One American political party has collapsed; the other is holding together a fragile prodemocracy coalition. I miss normal politics.https://t.co/chQewJK4rV
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 18, 2024
This is the period, every year, when I start emerging from my bleak midwinter SAD funk… and sometimes that means getting aggravated instead of depressed about the state of the world. I get the impression I may not be the only jackal who’s going through this right now…
Anyway… here’s Tom Nichols, at the Atlantic, on “The Age of Incoherent Partisanship”:[gift link]
On Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik called for an end to the GOP primary season—in January, after one caucus in which some 56,000 Iowa Republicans chose Donald Trump. “I am calling on every other candidate – all of whom have no chance to win – to drop out,” she said in a statement, “so we can unify and immediately rally behind President Trump so that we can focus 100% of our resources on defeating Joe Biden to Save America.”
Maybe I spent too much of my career studying the Soviet Union, but Stefanik to me sounded like one of the old-school Kremlin Bolsheviks nominating the new general secretary and calling for an end to all this messy voting. Comrades, we have heard the voices of the Iowa regional party organization; they speak for the entire nation. The unreliable cadres who support the deviationists must now unite with us to defeat the wreckers and saboteurs.
Stefanik, of course, is just one of the many Republicans who have jettisoned their inconvenient principles and sworn loyalty to Trump. Such reversals are still shocking, if we care to remember them: GOP leaders such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham once declared Trump unfit for office but now sing the praises of the Great Leader. As my colleague Mark Leibovich put it last night on MSNBC, this is “white-flag week,” when even the last peeps of primary-season dissent in the GOP are being snuffed out.
Long before Stefanik’s call for less democracy, I wondered what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat in 2024. The Republican answer is easy: To be a member of the party is to abandon all political principles, of any kind, and bend the knee to the personal needs of Donald Trump. For Democrats, it’s more complicated. The Democrats were always a gathering of several constituencies under one roof, and their electoral house is even more crowded now that the guest rooms have been taken up by appalled independents and apostate former Republicans. And yet, in a historical irony, the once-fractious party is now more ideologically coherent than its GOP opponents…
Partisan inconsistency is hardly news: Political scientists have known since at least the 1960s that voters are attached to parties but are far less coherent about policies. (Although much of this work is about the American system, plenty of evidence indicates that irrational partisanship is something of a natural human tendency that’s affecting other democracies as well.) But one American party has collapsed; the other is holding together a fragile, but so far dominant, prodemocracy coalition. In this unprecedented situation, our politics have been largely emptied of meaning beyond the existential question of democracy itself.
This is as it should be. Nothing is more important than the survival of the Constitution, even if some voters (and some legislators) insist on being mired in their own particularistic interests. I wrote in 2020 that I can never again be as partisan as I once was; I long ago quit the GOP and will never remarry another party. But I miss politics as a process, a series of arguments, among people united in their wish to better the country while disagreeing about how to do it…
Old School
Just like they did after Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucus in 2016, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Mike Huckabee won in 2008.
Baud
OTOH, Joe Biden is old.
lowtechcyclist
Nichols:
My father used to say, back in the 1980s and thereabouts, that both parties wanted the same things, but disagreed on how to get there. I doubt that was true even then; I think the appearance of it was window dressing on the GOP side to convince people that tax cuts for the rich and doing away with regulations (“cutting red tape”) was advantageous to everyone.
But at least there was a debate going on, even in bad faith. So I kind of agree with Radio Free Tom on this one.
zhena gogolia
Stefanik is so repulsive.
Frank Wilhoit
I don’t like the vibes I get from Nichols. But that’s just me. Anyhow, a party that has an unbreakable lock on roughly half the states can hardly be said to have “collapsed”. The Republican Party of Tom Nichols’s dreams would still be net harm. So I think he probably ought to shut up.
Turgidson
@lowtechcyclist:
I naively hoped that the GOP embrace of incoherent teabaggers and Paul Ryan worship of the early Obama years would be a watershed with the electorate – the GOP was finally done trying to pretend they had a positive agenda and basically admitted that they just *wanted* to starve poor people and help make filthy rich people obscenely rich.
although Obama did a good job running against this sentiment for reelection in 2012 (the GOP helpfully nominated a walking symbol of this cruelty, and its architect as VP), my hoped for voter awakening was, obviously, a fantasy.
