Shakes
3mo ago
It was only in hindsight that everyone declared Hillary a weak candidate. In 2015 everyone in America knew that Hillary was probably the next president.
Anyways, Trump isn’t running again. If the theory is Trump is a bad candidate and only beat worse candidates, that bodes well for Republicans. GOP will pick Rubio or JD or DeSantis. Dems will pick…? Maybe they won’t pick a bad candidate for the 4th time running.
Shakes
3mo ago
In 2024 the Republican party increased its performance virtually everywhere in America outside Atlanta and Utah. It's been the subject of some very famous maps
It's possible this is a high-water mark and maybe the GOP is losing and this redshift is all an affect of Trump. In that case I guess you'd be right. But it's not really in evidence. The Democratic Party remains extremely unpopular. Why couldn't a Republican Party sans Trump continue to win, say, a consistent 52-48 national victory.
Shakes
3mo ago
I guess you're calling specifically for me (a "Maggot") to go to jail so there's no polite way for me to interact with this post. (Anything I say is inherently inflaming tension, no? I don't think the mod response to your comment goes far enough frankly.)
However I would still like to try to politely point out this contradiction: You call for putting MAGA in jail, and then complain that we need people to interact with reality. Imagining that you can roll up an entire political faction and put them all in jail (representing ~30%+ of the country) is obviously political fantasy.
When I find myself thinking like this, I try to go for a walk and read a book and not log on for a day or more so that I can drink some tea and reflect on higher things. Chamomile with honey and glycine helps me dream deeply.
Shakes
3mo ago
Your analysis to me reads so differently from what I hear about American politics from my fellow Americans that, politely, I suspect you are not American or otherwise don't follow American politics that closely. You seem to ascribe great important to events or figures that nobody I know regards as important. (Liz Cheney?)
The result of his tenure as president, both first and second term combined has largely been to the disappointment of many
Trump has within the Republican party extremely high approval ratings. Whose disappointment? Later you cite the desire from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to have a reformed GOP. Liz Cheney also failed and was decisively rejected by the voters. "There is a significant desire among the moderates of the GOP to escape the influence of Magaist politics". Like the legislators just primaried in Indiana?
Perhaps your analysis that Trumpism has failed is motivated by something other than objective analysis? I mean, when I consult the oracle bones I'm not convinced MAGA will have run of the table after Trump fades, and there are a lot of ways this could all go. But MAGA is also the predominant faction now in the Republican Party, its mantle can easily be taken up by Rubio or Vance, and voters clearly still support it. MAGA is powerful. MAGA is more popular than the moderate faction you imagine supplanting it. MAGA has spent ten years purging the moderate faction. So where are you getting this idea that the moderate faction is about to totally win? From the pronouncements of the moderate faction? From the pronouncements of people who want MAGA to lose?
You see why this looks like wishcasting, yes?
The Japanese radio broadcaster assured me that the Japanese are winning in the Pacific -- it must be true. Let's discuss.
the need for a revitalized GOP, capable of once more cooperating across the aisle with their Democratic counterparts
See what I mean?
I don't see why Republican voters would want to cooperate with the Democratic party, but I can see why the Democratic party would want pliant Republicans again.
the American military has failed
Well I guess if you believe that Trump should be surrendering any day now, although he seems to have had the chance to already. But I have to add that if you are calling the war with Iran a failure and the war with Iraq a success, this is such an inversion of American sentiment that I'm not sure you really are a part of it. Are you aware of being provocative? Consider:
atrophying of the military industrial complex
Nobody in America would judge that the MIC is getting weaker.
the lack of cooperation and involvement with allied countries via NATO
Nobody in America considers NATO all that powerful, frankly.
(Actually, I think if I went around to average Americans and said something like "We could have won in Iran already if the Europeans had joined us" I would get a lot of laughs. The only people who seem to consider the Europeans important in the way you're describing are the Europeans themselves.)
