This brought out a bunch of doomers “…but! but!”-ing with all of the obstacles facing a pro-democracy movement in the USA, but I think it is worth thinking about the question from the other side.
What does MAGA need to do to do (not how, just what) to hold power long-term? Are they doing it?— “Online Rent-a-Sage” Bret Devereaux (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) September 24, 2025 at 8:52 PM
I’m breaking my own rule and posting Mr. Devereau’s entire thread. “Ancient & military historian specializing in the Roman economy and military”:
It isn’t enough to corrupt one part of the system, after all. If they corrupt law enforcement, but not elections, then they lose elections and get prosecuted. If they corrupt elections, but not courts or state govs, underlings go to state prison for election fraud (and then no more underlings).
In short, they need an answer to a challenge from each ‘level,’ we might say, of the system and they need them all in place *before* the moment of crisis where the power of the regime/administration is tested (because you only get to fail that test once before it is hanging-from-lamppost time).
The first level is elections: you need to be able to either win them fairly, corrupt them thoroughly or avoid them entirely.
Generic congressional ballot is ~D+4, Trump’s approval is around -10 and getting worse, so ‘win them fairly’ is probably not an option.
That’s notable because most competitive authoritarians *prefer* for obvious reasons, if they can use their state media, paid shills and handouts to preferred groups to win elections without a ton of fraud, to do that, for obvious legitimacy reasons.
Not an option for MAGA.
The next choice would be corrupting the system in thorough but subtle ways.
The US system makes this *really* hard because the elections are run at the state level and the states where you’d want to change the results are blue or purple states who are not going to humor your tampering.
That leaves the obvious options of either 1) cheating in the open – say, brigades of DHS goons sent to polling places in battleground states – or 2) suspending elections.
But even if you subvert elections, you aren’t immune to public response, which gets us to level 2.
Level 2: Media control.
You need enough control over information that you can either 1) hide your incompetence well enough to remain popular or 2) conceal from enough of the population your obvious election subversion so that people don’t ‘feel’ like you stole the democracy…
…OR – and this is *by far* the most common approach – 3) create the appearance of a consensus of regime support so that while many people think you cheat and are full of s***, they’re afraid to speak out and be alone in doing so.
Has MAGA achieved any of that? Fuck no.
If anything, that project is rolling backwards as the ‘Trump won the election, I guess we have to do whatever he wants’ disease seems to slowly be wearing off of some media elites.
Most Americans think Trump is doing a bad job, the ‘right track/wrong track’ indicators right now are terrible, so (1) ‘hide your incompetence and corruption’ is failing and it is really hard to create the illusion of consensus when you can’t even fire Jimmy Kimmel and have him *stay fired.*
Now, don’t misunderstand me: Trump and MAGA *are attempting* to undermine the press, to manufacture that consensus and to break the systems that would tell you either that their rule was weak or that they were moving to undermine elections.
They’re trying, my point is so far they’re *failing.*
That gets us to Level 3: dealing with popular mobilization. Ideally, your authoritarian is hoping that success at level 2 will keep the opposition small and fragmented, but chances are there will be some protestors, some dissidents, some resisters.
So you need goons.
And people are going to immediately point out that Trump and MAGA are using DHS to create their army of goons. True and concerning!
They are making progress on this front, which is bad.
But also I think people *really* underestimate how many goons they need.
In 1932, on the eve of seizing power, the Nazi goon army – the Sturmabteiling or SA – numbered 400,000 members. By 1933, it was over two *million.*
DHS has 240,00 employees and lot of those are non-goons who have, you know, real jobs.
ICE and CPB have, I think, about 90,000 personnel between them.
Now that number is going up, but the United States is also a *lot bigger* than 1930s Germany, which had ~65m people over; we have ~340m spread over a much larger physical space.
So the number of goons Trump and MAGA would need, assuming they had Nazi-esque levels of state capture and media control – which they don’t – would number not in the tens of thousands but millions.
The entire active duty military wouldn’t be enough goons, if they were all goons, and they’re not.
Now DHS is absolutely getting a surge of funding, which they will use to do stupid and terrible things and *absolutely* I think part of the idea there is to begin building this kind of security state, but a lot of it is instead flowing into things that aren’t armies of goons.
In particular of the $170bn they got, $47bn of it is going to border wall construction, which doesn’t do much if your problem are American citizen protestors. There’s only $12bn for new agents; the concerning bit is the $45bn for new detention facilities, a domestic Gulag Archipelago.
By contrast the DoD burns something like $230bn per year on personnel costs (not including the VA and such) and, as noted above, that’s probably not enough personnel to manage a totalitarian security state covering the entire United States.
And these guys won’t get another shot at more money.
Again, think numbers: No Kings put something like 5 million people in the streets when Trump was more popular and s*** was more normal than it is now.
90,000 DHS goons – hell, 200,000 DHS goons – are not enough to beat that kind of protest into submission.
And sure you *can* ask cops, the guard or the army to do some of the shooting for you, but there’s a reason the Nazis did not do that (they used the SA at first): you do not know which way those rifles will be pointed when the bullet comes out.
