word. People understand tyrant and dictator.
A lot of people never liked their grandpa.
Ksmiami
@Soprano2: exactly this.
Geminid
@West of the Rockies: One thing that I’ve noticed is that local and state media sites are the one’s that cover the progress resulting from the legislation passed by Democrats in the last Congress. If I only followed “national” news I would never know about them. Practically, I think this means we have to look for these stories and propagate them. I try to do that some here.
CliosFanBoy
@catclub:
“I’ll vote for a woman for President, but not her*.”
*applies to any woman who happens to run.
narya
I was listening to a recent “Talking Feds” ep, with (Butcher’s) Bill Kristol (h/t Pierce) and David French. Kristol wants to see a ticket of Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro (oh, you mean remove two recent dem governors from the scene? on a ticket with no chance of winning?). French was going on about how he’s pro-life but we dems should “welcome” him for now, which sounded like “beg me for my vote,” and . . . GFY. Seriously; you’re supposedly a grownup, vote like your life depended on it, because it fking DOES, asshole. I almost threw my phone.
lowtechcyclist
Russian media was given access to the Hamas tunnels under Gaza, because of course they were. They could be a pretty good construction firm, if that was their line instead of terrorism.
CliosFanBoy
@Matt McIrvin:
The “we’re a republic, not a Democracy” line was popularized by segregationists. It’s ALWAYS been used as an excuse to deny American citizens their rights.
...now I try to be amused
@Eduardo:
Liberal politics will always be a harder sell than conservative politics. Liberalism doesn’t just appeal to the better angels of our nature, it also requires higher brain functions which many people don’t care to use. Conservatism appeals to the hindbrain which we all have, and we tend to revert to hindbrain thinking when we’re afraid.
BellyCat
@Alison Rose: EXACTLY my first thought as well.
Matt
Fun activity: count how many people wetting their pants with this “WAAAAAAAAAA YOU CAN’T CRITICIZE BIDEN” shit also were 100% certain that the GOP would “become more moderate” when he was elected, because bipartisanship or something.
Dangerman
What do I believe? Well, I believe in the soul, the small of a woman’s back, the hangin’ curveball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent over-rated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone (he didn’t; I digress). I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf, the designated hitter, and the ghost runner at second to start extra innings (seriously, what is that crap?). I believe in the sweet spot, soft core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
/crash (kinda)
...now I try to be amused
@CliosFanBoy:
I think “herrenvolk democracy” is the term they’re looking for.
Villago Delenda Est
@Alison Rose: They’ve been broken since Goldwater in ’64. The rot only accelerated under the shitty grade Z movie star.
MisterDancer
May I add some color to this? Below is not sourced in full, as I still have readings to do on this topic:
In the 1st half of the 20th Century was the Democratic Party that accrued the racists as a voting bloc — the Dixiecrats. This matters because the situation very much was about moving that bloc from one Party to another.
Why? Because that bloc was basically the “Freedom Caucus” but with real power. They moved the New Deal to be more racist, for example, to (as much as possible) not include my ancestors. They could
And, of course, they enabled and maintained Jim Crow. The Dixiecrats, these White Supremacists, were the reason the term “Solid South” came to be — but that was a term originally about these Democrats, because GOPers couldn’t get voted into many areas of the South for love or money.
In hindsight, it’s funny that it was about the halfway point of the last century, that the then-GOP Chairperson, Guy Gabrielson, openly reached out to the Dixiecrats around moving to the GOP. By then, the GOP as an umbrella of interests included chatter around so-called “states rights,” just as the Dixiecrats hypocritically “advocated”. There were mutual interests, interests that Lincoln would have utterly opposed.
But it took a while for efforts like that, efforts that had been going on quietly for decades prior to the century mid-point, to click. For the GOPers eager for inroads into the Solid South to start getting Dixiecrats moving to the GOP, kick-starting the transition.
Seen in that light, the GOP chose, as an overall Party, to bring racists in. It wasn’t a passive move, it wasn’t people unaware of who they were openly engaging in these “come to the GOP!” dialogues with. By the time we get to LBJ, the writing is already on the wall, due to cracks in the Democratic coalition, anyway, over race. The various Acts to revolve a bit of centuries of racial bigotry were just the final straw over the situation, not the catalyst themselves.
Redshift
@WaterGirl:
It should be, but we don’t get to dictate what people will decide to be single-issue voters about. Democracy should be enough, but we need the other issues for people we can’t convince about that.
teezyskeezy
@Alison Rose: Diplomatic, yes, that’s the word I was looking for. Shows some respect for the “undecided’s” indecision (and, yes, impossible for me too and that’s why I’m not in the persuasion business.)
No One of Consequence
@Villago Delenda Est:
@Villago Delenda Est:
/Salute
-NOoC
cain
@Alison Rose:
Once you start losing elections and all your gerrymandering gets kicked out – there isn’t much to do there but engage in ideas. But currently, the GOP is not an idea party – they are lazy thinkers who have one or two things that they care about and that is it everything else is just culture wars which in the end as your population starts diversifying – not going to stand up.
cain
@teezyskeezy: It’s funny that they push that given that Trump can’t even remember what fucking city he’s talking at. Yet, you don’t see much of that “concern” for the GOP so called front runner.
teezyskeezy
@EarthWindFire: I would have gently suggested that, also, President Buttigieg might not have even openly supported unions as much as Biden has.
Old School
@Matt:
I count zero.
Can’t say that was overly fun.
cain
@MattF:
They don’t want a woman especially a biracial one. I think a lot of this is about misogyny because it’s really about Kamala.
Subsole
@rikyrah:
America’s great curse and sucking chest wound is that most folks* don’t realize Whiteness is a condition. Which is to say, it is conditional. It can be bestowed, or withdrawn, at a whim. If the Irish can become white, they can be made unwhite.
The great social challenge of 21st Century America is getting folks to realize that – to borrow a phrase – skinfolk aren’t kinfolk.
(*Note, this myopia is not limited to white people. It hits all social groups. Even ones you would think should damn well know better.)
@RevRick: Someone here suggested we just call them what they are: Unamerican. Traitors to everything we are and hope to be.
It has the benefit of cutting deeply in a way that only 100% truth can.
Redshift
@MisterDancer: Very clear summary. The one opinion I’ll add is that a big part of the reason GOPers couldn’t get elected in the South was they were the Party of Lincoln, and the South never got over Lincoln. It took moves toward civil rights to overcome that, I think (though I could be wrong.)
rikyrah
When I say fascism, I mean White people subjected to fascism.
