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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18896 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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I'm really hoping that the Republican wave coming our way (I have some positions on Republicans winning both the House and the Senate) will cool the fire on leftwing extremism. We need a de-escalation in this country and it's never going to happen while left-aligned people continue to belabor their most noxious positions.

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

No, democrats won’t de escalate, I mean they decided to run on abortion up to birth with a side of gun control in Texas of all places while their candidate was busily moderating his positions on energy and taxes. Everything we know about these people suggests they’d rather lose than moderate.

I dunno, independently of what your positions on those issues are, do you think those are the ones hurting the Dems at the moment?

Of course I'm just an outside observer, but insofar as I've seen - apart from inflation and general economy, which are a whole other category - the culture war issue where the Dems have moderated a lot from two years ago is crime, ie. they're not talking about defunding the police and indeed seem to be explicitly repudiating such stances.

I think that an unwillingness to move towards the center on those issues is a major reason for democrats' perception as being socially extreme, yes.

This is in Texas specifically though?

Maybe they're going for the "throw yourself against the wall enough times and it'll break eventually" tactic?

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

Undoubtedly there are extremist elements on the left (and right) who will be outraged regardless of the outcome. I think the better question is what comes after Republicans winning the house and senate.

Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era? Do we unite around democracy and liberalism in the face of Russia invading Ukraine and China doing China things, or continue to sour on our ideals and flirt with authoritarianism? I don't mean taking military action against either, but for America to lead the free world it has to believe in it, and it has to believe that is more important than what are mostly low-stakes domestic squabbles. Unilateral action from either side won't lead to de-escalation; all the stakeholders need to buy into it.

Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era?

The first one.

Both parties have learned that bipartisanship is bad because it's better to have no wins than give your opponents a shared win.

I'd be thrilled with a few years of gridlock. For legislation, "better than nothing" is a high standard.

compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era?

Bill Clinton (D), whose laws today are derided by dems as being too racist, ie too rightist. Yet it is the Republicans whom the media accuses of moving away from the centre.

Weird compromise where even if one party wholly adopted the positions of the other, it would still be insufficient.

You appear to have missed the word "compromise", and have concluded that the legislation in an era with a Democrat president perfectly reflected the policy positions of the Democrats regardless of who held the legislature.

Was the error founded in ignorance or partisanship? Either way, you're part of today'a political problem.

Meanwhile, the right bitches about NAFTA, free trade, globalization, trickle-down economics and military intervention abroad even as they pushed it in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. What? You don't want those things anymore? Huh. Funny how that works.

About 20% of the electorate was too young to vote during the Clinton era. Pretend population growth was zero and another ~20% of voters died in the last 25 years. So maybe 40% of the electorate turned over...and you're surprised that neither Democrats nor Republicans want the same things they did? The fact that you want the 90s frozen in amber forever rather than the 70s or 50s says more about you than the media or either political party.

Was military intervention right-coded in the Clinton era? I wasn't politically engaged then but I know in the West Wing "Republicans want to have the biggest army and never send it anywhere" was presented as a commonplace joke.

There are two different types of political extremism, I think. A Republican wave would make the leftists desperate and more extreme outside power structures (to the extent that they even exist outside those). The opposite would make them arrogant and more extreme within them. The only things that would deescalate their extremism in the long run would be federal student debt cancellation, the nationalization of healthcare, a federal minimum wage and so on.

I personally think it is entirely within the power of the mainstream democrat/left wing to reign in their extremists (excepting that last 1-3% of real hardcore who will just lash out regardless) with a little bit of carrot and stick (emphasis on stick) but there's seemingly very little political will to do so. Not the least because the leaders of the party are likely insulated from any impact they could cause.

It's definitely a major risk of couching your side as the 'resistance' and letting your people train in political insurgency since those tactics can be turned against you when you try to bring them back into the fold.

Something something we have to arm the moderate rebels to fight the radical ones.

(disclaimer: I have ceased to care about what the radical left or right get up to, as long as it is far away from me and my family. I live in a safe neighborhood in a safe town)

So the only way to prevent extremism is to give the Democrat extremists exactly what they want?

Would you buy "the only way to prevent abortion extremism is to ban abortions, giving them what they want"

Theoretically it's always possible to simply repress the extremist opposition. But that is not a case of deescalation.

Right up there with, "if you're upset about illegal immigration, then just make immigration legal!" retorts. No, I actually want to win on this issue, it's not a mere technicality or question of appropriate paperwork.

I hoped for that in 2016, but nobody seemed interested in reflection then. Six years of TDS later, do you have a reason to believe that this time will be any better?

I believe a lot of issues are tied up with Trump specifically, rather than policy positions.