Baud
@Turgidson:
Same.
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
@ Annie Laurie:
Try light therapy, it works wonders. I used to get sleepy during the day and I would have to take a nap. My doctor said a body can have too much melatonin during short days triggering drowsiness and other issues. Started light therapy and presto, no more day killing naps and it also returned the energy and cheer I have during non winter seasons. (mayo clinic) (link)
Yutsano
He could have saved so many words and just called them a cult. But Nichols loves nothing more than the sound of his own voice, so here we are.
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
@Turgidson:
you mean Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Soylent Corporation?
teezyskeezy
@Frank Wilhoit: Sometimes his “tough love” act is eye-rolling and off point, but I do like his response to the tankie trolls he gets in his replies (that I see on bluesky because I’m not on twitter anymore, but I presume in both places). He blocks and dismisses with his characteristic smugness. Contrast with Will Stancil’s response to similar trolls, which is to engage as though there’s anything to gain by giving them the time of day. As much as I sympathize with his frustrations, he shouldn’t do it because the whole thing is probably an organized attempt by trolls to drive him crazy and bury him in bullshit, so he should ignore it.
Tony Jay
Surely Ex-Prez Stinky Pants would prefer to rattle through a few more of these State Primaries. Really soak up the winning. Crush his petty little rivals and remind everyone THROUGH FACTS that this is His Party and everyone has to kow their tow if they want a seat at the table when the feast begins.
If he doesn’t tweak Stefanik’s nose and start talking about looking forward to letting each State
pledge fealtyhave its say… looks pretty damned weak to me.satby
@Frank Wilhoit: He’s coming out in favor of the only party that is prodemocracy. He shouldn’t shut up, we need every voice. It gives permission for other Republicans to maybe just this once vote for a party they normally are loathe to. We need them all right now.
artem1s
Nichols isn’t paying attention if he thinks there isn’t any politics going on. Between Nancy Smash and Dark Brandon I’ve seen more actual politics going on than I’ve seen in any other 4 years. Watching them figure out ways to use their negotiating skills to work around the GQP blockades has been a wonder.
During the era Nichols is opining about both sides pretty much knew what was going into budgets and bills and what wasn’t long before the ‘politics’ started. The decisions about who was next in line to get nominated was done in back rooms before the first primary votes were cast. That’s how the GOP ended up with BobDolesays instead of considering the more experienced and skilled politician for nomination, Elizabeth Dole. The Dems were stuck in a similar rut until they decided to jettison the Dixiecrats and expand their idea of who was allowed to lead and make decisions. And the GOP opened its arms wide and said come on home to momma – and decades later they are still trying to keep the ‘others’ out of their lily white male party.
Hoodie
@Frank Wilhoit: Metastasized would be more accurate. The GOP is now a cancer that is coherent only in its drive to increase its power and kill the host. It serves no other particular purpose.
zhena gogolia
@satby: Right.
Brachiator
I hate even having to think about Trump and the GOPs blighted love for him. But I don’t care if he is named the nominee by acclamation.
Are political parties public institutions? Can’t they select whoever they want, even go back to the days of smoke-filled rooms? How the GOP picks their asshole is not my concern.
If this pundit didn’t become a Democrat, or at least commit to voting for the Democrats, he is still full of shit.
We are steps away from fighting to remain a democracy. The days of the polite debating society are over.
JPL
@Baud: Biden needs to say worry about my age when I talk about the debank changing my politics like trump.
Geminid
I get what you say, Ms. Laurie about getting past your bleak midwinter SAD funk. I can see how the days are getting longer. I can feel it too, and it’s a good feeling.
Jimmiraybob
Maybe I’ve spent too much of the last 20 years studying Fascism but she sounds……familiar.
I don’t know if the Party has collapsed or been transformed to the American Bund of the 1920s-30’s.
sab
@Baud: Old and wise. Old and experienced.