I am Black. I am from people who were brought over here in the hulls of slave ships.
Post Emancipation, my ancestors were subjected to fascism. It was called Jim Crow and they were subjected to it until the mid-20th Century, for almost a century.
So, I know exactly why I’m fighting. My ancestors fought and marched to give me the opportunities that I have. And, also the opportunities for me to fight to keep this republic in a way that they did not.
I fight because I respect and honor all that they suffered through for almost a century. There’s a reason why Reconstruction isn’t taught in our schools – it was the last chance America really had to live up to its creed/ promise and do course correct on our original sin – Chattel Slavery.
But, they didn’t, and we had American Apartheid – Jim Crow.
When people come on social media, and talk about ‘ this isn’t the America that I recognize’, my response is that, ‘ Yes, it is. But, it doesn’t have to be. ‘
Black people in polls usually come up looking optimistic about the state of the country and its future. It’s because of our experiences in this country. I look at what my ancestors went through, and I can say, no. I have agency to do that. To fight on levels that my ancestors could not have dreamed about. Can use political levers that they never had.
We have a party committed to fascism, because its roots are in White Supremacy. The elevation of a Black man to the Presidency of the United States broke them. The society for which Barack Obama represented – a more inclusive society where all are welcome, and that you can produce , be successful and build dreams in America – is the society that the other side wants no part of. They would rather burn this country down than share its fruits with everyone.
I don’t think that’s something that a lot of White people, particularly on the Democratic side, and especially in the MSM, want to admit. Their family members would rather this country burn, than for a true, pluralistic society succeed.
I know that Joe Biden is the man for THIS time. He is the White man that is needed. The Elders in my community understood this in 2020 before I did. I now see the wisdom of their selection of Biden. You gotta fight with the best tools available. President Biden is our best tool. It helps that nobody is more clear about the choice for 2024, and because he understands it so clearly, he is able to articulate it with pinpoint precision.
2024
Democracy vs Fascism
Bottom line.
cain
@lowtechcyclist:
They get another 2 billion, and maybe Trump can get another tan from that glowing orb of theirs.
BellyCat
Co-signed.
ETA: Besides… alliteration appeals to all dolts who are closet poets but don’t know its. 😂
Subsole
@T-Bone:
They could.
The journalists with the megaphones don’t want to hear it. More importantly – and damningly – they don’t want you or me or anyone else to hear it, either.
For some reason.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t believe these surveys. I think that there are people who don’t care about government as long as it is not intrusive. For example, there are people who brag about never having voted. But they depend on streets being mostly maintained, and water and power and sewage being in order. And no foreign army invading. They can discard democracy as long as there is some minimal functioning and non-intrusive government that does not require their active participation or consent.
Also, when they were kids, they didn’t participate in government because they were too young. Somebody else made all the decisions.
People who say this today are openly teasing fascism. They don’t believe that everyone deserves a vote, nor that every vote is equal.
As I noted elsewhere, they foolishly believe that a “benign” dictator would never kick them in the butt.
No One of Consequence
Anyone else recalling when the thought of the day was: “1984 was a cautionary tale, not a policy manual.” during the Bush the Lesser years.
Having not read or see Handmaid’s tale, but being able to grok the gist of it, is this not history rhyming?
-NOoC
Warblewarble
IF there is a perception amongst Arab Americans the the settler regime and Israeli militarism have been embraced and the lives and rights of people in Gaza have been paused. Will Arab Americans be reluctant to vote , and what is being done to reassure them and show that they are valued. A conversation is needed.
Redshift
@cain:
I would say all of the VP talk is about that, and a lot of the “Biden is old” talk is “if he dies, she will become president without us getting a chance to voter her down!” Much of that is unspoken by people who support Dems, but it’s out and proud on the wingnut side.
MisterDancer
The power of the Democratic Party is that we are, in fact, a coalition. Specifically: we empower each other, lift everyone up in the ways they need — or, at least, we should.
The truth is that a lot of Americans already functionally lack Democracy. And, to go back to my other post, systems like Jim Crow were already Authoritarian, already so close to Fascism that the Nazis used Jim crow laws as a baseline for their sick Antisemitic laws.
A lot of people in America lack the education, the tools, and yes the free time to even have a basic understanding of how American Democracy works. How can we tell them to “Vote Democracy!” when they haven’t much of a clue what that means? How can we tell them to vote when in so many cases, voting involves far more free time and resources (e.g. drive to a polling place) than so many of the Least Of Us have?
Keeping our Democracy isn’t just about voting out the current GOP, now and forever. It has to include awareness of the many barriers to entry for Democracy, lest we just keep failing to have a robust democracy…which, in it’s fullness, it really a very new thing for America to begin with!
And worse — it has to include that, yes, people who are marginalized might vote for Fascism if they think they’ll get the food they need, a roof over their heads. That’s a very real threat when Fascism is mixed with Populist ideology, and we see it in Trump, among many others.
…sorry, I wandered a bit off the “single-issue voter” target. But hopefully the above makes some sense.
eclare
@Alison Rose:
Damn, Facebook. I don’t have an account, was it on twitter?
Alison Rose
@eclare: No, she hasn’t posted it there :/
I swear FB used to let you public posts without an account. Dumb that they changed that!
teezyskeezy
@cain: Yes, Trump is getting very close to non-functional (I mean a normal person without money or attendents would already be at his stage).
I wonder if there were a written sign directed at Trump telling him that he’d be so great and loved if he just did X, if his addled brain would just do it? I’m saying this only for entertainment purposes, clearly…but the possibilities are very entertaining.
Alison Rose
OMGGGGGG
zhena gogolia
@HumboldtBlue: GOOD FOR HIM!
Bill Arnold
@Matt:
Name three. Supporting links necessary.
zhena gogolia
@lowtechcyclist: Center of Moscow was shut down the other day because Hamas was visiting.
zhena gogolia
@Matt: Zero. the answer is zero.
Old School
@Alison Rose:
I don’t have an account but I could still view it. However, I’m on a laptop. I can’t see anything on Facebook on my phone as they want me to install their app first.
zhena gogolia
@Old School: GMTA
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Subsole: yup. smart jews have known that for a long time
@rikyrah: yup. that’s the crux, right there.
Miss Bianca
@Matt: Fun activity: Why don’t you stuff your head a little further up your butt and see if you can turn yourself inside out.