Good chance its at the tyrant, not the protestor.
(And the more protestors there are, the more the chance that the troops side with them increases.)
In short then, while I think MAGA and Trump are attempting an authoritarian takeover, I also think they are, from incompetence, failing and actually failing quite badly.
The United States is a tough nut to crack for this kind of thing, by design. Lots of independently elected officials (like blue and purple state governors) with their own supplies of force and democratic legitimacy. Big country, fragmented media, long democratic traditions.
Hard nut to crack.
The only way these fascist chucklefucks make this work is by succeeding in manufacturing the *appearance* of inevitability, because they *do not* have the force or skill to win a straight fight.
In short, the only weapon that can deliver them victory is you: the fool doomer whose nihilism is poison.
Do not be their sword.
Finally, I’m sure someone is screaming ‘don’t give them ideas!’ or something and..look, if anyone in the MAGA establishment is reading this, here is my advice:
Bail. This isn’t working out. Your big guy is billion years old and sundowning and Little JD ain’t got it.
This isn’t going to work. Bail.
What the MAGA guys should be doing, if they’re smart – many are not – is checking the exits, making sure to avoid doing anything that might land them in jail in a post-MAGA world and going either right-wing grifter or chameleon ‘Nikki Haley republican’ pretending they never believed in this.
So from our perspective, are there a lot of challenges to digging out of this mess and getting our democracy running effectively again? Yes. Even if we get these guys out, they’ll have broken a lot.
But they’re even further away from victory. They are not inevitable, do not make them so.
Another Scott
Thanks for this.
Indeed, as the good prof said, Do Not Obey In Advance points to a big part of our power.
Forward!!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Baud
Even if they were inevitable, what would I be doing differently? Nothing.
Baud
Also, noting an uptick in negativity on the tubes as we inch closer to a major government shutdown. Be forewarned.
Betty Cracker
Interesting idea to look at it from the other side — thanks for flagging that.
Kirklin
@Baud: I expect a lot of “Democratic shutdown”. In return I’ll be doing a lot of “Republican owns all branches.”
I think it’s a major battle that we need to win.
sab
Thanks for this. I will show it to my resident doomer.
Melancholy Jaques
The problem I see – and this also relates to the earlier What If It All Works Out? thread – is that none of the negatives of that asshole & the Republicans is developing into support for any Democrat or the Democratic Party generally.
Yesterday, Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog posted this Reuters/Ipsos poll.
This has been our problem since 2000: our people focus on things that people say they care about in polls – abortion rights & guns for two examples – but do not cause people to vote for Democrats or against the Republicans.
We want to feel like getting Kimmel back on the air was some kind of victory, but it was not a victory for Democrats and it’s not going to change any election outcomes next year. I’d also point out that the overall effect of the suspension will be to chill people who are not big shots like Kimmel and who do not have the following or resources to fight back.
The people who need to be not afraid are the leaders of the Democratic Party. And the only thing we can do to make them braver is to let them know with letters, emails, and phone calls that that is what they have to do.
MattF
One should assume that the MAGATs have already gamed this all out in detail. They’re all wargamers, they’ve all figured out that our federalism and dispersed political authority is a huge barrier to their plans. So, thanks to the Founders for putting elections in the hands of the states. One wonders who was responsible for that— Madison?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Melancholy Jaques:
That entire piece and comments over at NMMNB is a good, albeit predictably depressing, read.
Chetan Murthy
I’m a doomer, and the previous post (with the video) was …. deeply unsatisfying in a “he’s an idiot, and so is the woman who introduced the video” sense. I mean, so much fail there. But Devereaux is someone whom I respect. When he says he knows the history, I can believe him (unlike that guy in the video). This gives me some hope.
So thank you, Anne!
JoyceH
@MattF: That’s the problem with MAGA – they think they can cosplay a government. There’s a lot more to running a defense department than doing pushups and yammering about lethality, and that stuff isn’t getting done. There’s a lot more to running an authoritarian takeover than signing proclamations and posting on social media. This is an advantage for our side. The opposition are making the speeches but they’re not doing the work. (I blame their contempt for women – in most organizations, the men make the speeches and the women do the work. )
Bupalos
I agree with the thrust of this. There’s a lot of hyperventilating about how Germany went full Nazi in like 100 days… which abstracts from both the real timeline and the reality that we just aren’t in anything like the material or social-psychological state of people in the 1930’s.
I mean, we may get there over the next decade, especially with some serious global economic downturn. But for all the overheated rhetoric you hear, most people are not nearly discontented enough to help instigate or accept drastic changes.
That said, democracy has been slowly deteriorating and discontent rising for a long time, and world-historical forces like climate change, technology-mediated social dislocation, and spiraling inequality are set to force us further in that direction for the foreseeable future. We need to recognize the chronic nature of this. Trump is very unlikely to complete a full authoritarian turn for the U.S.. But if the next D administration isn’t effective in governance in a way that really addresses the chronic pressures, then the next authoritarian right wing figure is going to be much better positioned and likely much more competent.
