The implosion of the Democratic Party thread

All right, I'll try wading into this sea of shit.

CRT refers to a very specific academic subject that is really not what the right-wing noise machine thinks it is, and also is not part of K-12 school curricula.

The laws that Republicans are passing, with the aid of CRT as a bogeyman, do NOT only apply to CRT. Instead, they are extremely broad and vague, and boil down to "thou shalt not mention any historical fact that might hurt a conservative white parent's tender feelings."

Don't you mean a George HW Bush 1992 or a Donald Trump 2020 moment? Because it's pretty goddamned rare for an incumbent President to not win re-election. You want to talk about statistical flukes in terms of American Presidential politics, the fact that W ever got elected President at all is only the second time in history that the son of a President also became President, and the first time it happened, John Quincy Adams wound up a single-termer.

Just in my lifetime, every President who beat a single-term President (Carter and HW Bush), the subsequent President won a second term. Granted, we do have the fact that Ford never served a full-term, and was never elected President, but that was a singular moment in US history.

And if you're worried about it, WTF are you doing to try and ensure that Biden gets a second term (not to mention that Dems retain control of both houses of Congress after 2022)? You working with the local Democratic Party? You donating to candidates that you believe in? Or are you just sitting there being concerned? Because if it's the latter, then .

Not that your salty comments are anything but a red herring in this thread, yet another ad-hominem distraction, but I have been active with my local Dem party (in the US) for years -- canvassing, phonebanking, pushing people in my life to register and vote, donating where relevant, etc. Trying to correct Dems on messaging is also part of my personal contribution.

I feel like most incumbents do poorly against "any candidate" but those numbers always change once that candidate has a name and their own baggage.

Then you should know that polling data this far out about 2022 is fucking useless, and that when you're talking about so-called "off-year" elections, no matter how close you are to the actual election, polling data is only slightly better than hot garbage.

If you're serious about wanting to help the Dems get an effective message across, then I suggest you get The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, which basically predicted Trump some 60+ years ago and offers credible solutions to countering the kind of pro-fascist support the GOP is actively courting now.

Yet a high school teacher in Illinois disagrees with you.

https://outline.com/hR8cYR

When has the party in power ever won re-election in the mid-terms? 2002, when Bush had 9/11 boosting up his numbers?

There's a lot more at stake this go around but the pattern itself is not unusual.

Right-winger says stuff that backs up right wing's desire for a bogeyman. Film at 11.

and yet on the national level rural voters have massively disproportionate power, including an effective veto on all legislation via the Senate.

The reality is that rural voters "feel" a metric fuckton of victimization narratives to be true that are, in fact, utter horseshit.

This, a thousand times.

See: Hillary Clinton's late-emerging rural outreach office.

Right, the folks who wholly control at least half of the states (an odd mostly powerless governor aside) are such disenfranchised victims. It's a miracle they haven't been herded into camps already.

I swear, for a worldview that's wholly obsessed with swaggering masculinity y'all are the whiniest "y'all stop picking on us" crybabies the nation has ever known.

I LIVE here motherfucker. Used to BE one of them.

Been talking to then and with them all my goddamn life. Feel free to piss off with that condescending shit that's nothing more than projection, I've never met a single hard core right winger that didn't have a condescending contemptuous attitude towards anyone to the left of Rush Limbaugh (witness the batshit insane things that they have been absolutely convinced to be true for a hundred years that was never anything but propaganda and delusion). How do you have a mutually respectful exchange with people who literally think the Hillary Clinton has a hit squad (to just name one bit of insanity)? We're not operating with a common frame of reference.

No, the "all you have to do is show them respect" narrative is the worst sort of delusion. It's letting them set the narrative as they have for a century. It's a recipe for failure as long as you stay within the frame they assign you.

Good for you, @Nova. But I wonder what portion of urban Dems generally has even tried?

I dunno about that. I think that's basically the PR push on that (from both sides), but the only so-called anti-CRT law anyone's actually linked to here was remarkably bland and ineffectual.

And what's the response when their "feeling" is ludicrous horseshit?

I mean, look at Texas for one example - literally millions of left-of-center voters in 4-5 major cities and they go year after year being fucked over by a pandering governor, a dominionist Lt. Gov, a deeply corrupt AG, a laughing stock senator, and so forth. Just utterly embarassing state government on every front and they can't do a god-damned thing about it.

