I have a lot of thoughts of things to write about, so this will be a post that I hope to refer back to later about some topics that I think are worth discussing as we begin to come to terms with what happened Tuesday:
Combatting Generational Setback
Trump’s second term will set us back for at least a generation. Between all the 40-something judges he’ll appoint to the bench, how the Senate is going to be a continual thorn in our side after losing at least one seat that we thought was solid (Casey) and maybe others, and the rot that will be accelerated in the quality of public education, this country went back with a vengeance in a way that will be around long after many of us depart this vale of tears. Not to mention the impending mass deportations. How to mitigate this, what organizations are worth supporting, how to protect neighbors and others who might be targets of hate are all things I hope to discuss. Recent reading on this point: Your Guide to Survival in Texas, Because You Live There Now by the much-loved-in-the-comments LBJ twitter account.
Our Failed Media Diet
Apparently the NYT went full deep throat fellatio this morning on the greatness of the coming Trump era. Frankly, I don’t care. One of the mistakes made by our tribe in 2016 was thinking that longstanding journalistic institutions would rise to the occasion. Well, democracy didn’t die in darkness, but it didn’t do great over in the shaded corner where the sun hardly shines, which is what our vaunted institutions provided us. Here’s Ryan Cooper on why Democrats need to re-evaluate our relationship with mainstream media. Here’s Oliver Willis’ list of worthwhile media as a starter on the topic of good media.
The Crisis of Unfuckable Incels
Young men swerved right in this election, powered by a diet of Joe Rogan, video games, porn and red-pilled incel content. At the same time, young women are in a new place with these unfuckable, undateable man boys who say things like “your body my choice” — at its most radical feminist edge, there’s the 4B movement. The young men who married my daughter and nieces, as well as other relatives in this age group, are generally good people, so my question is how we can help these unfuckable douchebags pull their heads out of their asses and be more like the good young men I know. A little background on the reality on the ground from Paul Campos at LGM (another fan favorite here, and I’m mixed on the guy, but it’s short and has a couple compelling pieces of anecdata.)
How to Counter the Right-Wing Media Ecosystem and the Forever Campaign
This one is becoming a real obsession for me, because my wife’s Trumper relatives could talk of little other than the high prices, and I discounted that because I knew they only consumed right-wing media. I also looked at the macroeconomic numbers and thought that generally the country was headed in the right direction, never mind that we’re in a giant housing affordability and availability crisis that makes a mockery of those numbers. Well, shockingly, the folks who voted in this election didn’t have my blinders on, and they were living on a non-stop diet of “Joe did that” which tanked Biden’s favorability from the start. I also think that older elected Democrats still are living in a “govern for most months, campaign in the last 4” world that shapes some of our poor response to the right wing eating our messaging lunch. This is hard: Democrats’ institutional DNA makes them want to legislate, compromise and make incremental progress. Republican DNA, since at least Reagan, is shitposting and bullshitting to their base while they engineer handouts for rich donors. But, look who won. And, social media is in on the con, explicitly at Xitter, implicitly at Meta, Google and the rest . Matt Pearce’s piece is more about journalism than us building a counter to right-wing media, but the part on the mediation of good journalism by garbage filters is completely on point.
Some other quick hits: Who ticket-split in places like Missouri and Florida, voting for Trump but also for constitutional amendments to protect abortion? How to get people to hate Musk, Zuck, Bezos and the rest, and see them as leeches. A deeper dive into the numbers once they’re finalized, with a look at NY, NJ and TX as being of special interest. The migration from blue dots to red states and what that will do to the electoral map.
When I first started writing here, DougJ and I both agreed that a bunch of short posts on topics was the way to go. Well, he’s kept that up, and now look at where I’m at…
karen gail
From headlines: 2025 is the agenda. It is now being bragged about, so we were warned.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@karen gail:
But Glenn Kessler fact checked it and found that Trump didn’t explicitly endorse it, so four pinocchios!
Ramona
Even in the darkest of times, mass street protest works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest
Also, I donated to Kamala today in response to her email with her concession/carry on fighting. She hasn’t stood down her organization. The name has changed, can’t remember on broken sleep but kamalaharris.net has it.
I am so much better off than in 2016 even though this is worse because I have you all in this community and DailyBeans, CrookedMedia and so much more. We are much better prepared this time around.
AM in NC
I’m with you about needing a whole lot of thought, energy, and resources going into the media issue. It is a serious problem for us.
cain
I’m still trying to figure out how Joe Rogan is more powerful than Beyonce, Taylor Swift ,and a host of youube/instragram influencers whose outreach are way more than Rogan.
I will note that incel behavior is always linked to lack of jobs and opportunities. We saw this in the middel east during the 9/11 era. A lot of frustrated young middle eastern men flocked to influential and violent imams.
Ultimately, economic conditions for blue collar workers is what drove them to the polls. Everything else is behavior patterns related to the above.
Josie
It would be instructive to study how the Republicans rebuilt the party after the catastrophic Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964. They clawed their way back into relevance over a period of many years, We should take a look at how they did it. Someone may have already written a book about this. If anyone has seen such a study, I would be interested in looking at it.
Baud
I thought this was going to be about Omnes.
The Truffle
@Josie: I was part of Howard Dean’s OFA in 2005. I figured the Goldwater moment was then. Silly me.
At least we now have alternative media outlets of our own.
And really? I’m counting on them screwing up again and us having another 2026 and 2028. Lather, rinse, repeat.
How long before buyer’s remorse sets in on their side?
Biden should confirm a ton of judges in the next few months (heck, he already did).
Someday, after everything burns down and is rebuilt, there needs to be some sort of court reform. But now? I’m predicting there’ll be another catastrophe thanks to these people. Sad but true. Where is our FDR?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I thought it was going to be about public transportation.
Steve LaBonne
@karen gail: The people (thought they) knew what wanted and deserve to get it good and hard. Now let’s see how they like it. This was something that couldn’t be postponed forever (we would have gotten it in 2017 – 2020 if Trump and the Republicans had actually expected to and been prepared to win) and here we are.
DebG
Thank you for this post. I need these resources, and these ideas, because today will be worse than yesterday. And yesterday was awful. And things will get worse.
kindness
Looking ahead, we all understand Trump is going to screw everything he can up. Chaos is his operating mode. Only chaos allows him the reach he wants to govern by. Joe Biden got elected because Americans were tired of the chaos of Trump’s 4 years and unhappy with how badly Trump had screwed the pooch on every chance he got. Since Americans seemingly have the memory of a fruit fly, that all was ignored this election. Trump will do the same thing again. That’s his way. So on a positive note, our side has a good chance of taking the next election. Now we just have to make it through these next 4 years.
JMG
@Josie: The Vietnam War and the white backlash to the civil rights movement rebuilt the Republican Party after Goldwater.
Layer8Problem
Ok Omnes, step up to the plate.
ETA: Drat, Baud, you did it again.
Steve LaBonne
@The Truffle: That cycle is incredibly damaging over time and can’t be sustained forever. We may now have exhausted it because they may succeed in establishing an authoritarian regime that can’t be thrown out in 2028.
The Truffle
I did not need to read that post on living in Texas. Speak for yourself, dude. Especially with this.
New York and California aren’t Texas. Honestly, Dems need to focus on state legislatures at this point. And tune out people like this. Dude, speak for yourself.
CindyH
I’d love to see info about businesses/companies to support and best alternatives to AT&T etc
lowtechcyclist
@cain:
I keep hearing that blue collar workers are very much in demand, and having to pay them more is one of the things (in addition to demand) pushing up new house prices.
The Truffle
@Steve LaBonne: I hate to say it, but there will likely be a global economic meltdown before then. The only schadenfreude will be seeing these clowns turn on each other.
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
I thought it was going to be about public transportation in Britain, but then I realized Rose wasn’t writing this post.
The Truffle
@lowtechcyclist: Who is the FDR type who can appeal to them?
Hildebrand
I stopped teaching at the university level in 2022, mainly because I was tired of dealing with academia and it’s stilted and condescending political in-fighting, but also because I was quickly becoming annoyed with the lacrosse playing, business major dude-bros who slouched and oozed and whined through my Intro to History classes. They wouldn’t read, they spouted ignorant foolishness, and they generally irritated everyone who wasn’t a dude-bro.
Not surprisingly, they routinely got the worst grades and had the most insufferable parents who would lobby on their behalf when I failed them or gave them a ‘D’.
What struck me most about them is that they already had a deep crust of resentment for everyone who actually did the work and got better grades. If you told them they had agency and could get better grades with effort, they wouldn’t work harder, just complain louder.
Their Gen X parents really failed on the whole child-rearing thing. And it seems that both generations of white men (gen x and z) are pissed about not being in charge and being able to be as blatantly sexist and racist as in previous generations – all as they sailed through life as mediocrities.
Not sure what to do to fix that.
Lapassionara
Thanks to all who suggested books to read in the earlier thread. I’ve made a note of them.
Who do you think should be the new chair of the DNC? I don’t know who I would select, but I like Ben Wikler in Wisconsin a lot.
Steve LaBonne
@The Truffle: I anticipate that. It’s hard to be optimistic about the political outcomes that would produce.
UncleEbeneezer
I think Bouie is wrong here. I’m not finger-pointing yet, but I very much want to because I’m pissed at my fellow Dems who failed to show up for the best candidate I’ve seen in my lifetime, after the best President of my lifetime, for the most existentially important election of my lifetime that we all knew would come down to turnout. I’m pissed at the media for the BothSides™ bullshit and relentlessly hammering Biden on every issue possible. And I’m pissed at all the mother-fuckers on our side who did the same thing, only from a Progressive stand-point. I’m not pissed because I don’t understand the “magnitude and implications” of this mess, I’m pissed because I understood that shit all along!! And it makes me absolutely sick to my stomach that so many people allegedly on my side, did not.
Lobo
We should take a hard look at our DNA. We had too many self goals and can’t afford them.
You see my frustration. We are well and truly f##! They have the presidency, senate and courts. What’s the plan? It’s nice to hear we’ll fight, but how?
One idea is would be to close shop on the Democratic Party and fund an Independent Party made up centrist Repubs and remaining Dems in certain states, a la Osborn. The Dem name is too toxic in those places like Idaho anymore. Just concede the fight and create something new. See #10.
Ideas anyone? I think we all need to really admit the reality of the situation. We really may be entering a dictatorship in one form and the other. Should we really be handing over the keys? I don’t have a lot of answers. Sigh!
pieceofpeace
Thanks for this informative post. Finding excellent, reliable and relatable journalism/reporting is the first step in keeping one’s sanity, following Tuesday’s results. I’m guessing that misinformation will purposely be used to confuse and discourage, divert, divide and conquer, sow……etc., nothing new here, as his first term used that tactic in every way they could.
mapanghimagsik
I feel the incel dude six months from now expressing shock he’s not neck deep in hot women is going to be a blistering read on The Onion.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Truffle: FDR was seen as a rich dilettante until he wasn’t. We don’t know who might be that person in the future.
UncleEbeneezer
I saw someone griping yesterday about Harris (and Dems) needing to stop sounding like Gender Studies professors and after my head stopped spinning, I was like: what color is the fucking sky in your world? Harris (like Hillary) made her statements about women’s issues about as anodyne and general as possible. Anyone who claims she was out here doing Angela Davis rants, is telling on themselves. They just don’t want ANY mention of Misogyny, Sexism etc.
Another Scott
Steve Ballmer tried to make a big splash with his USAFacts.org site.
Unfortunately, while the site collects sensible numbers from US Government sources, the analysis is detached and seemingly from a “magic of the marketplace, best possible worlds” perspective.
E.g. Groceries. No mention of consolidation in the food distribution system, etc., etc.
We can’t let go of the importance of reality, thinking, facts, and truth, even as we work on increasing the quality of emotional connections with our fellow humans. There’s no easy solution, we have to push for incremental progress every day.
I heard a snippet of the BBC NewsHour this morning on the radio, where the host was interviewing some voters including a young Black guy about the election. Host asked why Harris lost.
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t, tell me.”
“You know.”
“No, tell me.”
(very roughly) “Sexism and Racism. America revealed herself again, showing the underlying truth that we’ve known for a long time is still there. […] Nothing can take away from the fact that a woman from Oakland, CA is the Vice President of the United States.”
I actually found the audio (it’s usually been impossible in the past for me, for some reason). Here, starting around 46:35.
I don’t know the answer to how we quickly change that dynamic. Maybe it’s not possible to do quickly. No matter the pace, it needs to be done.
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
K-Mo
You tell no lies. I’ll look forward to your thoughts.
Steve LaBonne
@Lobo: It’s pure fantasy that the Democrats had the political support to do any of that. Our electorate has shown over and over that it will tolerate a modicum of Democratic power only temporarily and for the purpose of cleaning up the preceding Republican mess, then it’s “thanks” for your service, bye.
Subcommandante Yakbreath
@The Truffle: Where is our FDR?
He’s still in the Oval Office for another couple of months…
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
Yes, I see that a lot on reddit. Also, if you encounter a young feminist at your school that criticizes men, that’s on Harris too.
Chris Johnson
Shocked, shocked I am that such a thing could transpire. Surely having delivered the Presidency to their patron they would not simply continue their sterling work as the Pravda for our new century, nay, for eternity.