Baud
@Melancholy Jaques:
We’ll probably never be popular given the diversity of people who make up our base.
Old School
@Melancholy Jaques:
I see it as a victory in the sense that it showed Trump not getting what he wanted. The most that happens, the most it’s likely to keep happening.
Part of me hopes that Trump does sue ABC for eleventy trillion dollars just to show media that appeasement will only lead to more demands.
Bupalos
@Baud: coalitions change. As well as the views of the people within those coalitions.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Also too, I’ve been reading Devereau’s blog:
acoup.blog/
since he started it in 2019. I knew his credentials and focus but anybody who can write cogently on the logistics of Sauron’s army in the Minas Tirith campaign is worth sticking with.
Baud
@Bupalos:
Slowly.
I’ll cop to the hyperbolic use of “never.” Things that happen after I die are someone else’s problem.
Geminid
@Kirklin: Right now it looks like the shutdown will come down to whether or not Schumer and 6 other Senate Democrats allow cloture on the 45-day* Continuing Resolution just passed by the House. There are plenty of questions to consider here, one of them being: will Trump and the Republicans be in a stronger or weeker position in November than they are now?
*Ed. It might be 50 days.
I’ll pass on the other questions for now because I expect this prospective shutdown will get a lot of attention here as September 30 gets close.
Right now I’m more interested in whether Trump/Erdogan Bromance still flourishes. The Sultan is visiting the Null-tan at the White House today.
MattF
@Old School: I was somewhat dubious about Kimmel’s return being significant until Carr made the absurd claim afterwards that he wasn’t threatening anyone. That’s a galactic level of gaslighting. And then Kimmel himself said what was needed. So, yeah, something really happened there.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Never say never.
Horseshoe left is quite unpopular, I would ditch them, their self defeating politics and grad seminar style lingo
ETA: I speak of the people who are always hectoring us, who never vote for us and encourage other people to not vote for us. I am not talking of Democrats.
JoyceH
@Old School: and all media and law firms and corporations need to understand something very clearly – they may settle a nuisance lawsuit for business reasons, because they have a merger that the government needs to approve or their clients work for the government or whatever. So they settle all coldly and logically and walk away and don’t feel diminished by it. But that’s not how Trump sees it! Not at all! Every settlement is a victory for him, and proof positive that he was right and they were wrong. Not only wrong but probably criminal. That’s how he frames it and his base believes it.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Every component of the party is unpopular with somebody.
Ishiyama
I understand as little as anyone what is going to happen next. I’ve been reading Carlyle on Heroes (the Great Man theory examined). Does that apply to Trump? Are we looking for a heroic leftist leader as an antidote? Do we need someone to rule with a heavy hand, to root out the embedded enemies of Democracy in the Courts and the military? How far do we need to go?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: The horseshoe left is universally unpopular outside its bubble.
You know the type, who blabber about carceral state and monoparty.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Which group of voters do you think we would gain if we “ditched” the HL (putting aside how ditching would be accomplished)?
Betty Cracker
@MattF: Yeah, Kimmel rose to the occasion. He could have made it all about himself. He didn’t.
Betty
I think as Trump’s health, mental and physical, continues to deteriorate, it will be harder and harder to maintain this veneer of absolute control. Vought is out there threatening to fire everybody again if there is a shutdown. It’s nonsense because they are in the process of hiring back lots of people they fired. Democrats are in a good position to challenge all of the overreach. They need to be loud and specific in criticizing all the destruction Trump and his minions are carrying out. The tide can be turned.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Normies. When they (HSL) say jump we don’t ask how high.
Practically speaking we stop kowtowing to their demands. Biden delivered on many and he still got zero credit for it. The HSL ended up calling him Genocide Joe.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
There are things we did that we’re not as popular as we might have hoped, like student loan relief. But I can’t think of a demand that we kowtowed too that wasn’t supported by a lot of non HL Dems.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Melancholy Jaques: Its a victory for free speech and democracy which is a necessary condition for Democrats to exist as a viable opposition.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Changing the primaries/caucuses to suit the cranky Vt Grandpa in 2020. There was no need to accommodate him after he sabotaged our nominee. Its makes us look weak and ineffectual.
As does ditching our duly elected nominee after NYT editorial board said something mean.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Hmm. We did some reforms but on the whole I’m recall that they were good reforms, like relying less in caucuses. I don’t remember the Bernie people getting much out of it.
catothedog
Without a commitment to defanging the rightwing thugs on the Court, no election victory is going allow a Dem government to rule or make policy that changes people’s life for the better. That will lead to more and more people checking out of politics and turning to strongmen, because “Dems can’t do anything”
Dem policies to make people better off are getting destroyed by this lawless Court. See what happened to ACA, (getting slowly gutted by Court rulings), student debt, CFPB. See what is going on with Trump’s executive orders – this thug Court is not ruling on it, but letting them stand, so that they can rule it illegal after the fact. So Trump gets to do what he wants, but a later Dem president is not able to do the same thing.