Ripley
@Yutsano:
I have a decent studio setup in my basement and have dozens of hours of me bitching to my camera in 2022-2023 about my job and “how unfair they were to me”, etc.
Sure, it didn’t change anything but I sound pretty darn good. But some of the content is pretty cringe-worthy, esp at my age.
I guess what I’m saying is, maybe some of our media darlings should try my method. You get to gripe all you want but nobody else has to hear any of it.
Eyeroller
I usually use Firefox, which has an article “recommender” called Pocket, and a prominent one now is from FTFNTY called “American Stares Down a Trump-Biden Repeat in Disbelief and Denial” and I refuse to click on it even to see who the author/s is/are. Why oh why can’t I overcome my inertia and cancel the online subscription I’ve had for decades. Anyway we need all the Tom Nichols we can get.
smith
Here’s something to cheer everyone up: Despite the best efforts of corporate media, consumer confidence is soaring, unemployment is still below 4%, wages are still going up. And the stock market hit a new record high. On the downside, Joe Biden is still old.
Suzanne
Stefanik is really being quite the PICK ME girl!
We hate those girls.
Anoniminous
@Brachiator:
“Are political parties public institutions?”
No. They are private organizations.
“Can’t they select whoever they want, even go back to the days of smoke-filled rooms?”
Yes. But a candidate nominated by a political party has to meet state law to be placed on the general election ballot which varies by state. In California all candidates for voter-nominated offices are listed on one ballot and only the top two vote-getters in the primary election – regardless of party preference — are placed on the ballot in the general election.
satby
@Brachiator: He clearly is saying the Democratic party is the prodemocracy party and “Nothing is more important than the survival of the Constitution”. Seems pretty clear to me who he’s voting for.
Omnes Omnibus
@satby: If what he writes gives some person mental permission to vote D, what the fuck do we care? We all need to remember that no one is trying to persuade us. We are already locked in.
Not arguing with you. Just riffing off your point.
Chief Oshkosh
@Frank Wilhoit:
FWIW, I don’t like his vibes, either. He spent most of his adult life working to achieve naked power for Republicans. He’s a shit. It’s great that he’s dinging Trump and the current GOP (which, again, HE worked to create), but I’ll take the short-term ally.
Let’s just say, he’s no Jen Rubin, and she’s suspect. ;)
Matt McIrvin
Hate and destruction are ideologically coherent as hell to me. It’s acting according to simple drives like a rampaging Dalek. It’s acting like a decent human that involves contradictions and compromises.
Attempted Chemistry
@zhena gogolia: she came up as a moderate-ish Republican, and now exists as the exemplar of “toady” in a party not exactly short of them.
Matt McIrvin
@Eyeroller: The headline is true though. Most of the people I know IRL either don’t really get that it’s 100% going to be a Trump-Biden rematch, yet, or if they do, they dislike that and don’t see why they don’t have some other option.
Ripley
Re: the season, a few years ago I started posting these updates on my FB feed every Friday for friends
They give a little hope and get just slightly better every week.
FelonyGovt
@Attempted Chemistry: When I was a kid, there WAS such a thing as moderate Republicans, especially in the Northeast where I’m originally from. But those days are gone with mimeograph machines.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
I’m sure that, with time, he can get over that.
topclimber
@zhena gogolia: Hey, that’s MY repulsive Rep you are talking about!
Last seen making headlines for challenging NYS mail-in option on early voting. (I thought I saw a piece that state’s highest court had shot her down but cannot find it now).
She must be worried the her +20 GQP district might not be so safe for her after all.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: I think I mentioned here that somebody said to me a couple of weeks ago, “I don’t think Trump is going to run.”
TBone
@Frank Wilhoit: I like yer style, saved me from breaking out out the tree-shaking saying that offends people.
topclimber
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: This thing about Biden being old is getting…old.
H/t the many jackals who have probably used that one already.
zhena gogolia
@topclimber: She brought down the president of her alma mater Harvard for no particular reason other than her own lust for power.
japa21
@Omnes Omnibus: Got any plans for tomorrow night, say 7-11?