Why ever would they do that. I for one couldn’t wait to run and hear what they thought about things again.
Oh woe, oh what a disappointment. It’s as if I was right about them this whole time, but that would be madness.
gene108
@Josie:
Republicans look for cracks in a successful Democratic election cycle. After 1964, a Republican operative (don’t remember the name) got information that conservative Democrats from Protestants to Catholics to blue collar workers weren’t happy with civil rights legislation.
That was a crack they found to pick up House seats in 1966, and get Nixon into the White House in 1968.
After 2008, Republicans looked polling data and found electing a black man made some white people uncomfortable. With the help of billionaires, Fox News, etc. they turned the 4/15/09 Taxed Enough Already protests into a political movement.
Basically, after Republicans lose big, they look for cracks in the Democratic coalition that won and exploit as quickly as possible.
The cracks always seem to be white people angry about civil rights gains.
Democrats need to find a way to tap into other types of resentment people who voted for Trump have that aligns with the Democratic agenda like tax the rich, but delivered in an angry manner.
The Truffle
@Steve LaBonne:
Fascism and anti-incumbency seems to be on the rise everywhere. I don’t get it. I just hope we can get FDR types or at least more people like Fetterman who can also communicate with rural Americans.
One positive sign–there have been local/state Dems winning in districts in very red states (Alabama, for instance).
But the “good and hard” part is setting in regarding reproductive health and it’ll get worse. Sad but true.
The best anyone can hope for is that after they wreck the system, there will be a backlash against them as buyer’s remorse sets in.
I also expect more states to discuss secession, sadly.
The Truffle
@Lobo: Don’t disband any party. You don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.
I really think the state/local levels are where gains can and will be made.
WV Blondie
I have no children. My immediate family’s only descendants are the three children of my late sister – and their father was MAGA long before there ever was such a thing. I have nothing to do with the asshole father, very little contact with the kids. My personal plan is to eventually move to Massachusetts (currently living w/husband in his mother’s house, so we can care for her). And to make a will that leaves nothing to the kids at all; there are many, many organizations that would benefit far more from my bequests.
Omnes Omnibus
@UncleEbeneezer: But, but, but…. Angela Davis supported Harris so she is a gender communist. And Dick Cheney supported her, so she a blood-thirsty, settler colonizing neo-con. And a raving schizophrenic.
gene108
@The Truffle:
Never.
Given the information silos we all inhabit, people will not be getting the same facts and reasons for what’s going on.
We’re in a post-truth era, where even the most basic facts can be debated, if there’s a conspiracy theory contesting it, ie flat Earthers.
Lobo
@Steve LaBonne:
We could have at least tried. I think we talk ourselves out of lot of stuff. Trump’s superpower is that he just does it and sees what happens. Many times than not nothing. Who knows?
The Audacity of Krope
Boycott the Beast
Got a safe, reliable job at on organization that is a blight on the face of the Earth?
Do you have less conventional options that could plausibly sustain your needs? (Really think about this)
Pare back your hours or even leave that place and cultivate those other options. We don’t need them. They need us. We produce. They own. So do those other things.
Or, I mean, if your workplace is inclined to unionize, please pull that trigger.
@mistermix.bsky.social
I specifically said a deeper dive into the numbers “after they’re finalized” because it remains to be seen where the popular vote ends up. That’s not cope, it’s just a fact.
The Truffle
@gene108: I don’t buy that. The ticket splitters who voted for Dems on lower levels and then for Trump are going to be in for a surprise. There will be more articles about leopards eating faces.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: It’s the same thing they did with Obama and Race. Pretend he was some fire-breathing, Malcom X even though he mostly avoided the topic altogether, and when he did speak about Racism he did so in the most unobjectionable manner possible.
Steve LaBonne
The elephant in the room is wealth inequality. Does anyone doubt that it has reached a level at which democracy is unsustainable? The primary effect of billionaires being rich enough to buy the government is exacerbated by asset inflation all the way down the ladder, so that younger middle class people can’t buy a house or in general build wealth. The Great Depression followed by world war was the exit from this ratchet last time- the massive destruction of wealth that Piketty cited as the only way historically that super-high inequality has been reversed. I very much fear the world is about to do it all again. I’m old enough not to care much what happens to me, but my daughter, my wife’s grandkids… This is why I’m not much interested in trying to troubleshoot and tweak conventional Democratic politics. The real problem is orders of magnitude bigger than that.
trollhattan
@The Truffle:
We live in a time Austria, Germany, Italy are dancing again with fascists–and when has that ever happened before–there must been a generational shift sufficient to erase the various, uh, downsides to having tyrants in charge.
Trump’s “self-made man” schtick, created and brought to you by NBC, has changed the country in vast and now deeply rooted ways. Uprooting it, should that even happen, probably takes a generation.
Captain C
@cain:
I suspect he gives them permission/justification to carry out their selfish and sadistic actions, and makes them feel smart for being so ignorant.
The Truffle
@Steve LaBonne: I have said it before–but we are headed for a similar economic mess, unfortunately.
OId Man Shadow
That seems to me to be the logical end of where Trump’s policies will lead us, so… problem solved!
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Lobo:
This is one I forgot to put on my list — how to stop thinking the courts will ever save us and finding other ways to get things done.
Captain C
@Steve LaBonne:
If there was some way to limit the damage to people who voted for this, I would be all for it.
Ridnik Chrome
Thank you for pointing this out. I was just thinking this morning, in a different context, of how it seems like a lot of things that used to be considered basic human needs are turning into luxury items, beyond the reach of the average person. And sex might well be one of those things.
A lot of people want to blame racism and misogyny for our current state (and those things are definitely part of the problem, to be sure!) but overlook the fact that we have been ratcheting up economic inequality for a couple of generations now, and it has gotten to the point where it is intolerable, especially for young people.
Ocotillo
A bad cold combined with post-election hangover has me too lazy to look, what is the status of the House?
The Truffle
@Captain C: There isn’t. Sometimes these things happen. I don’t think the real ramifications of Dobbs will sink in for people until 2026.
@kindness: I predict this will probably happen but there will be a lot of pain in the meantime.
And on that note, I’m out of here. I love you guys, but I don’t want to end up in a Daily Kos rabbit hole. I’m going to look into volunteering, being kind, and eventually go back to some sort of activism. Don’t know what.
Take care.
KatKapCC
What I would like is for some of y’all who advocate a 4B movement or something like it toward incels to consider a similar concept toward your Trump-loving family. Because all this “Oh but they’re actually really sweet and kind of lovely” shit is 1) wrong, because no one who supports the worst man this country has ever burped up can be sweet and kind, and 2) enables them to keep thinking it’s okay to support him because they’re not paying any kind of personal penalty for it. When you keep treating them like they are worthy of your time and respect, what you are telling them is cruelty, bigotry, and childish spite are acceptable to you. So why on Earth do you ever expect them to change?
If you have a friend who is trans, and your Trumper uncle murdered them with his bare hands, would you still hang out with your uncle and tell everyone he’s actually a super nice guy? I would hope not. Well, if that uncle helps elect a man whose policies and views will certainly lead to some trans people dying — either through lack of access to health care, through ending up on the streets because of being fired and evicted, or through violent murder at the hands of Trump’s minions — I would argue there is barely any daylight between those two scenarios. In the first, your uncle is directly at fault, and in the second, indirectly but still very volitionally and eagerly.
Your Trump-loving family also loves what he wants to do to other people. You can whine and wring your hands all you want, but that means they are bad people. And if you continue to treat like them like they are normal good people, you are telling them that you will ignore the absolute worst traits human beings can harbor because it’s just too hard for you to stand up to them.
Captain C
@Hildebrand:
Turning college into a consumer experience (‘give ’em what they want!’) rather than an educational experience (‘you must show a certain proficiency in x’) has been and is an ongoing disaster.
Eolirin
@Josie: No, this is a waste of time.
Please, everyone, stop thinking about this situation as if it’s something that we can come back from through peaceful electoral means.
It is not. We cannot. We don’t need to be trying to figure out how to win elections and persuade people to support democratic candidates for office. We cannot beat this through elections, not anymore.
Everyone is going to be left with a choice in the coming years between throwing their bodies between the monsters and the vulnerable and letting them kill us, and since the American people can’t be bothered to even show up for an election to stop the Nazis let me tell you how little I expect from them when it comes to being willing to risk their lives to stop them.
Resistance is not something that can be achieved through electoral politics anymore. And in those areas where people are dependent on governmental intervention, like with Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP, Social Security Disability, SSI, childhood vaccinations, etc, people are just going to die once they get their hands on the programs, and backlash and public outcry won’t amount to shit. Large amounts of people in the streets might. But if all they do is peacefully protest, it’s an iffy proposition.
And I want to point out, it doesn’t require an act of congress to destroy those programs if the executive is willing to be lawless about it. And they now have supreme court cover for that lawlessness.
Y’all need to get your heads wrapped around this fast. Those of us at risk will not survive you fighting the last war. We cannot afford to have you treating Hitler coming to power as if it’s just another swing in politics as usual.
Lapassionara
@UncleEbeneezer: thank you.
UncleEbeneezer
@Omnes Omnibus: Right! But the fact that David-fucking-Duke supports Trump…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Steve LaBonne
@The Truffle: Trump and whoever will be his FDA head can de-approve mifepristone and misoprostol by executive action, and I expect that to happen fairly quickly.
Suzanne
I differ from some commenters here on the topic of the economy. I do not think it’s great. (I don’t think it’s bad, either, though.) But I do think it’s deeply weird. I think it’s a really strange condition where people are working — a lot — and make enough money for some small luxuries, yet the basic stuff of life, like housing and a car and education, and yes, food….. is really fucken expensive. And saying that “we have the best economy in the world!” feels really out-of-touch to people who can’t afford to live where they want to live or even move out of their parents’ house.
The result of that is feeling locked in…. can’t afford to live near family or near your job or to buy enough space for your hobbies or enough bedrooms for your kids. And the sum total is that it is harder and harder to launch, to advance into adulthood. (And I will note that older people talking about their 15% mortgage rate back in 1978 or sharing a bunk bed with a sibling or whatever really just sounds like Dave Ramsey yelling at you about avocado toast.)
It should be a societal project to easily on-ramp people into the lives they want. I think a lot of the discontent is that there is a perception — and I think there is some reality to this — that there was a fairly well-defined path to success, at least for white guys. And this path is harder to walk now. Requires more education, and that direct cost falls on the individual more than it used to. Or it requires more risk, in terms of starting a business or a large capital investment. It certainly requires more hours of work put in by a family….. two incomes are required in much of the country (the parts that people want to live in) for a middle-class life.
Okay, my steelmanning of that argument ends there. Because the GOP has no strategy to fix it.
But our strategy of telling people that the economy is great very clearly did not land.
Steve LaBonne
@Ocotillo: Bad. We’re likely to end up with numbers similar to the current House.
The Truffle
@Eolirin: We need to come up with ideas, fast.
@Steve LaBonne: They are currently counting votes in some states; I am aware of that.
Captain C
@UncleEbeneezer:
Either they were listening to FTFNYT-esque interpretations of what Harris et al. were saying, or they need to take better drugs.
Hildebrand
@Ridnik Chrome: But there is economic opportunity, it just takes hard work and education.
I really think a solid percentage of the white male population in Gen X and Gen Z just don’t want to have to work that hard – especially when previous generations of white men could be mediocrities and still rule the roost (whilst being as sexist and racist as they wanted to be).
George
@kindness:
By no means am I looking to pick a fight with anyone, but can people please stop with the generalizations about American and Americans?
Stuff such as “Americans don’t know what they want” or “America is a crappy country and really sucks” and other pejorative terms are simply false. They do nothing at all except isolate the liberals/Democrats/progressives who use those phrases as terms of derision from the larger mainstream that we need in order to effect positive change. Normies–love them or hate them–are not going to respond positively to anyone who insults them.
We Americans on the left know what we want. The other side knows what it wants. The impressionable people in the middle might not know what they want, but rather need to be convinced. And America itself is just the chess board on which we all move our pieces.
It’s just one person’s view, of course, but I have gotten tired of blanket generalizations where they are not appropriate and often counter-productive.
AM in NC
@Steve LaBonne: Yep. Just amazing how this cycle happens over and over again, and we are still blind to it (or at least the rich, grasping, authoritarian fucks are blind to it).
japa21
Re: Ticketing splitting in FL and MO on abortion issue. It’s a little like the IGMFY syndrome. I’ll protect it in my state, screw the rest of the states. Didn’t work in FL, but in MO, MT and other states, it did. Except, they underestimate just what the GOP is capable of doing.
As someone said upthread, if all those unbedable, horny incels think they are going to get laid now, they are very mistaken.
Bugboy
I had a conversation with a staffer that gave me a glimpse into the mindset, about how Melon Husk is such a “genius”. I asked her “How do you KNOW he’s a genius?” The answer was basically because “satellites and stuff”, which I responded by correctly pointing out that NASA (a.k.a., that big bad ole’ gubmint) is who is responsible for the creation of satellite technology, not Husk. What Husk fans are buying into are STORIES about his genius, manufactured by the subject of those stories himself and his fans.
I believe this is illustrative of that canard we always forget: Propaganda works…
UncleEbeneezer
@Ridnik Chrome: Unemployment has been at historic lows and yet intel behavior is rampant. I don’t think it is nearly as tied to economics as it is to a culture of misogyny. Boys learn to hate Girls/Women long before job-opportunities even enters their minds.