Why?

All those poor pitiful disenfranchised helpless victim oppressed and abused rural voters that keep winning every fucking election.

Somehow my empathy reserve is completely bone dry.

IF they tried, after the got gobsmacked by being surrounded by people who've spent their entire adult lives living in a wholly alternate reality in which whites are the vicims of racism, Christians are going to be banned any week now, government agents are just down the road coming to confiscate their guns, and EVERY Democrat is a full bore communist determined to destroy America and turn it into Venezuela because reasons...

They'd meet the exact same results I always have.

I mean, I've spent a solid decade listening to people bitch about...things: teachers aren't paid enough, they never built that four lane, why are the factories closing, why does the state crime lab have an EIGHT YEAR backlog of automspies to get to....on and on and on.

And I tell them "because y'all keep electing the wrong people!" - in one ear and out the other because the "family values" party is going to save them from abortions and teh gayz.

Same on the national level: "Why don't the rich pay taxes?" and literally every other concern that's not abortion, gays, and guns and I tell them "Because y'all keep voting for Republicans" and illustrate the case to them in exquisite, patient, loving, respectful detail. Results?
Same motherfuckers go right out and vote straight ticket Republican no matter how fucked up the Republican available to them is (behold Mississippi's governor - His Dem opponent was more conservative then Joe Goddamn Manchin, pandered on the abortion bullshit and everything...but he was and is a Democrat. So rather than elect a reasonably competent man that shared 90% of their (incorrect, IMO) views - they elected the useless lump of bullshit we've got now instead.

It.
Can't.
Be.
Done.

It's a merger of politics and religion and if you have ever tried to convince anyone by persuasion that their religion is wrong and bad for them, you have a taste of what I mean.

And no, to Lanz's thesis - i don't give a single solitary fuck how disenfranchised you feel when you use your franchise to harm others and destroy the republic. These bitches don't want and wouldn't elect a Mitt Romney or a Liz Cheney or a Jeb Bush as president even though all these people share 99%of their politics. Nope, they want Donald Motherfucking Trump who couldn't be more obvious about his desire to be a dictator if he had it tattooed on his forehead and went about in a big red sash.

disenfranchise the entire fuck out of that shit. On a more personal level, let's look at Arkansas - passed a bill last year forbidding medical professional to render widely accepted care to trans youth because the fucking ADF told them we could be fixed. And if they get away with that they'll ban it for all trans people, and they'll set up vigilante watchdogs like Texas showed them how to be sure we don't sneak and survive in spite of them. And then it will be the gays, and left to their own devices we'll have "colored" restrooms again while John Roberts assures us there's nothing to see here and racism is a thing of the past.

Sorry, there's no compromise position on my right to live a free and equal life, there's either submission or outvoting them - which in half the state we fucking CAN'T do. If you think those folks want to here gentle persuasion from the left you've never met them - that is, in their view, weakness.

Every time a Republican runs for office he swaggers around with a long gun in his commercial all but saying "elect me and some day we'll shoot all the commies" and the Dem opponent over here saying "Elect me and I'll work across the aisle to make things better"

Who wins that race?

The Republican with the gun. Every goddamn time. That's what they WANT.
And within that cohort there's a smaller and even more passionate crowd who literally fall asleep at night dreaming of the day they get to shoot the Democrats with no legal consequences.

it's why they envy Rittenhouse so much. Dude lived the goddamn dream.

To summarize - we're fucked. Wholly and completely. The rightward third of the population controls so many election outcomes that they effectively run the country, they've bought off and infiltrated all the courts so theirs no relief there.

if you don't know the term "competitive autocracy" look it up. Or look at Russia.

That's what's coming. SOON. And who's bringing it to us?
Those poor benighted abused picked-on victimized disenfranchised rural voters.

Enjoy.

Two. Different. Realities.

How do you share a common frame of reference with this?

Opinion | Republicans are fomenting a violent insurgency in America. It may have already started. - The Washington Post


The United States has a serious problem with political violence, particularly right-wing violence, which has overtaken Islamist attacks as the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat. The list of right-wing outrages includes Oklahoma City 1995 (168 dead), Pittsburgh 2018 (11 dead) and El Paso 2019 (23 dead).
In many other instances — e.g., the 2018 pipe bombing attempts targeting critics of President Donald Trump — tragedy was only narrowly averted. The Jan. 6 riot was both horrible and not nearly as bad as it could have been: Though 140 police officers were injured in the worst assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812, the insurrectionists did not succeed in killing or kidnapping any lawmakers.
Faced with this alarming trend, a responsible political party would damp down its incendiary rhetoric and urge its supporters to moderate their zeal. That is not what Republicans are doing. They continue to fan the flames of hatred, violence and division.