A Dem president and Congress that destroys the power of the rightwing thugs on the Court is the first step to sanity. Until that is commonly recognized and accepted by the people, and becomes an election issue, a return to normalcy is just wishful thinking.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: My recollection is somewhat different. I should go back and check.
They got rid of superdelegates IIRC among other things. IDK if the superdelegates were necessarily a great idea but giving the saboteur who leeches of the party the say in designing the next set of primaries sets a bad precedent
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Pretty sure we still have supers. I think they just can’t vote in the first round, which is almost never an issue.
IIRC.
Belafon
@Melancholy Jaques:
The people who don’t have the following of Kimmel aren’t going to be Trump’s target. He needs the big guys to go away. It was a victory in a few ways:
1. It wasn’t ABC that fought back, it was people.
2. That power was stronger than Trump’s tantrum.
3. A few people who have probably been wondering what they can do to deal with Trump just learned they have power.
No, it won’t change many votes. But it also breaks the inevitability feeling.
Maybe people can also think about their Paramount+ subscriptions in light of this.
Belafon
@catothedog: Committing to expanding the Court has rarely been popular. It collapsed FDR’s support for the New Deal until the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it polled horribly last year.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Ok you are right that change was adopted in 2018.
Before 2016 no one even talked about the DNC, until the Sage of Vt made it into a big bad villain.
ArchTeryx
@schrodingers_cat: There was an absolute tidal wave of trans people (or “trans people” provocateurs) on BlueSky all screaming about how Harris would throw trans people under the bus in a heartbeat, and to not vote Democrat, in the months before the election.
Too many listened.
Cheez Whiz
The Trump adminustration has been focused on winning a media battle, cranking out content for its base. That’s Trump’s MO and happy place, he seems content to yell at DOJ on his Dollar Store X to just arrest people already, what are you waiting for. He clearly believes he already is Maximum Leader for Life and has no need for some larger plan to bring the country to heel, and that the very systems being corrupted and gutted will protect him as President. Now President Vance, that’s a very different story. If he holds true to his Opus Dei and techbro committments he will be very, very interested in bringing the country to heel, and not obsessed with making pointless “deals”.
Baud
@ArchTeryx:
I don’t know how many listened. I think we did really well with LGBT.
But they do exist. I’ve also seen them on Reddit recently talking about Harris’s book.
schrodingers_cat
@ArchTeryx: How many were real people and how many were Russian bots?
StringOnAStick
@Baud: The HL doesn’t vote for us anyway, no point being much interested in them one way or another.
Bobby Thomson
When push comes to shove, the billionaire-owned media always come through.
I’m putting my hope in sabotage.
ArchTeryx
@Belafon: In this case popular =/= good politics. Young people didn’t give a crap that it was SCOTUS that blocked Supreme Court relief. They blamed Biden anyway and stayed home.
“Popular” can get really squirrelly when you have a minority fanatically dedicated to fascism and they have a supermajority on the Court. Packing it is the ONLY choice we have if we don’t want to have every single thing we do knocked down and overruled if we even manage to take power back over their rulings. And I mean EVERYTHING.
FDR recognized this. His court packing was not popular, but he realized that if he didn’t exhibit a credible threat, the New Deal was dead and so was his political career, and the fascists were waiting in the wings, ready to join Nazi Germany. His scheme got voted down that time. But the more public pressure built for his agenda, the more likely it became he’d get his majority in Congress after the next election, enough to pack the Court. And they knew it. Even before the court packing bill went to Congress, SCOTUS was starting to walk itself back from the Lochner era.
Betty Cracker
@catothedog: Great points. I’m not a doomer, but I don’t believe winning in 2026 and 2028 will be enough, not even with a trifecta in 2028, unless there’s a real commitment to reform and the will to push it through, even if feathers are ruffled along the way. Winning elections is necessary but not sufficient for the reasons you outlined.
Structural impediments like the filibuster, the rigged court, etc., have to be addressed or we’ll find ourselves right back where we are now. Only possibly with more competent fascists in power and a more checked-out electorate.
Belafon
@schrodingers_cat: It was an argument among the trans people I follow on bsky. I can’t tell you, though, who did or did not vote.
MisterForkbeard
@ArchTeryx: There was a tidal wave of “democrats” everywhere online that was pushing insane perspectives about Harris. Just utterly mindboggling, and I still see a bunch of it today every time she speaks.
schrodingers_cat
@StringOnAStick: Oh they do work overtime to sabotage us. Telling people not to vote for us. And then tell us to bend the knee when one of their own wins the primaries.
Belafon
@Betty Cracker: Unless we get 60+ in the Senate, even with abolishing the filibuster, we might get two major packages through in 2029-2020. One of those will probably be a massive economic package. What should the second one be?
ArchTeryx
@schrodingers_cat: Quite a few were people I recognized. They weren’t Russian bots. Were they influenced by Russian bots? Impossible to answer. But the trans folks I followed as a whole joined the Horseshoe Left enthusiastically to shit on Democrats. It was absolutely insane, but so is social media.
schrodingers_cat
@MisterForkbeard: Many white people don’t like black women, politics aside. Mediabros are especially sexist.