Trump hamstringing the army and navy due to his obsession with “making deals”
So the theory is that Trump is sitting on a big button labeled "Win the Iran War" and hasn't pushed it because he's too nice? He negotiates too much? I think I need an explanation here. The idea is that we are going to replace Trump, who is weak because he is "obsessed with making deals," with a "revitalized GOP, capable of once more cooperating across the aisle"? MAGA is weak because Trump is a failure because he likes making deals, therefore we need a strong GOP that... makes deals with Democrats?
This contradiction seems so damning to me in your entire frame of reference that I'm tempted to delete the rest of my post and just emphasize this. You believe that America should replace Trump and his "making deals" with a "broad, consensus-based politics"? Huh?
Besides this, there is obviously no hunger for that right now in America.
his rule has largely been to the detriment of the country, especially as it pertains to America’s relationship with its allies in NATO
Are you European, by chance?
Shakes
3mo ago
Trump posting Obama's face on monkeys on social media
Trump posted a recording of a social media meme, which at the end briefly autoplayed the next video (the infamous Lion King meme) before being cut off. Trump made the rare apology and deleted the post altogether.
Shakes
3mo ago
As a follow-up question when do you believe sanctions against Iran started to be imposed?
Shakes
3mo ago
Graham Platener
This guy’s publicist deserves a raise. I went on his Wikipedia page just now to remind myself of some particulars and found it to be extremely, extremely sympathetic without ever actually appearing biased.
The detail I was looking for was his time at George Washington University. There’s a whole class of guys who congregate at a few institutions like GW so they can groom themselves for politics. (Pete Buttigieg and Vivek Ramiswamy are similar types although not GW kids.)
I’m not sure if this actually translates to mass appeal or not. Democrats have convinced themselves it does, and they’re all excited about that, but I’m not sure that that means it’s a real phenomenon. And if they’re excited enough to vote for him he could win with that. The blue collar facade is like a spell you cast to sprinkle victory on your cereal. One reason I think it doesn’t matter is that the nazi tattoos don’t seem to matter, because nobody is really looking at this guy as a flesh-and-blood human being. He’s an idea of a person, and has successfully convinced Democrats that the idea he is projecting will win and therefore allow them to acquire more power. So isn’t the rest all just rationalizing?
Seems like Collins would win to me, because apparently she always outperforms her polls, although maybe she is uniquely vulnerable this year or maybe Plattner really is uniquely strong.
If she does lose, I think it would have more to do with an argument I’ve seen advanced by people like Mike Cernovich. What good has Susan Collins done for Maine? It’s overrun with Somalis and welfare fraud now right? Easy enough to imagine a loss in that environment, especially if the only rejoinder is “nazi tattoos”. Turns out no one cares. (?)
Shakes
3mo ago
The logic here still seems to be "Agentic = good, but Trump = bad, therefore Trump is not agentic"
I guess if you really want to imagine Trump is so self-destructive to his own interests I can squint and try to see it, but it doesn't really make sense to me. Because then it's just a bunch of unrelated complaints strung together by panican feeling. What am I supposed to say? We have more deportations than any prior administration and they're increasing every month, what are mass deportations supposed to look like? Is he not investing in "structural Republican electoral advantage"? What does that mean? Congress won't pass SAVE while his DOJ is pressing red states to redistrict so Republicans can keep the House. I don't know, these are a lot of separate and unrelated arguments now but basically none of them touch on the question of whether Trump is agentic. Which is obviously trivially is, seeing as how his entire life is dominated by an appetite for action that's unusual in the extreme. First American President to ever run and win without prior political or military experience, but there's nothing worth admiring or learning from in that because the Iran war is taking longer than a week.
Shakes
3mo ago
We are ten years into the Trump era now, which was inaugurated in 2015 with a primary waged on dissatisfaction with the GOP establishment. That the base has been dissatisfied with Republican leadership is one of the central facts of American politics. It's why we have Trump. It's why half a dozen Indiana state senators got primaried yesterday after they refused to redistrict. It's why Erick Erickson got pushed out of mainstream Republican politics. It's why the Republican Party was happy to dump Trump throughout the 2020 election crisis. It's also a very simple explanation for why the Republican party is unable to pass Voter ID even though a supermajority of the American public consistently polls in favor of it. I don't know what else to add here. I think you are misunderstanding one of the basic facts of American politics and are now trying to invent alternate explanations for things trivially understood in my worldview.
