Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
6mo ago
In a reversal of traditional stereotypes, the GOP is wracked by infighting while the Dems are maintaining party discipline.
The GOP is wedged. It does appear that the largest segment of the GOP is willing to go along with whoever, but there are more than enough intransigents to scuttle any candidate. The right-wing extremists have fully embraced the far left attitude of "burn it down, we'll sort out the details later" and are nearly as happy to have no speaker as to have one of their own. Anything done to appease them alienates the moderates (such as they are), and vice versa. The far right can't strike a deal with the Dems for obvious reasons; neither can the moderates, both because they're mostly not actually that moderate and because their own primary voters will eat them alive if they do (another leftist meme the right has embraced is purity spirals, see also: "Tom Emmer's not a conservative"). And the majority is so slim you have to satisfy everyone.
Meanwhile, the Dems are, at least for now, content to say "not my monkeys, not my circus". They've made noises about being willing to make a deal, but they don't have much reason to save a GOP speaker without major concessions. They believe, probably correctly, that the spectacle of the GOP being held hostage by its right wing and the looming threat of a shutdown will make them look good by comparison.
Because it doesn't comport with the basic facts. Nobody here seems to be able to answer the question of why, if the Democrats/Blue States are hypocrites who are only pro-immigration when it's somewhere else, they are fine with the literal millions immigrants that live in their states (significantly more, I will note, than in red states - California has ~25% of all illegal immigrants in the entire country, while blue states have twice the overall number). The story the nativists are trying to tell is just nonsensical.
Obviously the accurate term should be "contingent electors", in the sense that these would have been the correct electors if Trump prevailed in his various lawsuits.
If Trump had won his lawsuits with decisive implications for the election, his slate of electors still had to be appointed by the state legislature. In the absence of that, they're not contingent electors, they're nobody. The only contingency is whether or not he won, which he didn't. In Michigan, for example, the fake electors gathered and selected themselves after all the lawsuits had been resolved (not to Trump's favor, needless to say). They subsequently represented themselves to Congress as the true electors from Michigan despite not being appointed by the legislature. That Congress wasn't fooled doesn't make it less a crime, any more than my attempts to shoot you don't cease to be a crime because my gun jams (nor is my sincere belief that murdering you is justified and legal a defense).
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Most Americans really don't see what's so hard about giving everyone an ID and tell them to bring it to the polls.
This is the sticking point. Republican political leaders have not been particularly enthusiastic about the universal ID part of voter ID laws. Only about half of states with photo ID laws provide free IDs, and the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).
The simplest thing to do would be to have a Federal voter database and an associated ID, but that seems to be considered generally unattractive.
The proposals consistently poll very well across both parties and independents.
A lot of things poll very well across both parties and independents until you start talking specifics.
This idea sounds plausible on its own
Does it? That seems like it doesn't pass the smell test to me. The correlation between things like personal liberty + economic prosperity and how aristocratic a given society was/is seems quite negative. If nothing else, contrast the US or Britain (no/vestigial aristocracy) with the Russian Empire (deeply aristocratic and reactionary, also bringing up the rear in terms of economic development and personal liberty). Nor would we expect aristocratic societies to do well on this front - landowning elites are primarily concern with the extraction of land rents and the preservation of their privileges. A merchant class threatens their power base and letting a peasant sue his lord undermines their elite status.
it co-exists in the DR with a ravenous hatred of "elites" and "globalists". How does that make any sense?
They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed dukes.
There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right?
There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
How many kids do you think would teach themselves math via the internet? Or how to read?
If you want to argue that there's a more efficient and/or effective method of delivering universal education than the status quo, I'm quite willing to believe that. I do not find it plausible that internet-based autodidacticism is one of them.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Conservative politics in the US is extremely Southernized - the South is cultural heart of American conservatism (especially the paleo varieties). Loving the South and Southern myths Southern iconography is very common, even if you're not from the South yourself. Attacking them is off limits.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
My point being that when someone says "the deep state sabotage Donald Trump" or words to that effect, they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".