Alison Rose
@Miss Bianca: LOLOL
MisterDancer
Thank you! I’ve said this before: My Dad, a Harris supporter in the Primaries, absolutly corrected me on Biden around that Busing attack.
They knew — those Black Elders had been around the block, they remembered this Backlash shit in ways all my book-learnin’ couldn’t emulate. And I’m reminded that it was people like Clyburn that saw Biden’s potential, who saw in him a person who could embody something like the spirit of what LBJ foresaw this Party could be. Someone who could more fully embody the ideal of a Coalition of Shared Power, like I talked about in my other comment.
It’s ironic that Biden is the reality of the Trumpist “imperfect vessel” evil fantasia.
eclare
@rikyrah:
That was en fuego. Bravo.
BellyCat
@rikyrah: 🔥 ❤️ 🔥
eclare
@Alison Rose:
Love it! Thank you.
...now I try to be amused
@MisterDancer: I figured out a while ago that older Black people are the most politically pragmatic people in America and they’re worth listening to.
Martin
So, I don’t know the nature of the threats made against Cornell college students, but be aware this is not a new thing. We were handling constant (often credible) death threats against both Jewish and Muslim, particularly Palestinian students 15 years ago. It getting news coverage is new, and good, but the threats themselves are hardly new.
Redshift
@Old School:
Huh. I uninstalled the app years ago, since I didn’t like the spyware, and I’ve been reading it in a browser on my phone ever since. But I do have an account; maybe that’s the difference.
Ramona
@rikyrah: I stand speechless, weeping and applaud you and THIS that you write here to remind us!
eclare
@MisterDancer:
Some Black people have written that they supported Joe because for eight years he supported Barack, never tried to take the limelight away.
I am White, but that makes sense to me.
RevRick
@Subsole: I don’t want to get bogged down in an argument about who is unAmerican. I chose the term fascism very deliberately, because it’s easy to explain the fascisms we fought against in WW2, and then make a visceral connection with their sacrifices and what we’re up against today.
Brachiator
@MisterDancer:
There were moderate Republicans in the 1940s and 1950s. And the Republicans had a (for the time), solid civil rights platform. However, activists fought hard to neutralize and to expel the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party. But it took time. And there were Dixiecrats who had a lot of power within the Democratic Party until the 60s. And some people forget, or do not know that when Adlai Stevenson ran for president in 1952, his running mate, John Sparkman, was a staunch segregationist.
Conservative Republicans were often comfortable with Jim Crow laws because they always favored tradition and the status quo. Racism and sexism was for them comfortable tradition. When Goldwater signaled his “principled” opposition to civil rights legislation, the Republican Party became fully aligned with racism.
eclare
@Dangerman:
Oh Crash, you do make speeches.
RevRick
@Brachiator: They may not have liked grandpa, but they all shrink back from pissing on his grave.
taumaturgo
@rikyrah: Have you heard any of the leaders of the Democratic party talk about this project?
Old School
@Redshift: Hmmm. Just checked on my phone and it loaded.
Never used to.
RevRick
@rikyrah: As Isabel Wilkerson pointed out in her book, “Caste: The Origin of Our Doscontents”, when the Nazis first came to power, they sent a delegation to the American South to study how Jim Crow did fascism legally.
All fascisms begin with a claim to racial/ethnic superiority and a messianic figure claiming he (it’s always a he) knows the way to restore their purity and power.
japa21
@Bill Arnold:
So I dedcided to waste my time and read some of this. I have bookmarked it so I can read more after a few drinks of scotch.
Kay will love this section, and this is just in the intro.
This made me stop, because I can handle just so much garbage at a time. For one thing, I always thought schools were there to serve the children.
Jeffro
@Alison Rose: so funny how this ties in to my guest post (which I think is coming up shortly?)
jimmiraybob
@rikyrah:
Absolutely. Project 2025 is nothing less than shouting at full volume for the end of the liberal American representative democracy (republican governance) that we have inherited (republican governance).
A review of Federalist 14, the whole thing – not cherry picked, is a good start to understanding that the authors of the American Constitution were advocating not for “direct” democracy, where every eligible citizen has to assemble to vote on every issue, but for a representative democracy (this had as much to do with geography and accessibility as anything). This was Publius’ (Madison’s) vision of the new republic.
The Constitutional republic established in the late 18th century drew directly from Enlightenment thought (free evidence-based thinking) – the arch enemy of Medieval and modern Protestant and Christian dominion.
PaulWartenberg
(goes trick-or-treating)
I got a rock.
Martin
@MisterDancer: I don’t think you can overlook white christians falling into the minority around 2012 or so as a root cause for why things have shifted so aggressively.
If you look at the demographics, the Civil Rights movement coincides with the moment that white Christians lose the ability to control both parties. Some of that is a consequence of black voting power being secured in the Civil Rights movement, and some of it is a natural consequence of demographics, which helped bring about the Civil Rights movement. The realignment in the 60s was also a recognition that white christians could only reliably hold control of one political party. They still had the majority, which is why we could talk about ‘moderates’ and bipartisanship in the way we did – because getting a subset of Democrats on board with welfare reform by appealing to racial tropes was still feasible.
That changed with the 2010 census when it became clear that white christians had slipped a lot more than expected, and it was a double-whammy. Not only could white christians no longer be able to carry policy ideas (no matter how aggressively dogwhistled) as they were about to fall out of the demographic majority, but symbolically that weakness was visible for all to see with the election of the first non-white-christian president. 2008 could be written off as a bad GOP candidate and the financial crisis shock, but 2012 was a shot at a more fair election and, well, Obama won again. That was a sign that white christians couldn’t really carry the nation any longer – and the data bore that out.
Trump was the reactionary response to that rallied up what aggrieved white christian democrats were left, and it worked, and then 2020 was supposed to prove that white christians had retained power, and Trump was blown out pretty badly, which they responded to by calling fraud, rather than accepting their own diminished status.
But there’s this pattern of crossing some demographic line, which results in some political realignment to concentrate power until the next crossing of a demographic line.
The problem I suspect we face now is that the white christian coalition will not accept their minority status, which is why they’ve gone full autocracy and will continue to favor violence in response to electoral losses.
Eunicecycle
@jimmiraybob: I have read some of Project 2025 and it is frightening. And the thing is, it’s all ready for the next Republican president, whether that’s 2024,2028, or later. It doesn’t require Trump, so defeating him doesn’t eliminate it. Democrats have to be thinking about putting in guardrails to prevent what they want to do.
Old School
@Jeffro:
Yes, Yes, it is.