Craig
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: me too. I love the Helm’s Deep analysis. Then I started reading his breakdowns of actual Roman history. Deveraux is great. Glad to read this.
ArchTeryx
@MisterForkbeard: Tell me about it. I had to leave BlueSky for a while before the elections because the propaganda was thicker there than on Twitter. They knew all the non-nazis went to BSky, so all the provocateurs, bots, and trolls followed them there.
schrodingers_cat
@ArchTeryx: Interesting.
I saw a tankie perspective from a respected Indian (from India) leftie.
That folks on H1-B deserved zero sympathy because they chose to go the US which is uniquely evil among nations so they deserve whatever awful thing happens to them. This guy runs a Snopes like outfit in India.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: For months in the runup to the 2008 nomination, lots of Obama partisans suspected “the establishment” (DNC, superdelegates, etc.) of putting their thumbs on the scale for Hillary Clinton. I know this for a fact because I was one of them. It’s not something that started in 2016. There’s always, for want of a better description, an establishment vs. insurgent struggle. Sometimes it ends in grief, sometimes not.
Belafon
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t think we’re that special yet.
The Other Bob
In the Washington Post article about the big military meeting next week, I thought this was interesting, but maybe I just never saw it before:
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@schrodingers_cat: Well to be fair, 2016 proved a lot of white women don’t like other white woman.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: I don’t remember HRC pouting during Obama’s convention and nor her supporters heckling the nominee .
Bowing down to BS after that performance just tells normies that Ds have kick me written on their backs.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
To his credit, I don’t recall Obama ever encouraging that.
schrodingers_cat
@Belafon: But this is the tankie perspective, and how Russia has poisoned the well against us. They have been at it for almost a century now. Propaganda works.
schrodingers_cat
@Belafon: Prateek Sinha begs to differ. (The writer of that tweet)
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Unlike we know who. When he runs again in 2028 we will see all the people criticizing gerontocracy eat their words.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
There were people called PUMAs. But to her credit, I don’t recall Hillary ever supporting them.
MisterForkbeard
@Belafon: Can we weaponize the government, maybe? We’ve been accused of that for decades while Reps actually do it, so maybe we should just get the benefit.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yep.
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: Yes. And the rest of the democratic party worked hard to marginalize them, including Hillary. Which was the right thing to do.
When people go off the deep end, you can’t let them represent you.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Agree about propaganda, but there’s always been an anti-US cohort both here and abroad.
Belafon
@schrodingers_cat: I totally get that. And I’m definitely not saying we haven’t done evil stuff. I just think we’ll have to get through what this administration plans before we truly achieve top of the heap status. Some other countries have done a pretty good job.
ArchTeryx
@Baud: Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake was one of the biggest online PUMAs there was. When Hillary Clinton flamed out she remained a gadfly against Obama for a while, fully joining the Horseshoe Left, then shut the site down in 2015 to grift somewhere else.
Scammers and grifters don’t just target the right.
schrodingers_cat
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: They love white supremacy more.
schrodingers_cat
@Belafon: I think Sinha is full of shit. Typical tankie.
Betty Cracker
@Belafon: I’m no expert, so I’ll have to leave the details to those who are, but I think it has to be a reform package that connects election outcomes to lawmaking power. That includes court reform because unelected “conservative” justices allow oligarchs to buy politicians and issue rulings that sandbag Democrats while giving Republicans monarchical powers. It should address voting rights so that pols can’t choose voters. That sort of thing.
ArchTeryx
@schrodingers_cat: Or they simply follow their husband’s orders. It’s rampant in the South, rural America and virtually everywhere the evangelicals operate. The white supremacy white women R voters and the church women R voters are often indistinguishable, but the Venn Diagram isn’t a perfect circle.
And there are a lot of very politically active church women explicitly stumping for fascism, with the usual pile of grifters latching on like barnacles. Remember Phyllis Schafly, the female fascist that sunk the ERA?
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: On account of the H-1B visa story, New Lines Magazine editor Hassan I. Hassan flagged an article that was published January 6 that might interest you and others. It’s about a controversy that erupted last December over the prospective appointment of venture capitalist Srinan Krishnan as a senior White House advisor for AI.
Authors Alex D’ Angelo and Surbhi Gupta explore the conlicts in Trump’s coalition over immigration and the H-1B visa program in particular.
The article is titled:
This link might work:
https://share.google/ams6iJA2Kx5Gb8ou
The link works.
New Lines Magazine covers a lot of ground. Recent articles are include ones about the plight of schlool kids in Gaza, Beirut’s book culture, and the resurgent Polish bison population.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Congressional Dems have been pushing comprehensive electoral reform for several years now. It doesn’t seem to register with potential blue voters.
They Call Me Noni
@Betty Cracker: Yesterday I listened to a Kara Swisher podcast with Mayor Pete and he said much the same thing. In the end he was really very hopeful and left me feeling optimistic, but I’ve liked Pete for a long time and he is one of our best communicators.