Yes, Erickson is generally much smarter than the grifters.
Erick Erickson is an extremely stupid man filling out the D Tier of conservative talking head punditry whose big claim to fame is saying stupid things on the radio while having a funny name. One day he calls Trump a fascist and says he'll never vote for him, the next day he's endorsing him for President, one day he's calling Supreme Court Justices "goat fuckers" and debating whether Michelle will cut off Barack's penis, the next day he's policing Trump's tone. No consistent principles. Erick Erickson is not smarter than the grifters, he is a grifter. Please, please spare me this delusional fat imbecile's self-serving fantasies about his high-minded Christian principles. (It must be nice to be principled when you can make a lot of money advertising how principled you are. I'm pretty sure Jesus says not to do this somewhere. Maybe Erick Erickson can spend some time contemplating the Christian principle of fasting and lose some weight?)
I consider this argument won because instead of confronting head-on anything I said you have pivoted to a non-sequitur about Republicans' prospects in the midterms. Although I don't see why Republicans would lose the midterms when we apparently have the power to commit election fraud without being punished. Seems simple. Republicans nationalize the Puerto Rico model and Democrats can't do anything about it because they don't know how to commit election fraud.
Maybe I'm getting too snarky. But I don't really understand why I'm being treated as the stupid one when your position seems to be that Republicans are too moral for politics.
Shakes
3mo ago
Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up.
Mostly because the only evidence leftists will ever accept is these bizarre reverse style "gotcha!" stories where they can be safe horny for election integrity. As soon as I read the words "there's a twist you might not expect" I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens. As long as we simultaneously arrive at the correct conclusion that, well, it can't have mattered anyways.
It's interesting, right? Criminal conspiracy to buy votes that, apparently, can only ever have maxed out at 5,000 votes in an election where the margin is way above that. You know it's futile, I know it's futile, but apparently the gangs organizing it didn't know it was futile? Weird that everyone involved thought this was worth doing when some back of the napkin math "proves" it can never have been worth doing. Why did they do it then? Well, they must have been irrational somehow, thankfully we don't have to examine our priors about whether election fraud is real or not.
Remember kids, though the GOP won in 2024 with Trump getting the popular vote, the grifters will tell you the losses this year are because the SAVE Act didn’t pass.
Note that this isn't even an argument against the SAVE act, this is just an argument that Erick Erickson is wise and his enemies are silly, while he sits in the corner watching. It might not even be true: this Wapo op-ed argues that the SAVE Act would turn Nevada and New Mexico into solid red states just by changing the voter pool. It doesn't even require us to believe in election fraud; The GOP simply chooses to play by rules that cause them to lose when they have a popular mandate and the power to change the rules. That's at least the decision Erick Erickson would make, as he looks down on me from his superior moral pedestal while pressing the "Keep Losing" button over and over again.
It's not like this guy is going to make a habit of murder by megaphone.
No but if the state government says "You can attack people at protests and get away with it as long as we like you and it's plausibly ambiguous," the mob can make a habit of it.
Shakes
3mo ago
Many MAGA optimists don't gauge things by what is happening around them. It's exactly like you say. Their barometer is what Trump does. If he does X, then X was the best thing to do because they trust Trump. Their gas prices going up or their jobs moving away or their farms going bankrupt is just not accounted for as a counterfactual.
I'm not sure what you're intending. Most people don't reason in the sense you're describing. There is no mass reserve of people who "gauge things by what is happening around them". Most people get their opinions from life experience, and most life experience is consuming media. There's nothing novel about MAGA here except that we broadly trust Trump's judgment. So that, if gas prices go up, I assume this was judged relative to other options and found to be the best course of action. It's not even that mysterious. It's not hard for me to make a case for why Trump went to war with Iran or how this is potentially a good thing. I don't have to appeal to mysterious subrational forces.