The Truffle
@gene108: We need more Democrats to be angry. Someone like Fetterman could deliver that anger. Anyone else?
rikyrah
We have told other Groups of Color that, even if they don’t like Black Americans, they still need to purse their lips to thank us.
Because, they would not be partaking in the ‘ American Dream’ without the efforts of Black people during the Civil Rights Movement.
Their ability to LITERALLY be in this country, is due to the changes in immigration brought on by the Civil Rights Movement.
The opportunities that they have to get an education ? By product of the Civil Rights Movement.
The opportunities to take that education and go where their ambition takes them? By product of the Civil Rights Movement.
When we say that the right-wing wants to ERASE THE 20TH CENTURY
They want to remove all the progress that this country has made since Brown v Board…
Do they understand the fundamentals of what that means? That level of delusion is what makes me give them the permanent side eye.
George
@cain:
With regard to incels, whereas there are many in that group who are jackasses, there are many who simply are impressionable youths and who follow various rightwing entertainers and influencers because they feel welcome. There is nothing that stops the left or liberals from providing a home to impressionable young men. I think we saw a little bit of that with Tim Walz talking about coaching football. He showed that a liberal white guy can talk sports.
In other words, give young men an opportunity to forge their identities on the left and I’m sure some will do just that. Keep repeating that “white male privilege” is the root cause of all the ills we face and those young men will naturally migrate to people who make them feel welcome and appreciated, not scapegoated.
Captain C
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m really getting sick of virtue-signaling not-doing-the-work fake leftists/liberals. One of my Facebook friends (since unfollowed, not defriending…yet), who always posts pictures of herself in front of demonstrations, had a self-righteous post about how she wrote in her mom and houskeeper for President and Veep because the evil Democrats were so awful and genocidal. Her (or her mom’s) fucking housekeeper! Sorry, maybe in 1924 a lot more people could afford a housekeeper, but in 2024, it’s a sign of affluence, if not wealth; you don’t get to claim you’re so revolutionary you can’t vote for a Democrat because they’re all the same if you (or your family) employ servants!
Suzanne
The frustrating thing is that people hear those associated with the left broadly, someone like Robin DiAngelo, and annoying college students in their lives, or people on Twitter….. and then they sort of collapse that into a caricature of the entire political left. Those associations become part of “the brand” of all Democrats. It is an incredibly frustrating thing to fight.
CaseyL
I don’t see this as a moment in time, nor as something specifically USian.
As I noted in a previous thread, there are cycles. Each generation raised in those cycles thinks the one they’re in is a kind of permanent order for the world. And each generation is shocked and appalled to learn that is not the case.
The Western World is at the end of the cycle – of increased liberty and decreased scarcity – which began post-WWII, reached its apex in the 1970s, began to wither in the 1980s, and fell apart with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the global oligarchy.
We are now in a cycle of decreased liberty and increased scarcity. Doesn’t matter if those things are organic or artificial: their effects are solidly real. The cycle, whether we like it or not, is going to last 40 years, because that’s how long these cycles generally do last. And it’s no accident this cycle coincides with accelerating environmental catastrophe – with huge ongoing impacts on liberty and scarcity.
So my advice, such as it is, is to narrow your focus. If you are fortunate to live in a community you care about and that cares about you, work with that. Get involved in the things about that community you want to preserve and expand. This could be the state you live in, the city you live in, or any definition of “community” that nourishes you.
This is harsh but has to be said: There is not much we will be able to do for the country as a whole, or for the world. There is nothing we can do for Ukraine, or Gaza, or any of the areas that will come under attack in the next decade. If you must have a global cause to care about, I suggest looking into national and transnational environmental organizations working to preserve what patches they can of the wild lands and seas.
I’m not even sure there’s much we can do here in the US for LGBTQ or women once SCOTUS has stripped away the last of their protections. The best I can come up with is organizing and funding to help them relocate to states where they may still have rights protected by law. (I have no idea whether or how states like California, or Washington, or New York, will react when federal law demands they. no longer protect those rights.
Speaking of which, here is another thought I have: Once the Project 2025 team levels the federal agencies and federal budgets to its satisfaction, they will have also destroyed a lot of the leverage they have over states. If the Federal Government is no longer going to provide disaster relief, or transportation funding, or any of the myriad types of assistance it currently provides, Blue States can tell the Feds to go piss up a rope when the Feds try imposing Project 2025 on them. About the only thing the Project 2025 people can threaten states with at that point is military force – which may happen and if it does will mark the end of the US.
TL:DR – “Think globally, act locally” (Remember that?)
hrprogressive
Biden is going to willingly hand over the keys to the White House to a man who claimed he’d be “Dictator, day one”.
I fully believe Americans will have to fight and die to get those keys back from him.
That’s the topic I want to see discussed.
I know nobody wants to hear that.
But a decade plus of “VOTE BLUE!!!” has led us to this point.
We are at the point where voting isn’t enough. It just hasn’t been, it won’t be, etc.
Geminid
@Ocotillo: I look at House results from time to time but there are still too many undecided races to say which party will win a majority. We may not find out until next week.
A couple Tossup races in the Pacific Nortwest seem to be going the Democrats’ way. That would be OR05, where state Rep. Janelle Bynum leads incumbent Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and WA03 where Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesnkamp Perez ls leading Joe Kent. A Perez win would be a Hold, while a Bynum win would be a Flip.
I’m kind of bummed about Alaska, because it looks like Rep. Mary Peltola will lose to Nick Begich. That race has not been called yet, and neither have the 0R05 and WA03.
oldgold
@Josie: “It would be instructive to study how the Republicans rebuilt the party after the catastrophic Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964. They clawed their way back into relevance over a period of many years, We should take a look at how they did it. Someone may have already written a book about this. If anyone has seen such a study, I would be interested in looking at it.”
The answer is known and I would not recommend that we follow it. They abandoned Lincoln and embraced the Dixiecrats. It was the Southern Strategy.
The Truffle
@CaseyL: I really like what you said. And yes, I think there will be dark days ahead. All anyone can do is support elections in their states and towns for now.
The courts have already taken away so much. States need to build up a bulwark in the meantime.
catclub
You have exactly my thought. 1/4 of those voters in 2020 cared nothing about Joe Biden, they just were unhappy about covid.
Ramona
@Eolirin: we need to locate the vulnerable and figure out ways to mobilise fast.
Mel
@AM in NC: Absolutely. This is essential.
rikyrah
And the MSM is kidding themselves if they think they are gonna get the clicks and view because of Trump. No, we’ve done that rodeo. not doing it again. cutting my viewership to basically nothing.
JML
Hard to blame Thurgood; he would have had to retire more than 10 years earlier to have a Democrat replace him, and clearly tried to hold on until his health failed him. Ginsberg, yes.
But Sotomayor just turned 70 and is in good health, and Kagan is only 64! expecting either to give up a lifetime appointment to the pinnacle of a legal career after a relatively short period because of a maybe seems unreasonable.
the idea that we need to reset our Justices any time a window appears isn’t going to work.
Captain C
@japa21:
I suspect a nontrivial number of them figure that a) rape counts as getting laid (since of course the wimmens shouldn’t have any agency), and b) now they won’t get busted and punished for it.
Suzanne
@UncleEbeneezer:
They are inextricably linked. Lots of boys are still brought up with an expectation of being a provider. In many traditions, a sole provider.
catclub
@Ramona: I see that as Ukraine and Taiwan.
And have very little hope for either one.
WereBear
@Josie: RIck Perlstein specializes.
Kelly
John Rodgers did some arithmetic
https://bsky.app/profile/johnrogers.bsky.social/post/3ladksdggfr2j
Ksmiami
@Hildebrand: a resurgence of polio works for me.
Steve LaBonne
@CaseyL: I want to do my periodic promo for liberal churches as exactly the kind of communities you’re talking about. And you don’t have to be a believer (I’m a staunch UU atheist).
cain
@Steve LaBonne:
100% this. That’s been the pattern since the late 90s.
Jeffro
This is a good point. We really ARE going to have to shift – ugh – to “winning the news cycle, every day” as priority #1. Our lefty version of Fox News can help with that, but our pols will have to make the shift, too.
BellaPea
I looked at the demographics, and it still amazes me that white women, Hispanic men, and black men (although maybe less that expected) voted in such numbers for that man. To the white women, you are nothing but sex traitors, period. I wonder how the Hispanic men are going to deal with suffering that their wives, daughters, sisters, and cousins will go through when reproductive rights are finally stifled.
Sorry to sound bitter, I just am.
Eolirin
I want to make a further point here. Any time we’re spending on how we got here is a dangerous waste of energy.
It doesn’t matter because it can’t inform what we need to do going forward. We cannot get out of this mess by winning national elections, not in the short term, and unless the Trump administration is particularly inept at consolidating power, not at all.
We do not need postmortems on the election. We need planning for how we’re going to get at risk people out of the country, how we’re going to organize mass protest, how to shift our communications into channels that are less easily tracked, how to fill the gaps for people who are going to lose critical access to food and health care, how to prepare for economic dislocation, how to deal with a rise in censorship crackdowns, how to deal with national bans on abortion, on Mifepristone being made unavailable, contraception being banned, vaccines being banned.
Because even if they end up being too inept to do the obvious things, if we have not prepared for them going full Nazi after outright saying they’re going full Nazi, it will already be too late.
And we wouldn’t be here if most of the country got that, so I have zero faith we’re going to rise to the occasion here. But that’s where the focus needs to be. And with urgency.
There’s a good chance they’re going to have the house. If they do, they’ll savage things even faster. But even if they don’t, it’ll only slow things down, not stop them.
How we lost is now irrelevant. What they can do with the power they have and what we can do to minimize those harms and effectively resist a regime that will not be responsive to public opinion, and will actively work to violently suppress that resistance, is all that’s going to matter.
This is not going to be a continuation of our cultural and political norms, it will be a hard break from it. The lessons we may have learned or could learn from things that happened under the old structures will not be useful under the new ones.
We need to look to older history now; resistance against the Nazis, against the Jim Crow south, against Musolini, Pinnochet, the Khemer Rogue, the Ukrainian, and other society state independence movements.
Don’t think it can’t happen here. Don’t think being in a blue state will protect you.
The Truffle
Before I truly sign off (yes, really!), I’m posting a link from Jon Stewart. The man is a national treasure.
Jon Stewart: “I Promise This Is Not the End.”
Take care, everyone. I hope to see you on the other side.
YY_Sima Qian
Here is an oldie that is probably truer today:
What we need to fight for & fight on is not just domestic issues, but foreign policy, too. The two are intricately linked. Domestic pathologies find expression on the international stage (long history of White supremacy in both US domestic politics & its foreign policy), & militarism abroad tend to rebound into domestic life (see the militarization of LE through the GWOT, or damaged/disillusioned veterans of the GWOT falling into the thrall of Fascism). Dems should never be campaigning w/ the likes of Liz Cheney, or show blind deference to natsec grandees who are unapologetically primacists, even if their Never-Trumpism temporarily makes them our co-belligerents against Trump.
I don’t generally buy the lazy analysis that liberal democracies by their nature act more benignly on the international stage, or that autocracies by their nature are more aggressive & revisionist, a self-delusional myth contradicted by far too much evidence. However, the US has such a strong proselytizing impulse, so there is a strong link.
p.a.
For 40+% (I’m being… uhhh… conservative) of Americans there is no unobjectionable way to talk about racism.
No One of Consequence
@Lobo: Another party always SEEMS appealing until one considers the decades it will take to build such a party from the local level up. Creating an independent party to elect a president with a plurality of the vote will be seen as questionable by many. Largely because of the fact that even if you got that Big Win, the resultant President would still have to deal with established party machinery by R’s and D’s at local levels and up. If you don’t build bottom up, you won’t have any institutional power to get anything done politically.
I love the idea of something new, but am not willing to wait decades for it, and frankly, with the turnout of our side on Tuesday, we clearly (imho) don’t have the minerals for that kind of struggle in that kind of time frame.
This is probably going to come down to mass resistance. So, so much hurt is on the way. I can’t see a way to generate the kind of Collective Will that is going to require right now. However, I like you, anticipate Bad Things, and perhaps Very Bad Things on the near horizon. That might very well affect general sentiment enough to fuel such a movement.
And such a movement would need to have very big goals, because without very big change, we are just rearranging deck chairs. Popular vote for President needs to become reality, but with entrenched Republican power, gaming the system in any and every conceivable way will be de rigeur. The courts will be stacked enough to stymie most legal efforts, and the Supremes will quickly become 8-1 with KBJ being the sole voice of reason or sanity. The replacements will be very young, wholly corrupt and with us for some time.
Unless we are willing to consign the next generation or two to suffering under the yoke of what is coming until That Brighter Day, we’d better figure out a more expedient way to our goals of Freedom and Prosperity for the People not the Oligarchs.