Regarding the partisan lean of government employees, I refer other comments in this thread. I don't think there is some intrinsic quality of government employment that makes it skew dramatically liberal (and indeed, certain types skew very conservative for pretty much the same reason in reverse).
Skibboleth
9mo ago
One thing they shouldn't do is start throwing more dynamite in the flaming pile.
If you want to preserve institutions, constant escalation is not the way to do it. And that of course goes for both sides.
On the contrary, that is exactly what they should do. Doubly so considering the top-down nature of the affair. The imperative is to send a message that you can play the game or you can sit out, but you cannot try to flip the table. If you can call for an insurrection and then call a mulligan when it fails, there's no reason not to do so every time you lose.
Skibboleth
4d ago
I'm being a little glib. As a pejorative it's tended to have pro-free market connotations, though when right-wingers adopt the term they tend to emphasize the globalist aspect of that rather than the anti-regulation/anti-public sector implication of left-wing usage. In either case, it tends to suffer from lumping together a wide range of people who may not be part of the same political coalition as each other or hold the views imputed to them.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
How is that winning the issue?
Any Federal voter ID law actually able to make it through Congress is likely to also impose restrictions on election administration that red states don't want. Avoiding Federal standards for voter qualification and election administration gives more leeway to put their thumb on the scale.
Alabama already exists.
Although frankly, that jibe could be applied to a lot of red states. Conservative Christianity is an extremely powerful political force in Republican-dominated states. What it isn't, that it sort of used to be, is a cultural juggernaut. The opprobrium of the religious right carries very little weight outside of the religious right. They have virtually no influence over trends in media/entertainment (outside of internally produced media that is largely considered a joke by outsiders). Increasingly, young people aren't interested in the story they tell about the world and are shedding their religious affiliations. Etcetera. A lot of recent conservative political priorities are fundamentally about trying to remediate cultural defeats with state power.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc
See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Push come to shove we'll bomb every oil pipe and free Europe from that addiction.
We can't even agree to aid the people who are currently in a hot war with Russia. Until that happens, the idea that we're going to comprehensively destroy European energy infrastructure is a touch laughable.
Even if true, it kind of runs counter to the Trump is NBD narrative.
Again, an economy about equal to Italy
If Italy could figure out a way to leverage boutique luxury goods into military and political power they could make a play for regional hegemon as well.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.
Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.
Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Breaking the power of Southern elites and the subsequent century of white supremacist rule in the South.
Killing seems excessive. Redistribution of the planter class' assets to their former slaves would have sufficed alongside actually maintaining legal and physical protection of freedmen (which, as we saw, was very much necessary).
Skibboleth
4mo ago
I think it’s a general progressive aversion to the idea of bad behavior having bad outcomes and good behavior having good outcomes
I think this is a bad model. You can find people who think like this, but it's a specific case of a broader disagreement over the actual mutability of outcomes.
(American) Conservatives adhere to a kind of socio-economic Calvinism and think outcomes are fixed, so we should be preoccupied with punishing bad behavior so they can't ruin it for everyone else. This is important for the conservative world view because without it they're just the latest round of elites explaining why it's god's will that they're rich and you're poor.
Progressives believe outcomes are changeable (as do most people left of center, though their specific analysis varies) and often think focusing on punishment for bad behavior is a distraction or outright impediment to improving outcomes. This is important to the progressive world view because without it they're just pissing straight up.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
The shared message in question isn't just saying not to drink bud light or shop at Target. It never says the g-word, but the phrase "shoving it in children's faces" has pretty unambiguous implications.
Skibboleth
1d ago
Why not say that instead of using a needlessly vague and conspiratorial sounding term?
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I apologize; I misinterpreted the question.
I don't think it's a very useful question (or at least not one I have a useful answer for), because I don't use the term except in reference to people who self-describe as such. You can look back to late 18th/early 19th century liberals, but that's a political context that's almost unrecognizable to today. I guess if you want my short answer: classical liberalism properly refers to a historical political tradition which has been succeeded by various offspring.
Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.
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