Matt McIrvin
@japa21: All I know about “parents’ rights” is that I’m a parent and they sure aren’t talking about my rights.
Redshift
@Warblewarble:
It’s worse than that already. There are plenty of active efforts online to turn off young voters in addition to Arab Americans by feeding them BS on this issue. (Like the garbage from Fox and Ryan Grim of the Intercept about yesterday’s press conference, claiming the press secretary equated pro-Palestinian protests with Charlottesville.)
topclimber
@CliosFanBoy: My pushback on this is…so what?
We are a Republic in that our rulers make the rules. We are a Democracy because ALL the people decide who those rulers are.
We are a Democratic Republic. Just let the Democracy thing work and the Republic will do just fine.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
I do. Aside from the other things I mentioned, there’s the simple fact that in, say, 1984, Reaganites really were the majority.of the electorate. They could be fond of democracy because they knew that in a straight-up democratic election, they would win. By huge walloping landslides. Reagan got close to a 60% majority in ’84–that’s colossal by American standards.
For most of my life, one of the standard taunts at liberals was “that’s why you keep losing elections.”
They don’t have that now. They can hang on and win and control things, but not consistently, and mostly through weird wrinkles of our constitutional system. They can claim the election was rigged and try to overturn it when they lose. They can claim the “silent majority” but they don’t obviously have the majority. That’s got to erode their faith in democracy. Liberals, we’re used to it from way back.
cain
@RevRick: The more I read bout our history – the more the U.S. is less of a beacon of light and more of a obnoxious angry grandpa that causes problems everywhere they goes.
If it isn’t Jim Crow laws, it’s the Angelican church going to Africa and sponsoring laws against LGBTQ+ people – we seem to do some good, but then also shoot ourselves in the foot.
Redshift
@Redshift: (meant to continue) It’s a concerted effort to turn off Democratic voters, because they know TFG isn’t going to gain any voters, so their only hope is to depress turnout. I don’t know what the answer is, but there are a lot of efforts now to get people to agree with “I’m outraged by X, I’ll never vote for Biden!”
NutmegAgain
@Alison Rose: I’m old enough to remember some good ones in MA and CT . Frank Sargent (MA gov); Ed Brooke (MA Senate); Lowell Weicker (CT Congress & Gov). There are others–New England states. But it’s old timey now. Even Bill Weld had a dose of reactionary in him, and Charlie Baker was mainly a bureaucrat, but still yards better than the national lunatic asylum party we see now.
catclub
1. I suspect Tax cuts attract lots of voters.
2. Evidence that a lot of voters have noticed the GOP do not manage the economy, is not very obvious to me. And I look for it.
The _only_ case I know of is that voters DID blame Bush for the crappy economy under Obama for a long time. Rather than blaming Obama. OTOH, they gave Trump full credit or the economy Obama left him.
Warblewarble
Nethanyahu wants Biden gone and will commit any atrocity that can be made to stick to Biden. Scorpions anyone?
Bill Arnold
@japa21:
No. Children are property, owned by parents. Schools serve the owners of said property.
(That is their doctrine. They do not use those words.)
catclub
I thought public schools were to serve the public good. US, as Trump just discovered.
Martin
@Brachiator: Until Civil Rights the US could afford to have two racist parties. They argued on the margins of how aggressively to repress minorities, but there wasn’t a lot of disagreement that minorities should be repressed. What ultimately brought about civil rights wasn’t some grand enlightenment among Democrats, but that the aggressiveness of Jim Crow enforcement became untenable at the national level in the era of television where it could be watched play out in real time and unfiltered.
What followed was a consolidation on the right of everyone who was primarily invested in the hierarchical social order, and the left picked up these new black voters mostly because it was their only path to the majority, and then spent the next 40 years mostly ignoring those black voters.
MisterDancer
Hey. You’ve mentioned this a couple of times now, and I guess I’d better come clean:
I ain’t doing it. At least, no time soon.
Aside from my own mental health and array of projects already on docket — I also just can’t see the benefit in explaining Project 2025 in and of itself. We know these assholes.People may not admit they know what they plan, but saying it out loud isn’t going to change this electorate, in my opinion, at least not on the “blogs talking about it scale”.
What concerns me, and if you look back you’ll see i talk about this in a number of my posts, is the funding and astroturfing. As much as we “know” the effects of, say, Fox News, I don’t think we’ve grasped how brutally powerful the overall Conservative Movement is, all the levers its put in place to make something like Project 2025 a threat.
That’s where the efforts to open up the emails about pushing Transphobia legislation are really critical. They open up that these efforts aren’t “real,” but rather well-payed hate mongers riding the coat-tails of this toxic movement. And it’s the same funding that put people like Mike Johnson into power, who push stuff like Project 2025…and who support Fox News, One News Network, and so much more.
If I work on anything — and right now I’m up to my eyeballs in life stuff — it’ll be that, because getting people to understand they are being lied to, and how, matters a hell of a lot.
If we’re going to reclaim this country for everyone, we have to show that the other side isn’t just selling toxic ideas, but that they are being funding to manipulate all of us, in ways that are expressly Anti-American.
Bill Arnold
@Warblewarble:
Mainly, Netanyahu wants whatever personally benefits Netanyahu. Power is one of those benefits, since it can be used to block prosecution for corruption.
US politics is just a means, an indirect means, and frankly, Netanyahu is very vulnerable now because he is correctly perceived to be incompetent in the one area of competence he has been claiming: the ability to protect Israel.
He and his religious supremacist allies figureheaded by I. Ben-Gvir and B. Smotrich are the greatest threat that Israel has ever faced.
(But yeah, we (the USA) should not be supplying weapons to Israel, and should be supplying them to Ukraine.)
Subsole
@strange visitor (from another planet):
Point well taken.
I am not sure how to say this without coming off as disrespectful, and apologize in advance.
They basically want to turn all of us into Jews*. They want us to be Ingroup enough to exploit, but also Outgroup enough to scapegoat. They want us to be simultaneously American, to reap our contributions, but also foreign enough to abuse and discard.
That is the absolute most ANY of us could ever hope for under them. And most of us would be lucky to get a good deal less.
*Except blacks. That community will never, ever be permitted to exist as anything but slave catchers, punching bags, and sundry other objects of contempt because fear and hatred of the slave is the rotten, toxic bedrock upon which the entire bloody, stupid edifice rests.