StringOnAStick
@schrodingers_cat: I know you love to harp on this stuff and I guess that works for you but it seems to me that it falls into the nihilism and “being their sword” that is mentioned above as the worst thing we can do. Are these people real? Yes, I’ve tangled with a few in real life and one who was convinced she and her cohort are the base of the D party and she was refusing to vote for Biden in order to “teach the Democrats a lesson” and “he’s too old’. Two things I said made her think twice; one was that while she’d be fine as upper middle class but her patients will really suffer (she’s an AIDs specialist) and that Biden got congress to pass the single largest investment ever for addressing climate change, which is her biggest issue. I think she has TONS of issues in the psychological sense, mostly that as a specialist MD she thinks she is quite superior and knows what is right in every aspect of life, not just her practice. I’ve also noticed that since we are now in the shitstorm that she said she was OK with when she said she refused to vote for Joe, she avoids me. Funny, that.
A lot of this is bots too, and HL’s are being kept wound up by Putin’s bots; that explains the MD I mentioned above when I asked her where she gets her info (the Intercept). I’ve had people tell me recently that when I first told them about the Putin bot army thought to themselves ‘wow, she’s gotten a bit paranoid” but have since seen enough information to know it’s true and recognize that Putin has been using this socially disruptive force multiplier for much longer than they realized. That’s something I want to see Democratic campaign leadership recognize and develop a counter to.
I will add that parking here and daily issuing smug statements about how white women suck, Bernie bros suck and in general far too much of the democratic coalition, such as it is, does not meet your standards is just another form of nihilism and Being Their Sword, just a boringly repetitive one. It’s certainly why I’ve stopped spending much time in the comments here, and I now plan to go right back to having my life be other than sitting reading a blog all day.
Omnes Omnibus
@ArchTeryx: Curate your feed. Block. Mute. It is what you make it.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: It was a long time ago, but I think sometimes folks forget just how ugly that contest was, even if the principals acquitted themselves admirably, which they mostly did. IIRC, there were far more defections among Democrats in 2008 than there were in 2016. We’re got lucky because 1) Bush was deeply unpopular and tanked the economy, so there was little chance his party was going to retain power, and 2) Obama was a generational talent and Clinton was truly a team player.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: The tech workers on H1-Bs who are subject to both an annual lottery and a cap get all the attention, and Indians dominate this category of H1-Bs. But there are cap-exempt H1-Bs for those who work for universities and not for profit orgs. These are researchers and physicians and other medical workers. And in all the media blatherings on H1- B these visa holders are usually ignored.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I’m not sure defections were a problem in 2016 so much as turnout.
Agree about 2008. Really wished we could have seized the moment at that time. The reason I’m here is because DailyKos went completely negative almost immediately after the election. I had enough of it.
Craig
@Betty Cracker: I liked how Kimmel slid the knife in using Carr’s own words to make him look ridiculous.
schrodingers_cat
@StringOnAStick: You don’t like my comments. Got it. Thanks for letting me know.
How does white women haven’t voted D since 64 translate to white women suck, which I have never said. That is your interpretation not mine
ETA: Except for one of Bill Clinton’s runs.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: Thanks for the link I will check it out.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I don’t know that packing the court and pushing through election reform are popular issues, but IMO, it has to be done or we really are screwed.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Dems haven’t proposed court packing yet. I agree that would be unpopular.
I don’t know that their election reform attempts have hurt them, but it doesn’t seem to have been a driver of votes.
cain
@Chetan Murthy:
The other thing to keep in mind is that Germany was fairly uniform in terms of its population. It’s entire ideology was about racial purity – eg the reich.
But that kind of thing won’t work in the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. White people dominate but there is just no way to have that kind of racial or ideology divide.
MAGA is not representative of the entire nation. We’re still more than half of this population of people with diverse everything. You’re going to piss off people and right now they are pissing off everyone because this particular administration is only catering to rich oligarchs. Everyone else are just useful idiots.
In 6 months, you’re going to see crushing unemployment in rural areas. Everything they thought they voted for is falling apart with no relief. The administration is doing nothing because they believe they can hold power indefinitely. But again, these people also are nuts and also have guns.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@ArchTeryx:
Calamity Jane and the Hamshers of the Apocalypse!
Ah, the good old days. Terms we’d use for her now would be “clout chaser” and “entryist”. Sooooo desperately wanted to be a *playuh*, not unlike a contemporary of hers, good ole Cenk Uygur, and equally unpalatable.
She had serious health issues just when he was going full-tilt cray-cray which derailed whatever longer-term efforts she might have had at some left-wing grift.
cain
@Belafon:
He’s definitely going to strike back though. He absolutely cannot stand the fact that Kimmel got away. He’s going to do something and waste a lot of money.
Disney doesn’t need a license from the federal govt. Now, he could go to the SCOTUS or tell congress to make a law. It’s not something he can EO.
trollhattan
What fresh hell?
Baud
@trollhattan:
Why is she making budgetary decisions?