I’m still flaming pissed, and self-aware enough to know I lack the patience for Long Game Only. Short term is Protect and Defend the vulnerable as best we are able. Medium term thinking needs to realize that the Republicans are not going to play nice or fair or be hesitant in the least to steamroll anything they deem non-Reich. Accordingly, our side needs to fight with every available tool, utilized and leveraged in the most effective and creative ways possible. Force multiplication will also be necessary. Meeting people where they are will be critical. That last part may be the hardest, and frankly, beyond me. Right now, I detest most of my fellow citizens who rewarded behaviour that would have gotten any of us expelled from ANY Kindergarten, with the highest office and responsibilities we can offer.
Long term, we need a media system. This isn’t going to look like anything currently, but we can use as example (not model) of Fox and the Right Wing Radio. Again, unsure how this will be done, but will need to be if we ever want our messaging to have any impact.
I’ll shut up and go back to lurking now…
-NOoC
Steve LaBonne
@BellaPea: I think the equally culpable people are the ones who simply stayed home.
Quinerly
I am going to “FeednWax” all this old furniture that dries out in the High Deserr and listen to Bob Dylan and Josh Ritter (seriously great. Check out his first albums if you can). Must get off political sites.
With that said, thinking about Ozark and his morning Guardian posts. He probably would have had this one up early this AM.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga
Omnes Omnibus
@Eolirin: Maybe everyone processes things differently. It might be necessary for people to figure out how we got here for them to figure what they need to do next.
TurnItOffAndOnAgain
I honestly wonder if we ever had more than the slimmest chance to keep the White House, if that.
I’m not being defeatist–I refuse to quit if only out of spite–I’m thinking about trends. A president being unseated four years into their term is rare, but so are pandemics. Maybe this was just a swing back to the as-of-now malignant norm; Democrats saw the writing on the wall and nominated Harris, hoping she could circumvent what would’ve been coming–even if someone else was prez–or at least mitigate the damage. (To be fair, if she pulled in people to vote down the ticket, it sounds like she did the latter.)
(ABSOLUTELY NOT absolving anyone of voting for Trump. Just wondering if that helped him along.)
In which case, one of our goals would be to learn how to interrupt that pendulum swing or at least ride it so minimal damage is done.
Republicans have got us so overwhelmed we can never come up with good long-term strategy or proactive plans. They’ve been insidiously infesting our body politic with their fascist bullshit for decades. They’re like bed bugs, spreading as they refuse to go away. We need to figure out how to be forward-thinking like that, even with all the distractions.
And every other goddamned disadvantage we’ve got going against us.
We could also (if we can find a way to be better heard) sell ourselves as the better, more practical option. One, because it’s true, and two, because there’s a common misconception that the most brutal and selfish option will be the one that’s most effective. If we can find a way to break past that, we might put ourselves in a better position. As much as we are the more moral option–low bar, but accurate–is that the way to sell ourselves right now? Or do we want to paint ourselves primarily as more efficient, setting the stage for us to later knit efficiency and morality together for the public to make the connection between them?
I don’t know. I’m just throwing shit out there.
syphonblue
Democrats have ceded the propaganda war completely. We need to fix our propaganda machine. When Trump sent out his COVID checks, they all had his signature on them. When Biden sent out his, they had someone else’s name on them. All the Build Back Better signs you see? Nobody knows what the fuck Build Back Better is. They should have BIDEN is huge bold letters at the top of the sign.
Everyone saw the BIDEN DID THAT stickers around gas stations when gas prices spiked. Will we see TRUMP DID THAT stickers around grocery stores when cucumbers cost $40? Or car dealers when a new Honda Civic costs $80,000? Cause we fuckin better. I better see TRUMP DID THAT stickers everywhere.
Eolirin
@Eolirin: Society = soviet
sherparick1
@gene108: Kevin Phillips was the operative, but it was not an insight that took any particular brilliance. LBJ stated when he signed the Civil Rights Act that the Democrats had lost the White South for a generation (he was to optimistic). I concur with those who like Oliver Willis, Steve M., and Ryan Cooper that we need to build our own pro-Democratic Party media machine and stop giving money and attention to the MSM (I would add the TNR and Brian Buetler to to Oliver’s list.)
https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2024/11/trump-is-toxically-masculine-andy.html
Baud
@syphonblue:
Very few people want to do that, where they can’t also demand that Dems do something to completely reform the underlying problem.
Suzanne
@Quinerly: Josh Ritter is a fucken treasure of a musician. I got to see him perform live a couple of years and he was fantastic. (Adeem the Artist opened, and they are also incredible. Look up their work if you haven’t heard any.) He’s also a joy on social media.
different-church-lady
Social media is killing us.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Do you agree with Eoirlin’s points?
different-church-lady
@The Truffle: Yes, it’s possible. But the trench warfare is wearing me out.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin: We need to multitask.
trollhattan
Help me out, somebody, am I now a fan of the filibuster?
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I am not arguing with where they find themself. I don’t think that abandoning electoral politics as useless is warranted right now. I also think that everyone should think about where their lines in the sand are and what they will do if one of them is crossed. I DO NOT THINK THAT ANYONE SHOULD POST THEIR ANSWERS TO THOSE QUESTIONS ANYWHERE ON LINE.
trollhattan
@different-church-lady: I’m all out of shovels.
lowtechcyclist
@The Truffle:
I thought we’d dispensed with the whole blue collar ‘economic anxiety’ theory awhile back, and figured out that they’re hard to reach for other reasons entirely. So there’s no point in trying to find an FDR type.
sherparick1
@Eolirin: Come this late winter and Spring, the Hispanic population in America is about to get the shock of its life as the “mass deportation” machine starts reving up. It will also be a shock to American labor markets and service businesses as they lose both workers and customers. RW media will portray this as “hiccups” to the “glorious all white future” Trump is bringing about. MSM media is drifting into being RW media “lite” so I think they will also give this lightest coverage possible.
Baud
@trollhattan:
No, but if they leave that tool for us, we’re going to use it.
gene108
@The Truffle:
Most people can’t get pregnant.
Even among people who can get pregnant, many (most?) are not pregnant and take precautions to not get pregnant.
The downside of Dobbs is still very abstract to a lot of people.
Unless you know someone bleeding out in a parking lot from a miscarriage, Dobbs doesn’t affect you.
Hospitals, they think, will treat them promptly for a miscarriage, because that’s what the health exceptions are about without understanding the difference between statutes that allow abortions due to the “health of the mother” versus “life of the mother”.
People are bad at deciding correctly on causation versus correlation, In this post-truth era, I doubt wrong notions about causation and correlation will be easily countered.
Another problem is we are past the point where there is a national conscience, wherein certain events trigger a near universal reaction in one direction, because it goes against common beliefs about what society ought to be.
We do not have that anymore. Every bit of bad behavior of those in power has people to justify it or dismiss it as unimportant.
Steve LaBonne
@TurnItOffAndOnAgain: The pendulum swing was never a sustainable mode of small-d democratic politics once the Republican Party turned fascist beginning with Reagan (arguably earlier). We all (quite rightly) wanted to keep it going as long as possible because we understood what the alternative would look like, but the clock has run out. People are going to get insane Republican policies good and hard, and who knows what will happen next.
Ridnik Chrome
@Hildebrand: I’m an early member of Generation X, and it’s true, a lot us were kind of lost when we were in school. But bear in mind, we too grew up in a time of economic hardship (the inflation-era Seventies and recession-era early Eighties), and many of us were also latchkey kids who were kind of left to fend for ourselves. I don’t think it was a moral failing on our part (as you seem to be implying) so much as it was a sense that a lot of the adults in our lives just didn’t give a fuck about us. I know that’s how it was with me. That said, most of the people I grew up with eventually became fairly successful adults. It took us some time to figure things out, but we did.
Melancholy Jaques
@Josie:
They did it be adopting and absorbing the Dixiecrats, then making white supremacy the heart of the party’s message. They haven’t run a single campaign without that theme.
UncleEbeneezer
@Suzanne: I used to be an Incel-adjacent young man for the first 30 years of my life. And so were most of my friends. I know this stuff from the inside. It had NOTHING to do with economics. That’s just an easy excuse. People do the same thing with using economic hardship to justify Racism.
Downpuppy
The pointless lives of young males are indeed a problem. Various Republicans are promoting national service. Before they can turn it into Hitler Youth, is there time to start a CCC type summer thing? Get the kids (including girls, of course) out into productive healthy labor for the summer?
Steve LaBonne
@gene108: Sooner or later they will go after those precautions against getting pregnant. I’m betting on sooner. There’s going to be a whole lot of finding out coming down the pike.
UncleEbeneezer
@p.a.: This is precisely my point. They want Dems to never mention Racism, Sexism etc. PERIOD!!
p.a.
Ahhh but isn’t contraception a target of the Xtianists running things? That will get people’s attention. Can’t Fox-fluff overturning Griswold. Some Cathofascist must have a court case ready.
Steve LaBonne
@UncleEbeneezer: Harris, in contrast to Clinton, hardly mentioned breaking the glass ceiling in her campaign. Doesn’t look like that helped her (nor, to be fair, hurt her).
Suzanne
@UncleEbeneezer: I grew up in a heavily Mormon (white) and Catholic (Latino) community, and I can tell you that the vast majority of those boys were taught that they would be patriarchs of families and the girls were raised to be homemakers. “Complementarian” ideology is a real thing.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
Agreed 110%.
Eolirin
@Omnes Omnibus: Cool, they can keep doing that all the way to people being dragged into the camps they’ve already commited to setting up. I’ll eventually be one of them. This is not abstract to me. And there’s also the removal of vital benefits programs and health insurance protections that will devestate the poor and the disabled, killing many of them. We can’t stop either of those things through elections in a time frame that would matter, especially if we failed to retake the house, if we can stop them at all.
So I’m sorry if I have no patience for people for whom this is not an existential threat engaging in mental masturbation about how to win elections going forward in an environment in which it will be extremely easy for the Trump Administration to prevent elections from mattering.
But sure, they can process through their grief however they want. I just can’t trust them to have my back because they’re still in denial about what just happened. And by the time they stop being in denial about it it’ll very likely be too late to do anything but watch on in horror.
We cannot afford to give them two years to consolidate their power without pushback because we think the 2026 midterms might save us. I’m not going to tell people not to focus on local and state elections, because those will still matter in providing some resistance of a kind we can’t do individually, but it’ll only be a speed bump to what’s coming once they’ve finished consolidating power. We will need to rely on other forms of resistance.
This isn’t going to be like Trump’s last administration. And they’re not gonna screw up Jan 6th again.
Omnes Omnibus
@Eolirin: It’s two days after the election.
Baud
@Eolirin:
Do whatever you need to do. Just don’t scold people for doing something different.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
Exactly. It’s why it’s so frustrating when people here (and throughout the Democratic party) spout off economic stuff that’s straight out of Theil’s astroturf groups Powerpoint 101 presentations as if it were some progressive solution.
Instead, billionaires like Theil assume their best Montgomery Burns position and utter “Excellent!”.
It’s the underpinning of the Neo-Gilded Age extreme economic inequality or in other words:
Inequality is just the price we pay for being able to have billionaire penis rockets.
Served
@Suzanne: There’s also some weirdness because it’s almost more difficult for middle class professionals than the working class. Layoffs and bad employment are almost exclusively happening in white collar, professional roles. Tech is still a wasteland. I really think that played a role in the lack of a suburban rout for Dems.
On top of that, higher interest rates have made housing even more unobtainable.
Raising interest rates may have been necessary to tame inflation, but they’ve been damaging to some critical parts of the Trump era Dem base and the Fed has been too slow to adjust them back to growth levels.
On the flipside, if Trump gets his economic policies in line, inflation is going to blow 2020-2023 out of the water
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Such as?
Jeffro
When we stopped highly progressive taxation in order to give rich people even more money, it left us with less and less to buy public goods and gave them more and more to buy politicians and media outlets.
(And buying whole neighborhoods’ worth of homes, too, to be rented out at exorbitantly* high prices instead of simply owned by working families)
*thank you, spellcheck =)
Tax the rich, America. It’s the only way out.
Chris
@Hildebrand:
I generally discount generational explanations, but something about the spike in incel politics among Zoomers makes me wonder if there’s something to them after all.
The Zoomer generation was raised by Generation X (or as I call them, the South Park generation), which in turn was raised by the Silent Generation (which was legendarily reactionary as fuck: too young to remember the Great Depression or World War Two, mostly coming of age just in time for the Red Scare and the stiflingly conformist fifties).
By contrast, Millennials were raised by Boomers who were raised by the Greatest Generation, and while all of these people have their own pathologies, none of them were as politically fucked up as those in the previous paragraphs.
Millennials are now raising Alphas (God I hope they get a better name), so maybe their coming of age is when we finally move past the incel bullshit. I guess we’ll see.
Suzanne
Side note: I remember SuzMom being absolutely horrified when we moved to AZ and she met some of the families of my Mormon classmates. Families of eight or more kids were really common. Dad worked some trade or low-level office job, Mom didn’t work, kids slept 3 and 4 to a bedroom, and they used a ton of government benefits (“bleeding the beast”) and got free school lunch.
Many of those girls became lifelong friends and they are having smaller families, more like 4-5 kids, and they work part-time jobs like accounting or teaching piano lessons. But the husband-led home is still an aspiration and expectation for many.
A side note: At least four of my friends are related to Mitt Romney. LOL.
Eolirin
@sherparick1: Unless the Trump administration is completely inept at implementing the standard authoritarian playbook, media that resists will face the full brunt of state power. We’ve seen this start locally with police harassment of local papers. It’ll be brought to national scale. Most of the media will opt for pre-compliance and bend the knee preemptively.