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah: Thank you, rikyrah, your clarity is inspiring! 🙏
wjca
“Because, if he’ll just pick an old VP, there’s a chance they both die, and we can get our reactionary Speaker of the House (which we think we have enough gerrymanders to hold) in as President.”
Ruckus
@Alison Rose:
I’m an old and have been following politics for decades and think that 6-7 decades ago the rethuglican party wasn’t anything of what they are today. But life changed and the rethuglican party has no idea how or that they should deal with that. So much has changed about how many boxes there are for people to fit into. Now the number of boxes hasn’t actually changed, but the numbers have, as well as that one of the boxes think that they own the country and get to say how it looks, who can talk and if the others don’t like it, they can fuck right off. That box is of course the rethuglican party. And the rest of this country is saying and very much meaning, it’s the right or restrictionist party, the rethuglicans. They want the life they think they had decades ago, when black and brown people knew their place – tenth or twentieth in line. And thankfully that time is long gone. What we are seeing is the early last gasp of breath of the rethuglican party. It will take a long time to overcome the hate and control they think is better, but it started decades ago and I think it is in the middle of it’s self destruction. Will it ever be fully gone? I doubt it, but I do believe that it is at least slowly losing, grasping at what was. If they only had their heads in the sand, rather than up their exit ports….. This way they can still stumble around and cause harm to those they hate, which is anyone that actually likes humanity in all it’s ways, shapes and colors.
prostratedragon
@rikyrah: Preach!
WeimarGerman
But too many GOP voters think “authoritarianism” means governed by writers and what wrong with that?
Can we call them what they are ? Neo-nazis.
Geminid
@Warblewarble: Many people have not noticed, but the PM is not in charge now. Two weeks ago, the Knesset ratified the new coalition agreement that brought former Defense Minister Benny Gantz and his 11MK National Unity into the government.
This agreement has the force of law. Under it, Neyanyahu is one of 3 members of a War Cabinet authorized to make all major war decisions. The other two members are Gantz and current Defense Minister Gallant, the one Netanyahu tried to fire earlier this year but couldn’t. Two non-voting Observers are also part of the War Cabinet: Netanyahu ally Ron Dermer and Gantz ally Gadi Eisenkot, who like Gantz is a former IDF Chief of Staff.
Netanyahu resisted this, but could not stand up to pressure from the public, the US, and members of his own Likud party. His practice in the past has been to bully his way around such arrangements, but he lacks the popularity and clout to do this now that he’s been discredited by the events of October 7 Even Netanyahu’s own Likud colleagues are ready to ditch him if he acts irresponsibly.
Subsole
@RevRick: I see that. Very reasonable, and probably more effective than my approach.
My only logical argument is that I fear fascism has been diluted to absolute uselessness. Also, fascism is a very nebulous, technical term. Unamerican is visceral. And everything I see convinces me that we live in a visceral, vibes and feels age.
You can call them fascists, and spend 90 hours explaining why they count as fascists according to Umberto Eco, and then spend 500 years trying to explain why, what they hear on tiktok notwithstanding, being able to fire a man for molesting the interns is not, in fact, fascism.
Or just call them nosy, judgmental, tyrant-worshipping, bootsucking Unamerican busybody assholes and watch them sputter about how they aren’t. (Note: Doing this requires A LOT more grit and bravery and combativeness than I possess.)
On an emotional level, they deserve a mouthful of the raw, in your face, fuck-you-you-aren’t-one-of-us energy they keep pouring out on everyone else. But that’s just spitefulness on my part, and can be safely discarded and disregarded.
Again, your approach is probably a much better idea. Assuming we are trying to persuade, here. :)
Subsole
@japa21:
They are. And children are the property of the parents. Ergo, the school serves the parents.
It makes a lot more sense when you turn off the higher sections of your soul.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
Very well said!
I am an old white man and have to agree with every word you wrote. And I would have done that when I was a very young boy as well. I was not raised to see race as one has superiority, because first it doesn’t. I was raised to have respect for others, skin color, gender, race do not define humans, being human does. My parents were not perfect, none of us are, but they, especially my dad, taught me that a human being is a human being. There are good ones and bad ones and the thing that makes them one or the other is not the color of their skin or the religion they do or don’t belong to, or the thing we no longer use – IQ, mostly it is thinking that this or that group or religion or skin color or gender or really anything but what they do and say and believe if it means it elevates them above some other group. There are good humans and shitty humans, and everything inbetween. I was taught – think better, be better, and do not confuse actions and words with artificial, idiot barriers that shouldn’t exist.
Ruckus
@Alison Rose:
Yes, absolutely this.
rikyrah
@taumaturgo:
I don’t think it’s something that the President or Vice President should be talking about. Not elevate it to that level. Maybe the DNC, or some group in the DNC. They should tell have a unit to spell it out.
Citizen Alan
@Brachiator: I just call ’em Nazis without a care in the world. You all know that deep down, these mofos wish Hitler had won WW2. That the GOP of 1938 had allied with him, taken over this country, and followed his lead on dealing with undesirables. Every MAGA would have loved living in Nazi Germany, at least until the bombs started falling.
Brachiator
@Martin:
No one has ever suggested any simplistic grand enlightenment. There was a long battle to dislodge the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party and to push for civil rights. And ultimately the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with strong bipartisan support, with the only strong opposition coming from Southern Democrats.
Television and photojournalism were vital in exposing Jim Crow, but this would not have happened without the active opposition and resistance of civil rights activists. But political leaders had to pick a side and provide support and protection for civil rights activists. Segregationists were counting on a return to the status quo of quiet stifling of black resistance. But this did not happen.
Are you suggesting that the essential racism of the two parties is essentially unchanged and that the left are opportunists whose alliance with black people is simply a matter of expediency?
Ruckus
This is one of the best posts that has ever been on BJ.
I am so glad I found this place so very long ago. I was starting to answer comments but I see I’d be agreeing with all of them, answering each and every one, and so I’m doing that now.
DAMN! This place is amazing, and is because of the people and has been for a very long time.
Subsole
@Martin: I look at the right and I see people who have been talking themselves into violence for decades.
My only remaining hope is that when these people finally snap, it may, may penetrate the both-sides bubble once and for all.
I have given up on the Right-wingers’ fever breaking, ever. I just hope everyone else’s fever for the lukewarm will break.
Subsole
@topclimber:
Tell ’em we’re a People’s Democratic Republic and watch them blow whatever circuits they have left right out their ears.
RevRick
@Subsole: I’m not trying to persuade all that many. I’m trying to make people choose between a future that takes us to very dark places and one that is open to something better.