Mikr1172
@Betty Cracker: Dean campaign in ‘03 comes to mind, too.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Agreed. Maybe there’s a way to package “reform” proposals without getting too bogged down in details. If it were me doing the packaging, the overarching theme would be “the uber-rich are screwing you, and here’s how we will stop them.” But I admit there’s little evidence that sort of framing would work.
wonkie
Actually, the Republican party has gone a long ways toward corrupting all of it. They have been working to end representative government for decades by corrupting the elections, the judiciary, and now the government agencies. MAGA didn’t do this. Republican leaders did.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Betty Cracker:
I usta think by saying
would get traction. But as you observe, talking about how the uber-rich are screwing over people hasn’t been an electoral winner and I’m no longer convinced it’s because we haven’t figured out a way to message it better.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: The DeSantii are a plague, and a boring, repetitive, unimaginative, desperate one at that. Always a day late and a dollar short, those two. For example, after Musk had to turn tail and leave DC because “DOGE” had fucked everything up and pissed everyone off, DeSantis created a mini-DOGE to go audit Florida cities. Most people seem to hate it, but I don’t expect any real consequences for Florida Repubs, except that and the epic corruption and dumb shit like this horse paste gambit might kill the nascent political ambitions of Casey DeSantis. I’ll settle for that!
Betty Cracker
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I know nothing, but I still think maybe that approach could resonate under the right circumstances. And by dog, if these aren’t the right circumstances, I can’t imagine what would be.
Pappenheimer
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: what’s more on point is Saruman’s preparation for war and handling of his attack on Rohan. Prof D thought Saruman was basically cosplaying a general with an army without cohesion. If we leave people like Hegseth in charge of our own military for long enough, that’s what we’ll get
Craig
@Betty Cracker: yes! Fuck ruffling feathers. Break wings.
dm
I think the Kimmel thing was the bully blinking, the little kid saying the emperor is naked.
The coverage I’ve seen of the Tylenol/vaccination press conference has felt like some in the press are getting off their knees. I think the tide may be turning.
It will be interesting to see how Oct 18 goes, and how it is covered.
(On the other hand, Karen Attiyah and Ann Telnaes are still out of their jobs.)
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: Political ambition sure is persistent. I get the impression that Ron DeSantis still thinks he has a political future despite his big flop last year.
Belafon
@cain: ABC does.
Glidwrith
@Belafon: Stripping the judiciary from accepting bribes. To wit: restore all of the bribery laws and strip the courts ability to rule on them.
hells littlest angel
“The guy couldn’t even take Jimmy Kimmel,” is rather foolish bravado. Kimmel is a fairly powerful person, and the administration didn’t expend much effort on him. On the other hand, it has blithely murdered people in small boats in international waters, imprisoned thousands of US residents and citizens without due process, and stolen the wealth of hundreds of thousands more. He may be personally weak, but he commands the largest military and law enforcement apparatus in the world.
Glidwrith
@Betty Cracker: A different approach: investigate the fuckers. You’ll find financial shenanigans, kiddie diddling, wife beating, rapes, because that’s what these people are.
There was someone out there that looked at financial disclosures of judges and a whole bunch had stakes in cases before them.
Bupalos
This attitude would seem to be the root of about half the world’s problems.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: Yeah, but who shows up? Election after election, dogcatcher to President?
Baud
@Bupalos:
The other half involves people wasting their opportunities waiting for something better to come along.
People. What can you do?
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
I would actually be interested in a survey of the makeup of the dedicated and reliable blue voter. We always focus on the people we have difficulty getting.
Omnes Omnibus
@hells littlest angel: We do actually know all that. The point is that Trump is not 10’ tall and bulletproof. He is unpopular outside of his MAGA base. He is incompetent and embarrassing. Fighting back isn’t pointless. It is necessary and it is possible.
Belafon
@hells littlest angel: What you’re ignoring is what Trump and Co are trying to do, namely make their takeover look legit. The could bomb where Kimmel lives, but that would blow up legitimacy in such a way that it would get a lot of people not paying attention involved (even a lot of conservatives I know didn’t like Disney getting threatened by the government).
Yes, he has the largest military, and I wish I could find a way to make him stop shooting boats, but at this stage he can’t use them here that way.
Omnes Omnibus
@Professor Bigfoot: I do.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
What ‘demands’ did the horseshoe left make that Biden (or other Dems) kowtowed to, that shouldn’t have been what we’re about anyway?
Bupalos
@ArchTeryx: People desperately want to believe that the failure is due to something other than a kind of internet brain rot that stretches across all politics and parties. Some saboteur, some foreign influence, some hateful and hated “other…”
I think it’s largely a kind of defense mechanism of the internet brain rot virus… it takes over people’s brains and forces them to go online and rant in ridiculous terms about how it’s X, Y, Z type of people, and definitely not just internet brain rot.
NaijaGal
@catothedog:
I think a lot of people see the threat of this Supreme Court (saying that ICE can detain anyone, citizen or not, based on appearance and/or accent) makes most nonwhite citizens, and even some white normies, see the six on the court as a problem.
If the next Dem president talks about expanding the court, I don’t think it will be dismissed the way it was when Biden said it. It’s one thing to hear talk about a court hypothetically aiding racism and fascism, it’s another thing to have witnessed it.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: We did win in 2020. Thank God!!!!