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@topclimber: Numbers notwithstanding, he’s not as old as his likely competitor. Not in the ways that matter.
TBone
@satby: do rethugs read the Atlantic tho?
Jeffro
@satby: all of this 💯
Hoppie
@Turgidson: George Carlin: “Half of them are stupider than that.”
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
I’ll take that bet.
cain
@FelonyGovt:
In Oregon back in the 70s the GOP were quite moderate and cared about govt.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Baud:
This is something that is very important. Why? Because, old. Never mind that Biden was 3 years old when PAB was squeezed out of the thing that birthed him.
OLD!
Another Scott
I recognize, as OO says, that we’re not the audience.
I recognize, as satby says, he’s not going to vote for TIFG and will almost certainly vote for Biden.
But I mostly come down with Brachiator. The quoted stuff strikes me as being almost incoherent. My former party full of power hungry monsters with no scruples and is a danger to the Constitution. But I’m going to sit in my ivory tower, pontificate, and not actually join people fighting the monsters now because politics hurts my feefees. It undercuts his (true) statements about the dangers when he won’t even join the only organization that can keep the monsters out.
Politics is how we collectively address big problems – and that still happens every day. It’s not just Team Blue vs Team Red and collecting a vig by helping elect people.
But, I’m not the audience, and if things like this help increase Biden’s (and Democrats’ – after all, Biden cannot do it alone) winning mandate, then yay Tom.
FWIW.
T-FSM-IF.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
Stefanik is clearly being a toadie here, but she’s also showing a lack of confidence in her guy. If Trump is as strong a candidate as he is made out to be, he ought to be able to put away DeSantis and Haley early on. Neither is a very strong candidate in their own right.
So what’s Stefanik sweating about? I think she knows Trump is not up to a protracted primary campaign. He’ll almost certainly win it, but I think it will make him weaker and not stronger.
different-church-lady
The problem is: it hasn’t.
HumboldtBlue
It’s been fucking white flag week for the media for going on nine damn years.
different-church-lady
@Hoppie: I think Carlin was wrong: 90% are dumber than average.
Jeffro
@zhena gogolia:
@Tony Jay:
@Suzanne:
I’m tellin’ y’all, it will be Stefanik, Noem, or Britt. 😉
Baud
As long as we’re complaining, my problem is with the title of the piece, because someone just reading it would assume it’s about “both sides” rather than the Republicans.
topclimber
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
Memo to Ageists: Grow up!
Baud
@different-church-lady:
My genius skews the calculation.
Jeffro
@zhena gogolia: she also had a score to settle, after being kicked off of Harvard’s Institute for Politics for supporting trumpov’s lies about the 2020 election
Jeffro
@Geminid: agreed
trump and pro-trump forces want this settled, quickly, for a multitude of reasons (none of which involve his being strong and dominant)
Odie Hugh Manatee
@different-church-lady:
If you think about how reports on average earnings are separated into the bottom 90% and then the rest of the breakdown is from the last 10%, you are probably right.
If 90% of the people are going to take being fucked by those at the top and do nothing about it, then yup…
Brachiator
@satby:
I’m glad he gets it. He should be speaking to his fellow conservatives and explicitly declaring for Biden.
C Stars
I find Tom Nichols a bit smug as well. Having read his tweets back when I was doing that sort of thing, I do wish that he and I weren’t in the same party. Which, as the article evidences, is essentially what he wishes as well, but that ship sailed when Sarah Palin was just a glimmer in Bill Kristol’s eye.
But to more cheerful things: another Atlantic gift link. This article about the insanity of Bill Ackman is hilarious.
topclimber
@Geminid: Skip the primaries so Trump can focus like a laser on his trials?
Hell, suspend the rules, open the Convention, and renominate the ACTUAL CURRENT PRESIDENT by acclamation. When that happens, who will DARE not give a STANDING OVATION to your FAVORITE PRESIDENT?
smith
This may be wishful thinking, but do you suppose his cultists are starting to see how incoherent and wobbly he’s getting, and GQP pols like Stefanik are hoping to keep him out of sight to the extent they can until the general election campaign? Or maybe it’s because corporate media is starting to report it?