If that doesn’t happen, we might have a chance.
Another Scott
@UncleEbeneezer: Yes and no, in my view.
“Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop” and all that.
People who are busy working and having a happy, fulfilling life don’t get into as much trouble – and have as much resentment – as those that don’t.
Economics matter, but so does people feeling like they are loved and accepted and feeling like their efforts have meaning. It also lessens the chance of only having hooligans as friends and feeling that peer pressure to be a cynic that just wants to burn everything down because things aren’t as easy for us as the fairy tales we were told about USA USA USA.
As usual, it’s both-and IMHO.
And the monsters encourage othering and punching down, because that’s an easy way to get people riled up and keep them from thinking about actual sensible solutions to the problems we face now and in the future.
[/soapbox]
Best wishes,
Scott.
Betty
OT: waiting for my 1:30 Zoom hearing to find out if my overseas absentee ballot filed in Cumberland County, PA is goingv to be counted. Hooray for the USA!
Kent
@Hildebrand: My experience at the other end of the pipeline is the opposite frankly.
I teach HS science (my second career) and was a regular classroom teacher up until the pandemic. I took off a year to educate my own kids and run a small learning pod at home during the first year of the pandemic and since then I’ve been mostly doing long-term science subbing at various schools in the Vancouver WA and Camas WA area. So I bounce around between some schools that are extremely privileged and some that are pretty high poverty and minority.
Last week I was at Camas HS, an upscale school with mostly White and Asian kids. Across 5 periods and nearly 150 students I had maybe 4 kids total absent. There were 5 sections of AP bio and they were doing rigorous college-level work. I know this because my daughter is a college freshman taking biology at this very moment. As a student body they are light-years ahead of my suburban Oregon HS in the 1980s.
By contrast the school I taught at for most of the past 2 years in the poorest part of Vancouver is majority-minority and about 70% free and reduced lunch so pretty poor. I would typically have 8-10 students absent per class and lots who would only be in class one or two times per week and would barely get enough done to earn a D, and often not even that. Coursework was dumbed down by necessity because they were coming in from middle school without the foundations to start learning at a HS level. Even AP classes were slower because we had to reteach too many things.
I would tell these kids that you aren’t competing against each other here at this school. You are actually competing against the kids over at Camas and the other affluent areas who are frankly going to be kicking your butts. They are showing up to school every day and working hard. You are not. That is the difference. Part of it was the pandemic which frankly ravaged the educations of poor kids vastly more than it did the educations of affluent kids. But that is only part of the story.
Long story short. I think we do have an educational crisis in this country but it is actually at the bottom not the top. College enrollments are declining and it isn’t because elites are failing to send their kids to college. It is because working class folks as well as Black and Hispanic students are increasingly skeptical of college educations for a whole lot of reasons.
What does this mean for the subject at hand? Well, education correlates with political ideology more than pretty much any other factor. In fact, the map of states with highest education attainment looks a whole lot like a map of this current election.
No Nym
I concur. I think this has been the feeder system for the class of rich, white, entitled cretins we have before us. Meritocracy, my ass. Women and people of color have to prove themselves, and receive harsher degrees of punishment when they don’t deliver or misbehave. Failure among dude-bros is a rite of passage. That’s why they project all their Ayn Rand “moochers” bullshit on to everyone else.
trollhattan
@p.a.:
My bet: Griswold does not survive Trump 2.0.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@japa21:
I hadn’t thought of from the IGMFY angle but that makes tons of sense given the seemingly electoral cognitive dissonance we just saw specifically on that issue. Many people (raises hand) thought that “abortion politics” would bring craptons of people to the polls voting (D) and of course we saw the exact opposite in terms of numbers…and basically “ticket splitting” between Hair Furor and abortion.
This is a fascinating chart on the abortion measures and Harris’s share of the votes:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/abortion-rights-ballot-measures-pass-7-states-fail-3-others-rcna178718
It basically says that the abortion measures on ballots didn’t have coat tails.
Belafon
@Ridnik Chrome: The rich have been stealing and hording for a while, and have successfully blamed minorities for it.
trollhattan
@Jeffro: That and slicing away at the inheritance (“death”) tax, treating capital gains differently than income, etc….
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
The same thing happens with minimum wage referendums.
Kent
I expect you are wrong. Griswold is fodder for the rubes. The moneyed elites don’t give a flying fuck about Griswold. Their priorities are much more about deregulation rather than re-regulation. And reversing Griswold would actually be re-regulation.
The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act (and other similar laws) are at much greater risk than Griswold.
Steve LaBonne
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Biden had started to take some tentative steps to get us out of that paradigm and miraculously got stuff passed that made a small but measurable dent in income inequality for the first time in years. We see what thanks he got for it.
Suzanne
Concur.
Ridnik Chrome
@Chris: Early Gen X (born 1965) here. A lot of us grew up in single-parent families, the result of that first wave of divorces, after divorce became easier and more socially acceptable in the 1960s and 70s. As a result, many Gen X kids kind of had to raise themselves. See also my reply to Hildebrand at 125.
Steve LaBonne
@Kent: Now substitute “Roe” and go back and look at how many millions of times that sentence was written.
Maxim
I posted the Oliver Willis link on FB and it was immediately removed for violating their so-called community standards against spam. So I re-posted it as a comment appended to a cute cat meme.
Jeffro
@trollhattan: yup, same thing
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: There are true believers in Christian Nationalism in high positions in the GOP. They will go after Griswold. Guaranteed.
Baud
We’ll never tax the rich because voters can’t stay committed to a process long enough for us to get there.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
Yup. Black men voted 77% for Harris, there’s *no* fault with that demographic of voters.
The 17% loss of voters from 2020, that’s where we should be looking.
Seeker
@Eolirin: Yeah – I don’t get people talking about the next election. There will be a midterm election but the result will never be in doubt. People will probably think it was a free and fair election because the media will say so. Similarly, however bad things get for some people…maybe a large number of US citizens will get deported…no one will know. It will not get reported on.
Whatever you think of Trump, his administration will be staffed by professional capable people with a plan. I don’t think people understand how rapidly and completely the country and society will be remade next January.
Ridnik Chrome
@Belafon: It’s an age-old con. See also the famous comic strip where a boss, an employee, and a union organizer are sitting at a table with thirty cookies on it. The boss takes twenty nine cookies for himself, and then tells the employee, “Don’t let that union organizer steal your cookie.”
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan: Inheritance tax has always been entirely optional. There have always been options with trusts that can move money unhindered from generation to generation.
Kent
Roe was different for some very fundamental reasons. If you can’t see the difference between abortion and birth control I don’t know what to tell you. The nation was and is relatively split on abortion. What we can see from all the abortion initiatives that support for legal abortion is generally more than 50% but less than 60%. By contrast probably less than 5% of religious extremists think that birth control should be outlawed.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Quinerly: Josh Ritter’s new album is great!
Steve LaBonne
@Seeker: @Seeker: I have more faith in their incompetence than you do. I hope I’m right.
WereBear
@Ridnik Chrome: Maybe it’s as simple as the Death of Boredom through handheld devices.
People are literally thinking less. Because a face on their phone will pop up and tell them what to do.
Mart
Anecdotal, but my 35 or so year old son in laws are disrespectful to old people like my wife and me. Always jumping down my back if I have trouble getting up, or finding a word. Not fun jabs, but mean. Always OK with the old fool babysitting…
The Audacity of Krope
The American political culture led by our frivolous mainstream media vote too often based on style.
Unfortunately for Kamala Harris; she ran in the style of a thoughtful and kind black woman. Every facet of that description is a handicap. This nation is sick.
Another Scott
@Kent: Thanks.
I had times in high school when we had no heat in the house, no food in the cupboard. Had to take a bus at 0-dark-30 in the morning to head to school because we had to move to the other side of town to be able to afford a roof of any sort (and we didn’t want me to have to transfer to a different school with all that entailed).
It’s hard.
I managed to get through it because it was temporary. But if that were a quasi-permanent situation, who knows how things would have turned out.
Everyone needs a certain level of basic economic support. Education is vital. But it is nearly IMpossible if people can’t actually live without existential dread.
The GQP ending the expanded Child Tax Credit will continue to cause great damage unless it (or something like it) is restored. And we know that is very unlikely now.
Hang in there, and thanks for your efforts. It’s important.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Steve LaBonne
@Kent: @Kent: Tell it to the six Supreme Court crazies. They don’t care.
Quinerly
@Suzanne:
I have been following him since I first heard him on NPR. Maybe 20 years plus. Have seen him 3 times. Great shows. Last one here in Santa Fe at The Lensic.
Bought the bumper sticker “Jesus Hates Your High School Dances.” IYKYK.😈
Going to put that on next and shake my tail feathers.
BTW, foregoing Phoenix on the Dec trip. Just Bisbee area for a week, Tubac, and 9 days in Tucson. Then La Posada in Winslow for Christmas Eve and Christmas. (Tradition for me now. Really like Allen and Tina Affeldt and what they are doing to preserve Mary Colter and Fred Harvey’s legacies).
Thanks for the emails. Will get back to you about Phoenix in the future. I’m thinking about week in Jan.
trollhattan
@Kent: IMHO you’re downplaying Trump’s continuing to court the religious right. He loves to be loved and will give them access to the White House the same way he did after 2020. Some Confederate state, Texas for example, could bring an anti-contraception case to the 5th District, or perhaps a Catholic health care network, etc. will file suit in their jurisdiction, demanding the state have primacy over the FDA. Whoever our new demented AG is will supply an amicus brief, supporting the plaintiff.
catclub
@YY_Sima Qian: Will Trump standup for Taiwan? My guess is no. Will Trump make it clear that we will stand up for Taiwan, so don’t even start anything?
Also No.
Likewise for Ukraine.
Ukraine and Taiwan are toast.
Quinerly
@Baud:
No truer words.
Steve LaBonne
@catclub: Our world is full of powder kegs, and Trump is a child playing with matches.
No Nym
@CaseyL: Your comment is sobering but accurate, IMO.
cckids
I am having the hardest time dealing with this. My husband has been gone since May, taking care of his mother in AZ, trying to get her into assisted living. On Oct 8th I tripped on my stairs, broke my wrist, split my forehead and an ear open, so I’ve got a cast till around Thanksgiving and can’t work at my part-time job. So I’m just here alone all the time. Thank Christ for Ms Bunny (of earlier cat-adoption fame here), she is wonderful company.
And now this fucking election. I can’t even do any of my normal coping things – sewing or crafts, deep cleaning, baking, because of the cast. It’s making me crazy.
And my son just texted me that one of his best friends, who’s gay, is on suicide watch. A sweet, smart guy is so devastated by this damn country.
Kent
Trump is frankly not that ideological. He is 100 about personal obsequious loyalty to him. And no one has ever been able to control him. Not his professional staff during the first Trump administration. And not his campaign staff this past campaign.
So I think he is just as likely to make his Cabinet appointments and high level political appointments based on a single metric of loyalty to Trump rather than some list of highly trained Heritage Foundation Yalies who are ready to become John Bolton style bureaucratic ninjas.
It will be bad, most certainly. But nothing in Trump’s political history tells us it isn’t also going to be a clown show.
Quinerly
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
That’s what I am getting into now.
I have to admit that my heart belongs to “Hello Starling.”
I just checked…I have been following him now over 20 years. Time flies for sure.
Are you familiar with AJ Croce’s older original stuff? Jim’s only son.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Jeffro:
Thank you Ronald Reagan.
If there’s one thing here in BJ, economic policy wise, that would probably result in near-unanimity of agreement it would be a return to a more equitable form of progressive taxation, ie., tax the rich, tax corporations, change tax policy that doesn’t benefit the defacto oligarchy, etc. Jeeezus, I’m really letting my inner Marxist freak flag fly this morning.
The effective abandonment of it was one part of good old trickle-down Laughernomics, one that’s still baked into our society.
Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.
Steve LaBonne
@cckids: I’m so sorry. I wish I had magic soothing words. Please know that you have a lot of people in this commentariat pulling for you.
p.a.
Yes. Here or another thread there were comments on past political history and how Rethugs used Civil Rights to crack the Dem coalition (the infamous WWC/Reagan Democrats/Hardhats) When I still talked to my Cathofascist relatives I noted that once they were rid of me the Talibangelicals would turn on them as the next apostate group. I wonder if there is some way the Dems could work now to weaken that unholy alliance…
Kent
Trump is a master genius at using people but he has zero loyalty to anyone. Not even those closest to him.
Trump will never again be running for re-election. So he doesn’t need the religious right anymore. Except to the extent that he can exploit them for monetary gain. Everything we know about Trump is that he has utter distain for the evangelical right. He is more than happy to use them to ride to re-election. But beyond that I don’t think he personally gives a flying fuck about abortion or gay marriage or any other hot button issue like transgender rights.
I predict that in the upcoming Trump administration, the moneyed elites and corporations will get all that they want and the religious right will be mostly ignored.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
That one is going into my clip file.
As I’ve said in another thread, as a former intel officer, the national security results of this election are dire and range from what y’all are talking about to the handling of “sources & methods”. It’s really, really scary.