Mussolini boasted that he would Make Italy Great Again
Hitler snarled that he would Make Germany Great Again
The Japanese militarists sneered that they would Make Japan Great Again
No need to get into an extended debate. Just encourage people to connect the dots… and let the Trumpettes try to explain their way out of it.
cain
I agree –
we look likewe are funding genocide. We’re going to have to take a stand – finally.Bibi needs us – losing the support of the U.S. will also been as a weakness.
Luckily our new Speaker is already asking for more fucking tax cuts and cuts to IRS. So, I think we can say ‘nope’ there and play chicken. The longer we wait – we can use the House dysfunction to waste time, but also make it clearer that genocide is indeed happening.
Ruckus
@Chief Oshkosh:
I agree with this 1000%. And yes, I am an old fart myself.
Martin
@Subsole: Authoritarian hierarchy, which the GOP has long supported, is more subtle than a binary in group and out group.
It works through a perceived in group and out group, and then a different effective in group and out group. In the US the proposed in group is white christians, and the proposed out group is blacks. That leaves everyone else kind of hanging, and that is needed for authoritarianism to work. Some groups will voluntarily slot into a middle area simply to not be in the bottom. White women often do this – they’ll accept a white christian patriarchy because it at least keeps them at the bottom of the top group, rather than something worse, which would be likely under a different hierarchy. These people fundamentally do not believe in egalitarian society – they think its beyond our nature, so when Democrats talk about equality, they can’t not slot what they hear into a new hiearachy with the group swapped around. So Black Lives Matter means that Democrats want whites at the bottom, or feminism means that women are better than men, etc. because they have no concept of a society which is not hierarchal in this way.
But because the whole point of authoritarianism is to protect this very small minority of the population – the top of the pyramid is pretty small – they need groups below them that are willing to not be at the bottom in exchange for doing enforcement. This is why black cops often act like white cops – because being a cop moves them up the hierarchy and the cost of them personally moving up the hierarchy is to to enforce the racial order.
I mean, Uncle Tom is hardly a new, modern concept. Where latinos, asians, indigenous people, muslims, atheists, jews, LGBTQ communities, people with disabilities, women all slot into the hierarchy is just a function of how the group at the top (white male christians) think is useful to build a coalition that gets them what they want.
And you can’t overlook that capitalism takes the same shape, so class and wealth map on very cleanly.
But blacks have to be at the bottom, always, because if they aren’t then we have to actually own up to slavery and how America invented this kind of racial categorization and even a century and a half after walking away from slavery, we’re still extremely committed to this kind of racial categorization.
Citizen Alan
The fever will never break until the patient is dead. The RW is a death cult now. It will either go the way the Jim Jones Cult did or else it will usher in the Apocalypse they all hunger for.
Subsole
@RevRick: That’s fair. Like I said, your approach is much more diplomatic. And therefore more likely to work.
RevRick
@cain: White supremacy was a mental illness born and bred in Europe. We Americans made our own ugly refinements.
I would say we are not uniquely bad. Every race and tribe and nation that has ever existed has done shitty things to other human beings. In fact, there’s evidence that one third of all Neolithic people died violently.
None of us has clean hands. My paternal grandfather, who emigrated to the United States in 1910 from eastern Germany was warned before he left to “beware the schwarze,” nevermind the fact he hadn’t come within a thousand miles of any black people. But the racism was already there.
Subsole
@Martin:
That is all very true and well-said.
rikyrah
@eclare:
Nor ever tried to undermine him.
White people can’t remotely understand what that said to Black people.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
That may have been what broke them but it started well before Goldwater.
wjca
Pretty much every group has xenophobia directed at somebody. Who , of course, varies.
When I was in college, the Chinese-American kids had been told by their parents some version of, “At college you will meet different kinds of people, and that’s OK. Just don’t bring home any Japanese[-Americans]; they’re inferior.” The Japanese-American kids had been told the same, albeit with the roles reversed. A white boyfriend/girlfriend was acceptable, but there were limits.
Lest anyone here starts feeling smug, let me point out that you all do the exact same thing. Your outgroup-of-choice is “conservatives” (by which you mean reactionaries, but you’ve embraced the reactionaries’ misappropriation of the word), but the xenophobia is textbook.
Uncle Cosmo
Really?IMHO a fuckton more people liked their grandparents a whole lot more than they did their parents.
WaterGirl
@narya: Wow. I like Talking Feds, but I think I’ll skip that one!
Martin
No, I’m suggesting that at the time of the realignment that was true – and we know it was true at that time. I’m also suggesting that despite Democrats relying on black voters as the most reliable voting base they had, we as primary voters were VERY good at talking ourselves out of nominating black candidates because they were ‘unelectable’. We were good at not appointing them to positions of importance because it would hurt the party in some way. The Democratic Party was pretty reliable at collecting black votes but not returning with black power. Ditto for latinos, etc. Some of us have been screaming for ages about Democrats taking latino voters for granted.
Further, I argue that the GOP is going in the other direction – that they used to be more amenable to various minority groups in their coalition than they are now. Witness the Log Cabin Republicans being completely ghosted by the party now.
My thesis is that both parties are rooted in the same racial hierarchy (I mean, honestly, how could they not be) with the Democrats at first begrudgingly forming this coalition with minority groups because the GOP southern strategy was so successful at siphoning off the Dixiecrats. I mean, until that realignment Democrats had no real problem keeping segregationists in the party. It’s not like EVERYONE left the party in that realignment. But that over time, the Democratic Party became more and more diverse and slowly began to share power from the white christian base. Again, Democrats have more women and people of color in positions of power than republicans, but those groups are STILL to this day underrepresented within the Democratic Party, even when Republicans aren’t included in the decision. Meanwhile, the GOP has gone the other way, becoming more pure white christian (I mean, my god, have you seen the new house speaker?).
So while they are very different in degree, they aren’t all that different in nature, though I suggest Democrats might finally be getting out of that box. I’ve observed that Democrats have come to pretty strong defense of the transgender community despite that community carrying virtually no electoral power. Transgender voters and allies aren’t going to swing any election in the US, but if you are actually building a diverse, egalitarian coalition, you can’t afford to exclude any minority group without shaking the confidence of the others, and I think Democrats are finally getting there (though I think this is largely self-fulfilling through increased diversity in leadership – a black woman is more likely to consider and champion the transgender teen and advance that message as a party leader than a white man is.) But Democrats breaking out of that box is both extremely new – 2008 at the earliest, and still incomplete, but definitely moving in the right direction.