AlaskaReader
@Ripley: Here, we are up to nearly gaining 5 minutes a day.
Soon, we will not have ‘dark’.
AlaskaReader
@topclimber:
In Iowa, the same sort of Republicans who, for the last four years, have been screaaming bloody murder about how numbered and verifiable mail-in ballots were intolerably corrupted, same set voted last night with unverified and unnumbered random slips of paper dropped into a variety of odd paper shopping bags and old popcorn buckets.
…paraphrasing a Betty Bowers thing I read…
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
I’ve been thinking. New Hampshire might come through and gove us (them mostly) a legitimate nominating contest with Nikki Haley. They love to pull out the “not so fast” on seemingly smooth nomination paths.
Geminid
@C Stars: I’m not sure of Tom Nichols is in your party, but he’s in the larger Democratic voting coalition. Virginia Democrats have been winning races with support from moderate Independents like Nichols for the last two decades. Successful Democratic candidates don’t have go out of their way to bring these people in, but they are made to feel welcome.
RevRick
@Eyeroller: The Biden reelection campaign says their greatest barrier to getting out their message is the disbelief of a huge chunk of the electorate that Trump will be the GOP nominee. These are the folks who don’t tune into the election until the summer and definitely don’t think about it as much as we do.
Mike in NC
“Stefanik the Bolshevik” has a nice ring to it.
AlaskaReader
@cain: …if by ‘GOP’ you mean some and not all.
RevRick
@Chief Oshkosh: She’s a convert. Rubin is espousing views she never would have in 2012 when she was giving Romney regular tongue baths.
satby
@Omnes Omnibus: exactly, and thank you!
mrmoshpotato
So when wasn’t the Republican party crazy, Tommy? Who was the last good Republican president? It was Eisenhower in my book.
topclimber
@Mike in NC: Stefa-NO-GoodNik?
Tony Jay
@Baud:
Nope. Can’t be.
A vast, multi-generational coalition of clamouring ideologies, theories and communities united only by their commitment to the democratic process and their belief that, hell yeah, we can do better, can’t be partisan.
That’d be like calling the vast, multi-generational orgy of hedonistic positions, kinks and groupings that constitutes your local Club Flesh-Pit monogamous.
Doesn’t compute.
satby
@TBone: Totebaggers and independents do. No one is trying to get cultists, they’re trying to get the they’re all the same / mushy middle / my vote doesn’t matter folks.
You remember them, the people we always wish would vote? Lo-info voters? This is part of that important messaging you all always say isn’t happening. It’s happening, just not always to your liking. (edit: not meant to be directed only at you)
RevRick
@FelonyGovt: A big part of the nostalgia for the politics of the 50s and 60s is the fact that each party had its share of liberals and conservatives, so cross party deals had to be struck all the time. But even in that era politics were often frozen by the alliance of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans ( from 1938-1964 to be exact).
C Stars
@Geminid: Yes, and I appreciate that Nichols is a rational person and not a bizarre caricature like so many of these GOP politicians, and that at some point along the line he made the choice to be rational (as opposed to Stefanik).
Omnes Omnibus
@japa21: Ha!
HumboldtBlue
Yeah, Joe Biden is old, old enough to remember how damn important retail politics are.
Geminid
@topclimber: Also, the New York legislature is working on another round of redistricting. Democrats might carve Stefanik’s district up, maybe throw her in with another Republic Rep.
This will be interesting. Democrats won a court fight to be allowed a new round of redistricting, but there’s no guaranty that their map will be acceptabl. So they might not try too pronounced a gerrymander this time. They’ll definitely try to tilt some districts though.
smith
@RevRick: And a significant portion of the potential electorate was frozen out altogether. It’s no accident that those supposedly halcyon days disappeared when Dems finally started to bring Black voters into the tent.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: The only thing that made mid-20th-century politics less partisan was that for some puzzling reason, the most electrifying political divide of the age (race/civil rights) was not a partisan division. At the time, political scientists lamented that because they felt voters didn’t have obvious coherent choices. But the moment that became a partisan division, we were on the road to the world we have today.