HBD has no place in mainstream conservative politics. The functional reason for the existence of the dissident right is to be a right winger that can acknowledge HBD.
Respectfully, conservative politics has moved way far beyond whether conservatives can talk about race.
From what I can tell the Trump we have now is so far removed from the 2016 Trump it's not comparable. If one wants to say that every decision that he has made that has removed him from his original brand has been the best course of action, then I'd ask, best course towards what? Draining the swamp, building a border wall and kicking all the foreigners out and give jobs to Americans? Or the best course of action for Trump to stay in power?
Well we are building a border wall and this is the first administration in generations that has seen more foreigners leaving America than coming in. As for draining the swamp, Trump has politically defeated a lot of powerful people in his attempt to reform the American government. To me this reads like making the perfect the enemy of the good, and declaring that, since Trump hasn't accomplished everything he must have moderated. But I don't know anyone, not a single person, who has ever accomplished everything they intended.
Shakes
3mo ago
You've again just defined "agentic" to mean "Trump does what I want". Maybe Trump has different priorities from you.
For instance, fuel prices. Trump decided to go to war with Iran, which is currently causing fuel prices to go up. Trump decided that the risk was worth it. Ok, you can argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that it shows that Trump is agentic?
For instance, voter ID. Trump cannot pass voter ID unilaterally, because of Congress. So he writes executive orders on mail-in ballots and cuts backroom deals to try to get votes for the SAVE act. Maybe President RandomRanger would say screw that and send in the troops. Ok, you could argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that this shows that Trump is not agentic?
Shakes
3mo ago
There is something very admirable about the seemingly boundless faith some grassroots MAGA supporters have for Trump. It's a pure loyalty exercise for them. To a point where reality itself is just a test to be overcome.
Well I don't know I feel pretty confident that it's my view that matches reality and everyone else is just too jaded to believe in anything because they're cynical and old and mad at God. It's as if you described Christianity in very clinical terms and said, "There's something pure about belief in Christ even though these Christians have to put fact aside." Well, no, Christians believe (I believe) that Christianity is based in fact, just like I believe my support for Trump is based in fact.
But I understand that my perspective is rare so I get what you're trying to say etc. etc.
Now how does one explain that as a race blind MAGA supporter in Trump's America? Do some similarly half baked sociology based on the Moynihan Report? Do we just advocate for the implementation of a genuine white supremacy to mend the black nuclear family back together through force? Or do we just not talk about it?
Sorry, it's not clear to me contextually what specifically is being hypothetically explained here, the existence of the racial gap as such? I think the mainstream conservative position is that blacks and whites behave differently, and then you fill that difference with some ratio of "culture" and "race" depending on how racist you are. And this more or less explains everything, without having to reach into every social institution and change every facet of society. I like the take of a friend of mine who described DC's local government as having "an abusive relationship" with respect to local voters.
Not talking about things seems to be the preferred option for dealing with most things that are unpleasant to think about for the MAGA optimists. We instead trust our leaders and don't think too much about things.
This is a fierce, omnipresent debate within MAGA and I really only ever hear this line from people who don't like my explanation for why I trust Trump. It can't be that I've thought things through and reached a different conclusion from them (from you), it's that I haven't thought it through.
I guess, to add some specificity here instead of just talking on the meta level: I trust Trump because he's smarter than me, has better information than I have, and has better instincts than I have. People look at me like I have two heads when I say this, but if you were learning physics and your teacher demonstrated obvious learning you wouldn't say, "I trust my teacher and don't think too much about things." No, he clearly knows more than me, in this situation it's correct to be a little humble and learn something. I mean that with zero sycophancy.
