laxam
8mo ago
I think signing on the R ticket and declaring we give too much money to Ukraine and Israel is a really bad way to grift.
That's an absolutely exceptional way to grift. People like Trump and Kari Lake have been doing it for years and raking in the small dollar donations by the millions for years.
When are you people going to realize that you are the establishment. You are the power now, so every time you sneer about the establishment neocons what you're actually doing is sneering as the heel to the face. The """"establishment"""" is terrified of voters that think like you do and have been bending over and spreading wide for almost a decade to try to please you. All they've gotten for it is cascading electoral failure. As someone who likes it when Republicans win, I'm not very happy about that.
laxam
1yr ago
In PA, the Dem vote dropped from 52% to 47.5% (4.5 pts), yet the R vote rose only 1.6 pts (46.6 to 48.2).
Also, for illustration, Trump underperformed state and Federal House Republican candidates in PA by 10,000 or 100,000 votes, respectively. To the extent you can talk about the 'generic Republican' candidate, it actually did outperform Trump.
While Toomey did underperform Trump in raw numbers, it was only a by 20,000 votes and 100,000 fewer votes were cast in the Senate race. Toomey actually beat his opponent by a larger percentage than Trump beat Clinton.
Probably any of the decent choices in 2016 would have beaten Clinton in PA and, thus, the race.
If you break them up into conjugal family units, you can even get some cultural change going.
laxam
7mo ago
The US doesn't have an empire. It is the hegemon within a state system. Abandoning the hegemony doesn't mean it can go back to ignoring the rest of the world and nothing bad will happen to it, it means there will be a new hegemon who will remake the system in its image and without reference to the interests of the United States.
Isolationism worked in the 19th century because the UK decided to be nice to us and no one else had the ability to touch us. Today, the UK is a minor power with no real wooden walls to hide behind, and now anyone with an ICBM can touch us.
laxam
1yr ago
Almost any other Republican would have won. Most other Republicans would also have won the popular vote, instead of squeaking through by the skin of their teeth.
laxam
1yr ago
Income taxes aren't slavery because they don't force you to work. A 100% land value tax really would be like confiscation of property-in-land.
laxam
3mo ago
The other Arab states couldn't care less about Israel. The Baathists were the only ones who ever actually disliked Israel at higher echelons of government and Saddam is dead and Assad has got bigger problems to worry about. The monarchies occasionally make anti-Israeli noises for their populaces but otherwise don't give a damn, Egypt has been sucking on the American military funding teet in exchange for peaceful relations with Israel for so long that the mask-for-money has become just standard Egyptian policy, and other Arab states are too distant to actually be bothered.
laxam
6mo ago
The idea that the parties themselves should be Democratic organizations is itself a Progressive idea. They did fine for a long time functioning as deliberative, member organizations which we're focused on winning general, rather than primary elections.
laxam
1yr ago
The CC monitor was large and immediately behind the moderators. You could see it in some shots.
laxam
7d ago
Also, Scots are Celts
Highlanders, yes. Lowland Scots are Anglos with a funny accent and some Celtic wives.
laxam
7d ago
'Christianity' declined in America when elite institutions started getting filled up with Catholics and jews. This happened in the 1940's and by the 1960's the new 'elite' was throwing their weight around. The old WASP ideals were pushed aside. That's all there is to the story of modern America. 1,2
The Modernism versus Traditionalism split in the Presbyterian Church pre-dates the 1940's. The split between what were essentially modern professional class atheists and fundamentalist Christians who still insisted on the Westminster confession dates from then, at the latest, not from the 1960's.
The growth of socialism, progressivism, modernism, and secularism in the 19th and early 20th century elite is something you can't ignore when telling a story about American social history. The guys in the scenes at Harvard from the 1930's in The Good Shepherd were quintessential WASPs but they certainly weren't Puritans.
And, of course, the most resounding condemnation of this from the 20th century, God and Man at Yale, was written by a Catholic conservative...
laxam
29d ago
I don't know about 'horrifically riven' but it did have plenty of civil war and strife over the years.
laxam
3mo ago
The IRG is a few hundred thousand personnel. If 'a few layers' was more than a couple of thousand people I would be shocked.
laxam
3mo ago
The point is that the Israelis aren't actually a source of instability in the region, except in terms of their relationship with the Palestinians. Get rid of the latter and you've solved the problem. Get rid of the former and you've still got a problem because they're a radicalized Islamist population which hates all of their neighbors.
laxam
5mo ago
What about in the more literal sense of being not male gendered or female gendered?
laxam
5mo ago
A tiny portion of our energies, maybe. It's not like these things are mutually exclusive.
Of course, a huge part of that was that the American people didn't really care, at the end of the day, once Bin Laden was dead. Israelis will care about what happens in the Gaza Strip.
laxam
8mo ago
But, I do agree this is substantively a center-left country, and a few lucky EV wins (Bush in 2000, Trump in 2016) along with great timing on SC Judges dying have given right-leaning people an overrated view of their own support within the country
Only ever paying attention to Presidential elections is going to give you a really warped view of the country and the electorate.
First: if you think the US was a center-left country in 2000, you're just lost. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Second: Republicans controlled at least one chamber in 39 out of 50 state legislatures in 2016 and had 31 governorships (and would win 3 more that year). The US was still a center right ght country in 2016, it's just that the Trump years have caused a lot of center-right people to question their convictions just enough to be willing to vote for what at least looks like a sane Democrat over Trump or a Trump affiliated Republican.
laxam
10mo ago
their preferred outcome is to continue to lose forever
They were doing a lot of winning down ballot prior to 2016 for a bunch of people who like losing.