TBone
@satby: point taken.
Brachiator
My Brave browser kept freezing so I had to switch devices to read the full Nichols article. Still have some reservations, but see what he was saying. I also had to remind myself of his past positions.
I get the impression that he is still trying to convince himself to fully embrace the Democrats, but he clearly recognizes the harm to the country caused by the Republicans.
Villago Delenda Est
@zhena gogolia:
Stefanik is a pure opportunist. No principles whatsoever. Perfect for TFG.
zhena gogolia
@Villago Delenda Est: I just don’t believe he’s going to pick a woman, or a person of color. I guess my predictive abilities aren’t the greatest, but we’ll see.
AlaskaReader
@Geminid: …and if all they accomplish is a near leveling of the playing field that will still be a huge win.
Alaska just went through an astounding state Supreme Court ruling that confirmed partisan gerrymandering violates our state constitution, …everyone here will be more circumspect in their striving to gerrymander for advantages,
Overall, that’s a win I can respect.
Villago Delenda Est
@zhena gogolia: Oh, I don’t think that she has a chance in hell of getting the nod, for the reason you cite. She’s got a parallel mindset to TFG, though.
kindness
Reading Nichols’s article I see he equates liberals criticizing Israels methods of warfare as anti-semitism. Yup, he used that to suggest there are large swaths of anti-semitism in the Democratic party.
I don’t know if this Nichols guy has ever been around a common MAGA when discussing Jewish folk. I think not.
HumboldtBlue
If you thought Stefanik couldn’t sink any lower.
smith
@zhena gogolia: I didn’t think so either. It would be so much more satisfying to him to thoroughly subjugate a white man in that position. I don’t know what kind of loyalty test he’ll use to ensure that guy doesn’t pull a Pence on him, though.
zhena gogolia
@HumboldtBlue: VOMIT
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia:
Being nice about it.
Matt McIrvin
@kindness: Nichols is never gonna be a liberal and is never gonna be comfortable around liberals. If he tells people to vote for Democrats I’ll take it, but I’ll never pay attention to his advice for Democrats.
different-church-lady
@AlaskaReader: How do you gerrymander a single district?
zhena gogolia
@Villago Delenda Est: I would love to see her brought down.
different-church-lady
@HumboldtBlue:
The questioner followed up. Are we sure it was a reporter?
japa21
@different-church-lady: State legislative districts
Geminid
@AlaskaReader: Albany Democrats ought to be able to tilt the map in their favor. They probably won’t tilt it as much as they tried to in 2021.
And certainly not as much as Illinois Democrats managed that year. That map’s a doozy! I was really impressed by how they wrapped the 15th District around the 13th like a horseshoe. They got away with it too, because it was a different state law and a different supreme court.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@HumboldtBlue: there is no bottom.
Jackie
@Jeffro: Stefanik, Huckabee-Sanders, or Noem.
West of the Rockies
@smith:
I don’t know… banking on Trump’s physical and mental decline (or Putin’s supposed ill health) seems kind of self-defeating. That said, I can think of no two humans so deserving of misery and death.
Baud
@Jackie:
She would come with a nice lectern.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: I agree.
Gin & Tonic
That doesn’t pay the mortgage.
HumboldtBlue
@different-church-lady:
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
Nope.
eclare
@Geminid:
TIFG has an entire month between NH and SC. I expect his campaign personnel are terrified at what he might say as he becomes increasingly unglued. An all-caps message* at 2 am about presidential immunity? Continuous messages disparaging E Jean Carroll?
*I have no idea what his inane platform calls posts.
HumboldtBlue
If you don’t wish to visit Twitter, here’s the link to MediaMatters from 2018 about Patrick Healy, the subject of that quote.
Old School
@eclare: I believe they are “truths.”
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
Garbage.
Jeffro
@eclare: and this explains why he and his minions want very much to “wrap up” the primaries in a hurry …he wants the affirmation, the GOP powers-that-be want it locked down before it becomes obvious even to the low-info normies that he is a drooling deranged idiot
eclare
@HumboldtBlue:
The curse words that I know are insufficient. What a vile excuse for a human being.
eclare
@Old School:
Of course they are. JFC.