To take an even more specific example, let's take immigration. I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. After ten years of Trumpian politics, I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. Now, in the day-to-day, there are all sorts of stories, why isn't Trump deporting more people, is this a broken campaign promise, or why hasn't Trump tried this strategy instead of that strategy, or what's he doing in Minnesota, or maybe he should defy judges, or this or that. There's a lot we could sit and debate I guess. But ultimately what reason do I have for actually supposing that Trump is wrong? He's much more agentic than I am, he's much more successful than I am, he has much better political instincts than I do, he has much more information than I do, he has much better judgment than I do. So take Minnesota. Maybe he could have done what twitter is saying and doubled down and called it an insurrection and declared martial law and forced an even bigger crisis. I'm sure that was presented to him as an option. But he didn't take it. Why would I assume that my judgment is better than his? Because I scroll twitter?
Note that this logic is not a blank check for trusting all leaders blindly. When leadership of the Republican Party passes to Marco Rubio or JD Vance I don't suppose that they will replicate Trump's skill in every domain. (Although they probably deserve more deference than random posters on twitter.) Likewise Obama and Biden don't deserve this kind of deference just by virtue of being the president. (Actually if there was one Democratic leader I would defer to it would be Nancy Pelosi: if you were a Democrat it would be entirely reasonable to take cues from her about what is politically possible, you wouldn't be very credible if you claimed to know better than her. That's because she earned it after a very long career of very highly-demonstrated competence.) Anyways, Trump has obviously performed at the highest levels for a generation now and succeeded in situations everyone else thought impossible. That actually obviously, trivially merits a pretty high level of trust. Backseat driving every decision Trump makes is about as compelling to me as a fat washed-up beer-belly in a sports jersey complaining that he can tell every time Lebron James makes a mistake.
I'm trying to lay this out very neutrally although reading back I think this conversation is not quite the right jumping-off point and I'll have to try again in the future. But I'm bored at work and I have time at my desk and so why not. I get why this sounds so irrational and strange to people. I also believe that Donald Trump dodged a bullet in an obvious miracle and is clearly chosen by God and clearly represents the deep spirit of America, U-S-A, U-S-A, and we're all too cynical so we need a reason why we should listen when Mom tells us not to touch the hot stove. But putting that aside I think loyalty can be extremely rational, which is what I'm trying to enunciate.
Just listen to cope merchants on Fox and friends tell us about how everything is under control.
As an aside, Fox has always been relatively critical of Trump and is definitely not where you go to hear happy stories about how everything is fine. Fox is where you go to hear about how woke transgender dog clinics are ruining San Francisco with vegan homeless shelters. If I was woke I would watch Fox News because it would make me feel powerful.
Shakes
3mo ago
Yeah Trump makes mistakes too what does that have to do with whether he's agentic or not? In the sense of the discussion about ressentiment and whether the populist right is the political faction that casts itself as powerless and mad.
the origin of the TACO idea
When you're actually "in the arena" the amount of criticism you face is infinite and I don't consider the fact that it exists to prove much of anything. One tweak in the algorithm and the viral meme would be "Trump Always Overdoes It" or whatever.
Shakes
3mo ago
It’s clear you and Donald Trump have different priorities. We shall have to fine some way of judging whose are more successful.
Shakes
3mo ago
More on the populist right surely
The populist right? Which populist right?
Maybe if you mean the groypers and GOPe. I don't expect the Motte to like my answer here, but I only find these feelings of ressentiment among the Panicans. Trump himself is maybe the most agentic man in the world, even when he's complaining about unfair treatment on twitter. I don't see impotence fantasies from the people behind Iran and Venezuela, or Trump's Ballroom and Victory Arch, or the MAGA loyal faithful who think we could pull out a victory in the midterms. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from the anti-Israel crowd and the neo-Tucker / Kent / MTG / Candace Owens people who say MAGA was betrayed and everything was lost. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from Hill Staffers and Congressmen who all of them, to a man, no matter what they say in public, believe that the midterms are 100% a guaranteed Republican loss so anything Trump tries to do about it is actually cope and therefore illegitimate. (They not only believe that we deserve to lose the redistricting wars for this reason, but that Trump squandered his 2024 mandate because of stuff like ICE protests in Minneapolis, oh well, we tried nothing and ran out of ideas, we deserve to lose, maybe we can try again next time in 3028.)