Paul in KY
@ArchTeryx: all 476 of them?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Belafon:
@Betty Cracker:
Term limits are popular though. We could set them for 20 years. If the sinister 6 became the feckless 4, we’d have what we need. It would result in better, more experienced judicial picks too
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Guess he doesn’t want them to go to Great Britain either…
They can go to Liechtenstein or Luxembourg. They didn’t do to much conquering. Maybe Andorra too.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: I’ve seen similar stuff from European lefties, saying they find Trumpism “cathartic” because it’s punishing Americans for our many sins over 200 years. The chickens are coming home to roost, warmongering liberals are finally getting it in the neck and having done to them what they did to Vietnam 60 years ago, etc. Not a common view but it’s out there.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: In general, I think white women who don’t vote D (especially now) suck. There are exceptions to that, of course.
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: Someone needs to unload their warehouse of ivermectin…
Paul in KY
@Pappenheimer: They certainly needed more orc archers.
Chetan Murthy
I used-to-believe that, until Nov 2024, when so many nonwhites voted for White Supremacy. But sure, I also am praying for a line of 5 Cat5 hurricanes to slam into the Gulf Coast. 25% unemployment. A completely hollowed-out Federal bureaucracy that can do nothing, even when it has the money. And Red state governments that are likewise.
I’m hoping for it, praying for it, b/c I don’t believe anything else will save us.
Or more succinctly, “God Damn America”.
dm
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Well, the next Democratic President could publicly muse that lifetime appointments to the Supreme court plus Presidential immunity for official acts (and the pardon power) means employing Seal Team Six to rebalance the court is a viable option, then bring a few cases to the court that would allow them to reconsider some of their decisions.
For example, resume enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that subsequent events have shown the Court’s reasoning was flawed (folding one’s umbrella and realizing the rain was still getting you wet, in, I think Justice Ginzburg’s formulation).
chemiclord
@JoyceH:
Whenever I hear this sentiment, I like to ask:
What would “the work” look like in this scenario?
jlowe
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: or military operations using examples drawn from Rohan.
jlowe
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: or military operations using examples drawn from Rohan.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: What we’re seeing now is a complication: when people deep in the cultural MAGA base realize they’ve been had, or simply get hurt by the regime, they don’t become liberals, but some do start looking for somebody to shoot. And when they do shoot somebody, that violence becomes an occasion to demagogue against the liberals who supposedly put them up to it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: That may be so, but it doesn’t change my point.
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy:
This time JD has to toss the paper towels.
They Call Me Noni
@trollhattan: Jesus Cristo! What the actual fuck is wrong with these people? Do they just glob onto weird shit just for the headlines?
Eyeroller
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Term limits would be a good start. We can’t talk about “packing” the SC. Republicans of course are against that, since it’s been their project for several decades now to dominate the courts, but “normies” go “That’s not faiiir” (paradox of tolerance, basically). Plus a lot of Americans probably believe that the number of SC justices (and House members) is set by the Constitution, like the number of Senators is, because our civics education is so bad. (To be fair to ordinary people, our system of government is stupidly and unnecessarily complicated due to the conflcting interests and other factors at the time it was set up.)
The SC justices could be rotated in and out of the federal court for a limited term. That would get around the “lifetime appointment” rule of the Constitution, which only applies to federal court justices and not to SC justices specifically (as I understand it).
Congress can also strip them of jurisdiction, over for instance voting rights, but has been unwilling to do so for various reasons.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: This time, if we are to retain our Republic, JD (and Donnie) must be too goddamn afraid to even venture into the afflicted areas. For fear of their necks.
prostratedragon
Luckovich: “Fighting for Freedom“
UncleEbeneezer
@dm: Karen Attiyah shouldn’t have been fired for what she said about Charlie Kirk. But she should’ve been fired for retweeting celebrations of the 10/7 massacre. And it’s rather telling that so many people would’ve normally and rightly demanded accountability if a journalist had done that about the mass-killing of any other persecuted group (Dylan Roof, the Pulse nightclub shooting etc.) didn’t even raise an eyebrow about a mainstream journalist cheering on the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
Another Scott
@prostratedragon: 👍👍
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: Got link?
chemiclord
@Betty Cracker: I know that she “liked” and “retweeted” that infamous “What do you think decolonization means?” tweet right after 10/7. I don’t recall her celebrating it or platforming anyone who did, though.
Betty Cracker
@chemiclord: I don’t know one way or another. Looking for receipts, not hearsay. It’s a serious charge, so it should be accompanied by credible evidence.
Kayla Rudbek
@Glidwrith: I am willing to bet my yarn money for the next year that Barrett has covered up/ignored molestation of at least one of her children, and I also would not be surprised if she or her husband had visited Epstein’s island (after all, there have been hints that something truly explosive about Epstein’s client list, and I can’t think of anything more explosive than that).
Paul in KY
@UncleEbeneezer: Agree that celebrating the 10/07 massacre of Israeli concertgoers and minors should be a fireable offense, if you are in the kind of position she was in (and that she did do that).