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No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities. But I thought I was being careful, I was just too much of a quokka to understand why a woman might lie about being "on birth control AND infertile". I was presented with the situation fait accompli and had my life thoroughly derailed. It doesn't match up to the body horror of having an unwanted entity growing inside you, but it's not nothing.
But that's what a reverent respect for norms as the highest value would actually look like. From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter. Because no one (aside from maybe 4 civic religion fundamentalists and the older Republicans who were content to be corrupt Washington Generals) actually places norms and standards as their highest value.
Again, my objection is to the two-facedness of crying about norms and standards, while never actually prioritizing them when it would cost. It just comes off as concern trolling.
Schumer did cave on the budget, not as an act of goodwill, but because a shutdown gave Trump even more power and authority. Meanwhile, every action you listed has been hit with an injunction from activist judges, often with no authority to do so, even after the SC smacked them down and told them to stop it. I don't deny that the Dems don't seem particularly effective in their opposition, aside from the rogue judges, but they still seem to mostly be in earlier stages of grief than acceptance.
I do sincerely think there's a massive gap in how nutjobs are parsed. I would bet that 80%+ of Republicans would support putting a bullet in Dylan Roof Storm. OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left. People wear shirts emblazoned with his face in public. In the wake of the most recent shooting, the response that I've seen on the Dem side is a blend of blaming Trump (ABC news had an amazing piece where they noted that "Trump's name was on one of the guns" without mentioning that the phrase on the gun was "K-ll D-nald T-ump"), mocking prayer, and freaking out over the possibility that people might try to have a conversation about the Venn overlap between trans, mental health, and violence that looks like it might be a Thing.
Eh. I think the calculations there are very different. Biden himself probably is a good standard bearer for the "norms and standards" crowd, or at least he would have been 10-15 years ago. Same as the Republicans I mentioned above, I don't think Biden has broad ideological commitments. I think he wanted to keep the boat steady and enjoy the kickbacks.
The people who made up his administration are a different story.
They very much did go for the Hispanic vote. That didn't pan out too well, but ironically, going absolutely ham on illegal immigration did seriously improve the Republican party's favorability with that demographic.
But let's look at the comparison of today's Rs with the ones from 20 years ago. Roe was overturned, and that was a major win for the religious right, but it's coming from a president who utterly refuses to pass national legislation on the topic, and openly talks about how a 6 week window "isn't enough weeks". The religious right "won", but at the cost of their party being forcibly dragged over towards the much more popular centrist position on the topic.
Gay marriage is not something that anyone anywhere in power on the right is willing to spend political capital to roll back.
They're much more opposed to foreign adventuring. No more Iraqs. No more Afghanistans. The neocons have flipped back to the Democrats as a more pliable vessel for warmongering.
It's not "saying nice things", but these are all significant motions back towards the center of the American Overton window.
No, you're mostly right. I don't give high odds of things ever getting that bad. I did try to phrase that carefully, as "if the worst of the worst comes to pass". If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah. But I don't think the version of the party that could do that is one that can win national elections in the first place.
I think a lot of Democrats believe the world we live in is as bad as the "worst case scenario" I outlined above. I often hear people talking about ICE snatching any random non-white person off the street to disappear them forever - this is a thing I literally hear from strangers. FEMA camps for queers are opening up any time now. Women are dying in droves because Roe was overturned, and they'll probably lose the right to vote soon. The economy is surely about to melt and all the poor people will starve. Millions of children have been stripped of healthcare, we murdered millions more in Africa by cutting US AID, etc, etc.
So many issues where the emotional rhetoric is starkly at odds with the facts on the ground. So many people openly wishing for violence about it, much more than I saw during the Biden administration from the other side.
I think there is a world of difference between believing that there are potential futures where political violence is acceptable or necessary, versus catastrophizing yourself into believing that we're already there by social media psychosis.
This is complicated even further by the "who has the guns" issue, as you noted. I think a lot of the left-wing psychosis and ideation is driven by a kind of general helplessness. Someone should be doing violence to save the innocent trans migrants, someone else. I think a major factor in why the rhetoric gets so heated and incendiary is because there's no thalamic outlet, just keyboard rage until exhaustion. Humans weren't evolved to handle that kind of stimulus. I think the right is less prone to that because there's at least some degree of awareness that the specific individual might actually have to do something, and because they're more likely to have a gym habit or manual job that offers endocrine catharsis. There's a reason this rhetoric stuff seems the worst with "disabled by mental illness" twenty-something NEETs, because they have the most frustrated energy.
Or maybe it's just a bubble, and I tend to see the worst in the outgroup and only pay attention to the parts of the right I find tolerable.
I'm fine with that in the abstract, although in terms of concrete details it seems like a system open to abuse. But I'm sorry you're in that situation, and I imagine you don't want to debate something so personal.
The bad thing about McCain and Romney is that they lost, and the good thing about Trump is that he won.
Not to mention it's easy to lionize men who never won the presidency and had to actually get their hands dirty.
You think Mangione doesn't have fans on the right? Are you telling me MAGA is a populist movement that loves CEOs of health insurance companies?
For all the conservative memes mocking childless liberal women for their breathless, supposed erotic fixation on the Handmaid's Tale you have a shocking lack of awareness for similar fantasies on the right. There's this odd fetishism with home invaders and having to defend your family from the rapist hordes at the gates.
Isn't that the point of this place?
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