I suspect I will be accused of gross partisanship or bias but when I scan the landscape it's the faction that believes we can Make America Great Again that is the most ruthlessly optimistic about the future of America. Who is more excited about the state of the future today? The tech people? The peptide biohackers? I don't see a wellspring of optimism about the future coming from many other places.
More than that though:
It takes its root in equally incurable impotencies or weaknesses that those subjects constantly suffer from. These impotencies generate either individual or collective, but always negative emotive attitudes.
Does this not actually describe, to a T, the modern leftist emotional bent? It's the left subsumed in infinite impotence fantasies about how invisible ineradicable all-powerful forces permeate society at every level. They believe, for example, that White Supremacy is woven into the fabric of American life, it explains everything bad that happens to a minority anywhere, you can't log off and ignore it, you can't hard work your way out of it, you can't argue with it. A black man who fails failed because of White Supremacy. A black man who succeeds succeeded despite White Supremacy. We have to have massive, world-spanning DEI infrastructure to even begin to address the imbalance, it's never enough, we need police reform, we need reparations for Haiti, we need gun control. We can't even begin to address everything wrong with the world until we address capitalism, and to do that we have to fight the billionaires.
Is it not a movement premised around an extremely negative emotional outlook?
Climate change is going to destroy the world and as individuals we're powerless to do anything about it.
Sexism and racism are vast systemic forces and as individuals we're powerless to address them.
Technology and capitalism are destroying the world and as individuals we're powerless to change things.
Leftists often believe in all these powerlessness fantasies even as they do exercise real power. Climate change is the perfect example, real environmental problems that could be solved are subsumed into the ultimate global problem. Instead of getting people to go into the forest and pick up trash out of the river, you get them to protest for regulations that could curb 1% of a country's Co2 emissions over a 15-year period so that 0.02% of the global climate problem can be alleviated. It's actually extremely consistent, a lot of leftism is a machine for transmuting its followers real problems into vast impersonal forces that we are all powerless to do anything about (until the final defeat of capitalism i.e. Alex Jones and Donald Trump).
It might at best recognize the disorder when, for instance, a ressentiment-subject says, "There is something wrong with me." But this is very rare among those subjects,
I mean, "personal responsibility" is an idea so obviously coded one way that it's at this point a bad cliche.
Shakes
3mo ago
This seems to me to be doing a lot of mind-reading not in evidence. We don't actually know what risk assessments Trump had in mind before beginning the war and we don't know whether the American military leadership is even dissatisfied or not. (Likewise, we don't know the full range of options available to Trump and can't really judge his actions half-measures: before committing to ground troops there's always Bridge and Power Plant Day?)
What we do know is that American decapitated the Iranian military, there's a lot of confusion as to who's in charge of Iran, and Trump is pursuing negotiations instead of bombing for now. This all suggests that Trump is fine with the pace of progress because he's not in a special rush to change the status quo.
A month ago many posters were predicting total American catastrophe because Iran could threaten the Straits of Hormuz and shut down the global economy. That prediction hasn't held up very well. It has not successfully predicted an American rush to capitulate and given the Iranians terms. It has not successfully predicted America exiting the war. Likewise, the idea that the next Iranian leader would be some incalcitrant hardliner who would refuse American terms even harder doesn't seem born out. And as the Strait shutdown continues global economic apocalypse has mostly not ensued. Prices are up and maybe that matters in other countries. But in America everybody is already talking about the next Current Thing; last week it was the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Dinner and redistricting.
I guess we'll wait and see.
Shakes
3mo ago
But Harris did back down on woke.
She didn’t repudiate or apologize for any of her older woke positions. She simply stopped talking about them.
The Democrats tried to push for further right immigration policy.
Democrats under Biden let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants. What further right policy? Campaign promises? After implementing very left wing policies why would voters immediately accept that Democrats are going to reverse course?