WereBear
@Suzanne:
Under Mormonism, it’s religious law. Women have to sign over assets, like businesses, to their husbands. Then get nothing in a Utah divorce.
But even men who don’t provide claim the privilege. Wife works two jobs, her mother watches the kids for free, and his paycheck — should he have one — is his to play with.
A giant factor in relocation was the dating pool. I didn’t want the one I had.
Sure Lurkalot
@cain:
So if this economic anxiety amongst young men is cross cultural, let’s drill down on the flocking to misogynist and/or pro-violence messengers like Daesh, Rogan, Tate, Peterson, etc.
Back in the 80’s, 3 of my friends had teenage sons that went to live in the streets. They tried all sorts of remedies before tough love. Eventually, in their mid twenties, they came back.
I have a few nephews, a couple who “failed to launch” and didn’t attend college but they didn’t go toxic either. Maybe a bit too much gaming rather than thinking about or working toward their futures. It took a while for them to be self-sufficient, but both in their 40’s now and working, one in sales and the other waits tables, generally doing well.
Seems more than just a lack of jobs.
Is it that men mature more slowly? Testosterone? Sense of patriarchal entitlement? Greater prevalence of learning disabilities?
Why the discrepancy between men and women attending college? This trend has been going on since the 80’s.
How do we get young men to invest in themselves to be ready for employment, be it blue or white collar? What makes some of them less resilient and responsible for their own futures?
Suzanne
@Kent:
You sure about that? I am not.
But, honestly, I’m much more scared of Vance. The Christian/Catholic Integralists are the biggest threat on the Right. And Vance is their boy.
wonkie
It seems to me that Republicans have won because
What do we do? We argue with them about their all-outrage stuff which just focuses the conversation on shit like drag queens in libraries and turns attention away from issues like climate change. We argue with them about the stupid stuff they say with responses that require an attention span to understand and amplifies their stupid stuff.
We think long term about real solutions to real problems, but the benefits of what we do end up benefiting them without us getting the credit. All the economic stuff Biden did will benefit Republicans because the jobs will appear in the coming years. Besides, voters who live on a diet of All Outrage All the Time vote R even when they benefit from a D policy.
Our messages aren’t repeated enough. Republicans have spent decades on their “Us good, everyone else bad” crap. Democrats say something once or twice as if that is enough. Or we lecture. Or we talk about abstractions and principles. We need to pick a simple emotionally resonant slogan that resonates with people’s personal problems and repeat it for the next ten years.
So what to do?
I was a public-school teacher. I’m coming from the POV of a person who understands that you can’t say, “Open your book to page 33” and expect the whole class to open their book to the right page. At least a third will be sitting there quietly unaware that you said anything. Most of the students who heard, “Open your book” did not hear which page. Republicans have always understood this. YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO REPEAT YOUR MESSAGE FOR YEARS.
Early in the campaign I heard a Dem mention inflation and the cost of living. Then Trump seized on it and made it his issue. We laughed and mocked Vance’s stunt in the grocery. There was a lot of chatter about whether or not eggs really cost that much, but there was not a loud and repeated response that NO REPUBLICAN CARES ABOUT PRICES BECAUSE ALL THEY EVER DO IS CUT TAXES FOR RICH PEOPLE. Other than a few peripheral voices there was no unified CORPORATE MONOPOLIES ARE PRICE GOUGING AND WE ARE GOING AFTER THEM TO BREAK THEM UP.
We need to act on the understanding that most voters are poorly informed or misinformed, busy, tired, focused on their day-to-day survival, and not paying much attention. Faux and other hater outlets can reach them while they drive or at home when they are watching TV. To get them back, we need to penetrate and that will require a simple, emotionally resonate message repeated upon every opportunity for years and years, election after election, win or lose, until it gets heard.
KatKapCC
@The Truffle: Jon Stewart is the opposite of treasure. He’s a fucking trunk full of garbage. In this case, generic, bland, trite ass garbage that means nothing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Stop digging. Project 2025 is against Griswold. Trump doesn’t need to actively do fuck all. He just needs to let the Federalist Society fucks have free rein at the DOJ. And why wouldn’t he?
Baud
@wonkie:
I think much of that makes sense. A lot of people don’t want to do that, however. It’s a tough nut to crack.
Ramona
@japa21: when we get the numbers in a few weeks we could see if what really transpired here was that some people voting R for POTUS and Senate did not care one way or the other on the amendment and left it blank. So, on the amendment only the number of yeses outnumbered the noes and while the yeses went on to vote D, the noes and the don’t cares voted R. So if the total of voters registering a preference on the amendment falls short of the total voting by the right number then we can know that those voting yes on the amendment did not vote GOP, they were simply outnumbered by GOP voters on offices but not amendment
cain
lol – some Trumpers are already in the find out phase. Companies have telling their employees that they now have to buy products for the next two years becasue of the tariffs. Apparently these employees are all confused because they thought the country pays the tariffs. Their VP had to explain, that’s not how tariffs work.
If he does those tariffs, a lot of people are going to get hit with some high prices. If they think prices are bad now. The price of eggs will be the least of their worries. Morons don’t even understand what a global market is, they don’t even understand capitalism.
In fact, all of us we all need to plan for these tariffs especially if you’re on fixed income. You can also will see havok being wrecked on the other agencies. It’s going to be a shit show.
UncleEbeneezer
@Another Scott: Agree. Economic hardship certainly can play a role, but ime (and that of pretty much all the misogynist dudes I knew) it wasn’t a huge one. My friends were all from comfortable, upper-middle-class or even moderately wealthy families. And we were misogynist as fuck, parroting many of the Incel talking points even before the Incel movement had a name. $ seemed to have very little-to-no effect on who shared these toxic attitudes. We mostly grew out of them with age, regardless of varied economic circumstances.
Suzanne
@Sure Lurkalot: There is some evidence that the nature of work has changed a lot, and that behaviors classed under the broad term of “conscientiousness” are much more vital to success in the job market than they used to be. Basic things like reliability and remembering to turn in homework, but also things that require a bit more mental organization and communication skill, like complex task planning and scheduling or resolving a dispute. Various psychological studies have indicated that girls develop conscientiousness behaviors earlier than boys. We call it broadly “maturity”, but that’s more specific about what that really means.
weasel
Lots of good stuff to digest here, thanks for the post!
cain
@Sure Lurkalot:
For the middle east, the lack of jobs is linked to sexual frustration. You have to have a job or economic means to be able to get married. A girl’s family is not going to allow marriage to a deadbeat. There is no concept of sex outside of marriage there during those times so the men are also sexually frustrated.
The the link is sexual frustration. Gen Z women are not interested in men who act like toxic incels and so they go deeper down the hole – turning more misogynistic and violent.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sure Lurkalot: I see this sense of male entitlement and grievance (girls get all the advantages!) in boys as young as 6-13. Boys who come from very affluent families who are not even looking for jobs yet. Some are pre-pubescent (no elevated Testosterone yet). Hell, I see it in 4-year old pee wee students who throw a tantrum because a girl won the game we are playing but don’t mind if another boy wins.
cain
That fucker Stephen Miller is already starting up a “Denaturalization” program within the DOJ. He’s coming after naturalized citizens. Once we are denaturalized, we can be kicked out of the country.
What is weird is where exactly are we going to go? People like me, how have valuable skills could find work in europe. But I will tell you this is a direct attack on Indians. They are going to be pissed.
trollhattan
@Kent: Trump wants to get rich again (for the first time) and also has an enemies list longer than his tie.
Watch carefully who he stacks his administration with. You might be surprised/horrified at what his lieutenants can accomplish while he goes golfing. And don’t forget JD’s deep thoughts about women and procreation.
Omnes Omnibus
@UncleEbeneezer: Jesus, those kids should play with my frequent tennis partner from law school. She was IL high school state champion and played at Indiana. Lefted-hand, she used to play with her right to make it fairer. I could take a game or two off her every once in a while. I still had fun.
Steve LaBonne
@trollhattan: Vance will be the éminence grise from day 1 and the actual president long before the term is up. And he is the puppet of Thiel and Musk. They will get whatever they want.
cain
@Steve LaBonne:
He’s going to have to fight Stephen Miller and Kennedy.
That entire administration is going to turn really really toxic with back stabbings and power plays . They’ll try to undercut each other at every turn.
The fucking media is going to be getting all the dirty and throw out dribbles here and there. It’s fucking Christmas for them.
JML
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I will always blame Reagan for so much of what has turned to shit in this country and the rise of the extremist right-wing. The roots of everything that’s going on right now are all to be found in Reagan. (Nixon was a corrupt thug and a far more dangerous and reprehensible person, but it was under Reagan that politics and policy turned to utter shit under every Republican everywhere)
from de-regulation to environmental fuckery to massive deficits to absurd military expenditures to perversion of the justice system to screwing of Labor and more, it all tracks back to Reagan. he was the absolute worst, the smiling figure on top of a towering pile of rot.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
I just saw this in a comment over at DK entitled “The Billionaires Coup”:
Steve LaBonne
@cain: Their goals are not nearly as divergent as we might wish, and anyway I would put plenty of money on the billionaires in that fight.
trollhattan
@Steve LaBonne: I can’t help but think Vance will be the inverse of Pence, handed either intentionally or de facto, considerable power. Pence was doubtless horrified observing Trump at work and was never more than Trump’s shine boy, while JD has zero moral firewalls preventing him from thinking everything’s going great. Trump loves that shit, and remains a lazy, lazy man.
Quinerly
@Omnes Omnibus:
Truth
Another Scott
@Kent: +1
I think we should remember that he also really, really wants to be popular. He was genuinely shocked that Democrats weren’t singing his praises after he fired Comey.
I think he’s also genuinely shocked that he didn’t get universal praise for ending Roe and “sending it back to the states like everyone wanted”.
He really, really wants his Nobel Peace Prize – recall his ham-handed attempts to get a “deal” with Kim. (And that’s one big reason why he’ll make a show of “ending” the Ukraine war, while of course it will not end.).
He’s a narcissist. He demands validation.
People know this, even more now. They know it’s a weakness for him and can be used against him.
We have ways to make him miserable, and lessen his wins.
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Josie:
As an old, I say they rebuilt their “party” by diving full speed into the toilet.
There will aways be a segment of the population that wants full on conservatism. They want to go back to a time when men were men and women cooked and screwed them (physically that is), which of course really was how it worked. Not. The concept of women doing anything other than cooking, cleaning, having babies is a long gone concept for seemingly most women – thankfully (says this male old fart) because women are actually over (slightly) half the population. And because it’s actually demeaning to say that women can only do X. And a lot of people still believe this. It’s bullshit of course, but then without bullshit what would many people have to say? We, as the human race, have to STOP saying, demanding that half the population be demure, silent, obedient because the other half says so. Hell, isn’t that the concept of this country, that we are all equal? Or did I make that up one night in a dream?
wonkie
Why Democrats Are Losing the Culture War
Interesting article but to me the best part is the point the article makes about Dems being too reasonable in conversations. Fetterman was on the Rogan show and Rogan said something about Dems importing illegals to vote. Fetterman’s response was typically Dem: polite and focused on looking for areas of agreement. He didn’t contradict. He instead said something about, “We agree that there is a problem on the border.”
He should have said, “Is there really anyone dumb enough to believe that illegals can register to vote? That’s a lie and the reason Republicans have to tell lies like that is because your agenda is exclusively pro-corporate power and pro-rich people which you can’t discuss publicly. YOu can’t discuss how Trump’s only legislative accomplishment was a tax cut for the rich. You can’t discuss how he did not and will not deport the illegals who work for corporate farms or meat packing plants because to do so would deprive them of cheap labor. Republicans LIKE illegal immigrants. Trump employed hundreds of them. YOu like them because they can be exploited for hatemongering and you like them because they can be exploited for cheap labor. Most of all you like them because they give you an issue you don’t really care about to avoid talking about your pro-corporate agenda.”
It’s not that hard. We have to talk to them and about them the way they talk to the rest of us (but without lying.)
Suzanne
@UncleEbeneezer: But all of what you described — a baseline expectation that boys are just better at things than girls, that men dominate women, that husbands lead families — is absolutely linked to the economics of family life. And the expectation of that dynamic is set incredibly early, as you illustrate.
Those boys grow up expecting — not hoping, but expecting — that they will easily find employment that allows them to financially control a woman and children. That’s the natural order of society to them, and their place in it. It’s not like we grow up not thinking about work until the day we submit our first job application. Our families model our roles in front of us every day starting when we are born.
This is why we object to pink plastic vacuum cleaner toys for girls and cool construction toys for boys.
RinaX
Regarding governing for most of the four years and then running for four, this is where we need to start leaning into influencers. Dems accomplish things because we elect competent people who want to work.
Besides, the ones on the right most successful at pushing right-wing nonsense aren’t in Congress. And when you listen to their top podcasts, they’re validating the crazy things people want to believe, so that’s a big hurdle.
Even if we do manage to round up influencers on our side who are willing to go full lib on TikTok, gaming channels, etc., people have to find them entertaining. We’re talking about appealing to the lowest common denominator. Are we willing to accept girls in lingerie jello-wrestling while discussing income equity? Men having arm-wrestling contests while debating whether Joe Biden could beat up Trump?