If trump announces that he is running again (and possibly winning) we're in for more extremism from both sides.

If Trump announces that he isn't running and that he is endorsing someone else then I think tempers can cool down.

If trump announces that he is running again (and possibly winning) we're in for more extremism from both sides.

What do you see as an extremist position that is currently being pushed by Republicans or that you expect to be pushed if they are in power?

My expectation is that Trump will take legitimate concerns, lie about them, fail to do anything about them and then rile everyone up, eagerly helped by media and other Democrat aligned businesses.

That sounds more lame than extremist, which is pretty much what I expect as well. Whether a literal border wall is a good idea or not, it's not an extreme policy, and I am not inclined to concede the point that it is simply because people react histrionically to Trump.

I don't see your inference that a republican victory will de-escalate things. The last time republicans won on populism, partially on the back of "basket of deplorables" , left extremism (if that's even the right word) kicked into overdrive. The lesson learned in 2016 — based on IRL conversations, not just Twitter — was that the country is shockingly still full of dangerous racists who need to be suppressed. I predict a similar reaction if Trump-backed candidates outperform expectations.

If anything, a republican drubbing might lead to de-escalation, if that's actually what you care about. McConnell's concern about "poor candidate quality" risking a slam dunk GOP victory will come true, the populists will be discredited. The RINO wing of the party will resume control. Things will go back to "normal".

If anything, a republican drubbing might lead to de-escalation, if that's actually what you care about. McConnell's concern about "poor candidate quality" risking a slam dunk GOP victory will come true, the populists will be discredited. The RINO wing of the party will resume control. Things will go back to "normal".

Yes, the "normal" where [Mitt Romney was a dangerous theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale if elected. Even in 2018 still tarred with that brush, before he became "the only good Republican" for being anti-Trump. That "normal". For a certain section of the Democrat side (and this is based on what I see online, so that is going to be both the most exaggerated and the smallest), there is no acceptable Republican because Republicanism is evil. Get rid of the populists, and the moderates left are next for the "this guy is the worst person since Hitler" rhetoric. The only acceptable outcome is a single-party state, where the Democrats are in control forever, and then the real work of reform and restructuring can happen.

there is no acceptable Republican because Republicanism is evil. Get rid of the populists, and the moderates left are next for the "this guy is the worst person since Hitler" rhetoric. The only acceptable outcome is a single-party state, where the Democrats are in control forever, and then the real work of reform and restructuring can happen.

I don't think this is exactly an inaccurate view of a significant segment of the left, but I think it oversells how unified the Democrats are. There's a good amount of messaging that the Democrats are an awkward alliance of the left and center-left (erm, whatever those terms mean) that is held together by defending from the evil Republicans that want to destroy elections and ban contraception, and if the Republicans were out of the way, they could hold elections on actual policy, not whether or not to elect the evil(TM) candidate. Although I guess you may be saying that no matter how far the Overton Window moves left, the right side (even if they're currently part of the Democratic Party) will always get called an evil that must be defended from as opposed to a legitimate alternative to be discussed on merits.

Mitt Romney was a dangerous theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale if elected.

Admittedly, I haven't read past the Wikipedia summary, but it certainly sounds like Mitt Romney's position on abortion has changed a lot in the past several years:

In a 1994 debate with Senator Ted Kennedy, Romney said: "[...] I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice, and my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign." Romney had endorsed the Freedom of Choice Act which would define legal access to abortion as a federal law even if Roe is overturned.

[...]

In 2020, Mitt Romney signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

(He made other anti-Roe comments in the intervening years according to that article; I'm just trying to stick to minimal interpretation of his comments and the published amicus brief just seemed like the most clear-cut one.)

This does make me wonder: for a few years now, or at least dating back to like 2018 or so, some people in this sphere were saying that we're about to see a political re-alignment of the parties. What would it look like? Democrats switching sides to R and trying to appeal to voters they may have once spurned, out of sheer pragmatism?

Doubt it. It will just make the left more entrenched in their views, like after 2016

That was my thinking in 2016. It didn't work then, and I don't expect it to work now. This stuff has reversed in the past, but the previous reversals, to my understanding, involved economic prosperity that got everyone too busy making money to worry about ideology. I'm not sure we've got another of those coming, and there's reason to worry that this time might be different in any case. Still, if you're looking for hope, that's where I'd look for it.

It seems like modern history has been something of an anomaly where we have had back to back revolutionary gains in productivity. Prior to the industrial revolution, there were long periods of marginal gains punctuated by smaller revolutions such as the printing press. Unless AI or some new energy source can come along and make us more productive I fully expect us to slide back into tribalism.

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