Eolirin
@AlaskaReader: The current maps are pretty close to level, and we lost five seats because of it. Given the state of play in NC and FL and OH we need a little more of a lean than that.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: Stefanik really thinks he might pick her for her loyalty and political chops. He won’t even see her unless she bleaches her hair, gets breast implants and those puffed up injected duck lips like Alina Habba.
cmorenc
@Frank Wilhoit:
Recall that not so very long ago, the GOP had a seemingly strong lock on California, and more recently, Wisconsin and Virginia. The dominant party incrementally, but steadily grows out of step with a slowly growing portion of its voting citizenry over time that its ability to maintain gerrymanders erodes, until often the dam breaks realtively quickly over two or three election cycles.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Pompeo moving up along the inside rail
Gretchen
I have trouble taking people seriously who were ok with Newt Gingrich, the great Clinton penis hunt, being lied into the Iraq war, and all the rest of the last 50 years and it was only Trump that woke them up.
brendancalling
Stefanik makes me utterly ill, especially because I know she knows better—as do so many of those amoral pukes. I will also say for the the hundredth time that, although I enjoy his columns, Tom Nichols played no small role in catapulting the “lie for the sake of lying” propaganda of the early aughts that ultimately led to the GOP’s current deplorable state. Regrets/he has a few…
On an unrelated and open thread note, our band The No Good Crowd just dropped our b-side on Spotify and Apple. If you ever wanted to hear me singing at you, now’s your chance—check out “Pioneer.” And of course, if you dig the sounds we’re puttin’ down, give us a like and a follow, we might even earn enough to buy a few bags of potato chips. I hope the mods don’t flag the links.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans.
Whodathunkit??
It’s a real paper, a preprint from 2019.
(via mastodon.social/explore )
Reminds me of the story about Bobi the “31 year old” dog.
Cheers,
Scott.
gwangung
@cmorenc: Well, yeah, but then the relevant term is “collapsing” and not collapsed.
And something that has not yet collapsed still has sizable potential for mayhem, mischief and damage.
Avoid the death throes (and maybe accelerate them if we can).
RevRick
@smith: Excellent point.
wjca
But we’ll always have dark Brandon.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jackie: Suggesting Huckabee-Sanders as a running mate fror TFG, some idiot at National Socialist Review called her “winsome” today.
HumboldtBlue
@wjca:
Did someone say Dark Brandon?
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: The political elites decided that they needed to deal with the problem of Civil Rights as part of the struggle against the Soviet Union, which was making great inroads in the Third World by pointing to the obvious ugliness of racial caste in the United States.
When JFK proposed the Civil Rights legislation in the summer of 1963, his polling plummeted among the white working class.
A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno)
@Jeffro:
As Noem is the “prettiest” of the group and has already shown a disregard for her marriage vows – I’d bet on her.
Jackie
@Villago Delenda Est:
Winsome in an evangelistic white nationalist christian way. Those smokey eyes…
Kenneth Schulz
@Frank Wilhoit:
The party has collapsed into a cult of personality. It is no longer an organization of people who have common interests and goals, and propose programs to serve those interests and achieve those goals through the instrument of governance. It is an aggregation of individuals who subsume their thoughts, interests and aims to those of the Leader.
frosty
@Another Scott: Really whodathunkit? “Relative poverty and short lifespan … support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.”
Chris
@mrmoshpotato:
Even Eisenhower is overrated as hell and a substantial drop in quality from the Roosevelt/Truman era that preceded him.
His foreign policy was basically to unleash the Dulles brothers and probably cost us any chance we had of making ourselves popular with the average Third Worlder. Domestically, he happily rode the Red Scare to power even if he helped gut McCarthy after he was gone, and went all-in behind social reactionaries like Billy Graham that were on the rise during that era. His big achievement of standing up for desegregation was basically forced on him by the Supreme Court, of which he said that appointing Chief Justice Earl Warren had been one of his biggest mistakes. (Fun fact: the person he originally wanted to appoint instead of Warren was John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State and former low-key Nazi sympathizer. Imagine the alternate history of a Supreme Court with that guy in charge, especially for things like the civil rights movement).