People keep talking about boosting our propaganda. You have to look at how they’re doing it (tradwife BS) and be willing to match their level without demonizing other groups. Again, though, that’s a big part of the right-wing appeal, so…
Ruckus
@Kent:
shitforbrains is a master genius at NOTHING. At his best, many decades ago he was less of anything other than having inherited money. And he’s lost most of that and any and all of the “respect” he never actually had. Other than having been a loudmouthed loser who inherited a lot of money, from his father, and getting elected to the highest office by bullshitting his way through life, what has he ever accomplished? I’ll wait. Is this long enough? His siblings actually did jobs, have/had reasonable lives, and all he’s done is bullshitted his entire life
And he’s not actually good at that.
Quinerly
I laughed.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-family-election-photo-features-elon-muskbut-not-melania/
Emily B.
@cain: I think the inflation that will stem from those tariffs deserves a more precise name: Trumpflation. Let’s make sure to give credit where it’s due.
Suzanne
@wonkie: Thanks for sharing that piece.
Agree with you about the tenor of conversations, and that’s interesting. Sarah Longwell has said on her podcasts that the most frequent positive comment she hears about Trump is “he’s not a normal politician”. I have long thought that what we think of as decorous and respectful behavior comes across as pretentious to some. So the bullshit and bluster and insults have a lot of appeal.
The idea that vociferous fighting/arguing is the era’s defining mode of communication…. there’s a lot to chew on with that. One of the things I saw a lot coming out of the right-wing puke funnel were a lot of assertions that Harris isn’t smart, and the “evidence” of that was always a clip of her speaking in a somewhat circuitous or indirect way. The way women are coached to speak so as not to cause offense.
Chris
@Hildebrand:
Well, I can sympathize with that. I think most of us are working way too hard, and could stand to be paid a lot better for it.
But those guys don’t want workplaces in general to be easier and more forgiving to their employees, they want to specifically be the ones working half as hard while women and whatever ethnic group they’re pissed at make up for it by working twice as hard. (And getting no reward).
Eolirin
@Baud: Sure.
Most of those of us who are going to be targeted can’t survive our country going full nazi without the assistance of enough of the rest of you.
But yeah we’ll just do what we need to do for ourselves and we won’t tell y’all what to do.
You understand this is what gets us dead, right? Not advocating for the things that keep us alive? Being told to be quiet about it by the people who’s support we have to rely on? Having to coddle the feelings of those less existentially threatened, instead of expecting you to take things more seriously as our allies?
I’m done with it. Y’all do whatever. But focusing on this isn’t going to help us. It isn’t going to help you. If it makes you feel better, cool, whatever. Everyone needs to do what they can to protect whatever resilience they have.
But if you want to keep sleepwalking into how bad things are going to get and how little they can be resolved through the ways and means we’re used to, you may have the luxury of that delusion, but delays in grappling with that reality will cost the rest of us that don’t.
As one of those people I have every right to ask you to wake up about it. I feel I have a moral obligation to all of the others in situations like me to do so, even. You can get annoyed by that all you want, but it isn’t your life on the line.
But I guess it doesn’t matter that much really. This blog isn’t big enough to make any kind of difference on that front, my personal reach is limited, and again, I don’t expect a country full of people who aren’t willing to show up for something as simple as a peaceful election to be willing to show up for other people when their lives would be on the line if they do.
I’ve watched the country collectively shrug over gun violence, over torture, over child separation policies at the border, over police misconduct, over the treatment of trans people, over a million+ pandemic deaths, over women dying from lack of basic maternal health care. I expect it to collectively shrug as they start rounding up people, as they fully criminalize being trans and then being gay, as people with disabilities and chronic conditions are denied necessary medical care, as the poor starve.
Not that lots of people, and I truly believe everyone here, will look on in horror, but it’ll just happen, and the things necessary to stop it won’t.
And hashing all of this out here, or going back and forth about it won’t change that. I can hope it doesn’t happen, but it’s going to take collective, consistent, and sustained efforts to stop it once it starts, and at this point I expect nothing from this country.
The utility we had, and don’t get me wrong here, I’m really proud of everyone here for their contributions, I’m really proud of the fight everyone put in, I’m eternally grateful to WaterGirl for the work she put into organizing… But the utility we had for anything other than just being a fractious, rowdy, occasionally insightful, frequently amusing, and often maddening community, is basically over, as we transition into the new reality we’re facing.
If things go the way they’re very likely to go, places like this won’t even be allowed to exist long term, the groups we help fundraise for won’t either. It certainly won’t be safe to do the kind of organizing we’re very likely going to need to do out in the open like this.
I truly love this community and the people in it. I really truly do, even if sometimes y’all drive me crazy too.
But, right now?
Y’all can keep talking about how dems need to figure out how to build a media ecosystem to counter the right wing propaganda networks as if the fascists would ever let such a thing exist, first amendment be damned. You can keep pretending we can still vote our way out of this, even as they’ve demonstrated they’re willing to use force to overturn those results. That they failed only means they’ve had more opportunity to learn how to do it better this time.
Those of us at risk need to be concerned with exit strategies and contingency planning, with how to stay safe and stay alive, we don’t have the space to be engaging in fantasies about things being the same enough that we can continue business as usual and try to plug along trying to win inside the system like we used to.
Right now?
It feels borderline offensive to be around people doing that, it’s certainly illustrative of an extremely deep privilege that those of us at risk no longer enjoy.
So it’s just better if I’m not here, at least for a while.
But I’m going to make a plea to everyone to take this seriously and assume we’re going to follow the same kind of progression that Germany did when the Nazis came to power. If they screw it up and we are able to use the tools of the old system to beat them back, that’s great, cool, best possible outcome, hooray.
But if we act like that’s going to happen, we turn away from the idea of the horrors that can come because it’s more comfortable to focus on how to beat problems that require things to function more or less the way they did before. We’re very unlikely to be living in the same world after Jan 20th.
That world is going to have completely different concerns and challenges.
If we’re not ready for the death camps before there are death camps, we cannot hope to stop the death camps.
Those of us that are going to be earmarked for those camps do not have the luxury of time for this to slowly dawn on people. And we cannot keep ourselves safe and alive on our own. Our fates are intertwined with the willingness of our allies to stand up and take appropriate and potentially extreme actions.
Don’t think it can’t happen here. Don’t assume it can be stopped through the existing means of political change. Get yourselves ready for it. Get everyone else you can ready for it.
WG knows how to reach me if anyone needs me for anything. I love you all. I hope you all find your way through this moment.
Kent
Nonsense. He has a feral genius for politics and a willingness to relentlessly and tirelessly tell any lies towards that end. Otherwise we’d not be having this discussion.
He is also the biggest grifter in the history of the US bar none. Look how he has just managed to turn vaporware into a multi-billion personal fortune with Trump Media. At one level you just have to step back and admire the brazenness of it all and the vast number of rubes he exploits to get there.
Chris
@Kelly:
Rogers is a good guy.
One of these “if the average white man were like him, we’d be in solid shape.”
taumaturgo
@CaseyL:
There is precedent for what might occur in the US. Take a look at Hungary in the few years the ultra-right nationalist party took over. Warning, it is not pretty.
Chris
@trollhattan:
I mean, everything in politics right now and for the foreseeable future needs to be viewed through the prism of “does this currently help us or them?” If it helps us, we need to support it. If it helps them, we need to oppose it. This is no time to worry about hypocrisy.
taumaturgo
@Kent:
“If some imaginary proposition is exciting, and nobody can prove it’s untrue, then it’s my right as an American to believe it’s true. P. T Barnum “
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@gene108: Yes. That’s the heart of the issue. Anything critical of the GOP is carefully filtered out of their world. These people don’t even know women are dying from their abortion policies unless it happens to someone they know. They aren’t watching or reading the MSM. They are completely sheltered from any opposing views
UncleEbeneezer
@Suzanne: Sure. But what I’m saying is that I think the economic expectations/dynamic are formed by misogyny, more than the other way around. Although I’m sure they both influence each other. I dunno, do we have any examples of cultures where women are expected to be the financial providers to compare the amount of misogyny in Boys/Men?
Kent
Its just my opinion, nothing more.
I think the coming Trump administration is going to be horrific in all sorts of chaotic and horrible ways. I just don’t think Griswold is going to even be in the top 100 or even top 500. Because there isn’t any personal or corporate profit in it.
Repealing environmental regulations, labor regulations, health and safety regulations, doubling down on fossil fuels, targeting every social welfare program in the books from the ACA to social security and the VA? Yes, yes, yes and yes. But bending the knee to the 5% of population who wants to outlaw birth control for fundamentalist religious reasons? I don’t see it. That ship sailed 50 years ago.
Shrug.
Chris
@Steve LaBonne:
Frankly, it’s not a sustainable mode of democratic politics period. Most things that are worth doing in politics take more than two or four years. If everything everybody starts gets snipped before it’s even done getting off the ground because The People Who Wanted It are gone and The People Who Didn’t Want It are back, that’s a recipe for complete governmental breakdown.
It goes against everything we’re taught of by “checks and balances!” and “bipartisanship!” worshipers, but the plain fact is that we were vastly better off during the seventy years after the Civil War when Republicans dominated politics and the seventy years after the Great Depression when the Democrats dominated politics than we have been in pendulum-swing world since the nineties. Half of that is because in both those cases, the dominant party was also the more liberal of the two. The other half is there was long-term continuity of governance, which allowed politicians to actually get shit done.
Bobby Thomson
Bart Simpson has some advice regarding the Unfuckable Incels, even if it originally was said about Gen X.
japa21
@Ramona:
Right now the number of yes votes outnumber the Harris votes by about 1.5 million. So it definitely wasn’t the Yes votes voting for D.
Soprano2
@lowtechcyclist: But the average bag of fast food costs $13, it cost $9 in 2019 and they think he can bring that back without lowering anyone’s wages. I don’t buy this because the job market for almost all blue collar people has been incredible since 2022.
Kent
The real question is whether the total votes for the top of the ticket greatly outnumber the total votes on the referendum.
The information you just provided doesn’t tell us that.
Chris
@cain:
Now see, the rational response to this sure seems like “the problem is our backwards-ass social norms, if women didn’t need their parents’ permission it’d be a lot easier for people to marry for love rather than social standards of suitability. Also, it women and men were equal in the workplace the man wouldn’t always have to be the provider.”
But somehow this doesn’t seem to be the solution the yutzes land on.
Lobo
@JML:
Question: When we will hold the elections, the presidency or senate again? They can be replaced now for certain or gamble. I am not willing to gamble any longer. Republicans are pretty cold blooded about this and in power. Their strategy seems to be a winning one.
Chris
@cain:
I read a lot of Bernie Gunther during the first Trump admin, especially the early years – it’s not without its flaws, but it does really capture the utter dysfunctional snake pit that is fascist politics in a way that most WWII stories, still hung up on the image of fascism rather than the reality, don’t.
Maybe I’ll reread some.
PJ
@Kent:
If he lives, and isn’t completely brain dead, and there is an election in 2028, Trump will be running. He can’t run the risk of going to jail for his crimes if a Democrat becomes President. The Supreme Court will say the 22nd Amendment only applies to consecutive terms, so it’s all ok.
But I think Trump will do his best to make sure there are no more elections. If Democrats win the House and enough of the Senate in 2026, he will be impeached and convicted. He can’t let that happen.
Chris
@JML:
Reagan’s administration was also staffed from head to toe with Nixonites. They’re two of a pair.
People talk about Ford’s pardoning of Nixon as a catastrophic event (which it was). The other part of it that most people don’t talk about is that there was absolutely no work done to de-Nixonize the party. None of his people should ever have been able to find work in Washington again; instead, they basically ruled the next Republican administration.
Kent
There are a lot of things to worry about with the coming Trump administration but this isn’t one of them.
He can pardon himself from every last crime he has ever committed and SCOTUS will back him up. And there is no universe in which Democrats get 67 Senate seats in 2028.
Worry more about what new GOP-ers will follow Trump. And the media environment they will construct to tilt the playing field towards them just like the current one is tilted towards Trump.
Lobo
@No One of Consequence:
My idea was only to build a Independent Party in certain states. Nothing more. For example, the Democratic party is Idaho is just a shell. Discard it and try the above. Nothing to lose. Or maybe the easier way is to make legislative races in states non-partisan like Nebraska. It may help in some ways.
Anonymous At Work
Re: Ticket Splitters.
I had had some fears that the “permission structures” that Liz Cheney and other Never-Trump Republicans were pushing could work both ways, such as in North Carolina. “I voted against the black Nazi [Robison], so I can vote the white one” would be an example. I hadn’t considered too deeply that in almost every place with abortion on the ballot now or previously, there were “Cafeteria Republicans” who would vote against abortion bans/for loosening abortion restrictions AND vote for the party that made them necessary, at least not in the numbers that they did.
Also, anyone wanna guess is Mark “Black Nazi” Robison will be next HUD Sec? “Black, grifter, and makes liberals mad” might be the trifecta for TFG.
japa21
@Kent: It does.
Ruckus
@Kent:
You mistake the concept of having followers and being a leader.
shitforbrains has followers because he’s had money – a lot of it. Not that he got it from being productive in any manner, just that he had it.
A leader is someone who leads, not someone who has followers. There is a huge difference between the two.
In the military there are leaders and many, many more followers. Not everyone who is higher in rank is a leader, many of them couldn’t lead their way out of a wet paper bag but leading is not how one gets higher rank.