If Kamala had won, do you think we’d have fewer immigrants coming in? Trump stopped the border crisis, do you think Kamala would have done anything similar? Supported Remain in Mexico? Deporting immigrants? Restricting asylum claims?
Even accepting the premise that it's impossible for a party to the left of the Republican Party to be electorally successful
Where did you get this premise from? It’s not to be found in anything I’ve argued.
Shakes
3mo ago
I am in favor of voiding elections if credible suspicions of election interference are raised by trustworthy sources. Are you implying they made an inaccurate assessment of the situation?
You’re in favor of handing ultimate power to whatever constitutes “trustworthy sources”. I don’t even know what that looks like. Probably bureaucrats in the security state. Everything important to know will ultimately be classified. Call that system whatever you like. Doesn’t sound like democracy to me.
Democracy is ultimately a goal to strive towards, but
See, I won’t mind if you don’t especially value democracy. You’re a socialist, or a utilitarian, or an adherent of scientism, or whatever. You don’t believe in democracy as such, you just admire democracy if it can take you where you’re going. That’s fine, Erdogan famously said democracy was like a bus and he’d get off at his stop. Japanese nationalists and German bureaucrats alike have no problem admitting this is how they feel.
I would certainly consider it justified for a minority to impede their efforts,
Just remember that we invented democracy as an alternative to war. And that’s what you’re eventually going to get if there is no democratic way to deport migrants who will inevitably need to be deported.
Shakes
3mo ago
Woke social policies are not popular. The Democrats under Biden let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants after allowing a crisis at the border, and refuse to own up to it. The Democratic party brand is tarnished with the idea of trans kids, health care for illegal immigrants, lax policing and crime, homeless junkies in public parks, Israel-Palestine divisions, DEI racial and sexual discrimination against whites and young men, and above all their refusal to debate any of these preferences openly. The Party lives in such a bubble that they could not do anything about Joe Biden until his debate performance was so obviously senile that he had to be replaced, which could not even be admitted in public. Which was followed by Kamala Harris, a mediocre candidate everybody disliked who was promoted to VP solely because of her sex and race, which could also not be openly discussed by Democrats anywhere.
Realistically, at the same time, Democrats could have lots of popular successes on other issues. Trans kids are not popular but a mild trans toleration is more in line with American tastes than a trans crackdown. Same with immigration, and guns. Democrats who could convincingly project moderate positions on these social issues -- that are not assumed to be covers for more extreme positions -- would be popular. This would give Democrats lots of room to push their economic agenda, which is broadly popular. Democrats could have healthcare, tariffs, and infrastructure. This is basically what someone like Josh Shapiro did. A national platform along these lines would probably be very successful. In fact, I think if Democrats had adopted something like this all along they would never have lost to Trump in the first place.
Well, it's your choice. But I have correctly identified that you have two options: on woke you can back down or double down. That's what the public dislikes about Democrats the most. That's the most salient issue Democrats could change. It's not the other policies that need working, voters don't like woke. At best you can offer them other policies that make the poison pill go down sweeter. Which requires that whatever Republicans do is worse to voters than woke. Well, maybe it will happen that way. But it's not much of a choice. Double down and hope that Republicans screw up. Good luck!
Shakes
3mo ago
If more legalistic methods had been applied to suppress disinformation from social media sources and the papers were held liable for misinforming the public, this trend could have been “strangled in the crib”, so to speak.
So you're in favor of eliminating the first amendment and freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
a solution can certainly be reached to resolve the issue. If you look at the 2024 Romanian presidential election for instance, the results which favoured a right-wing populistic party was annulled after irregularities were discovered which had shown clear interference from outsider forces to bring an anti-Atlanticist candidate into power.
So you're in favor of voiding elections if forces in the security state allege that they are invalid.
The preoccupation with calling the actions of constitutional governments “anti-democratic” is well understood as a tactic used by forces hostile to democracy
Ok, you can continue to call yourself democratic while suppressing the press and election results you consider anti-democratic. But that's not what most people understand those words to mean.