The fact that Ike was still vastly preferable to the Nixons, Reagans, Dubyas, and Trumps that came after him helps his legacy for sure. The more interesting question is “when was the last time we had a Republican president who was better than his Democratic opponents?” And it’s hard to say exactly, but certainly it was before FDR. There hasn’t been a single presidential election from 1932 onwards in which the Democrat wasn’t the better choice.
Chris
@RevRick:
People miss the 1950s/1960s politics not just because each party had its share of liberals and conservatives alike, but because the liberals (or at least the moderates, in the GOP case) were the dominant faction in each party.
AlaskaReader
@different-church-lady: Believe it or not, we have more than one political district. (and we don’t live in igloos)
AlaskaReader
@Eolirin:Many states are differently regulated and administered. Ideally, one might say partisan neutrality could be considered the goal, another someone would suggest weighted to percentages of voters should determine representation in maps, I don’t know where your maps sit or how that was achieved but percentage weighting only solidifies current demographics and will hinder a changing population, the effects of gerrymandering are slow to surface and they drag on well after they should.
Examples are maps deemed illegal, but they’re used anyway because no time to review in courts before pending election deadlines. Alaska has been forced to use illegal maps.
It might not hurt to see if your Constitution has a mention pertinent to the process. (long game tactic)
AlaskaReader
@cmorenc: Or it goes the other way and erodes from Blue to Red. My state used to be reliably blue. Not now.
AlaskaReader
@NotMax: Can I suggest he break a leg?
Is that just an actor thing ? …../
AlaskaReader
@Gretchen:As an oldster, I can pass this along:
A whole lot of old people are intractable assholes whose past professional actions and current electoral actions have almost certainly brought about the literal demise of mankind as a whole.
The Lodger
@Tony Jay: Trump isn’t immune to the treatment the Politburo gave Brezhnev.
The Lodger
@Matt McIrvin: Heroes don’t agonize over whether they are doing the wrong thing.
Chris T.
@Another Scott:
How do you think Methuselah and Noah and so on lived to multiple hundreds of years? Same way: once the rest die off, the kids all say “whoa, look at him, he’s gotta be a million years old!”
AnonPhenom
@Frank Wilhoit:
How Nichols managed to read James O’Brian’s book(s) [the sports analogy being a direct crib of O’Brien’s “footballification” theory) and not arrive at the conclusion that two culturally and politically related systems undergoing near identical convultions could have near identical cause (a handful of billionaires standing athwart history yelling Stop while throwing their money at think tanks, political campaigns, media conglomerates, etc…) make me think he’s just looking to chalk everything up to an easy scapegoat (“Trumpism”) and look for a mulligan circa 2016.
Chris
@The Lodger:
… you mean leaving him in power until he dies of old age?
Miss Bianca
@HumboldtBlue: I love our POTUS. It’s true, I do.
Paul in KY
@Attempted Chemistry: I think ‘lickspittle’ is the better term. ‘Toady’ is OK too!
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: If she was a guy, she’d be perfect (for him).
Paul in KY
@Chris: He froze enlisted promotions for the whole of his 2 terms & waited until he was days from being out the door to give any warning of ‘the military-industrial complex’.
Paul in KY
@Chris: I would say Teddy Roosevelt.
Chris
@Paul in KY:
Don’t you just love that speech? “I think this is a big problem that I’ve been contributing to all this time, and now that it’s not my problem anymore, I think somebody should totally solve it!” Shades of George Washington freeing his slaves, but only on his deathbed.
@Paul in KY:
Roosevelt is probably the last time a Republican ran for office 1) who actually wanted to enact major reforms to fix what he saw as the country’s problems, and 2) whose reforms were actually good. For most of the twentieth century, Republicans are largely either people who want to be President but don’t particularly want to change anything, they think they country’s fine as it is (Eisenhower), or people who do want to change it, but only in ways that make it more corrupt, more racist, less democratic, less free (Reagan).