Many on the right routinely depict Democrats as America’s enemies. At one recent conference, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said, “The left hates America,” while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said: “Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America.” At the same time, Republicans make a fetish of gun ownership and use; weapons of war are the hottest fashion accessory in GOP campaign ads.
The message many Republicans receive is that violence is justified to save the United States from a leftist takeover. An audience member at a pro-Trump event spoke for many when he asked: “When do we get to use the guns?”
An American Enterprise Institute poll found that 39 percent of Republicans believe, “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Another survey by the University of Chicago found that 21 million adults believe the “use of force is justified” to restore Trump to the presidency.
Of course, the vast majority of people who think that violence is justified won’t actually use it. But it doesn’t take many extremists to cause mayhem in a country awash in firearms. Terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Irish Republican Army were able to carry out attacks for decades even while having memberships ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand.
We are at the greatest peril since the early 1970s — when the threat emanated from the left — of a violent insurgency in America. Indeed, the scattered terrorist attacks we have seen in recent years might be the early stages of such an uprising. If we see a full-blown insurgency — something that becomes more likely if Trump runs and loses again in 2024 — it would bear roughly the same symbiotic relationship to the GOP that the IRA had to the Sinn Fein party: It would be the armed wing of a larger right-wing movement. Trump made the relationship explicit when he told the Proud Boys, an armed group that later took part in the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, to “stand back and stand by.”
Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) has made himself the poster boy for Republican extremism. He spoke in February at a conference organized by a white-supremacist Holocaust denier. He has promoted conspiracy theories about Jan. 6, claiming that the FBI might have been responsible for the attack. He tweeted an animated video showing him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and attacking President Biden. Last week, he joined other House Republicans in hero-worshiping Rittenhouse; at least three of them want the violent vigilante to intern for them.
Gosar’s video showing him killing a co-worker would have gotten him fired in nearly any other workplace in the United States. But only two House Republicans voted to censure him last week. Instead of expressing outrage over Gosar’s conduct, most Republicans expressed outrage that Democrats would dare to call him out.
Why do so many Republicans go along with extremism? Some, like Gosar, are zealots themselves. But many others are simply afraid of the crazies. Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said Republican colleagues told him they feared for their safety if they voted to impeach Trump in January. One of the pro-impeachment Republicans, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio), is leaving Congress in part, he says, because of the danger to him and his family. Even the 13 House Republicans who recently voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill have received death threats.
Republicans are complicit in fomenting violent extremism — and they have also become hostage to the extremists in their ranks. It’s an ugly situation familiar from other people’s civil wars, and it portends more grief and bloodshed for a country that has already seen far too much of both. It’s not too late to avert a wider insurgency, but it will require Republicans to dial down their violent and apocalyptic rhetoric — which they show no sign of doing.

Apart from all the comments from those who started the anti-CRT nonsense saying outright that their strategy was to label any history they didn't like as CRT.

The irony of this post . . .

you'll have to diagram it for me.

Nova's proposal to "fix" the disenfranchisement of democratic voters is to disenfranchise republican voters. Because that would be fair.

No, it's one person one vote. Shouldn't matter where you live.

No, it shouldn't. But it does. Because "one person one vote" guarantees that three or four large metropolitan areas decide governance for the whole country. Also that no national candidate would bother campaigning anyplace outside of those large metropolitan areas.

No more than anyone anywhere else.

I mean, epistemically, I hate that. They’re fraudulently gathering political support. But it doesn’t seem like that’s translating into the education policy changes they’re claiming to want, even when they have no obstacles to it.

I mean, the Republicans could get more voters by campaigning on things that are actually popular instead of shoving their slimy authoritarian oligarch agenda down everyone's throats.
Nah, that's logical, better to keep beating the racist yokel horse.

This is only an issue if you assume voters in large metropolitan areas are unequally split politically.

Why would they be, versus rural voters?

Could it possibly be... gasp!... race and/or informed nature?

I mean they could just buy votes like the Democrats.