I would also argue that the Democratic and Republican trends are interdependent – that the more christian nationalist the GOP gets, the more egalitarian the Democrats become. We can have a separate discussion about what this tells us.
Geminid
@Martin: I thought one significant aspect of the 2018 midterms was that Democrats nominated Colin Allred, Lauren Underwood, and Jahana Hayes to run in majority white-districts in Texas, Illinois, and Connecticut. They all won, and Allred and Underwood flipped red districts. I don’t think this would have happened before Barack Obama showed that a Black man could be President, and a good one.
Subsole
@wjca:
Apologies.
I for one will try to be less judgmental and more open-hearted and accepting of people who accuse me of chopping up babies, diddling children, and selling out America to Commies/Gays/Muslims/Atheists/The Jew.
And the many, many good conservatives who don’t think that, but somehow reliably fail to stand up to it at all, either. And, in fact, repeatedly enable and support and outright shelter the folks who do say it.
There is a world of difference between wounded anger at someone who shits on you and yours while tearing down every delight in your country that they can reach, and abusing some Other which a jumped-up dickpill salesman fed you to make you feel better about yourself.
Don’t give me that garbage about us lumping all conservatives together. 40 years of their enthusiastic support of and craven spinelessness before said nutjobs might have contributed to that process.
Put simply, they lumped themselves in with the nut jobs. I simply observe the fact.
Brachiator
@Martin:
You’re talking about modern history. But even here, you are wrong about the timing of events.
Unfortunately, I have to attend to some business. But I am sure that issues raised here will come up again in other discussions.
The Other Steve
In reference to Biden and economics… I am encouraged by what I am seeing with regards to anti-trust. A realization that the era of Robert Bork went too far and that competition is better for America than mega-mergers in the long run. I don’t know that he’s doing enough to advocate for that message, it’s just what I’ve been seeing in anti-trust enforcement.
The Other Steve
@Martin: You may wish to look into the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Hubert H. Humphrey’s speech in particular. This was a fundamental event of the shift.
Geminid
@The Other Steve: That year was when Strom Thurmond ran as a “Dixiecrat.” I wonder if Humphrey”s speech influenced his decision.
Truman won in 1948 despite Thurmond and another Democrat running to his left, in the person of Henry Wallace. The Roosevelt coalition was good for one last flex.
wjca
And yet, here I am. *I* think I’m a conservative. Have since I was at Berkeley in the late 60s.
Never voted for Reagan. Period. Nor any Republican presidential candidate this century. I don’t think I qualify as racist (having been in an interracial marriage for decades). I’d prefer to reduce the deficit (and otherwise improve the economy) by taxing all** income above $1 million per year at 90% (exact percentage negotiable). I probably qualify as homophobic (emotionally, not intellectually, but can’t seem to get past it); and started advocating for gay marriage in the mid-80s because it was the right thing to do. I could go on.
I submit that pretty much any of those qualify as conservative. Not reactionary. Not theocratic. Not MAGA insanity. But still, conservative.
So yeah. I say “I’m conservative” and I get lumped in with the crazies.
** The whole capital gains thing is bullsh*t. Income is income.
Geminid
@wjca: Back when exit polls meant more than they do now, they showed that in 2008, 7% of Obama voters self-described as Conservative. That number was the same in 2012. I did not find that very surprising.
wjca
@Geminid:
I was one of them. But then, Obama was a conservative. (If he wasn’t black, the progressives would have been denouncing him loud and often. Instead of just complaining.)
WaterGirl
@Brachiator: I was thinking it was a reference to Women Get Shit Done or Bitches Get Shit Done.
Warblewarble
can anyone seriously think it would be a good idea for a force from the US,UK and France to take over as a proxy occupation force in Gaza after the IDF has completed its murderous campaign.
WaterGirl
@Warblewarble: I don’t know what you are referring to.
Geminid
@Warblewarble: Well, to begin with, the US, UK and France probably don’t think it’s a very good idea at all. The US kept a battalion-sized force into the Sinai after the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, but Gaza is a different proposition entirely. Has somebody suggested this?
Subsole
@wjca:
I am going to preface this by saying I am emotional and not in a good spot right now. I am often abrasive. I am frequently an ass. I am very often an asshole. I am trying very, very hard to engage respectfully here.
I am also tired, and frightened, and just sick of feeling like my chosen political group is being asked to support the entire world on its back with nothing but abuse from everyone. Including the people they are trying to shelter.
So if I act the entire fool, I apologize in advance. I am tired.
See, I am questioning why the onus is on me to just choke down the wickedness I see and be more meek and submissive for these folks.
That’s the crux of my umbrage: I object to being expected to be the only adult in a building full of them.
If I understand you, you see conservatism as a brake, rather than a reverse gear, which is the true, original and noble purpose of it. A means to ensure balance and temperance. And I will agree with that bit of semantics. What practical effect has that ever produced?
Maybe this is a generational thing. You were at Berkely in the 60s. I was born under Reagan. Whatever the GOP was, I never saw it. I have lived my life downstream of the disaster that was Nixon’s southern strategy.
What did principled conservatives do to stop him? Reagan and his shenaniganders? Gingrich? Tea Party? Bush? Trump?
I am genuinely not trying to argue or put you down. Show me when you guys fought. Show me when responsible conservatism, as a whole, put even a fraction of its vast resources into stopping the madness or encouraging responsible stewardship of the nation, or the economy? Just a quarter of the energy it put into stopping us when we were trying to let minorities vote or keep workers from getting shafted.
If I had ever experienced a conservative movement that acted with temperance, or conscience, or morals, or substance, or even just the desperate courage that comes with rank self-preservation, I probably would have been a conservative, too. Hopefully a good one, like our esteemed Host. But I also know me, and I have my doubts.
More than that: if I had ever seen a sizable chunk of conservatives stand up and fight, I’d probably be more open hearted.
Responsible conservatives didn’t have to win, they just had to try. And from where I’m standing, they didn’t bother.
And that’s MY fault?
It’s my fault for not believing these folks exist when they fail to show?
It’s my fault for not being impressed when they meekly submitted to evil because spiting their esteemed opponents was more important than living up to core principles?
Somehow, it’s my fault for being disillusioned at a group of people who have never managed to deliver, decade after decade? Despite the endless assurances from every authority that they exist and are this vast, silent, thronging majority that’s gonna wake up and start fighting any day now?