By the terms most people understand, you are suppressing democratic freedoms to entrench a regime you are calling Democratic. In this scheme Democracy isn't about freedom of the press or free and open elections, but about moderate liberal and conservative parties sharing a monopoly on power. I take it that parties such as Restore and AfD (which represent significant sizes of the electorate) are a priori not democratic. Maybe because they promote mass deportation. Democracy is about never allowing parties that support mass deportation to come to power. Elections are secondary.
Ok, you can invent whatever definitions you want. But most voters are wise to this trick by now and you are not going to get much traction here by advancing it.
Shakes
3mo ago
Why not? It's too soon to really predict confidently but: she polls extremely well among the base, has a national profile few other Dems can match, is already integrated the party elite and can fundraise / network / cut deals etc., she's demographically correct in a party still hesitant to challenge DEI orthodoxies, and she has made indications she's interested in running. She's probably the front-runner.
Gavin Newsom is probably the closest real competitor he has issues that can't be papered over with his bad impression of Trump on twitter. An outcome just as likely is somebody we aren't really thinking about yet going on a barn burner. That's how we got Bill Clinton and Obama.
Hillary was the strong horse. She ran an extremely close primary in 2008 against Obama, which was extremely close and made her the obvious next candidate. She had name recognition and the majority of the Democratic Party on board. She was made Secretary of State as her consolation prize, which meant she was effectively one of the most powerful politicians in America. And she had the better part of a decade for the public to accept that she was the most obvious candidate to be the next President of the United States. Seemingly every TV procedural and light fiction had a blonde lady female President. A woman president! She had this mystique too. Hillary was then able to cut deals within the party to ensure the nomination was all but won. (I do believe the wikileaks reveal that Tim Kaine allowd Debbie Wasserman Schultz to replace him as head of the DNC in exchange for being made Hillary's running mate. But there were other deals made as well.) Hillary was qualified, she was experienced, she was successful, she was famous, she was even relatively popular. Secretary of State, Senator, First Lady, consumate politician. Foreign policy, Domestic policy. In the lead-up to the 2015 Democratic Primary she was the obvious obvious frontrunner, which is a big part of why nobody serious bothered to run against her.
In hindsight the weaknesses there were latent. A lot of it probably had to do with Obama fatigue. A lot of it was natural generational turnover. In hindsight the fact that she so truly represented the best of the Washington political class is exactly what made her vulnerable. But she was the best of them.
Bernie's primary challenge having legs was a surprise to everybody. It was probably even a surprise to Bernie, who can't have expected that after two generations in the political wilderness on the fringes that he was finally about to go mainstream. It was a lot closer than anyone would have expected in 2014. But it still wasn't really close.
Meanwhile the Republicans didn't have anybody of Hillary's stature. They had a lot of solid candidates by traditional Washington candidate standards and felt good that after 8 years of Obama it was finally their turn to win. But nobody was really ready for prime time. Jeb was theoretically the frontrunner and big hitter, but he had no strong public persona besides his Bush name. Ted Cruz was alienating and weird. Rubio was young and untested. Then there were all these governors and senators and winsome folk. In hindsight it's obvious that they were all weak and Trump tore through the field like wet tissue. But then it was assumed that Trump himself would lose, easily, and Hillary was the obvious favorite.
And so many things had to go right for Trump to win that it could be called divine intervention. 2016 was one of the most shocking things to ever happen in the lifetimes of everyone who lived through it. Those woke posters who called it the most shocking event since 9/11 were woke-more-correct. Nobody expected Trump to win. You had to be extremely weird to have considered it. Half the country thought Hillary was up by ten, the other half sanguinely thought it would be closer than that but she would probably win. It was genuinely shocking to the whole world, one of those events that makes people peer behind the veil and realize how arbitrary life can be and how you go along and there's a plan and the world is certainly on it and then suddenly everything changes and you can see history being made. TPP, Wikileaks, Comey, Obamacare rates, the border crisis, ISIS, Pokemon Go to the Polls.
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