And many of those in the military who are followers could be exceptional leaders, they just aren’t high enough in rank to be considered leaders.
But that isn’t actual leadership, that’s leadership through position. djt isn’t in any way a leader, but he has held a position of leadership. He has none of the skills of leadership, he has a position of leadership. There is a significant difference between the two. Remember actual leadership is earned. Political leadership is given. They are not the same. Some people will earn actual leadership, most will not. shitforbrains will never earn it, he is and always has been incapable of earning it. It has been given to him. Because he has money.
Citizen Alan
This, to me, is just the same as excusing MAGAts because they were taken in by Trump’s lies. No they weren’t. They actively sought out people who would lie to them in ways that would reinforce what they already believed. Just as the Incels follow the “entertainers and influencers” who basically tell them that it’s okay to rape women.
Citizen Alan
@The Truffle: That’s nice, Jon Stewart. Now go invite a few more Republicans onto your shitty show to kiss their boots while you both-sides fascism.
Kirk
One of my concerns is the next pandemic that should only have been an epidemic if our health services were allowed to do their jobs; if we weren’t going to see a massive decrease in vaccinations.
Citizen Alan
@trollhattan: Hell, I said after Dobbs that Brown v. Board of Education was on the chopping block.
Ruckus
Big media is exactly that – BIG.
Lots of money moving around and stored from selling big media’s output. Into not all that many coffers.
Big money-Big media. They aren’t interchangeable but they are closely tied to each other. That is one reason that the web has power, because of the thing we are doing here, now. Big media shapes what we see, read, have at least a tendency to believe. And without the web, we would be mostly unable to discuss what we see, read and hear from big media. It would shape our lives a lot more than it does any more, and like it used to do. Big media has lost SOME of it’s power to shape our lives over the last 20+ years. I doubt it will go out of business in the next half a century but it might loose a lot of it’s power and I’d bet the owners of big media know and understand this. What we are doing is around 20 years old, big print media has been around for a hell of a lot longer. It shaped a lot of life because it delved deeper into news than TV mostly does. But now it is competing for attention to TV and to things like we are doing here, informing each other. A lot has changed in daily life in the last 20 or so years. Newspapers waste a lot of resources that don’t have to be wasted. Some of them are basically all waste. And some of them see no way to change and exist as they do now. I see that they could go all online with a cheaper price, sell access to their website, like the NYT does now. They already put it all on computers, the basis is already set, it’s seeing the future rather than the past that isn’t.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: It costs a lot more to be middle class these days. Used to be one car, one TV, one phone, a house with a one car garage. Now it’s two-three-four cars, a house with three-four garages, two-three TV’s, a phone for everyone over the age of 10, streaming or cable that you have to pay for, and so on. Plus the expectations for what a starter house is are higher than they used to be. I talked to the woman drawing my blood yesterday, and the topic of HOA’s came up. I said where I lived there isn’t one, and she said something like “Well anywhere you’d want to buy a house has one now”. I guess that’s true, no one wants to buy a house in my neighborhood even though they’re a lot more affordable and sometimes even bigger than what you can get where there’s an HOA. I know it’s all about where people want to live, but that’s a choice not a requirement.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@wonkie: this reminds me of a quote from, I think Humphrey, who had been a teacher for a while, about making a speech. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. Repetition is crucial to getting points across to groups of people.
Barry
@mapanghimagsik: “I feel the incel dude six months from now expressing shock he’s not neck deep in hot women is going to be a blistering read on The Onion.”
‘Months’? I expect weeks at the most.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@JML: and I recognized the feeling I had Wednesday morning when the electoral disaster became clear. It was the same feeling as 1980 when Reagan first won the presidency.
AMcC
Great post. Many thanks. FYI, I’ve canceled NYTimes and WaPo and donated to The Guardian and ProPublica. Also longtime subscriber to Talking Points Memo. That said, I need some time to hibernate and heal. But promise I’ll be back
UncleEbeneezer
@Anonymous At Work: One of my fave Black Podcasters who lives in NC said he never had any doubt that Robinson would lose. Like Hershel Walker proved, Black Men can’t get away with being as unhinged as Trump can.
UncleEbeneezer
@Kent: We missed our chance to hold Trump legally accountable through our own failure to do our part on Tuesday. Not you and I, obviously, but “we” collectively. Ironically, there are undoubtedly a significant number of people who decided not to bother voting Tuesday who also bitched and moaned about Garland/DOJ. Even though Garland/Smith had criminal trials in motion that only needed us all to do one thing (keep him out of the White House) to proceed. I don’t wanna hear shit about Garland ever again. WE THE VOTERS let Trump off the hook, not DOJ.
NobodySpecial
I keep shaking my head at how easy it is for the Andrew Tates of the world to pick up these young men for free to fleece and then to soak in right wing madrassa style propaganda and their best ally in it is Democrats who can’t spend a single drop of empathy for those young men.
Do you ACTUALLY think they all grow up wanting nothing more than to rape and abuse women? Or could it, I dunno, POSSIBLY be that in moving towards a new set of societal values that men AND women BOTH still hold men to the old standard, which is frankly an impossible square peg to put in a round hole?
The trendlines have been around forever, and there’s been decades of studies and data to go with it. Young men don’t go to college as much as they used to. They don’t have the old ability to get a good paying job that provides for things like families or their own housing because NO ONE has that anymore in the younger generations. Most of the third places where you go to socialize and date are gone, replaced with technology that doesn’t sell you a solution because when you get a solution you’re not a paying customer anymore. Both men AND women of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are increasingly lonely and isolated and unhappy.
You know what the difference is? When young men say something about it, a lot of people hit them with this Neo-Calvinist bullshit that if you’re unhappy, it’s because you’re a terrible person. And then you wonder why they don’t want to take advice from people who insist they’re bad without knowing a damn thing about them. The Andrew Tates of the world don’t talk about being conservative, they talk about how to save themselves. Their message is complete bullshit designed to separate them from their money, or in the case of the Steve Bannons of the world who push shit like GamerGate to sell them on it, to make sure that they’re always receptive to conservative programming. And for every person on the left I talk to about this, I get five who just go “Fuck ’em” and then they wonder why they don’t listen to the left.
If people spared a tiny bit of empathy occasionally instead of becoming instant Twitter style ragebots towards young men with problems, we probably wouldn’t be in this fix.
Ramona
@cain: are these anecdotes related to you or if it’s a publicly available source can you recall even vaguely where you encountered this information. I find it richly funny!
Ramona
@Another Scott: that’s what so riles me, that Musk and Trump are going to ruin America in a ham handed attempt to appease their vanity! People say that Trump is driven by power but to him power is only a means to feed his insatiable vanity. He was beaming like a 3 year old who’d proven himself to be such a clever good boy when he appeared to gloat over his electoral victory! He seemed so sure that he was at last loved by ALL! And Musk too just wants to be adored.
My impression is that even fucking Hitler had a dark vision not necessarily tuned to fill a deep need for approbation.
Ramona
@Eolirin: thank-you Eolirin! You are brave and clear-eyed.
bluefoot
@cain: I haven’t read all the comments yet but I wanted to reply. My early-20-something nephew has told me that since at least his early teens, there has been recruitment of boys on MMPOGs, both just making them feel discontented and entitled all the way to actual recruitment into white supremacist groups. He says it always starts innocuously, much like a cult, and draws kids in. He’s been immune (he’s mixed race but looks fairly white) but he says it’s *everywhere* – games, YouTube, Instagram, etc. he’s followed some of it i.e. let himself be led to see where it goes, and he says it’s very well organized and deliberate.
I don’t know how to counter that. And what counter programming we can offer. The “lol nothing matters” and South Park “it’s stupid to care” attitude is pervasive in our culture. The habits of isolation during Covid has only made that worse.
Related to that, a friend of mine is in a band and he says since Covid, crowds are a lot uglier – some venues now have to provide bouncers inside because people try to grope or otherwise assault band members while they’re playing. He says it’s as if people no longer know how to act in public or consider others as anything else than animate objects for their entertainment.
again, I don’t know how to counter that, not in a systemic way.
Ruckus
@Kent:
I call BS.
shitforbrains is not a master at anything, it’s just that he supposedly has millions of dollars – HE’S RICH!!!! (just ask him….)
If you follow the actual truthful reporting about him, he’s about as smart as a jackass with dementia and bays about the same.
bluefoot
@Eolirin: I wish I could marry this comment
NobodySpecial
@bluefoot: Yes, it’s been systemic for a decade or longer. Steve Bannon was instrumental in turning the first GamerGate from an incoherent protest about how video game journalism was bought and paid for into an anti-women platform to launch gamers into a wider culture war.
That exact playbook is being used again to turn innocuous stuff like DEI and diversity consulting like Sweet Baby Inc. into a new wave of young men ready to bully and harrass women, minorities, and non hetero people, and straight into a voting booth in a few years to prosecute their Kulturkampf.
George
@Citizen Alan:
First, I think you are overstating the idea that all or even most young men in the “incel” group think it is okay to rape women. If you believe that, fine, but that belief is an obstacle to the goal of providing impressionable young men with a chance to find their masculinity on our side of the spectrum, not in the Joe Rogan side.
Second, most people in their teens to early 20s are impressionable. All I’m saying is that providing the opportunity for, in this case, young men to find fulfillment and acceptance as liberals/Democrats/progressives is a good idea.
I don’t think this sort of thing is genetically predetermined. It’s not like these young men jumped out of their mamas’ wombs spouting epithets and making obscene gestures.
The Rogans of the world just found ways of recruiting such young men based on a sense of acceptance and camaraderie. There is no reason at all why our side cannot focus on doing the same.
Art
IMHO almost all of this comes down to media control. All of the media outlets are controlled, or owned outright, by people with wealth, power and access. These people stand over the American population like giants. They can, and do, magnify or diminish causes, claims, framing and context. The slightly more biased ones establish mills that produce constantly repeated positive or negative stories about the players.
Why were Biden’s approval ratings so low? Every accomplishment was minimized, every fault magnified, and this against a Greek Chorus, repeating ever half-hour, of gripes and nit-picking accusations and analysis. If he licks an ice-cream cone does he do it in a manly enough manner? How about using a straw? Seems a little effete to me Bill.
Everything is viewed through the provided media lens. Illegals coming across the border has always been a thing. Since day-one. An issue but not a major threat. We are a nation of more than a third of a billion people. 100k sounds like a huge number but it amounts to a drop in a very large bucket. But if you frame it as a major threat, taking great care to emphasis any violence, and repeat it every half-hour, it is easy to remember it is a small issue in an ocean of much more pressing problems.
Same with every issue. Anti-vax was the purview of a small number of rock fondling ‘earth mother’ types who spent their time smearing the soles of their feet with oregano oil to remove imaginary ‘toxins’. Then someone figured out these people had money and you could sell them stuff. Google De-tox foot pads. With markets came sales, and advertising and the media ability to rope people into this world-view so you have more people to sell to. A non-issue can become a protest movement, lawyers and politicians get involved Anti-vax and toxin removal are industries.
When you can conjure a movement and market from thin-air it is child’s play to vilify or lionize a candidate. You can sane-wash the insane and make a very smart man seem to be an idiot. The Apprentice made Trump look like a business genius. It was all theatrics camera angles, wardrobe, set design and talented scripting. A silk purse made of a sow’s ear. Smoke and mirrors doesn’t begin to encompass the illusions and lies that were sold to the American people.
I also think a lot of blame goes to our decrepit education system. Used to be every kid knew the dates of D-day, Pearl Harbor, we learned about Nazis and fascists from books and we wrote papers on them. Most people can’t learn from books any more. Now we are going to have to learn about the horror of fascist regimes by living through one, or more.
Me and mine will get through this. We have resources and ways of getting critical information. I love America. This is like finding out your adult child is a heroin addict. I want to shield them from the pain. I tried to warn them. There is no treatment program. How many will suffer and die before the majority figures out fascism is bad. Hate is bad. The loud-talking guy who offers little packets of feel-good and joy, is not your friend.
It breaks my heart.
Kosh III
@Lobo:
I blame Obama. He refused to punish the Banks because he wanted their donations. Folks like Jamie Dimon should’ve been swinging from the end of a rope, instead of a slap on the wrist.
Case in point, Countrywide/Bank of America committed felony fraud hundreds of thousands of time with the robosigning crimes. No one was prosecuted. BofA was fined 14 billion, much of that was able to deducted from their IRS taxes.
Yes, it still pisses me off after all this time because it’s only gotten worse. And I don’t know what can be done now.
Hail Hydra! (sarcasm)
Kosh III
As far as media sources, I generally read foreign media, BBC, Sydney Times, Times of India, Reuters etc. A different perspective and often more reliable.
Ramona
@japa21: Good to know. Thanks for this information. I’ve been idly looking for it.
trollhattan
Ooh, angry man-baby ANGRY. Fuck you Donny, fuck you very much. We’re not giving you shit.
To repeat, Fuck you, Donny.
Barry
@Kent: “I think the coming Trump administration is going to be horrific in all sorts of chaotic and horrible ways. I just don’t think Griswold is going to even be in the top 100 or even top 500. Because there isn’t any personal or corporate profit in it.”
He billionaires can feed at the trough at the same time as the Christofascists slap chains on women.