It’s my fault and mine alone for not trusting these folks? They have zero responsibility for how they are perceived?
I am sorry. I don’t know how to address that.
I wish I did.
Regardless, thank you for engaging respectfully.
Warblewarble
Guardian headline “US and Israel considering peacekeeping force for Gaza”. Presumably the peace of the graveyard.
wjca
@Subsole:
Thank you for the gracious reply.
I share your view of a lot of what is (mis)labeled as “conservative” these days. Between the reactionaries, the theocrats, the fascists, the Know Nothings, and the racists it’s pretty appalling. It makes being a real conservative damn difficult, let me tell you.
And I definitely have no problem with you calling them out. I’ll probably join in — enthusiastically, since it’s my philosophy they are giving a bad name. My only (forlorn, and unrealistic) hope is that people put the blame where it is actually due.
In addition to everything else, I’m sure that I’m far from the only guy out here who hates them. But who feels like everybody left of center totally dispises us. Makes it hard to get us into the big tent to help destroy the cancer on the body politic. And, with a bit less venom, I think even seriously gerrymandered states would get a serious housecleaning.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@wjca: wj is that you? [ –ral ]
wjca
Yup
Mr. Bemused Senior
I hope you don’t feel that way here [on BJ]. We may be a snarling mass of vitriolic Jackals but it’s not personal as far as I can tell.😁
wjca
I definitely don’t take it personally. What concerns me is that the scattergun attacks, as they spill over into the wider world, will drive away people who aren’t political junkies, who feel like they are conservative (or, at least, not “progressive” — however defined), and who could be allies, active allies, against the radical right.
Beating back the crazies can, eventually, be done without them. But sooner is far better than later in this effort. Which means mobilizing everybody we can. Only after that’s done can we go back to arguing about, and sensibly compromising over, real world policy questions.
BellyCat
@Martin: Bravo. Explains the bizarre gradations and curious associations within authoritarianism quite well.
BellyCat
@wjca: I enthusiastically support your point.
Most non-political junkies consider themselves to be middle of the road. Conservative, if you will. This group of people will be the ones to tip the 2024 election, in fact any future election, one way or another.
In further support of your point, it’s impressive how Biden has been careful to talk about the destructive efforts of the MAGA wing in government while being more silent about criticism of “conservatives”.
Joe knows the devastating consequences of such behavior.
206inKY
@Alison Rose: Agree 100%. This election is about one issue: abortion. Andy is relentlessly hammering on this front in Kentucky and headed toward a blowout. It’s not just a savvy strategy. The health of our democracy is downstream from the basic disrespect for bodily integrity at the heart of anti-abortion activists who are on the record opposing exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. You can sense it in the commercials—the terror of the world where a cruel minority has hacked the judiciary and seized the Speakership based on decades of theocratic fantasies. I recommend Danielle Mcguire’s At the Dark End of the Street (2010). Argues that the beating heart of the 20th century black freedom movement was not voting and a seat at the table of democracy. It was the fight for black women’s bodily integrity against a system that enabled impunity for white men to rape. Rosa Parks cut her teeth as a rape investigator for the NAACP in the 1940s. The charismatic dudes like MLK were downstream from this struggle, which continues today in the basic idea that black lives matter. There is no democracy without bodily integrity. And you’re right: people sense it in their bones, it requires no intellectual strain to understand the evil.
Geminid
@BellyCat: I think Democratic politicians in general don’t disparage conservatives. At least I don’t see that in Virginia. They also don’t sneer at Independents the way some partisan Democrats do on blogs like this. They know better.
Yesterday I heard a Democratic radio ad on WTOP. They’re based in DC, with another transmitter in Fredericksburg which is how I listen. The ad’s narrator was an earnest woman who warned listeners of how Virginia Republicans intended to strip Virgina women of their right to choose, and named 5 Northern Virginia Republican candidates who intended to do this.
Two interesting points. One, the narrator introduced a short clip if one of the Republicans saying he wanted to prohibit all abortions. Some of these candidates have expressed support for Governor Youngkin’s 15-week ban, but I say, paint ’em all with a broad brush, and if they don’t like it they explain themselves.
They really don’t want to be talking about abortion at all. I thought one reason Youngkin won last time was that he succeeded in keeping the issue of abortion rights in the background. Same with gun safety.
The second point: I think the narrator used “Republican” only once, at the beginning. After that she used “MAGA extremists” to characterize the Republican candidates. I thought that was a good approach.
wjca
The politicians (at least the good ones) do know better. That definitely matters.
But informal discussions like we have here also matter. Because a) some of the intended audience sees this stuff as well. But, even more importantly, because b) a lot of folks from forums like this become campaign workers for those politicians. And the way things are routinely expressed here inevitably bleeds over into how they talk to potential voters.
wjca
Consider the rotating tag that just appeared at the top:
“”If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.”
Yet in many parts of the country there are voters, and even local politicians, who are still in the GOP, but who are not extremists. If only because they want a say in who will represent them, and locally the GOP primary is what essentially decides that. To reach them, far better to say something like:
“If you are still in the GOP, you are in bed with extremists.”
Words, nuance, matters if you are trying to persuade people who do not already agree with you.
Paul in KY
@Cameron: Given the ‘winners’ the GQP has gobbed up in recent years, I might have voted for Dick Nixon back in the day (would matter who he was facing off with). I was too young to vote back in those days of yore.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: Alot of people (especially on the GQP side) think it can’t be ‘fascism’ if there’s no fancy uniforms involved.
Paul in KY
@wjca: Nowadays those positions make you a collectivist, commie, anarchist, redistributist, non-murcan to the current GQP loonies.
wjca
@Paul in KY: I don’t really expect to get sanity from the crazies. But I still hope for some open-mindedness from the other direction.
Paul in KY
@wjca: To me, if those ‘non-whacko’ voters/politicians in GQP (in ‘red’ states, to use a shorthand phrase) left the party and became Democrats, maybe they’d find that local races would be much more competitive.
I guess it depends on how many of your flavour of conservatives are still in that party.
Paul in KY
@wjca: We all like those positions. They are cool by me.
wjca
@Paul in KY: No way to tell, unfortunately. Having an Open Primary system would provide a workaround, but getting that instituted could be tricky.
WaterGirl
@wjca: rotating tag has been slightly edited.
wjca
@WaterGirl:
Unexpected. Thank you!
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Paul in KY:
Black shorts
Paul in KY
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Spodeism is a close cousin to fascism! Difference seems to be the shorts.