In fact, most of the losing they've been doing has been from 2018, onward.
laxam
1yr ago
My wife and I work around this by completely banning having a cookie by yourself in the house. If you want one, you have to get one for the other, too. This means you have both the impulse control of each person as well as making it relatively rare for both people to be craving cookies at the same time, so it's very rare for us to have more than one or two each. I can't think of the last time we've done anything even close to having a whole box in one sitting.
It also helps we don't keep particularly delectable cookies like flavored Oreos in the house at all, anymore.
laxam
1yr ago
I'm going to take a wild guess and say you probably think it's fine for the federal security services to collude with Twitter, facebook, google, and most major media corporations to manipulate the information available to voters.
Not particularly. I just don't think it's enough to win elections all on its own. A bit better distribution of votes and the GOP picks up 10 more House seats (the 10th closest seat last year was NC-13. The Dem won by a tad less than 9,000 votes out of 250,000 cast. Vote distribution across distributions based on turnout differentials and last minute independent swings and the like are a bitch. The Democrats complain about them constantly). Some saner Gubernatorial and Senatorial candidate choices and the GOP probably picks up a few governor's mansions (or refrains from losing them) and a Senate seat or two.
As an example, the AZGOP received more total votes in House elections than the AZDEMS by more than 300,000. While the AZGOP ran two more candidates than the AZDEMS, it was still a larger gross than Katie Hobbs got in the gubernatorial election and just an inch more than Mark Kelly in the Senate election. The AZGOP also swept the vote totals in the state house and senate, (58-42 and 55-45, respectively, although again the AZGOP ran more candidates in both, 8 more -- two of which were independents who got less than 2,000 votes total -- in the state house, and 1 more in the state senate). Same story in PA: the vote gross was heavily weighted toward the PAGOP in both the state and Federal House elections (by 400,000 in the state house and a bit under 300,000 in Federal House elections). While the gross here doesn't total to more than Shapiro or Fetterman got, there was the obvious anchor of Mastriano that wasn't present in AZ (Lake had her problems, but she was a very talented television presence and knows what she's doing when speaking to the public. Mastriano had no media presence at all and didn't speak to any audiences that weren't entirely in the bunker for him), borne out by the fact the PAGOP US House candidates totaled almost 500,000 more votes than Mastriano got.
Same thing in GA, where both the state and Federal House gross vote totals would have won outright, without the need for a runoff. Same in Nevada, even.
People can and do vote for the GOP, they just need good candidates (and some luck with voter distribution, and Dem gerrymandering doesn't help -- while I'm more skeptical of the jump to gerrymandering accusations than most, some places, like NV, are egregious) and they can do well. People just need a reason to think voting GOP is a good idea. Depending on how this all shakes out, this may be turn out to be that idea. If deal that was worked out successfully instills budget discipline without people experiencing major damage to their lives and livelihood, it certainly counts as a reason to me.
laxam
1yr ago
Your claim is McCormick would do better than Oz in suburbs and independents except Oz polled ahead of him with those groups and did better with one them in the GOP primary. McCormick's demo was foxnews boomers who did vote for Oz in the general. Oz got killed not because of indep or suburbs, but because no working class people showed up to vote for him. This is why I think McCormick would have done even worse.
1.3 million people voted in the Republican primary, 5.3 million people voted in the general. Primary results don't mean much for the general, otherwise Mastriano wouldn't have gotten blown out everywhere.
it's convenient for the people who have been failing in PA
What's convenient is that, every time a horrid, worthless candidate gets pushed over the primary top by the Orangenfuhrer, their loss is always excusable by something. Even if those losses are totally discordant with how other elections in the state went, like Oz and Mastriano running hundreds of thousands of votes behind the GOP House candidates in PA, or how the AZ GOP Treasurer obliterated their Democratic opponent. There's always some excuse.
Also, Trump's 2016 'get out the vote program' in PA...received fewer votes in PA than Obama, both times.
laxam
1yr ago
So you think McCormick would have done better with which part of the electorate?
McCormick would have cleaned up in the suburbs and with independents, both groups Oz somehow managed to lose against a socialist loser with heart problems. McCormick codes as a business conservative in places that used to only elect business conservatives like the Philly collar counties. He would especially have had an easy time riding to victory over the brain dead if Lou Barletta were at the top of the ticket instead of Mastriano, who acted like an anchor, dragging the entire state party down with him.
McCormick may well still end up a Pennsylvania Senator. There's a lot of interest in having him run for Bob Casey's seat, although Casey is a tougher nut to crack than Fetterman was.
laxam
1yr ago
Yeah, and even the ultra-wealthy Southern plantation owners were the analogical poor cousins of European nobility, who were forced by markets and circumstances to take an unseemly level of interest in the day to day management of their farms, ie. they were rural capitalists subject to market pressures.
Their favorite pastime was even bitching about their Scottish factors.
The Trump era has been a historic disaster for the Republican Party downballot. After fighting and clawing it's way into centuriate power during the Tea Party era, reaching a peak of state and local power in 2016 unmatched since the 1920s, the anti-Trump backlash drove them out of power everywhere in 2018 and 2019.
They have the luck that the Democrats really suck at not just assuming they will hold power forever, so driving yet more backlash, but people in many places would rather have Democratic leftists over Trumpist conspiracy theorists (even if that is a near run thing).
The fact that the crazies have gained local party power in a lot of places is going to be a hobble on the party's performance for a long time. Arizona -- what is probably still a light red state in natural circumstances -- is probably going to be become blue just because the AZGOP is nuts.
My local party has stayed mostly sane, thankfully, so hopefully we can finish pushing the Democrats who won county control for the first time in half a century back into minority status. We'll see.
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