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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25653 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.

This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.

Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf. His first administration was a shit show, but besides putting a few migrant kids into cages, he mostly harmed the reputation of the US.

His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

Of course, the Democrats reacted with a lot of lawsuits. Some with merit, some pure lawfare. In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas. Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.

The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints.

While I am reluctant to defend the woke mob, I will also notice that government can do a lot of things that most social movements can not do at scale. The BLM riots happened because local governments were willing to turn a blind eye to rioting rather than employ police violence. So the government should at least get half-credit for them. But a bunch of criminals looting is small fries compared to the kind of damage the federal government can do.

Saying that you are less worried about government because it has checks and balances is like saying that you are less worried about nuclear weapons than you are about knives because nukes need a code to activate them while knives let anyone stab people. Sure, the median crazy killer will murder more people with a knife than a nuke, but if the safety mechanism fails the nuke-wielding crazy will be able to do orders of magnitude more damage.

His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

Well, I guess the question here is "is it really any worse to try to overturn an election, claiming it was fraudulent, than to agree an election was free/fair and then try to overturn it anyway?"

Because, well, after Trump won in 2016 there was a scheme to have the Electoral College throw out the results, and there were riots trying to prevent the inauguration.

It's especially ironic that you mention the phrase "peaceful transfer of power", because I found an interview with one of the organisers of the latter, in which he said:

There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition.

Don't get me wrong; J6 was bad. But to claim it was unprecedented is... inaccurate.

Because, well, after Trump won in 2016 there was a scheme to have the Electoral College throw out the results, and there were riots trying to prevent the inauguration.

From that article, ten electors wanted to defect. Five ended up defecting from Clinton, two from Trump, who had a margin of 37.

Personally, I think that trying to defeat Trump through faithless electors would have been a terrible idea. Still, I think what Trump did was worse. The constitution at least mentions electors, and that attempt to steal an election would have been subject to the SCOTUS oversight. By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol, and it seems unlikely that the SCOTUS would have been in a position to rule against them without the mob interfering.

I do not find your J20 thing convincing in the least. To my knowledge, Legba Carrefour was not a fixture of DC Democrats. Now, if you have evidence of Obama, Clinton, Pelosi or the like telling the disruptJ20 rioters something along the lines of "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore", then I would concede that this is equivalent to J6, but otherwise I do not blame the Democrats more for their fringes than I would blame Trump for the odd Qanan loon.

I think what Trump did was worse. The constitution at least mentions electors, and that attempt to steal an election would have been subject to the SCOTUS oversight. By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol, and it seems unlikely that the SCOTUS would have been in a position to rule against them without the mob interfering.

What, exactly, did Trump do on J6? I'll give you a hint, he didn't tell his supporters to break into the capitol and riot.

Not in these words, directly. Apparently, he was spinning his usual lies about the election being stolen -- a process that would be finalized through the certification of the election -- and told them:

"If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"

What do you think was he anticipating that would happen? Than MAGA would pray for a divine intervention, and get archangel Gabriel appear before Mike Pence and tell him how the Democrats had rigged the election and that he must certify Trump?

If a mafia don is telling his subordinates how an associate has become a thorn in his side and how good he would feel if that guy just dropped dead, and his goons took that as an order to kill himself, would you also claim that the mafia don is innocent of murder because he was never telling anyone to kill the victim in so many words?

  • -10

Sounds like a slam dunk to me.

Right after you prosecute the last fifty Democrats to use similar language. Don't rush, I'll wait.

I eagerly await the prosecution of the organizers of the "Fight for Fifteen" movement; c'mon now...

From the exact same speech:

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

Trump said nothing remotely approaching incitement, legally or morally.

By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol

Perhaps my memory is incorrect here, but I thought it was IMHO generally notable that none (or at least very few) of the charges for J6 involved bringing 'arms' into the Capitol. For a crowd of right-wing protesters, there was, if anything, a dearth of guns.

armed goons breaking into the Capitol

Please forgive my provincialism, but I still don't get the precise mechanism by which that was as terrible as it's often treated. Even if they hadn't been thrown out, what would they have done there? Or is it all just symbolism?

Well, I mean, AIUI the mob was chanting "hang Mike Pence", they erected a gallows outside the building in which Mike Pence was, and then they entered said building. It seems pretty plausible that, had the mob captured Mike Pence, he might have been hanged. I don't think a VPOTUS has ever been assassinated, so I don't exactly have examples at hand, but it doesn't sound like that'd've been good for the culture war. At the very least, I imagine Mike Pence would have been rather unhappy with that result.

Okay, but is the possible hanging of Mike Pence, a man I last heard of described as an enemy of modernity and progress and all that is good and moral, really what the left and polite society are so up in arms against?

Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.

All coup attempts seem silly until they succeed. Hitler marching on the Feldherrenhalle was far more silly than J6.

Take the vote for the Enabling Act. I would argue that the presence of the brownshirts during the vote was a clear factor in persuading Zentrum to vote for the act which turned Hitler into a dictator. If anything, the surprising thing was that the SPD showed balls of steel by voting against it.

Is it possible that Mike Pence would have stared down the barrel of a gun and certified Biden? Sure.

Is it possible that the SCOTUS would have overruled a certification for Trump under duress? Sure.

Is it possible that the military leadership would have arrested Trump on the spot? Sure.

So while Trump was unlikely to succeed, I would not claim that his coup attempt was totally absurd -- more like shooting with a handgun at someone 80m away than trying to shoot the Moon.

  • -11

Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.

With zero guns? My god man. There's a slight problem with your theory.

Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability.

Errrrrr..... this stuff dates back to at least the Clinton administration, e.g. the Lincoln bedroom affairs, the Chinese campaign funds scandal, and the Marc Rich pardon, inter alia, and likely before - I'm just not as knowledgeable about the Bush I, Reagan, etc. presidencies.

Since many people wrote about all my other thoughts:

J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

J6 showed for the X time that Democrats cry foul when someone else does what they do.

J6 was actually mostly peaceful in a way the BLM riots never were.

Trump mostly told everyone to relax.

This is kind of the point of the post you’re replying to - the truth changes on political perceptions.

The BLM riots were never about challenging the peaceful transfer of power on a national level. The idea of J6 was to "stop the steal".

So the fact that the BLM riots caused a lot more damage than J6 is besides the point I am making.

Trump mostly told everyone to relax.

From WP (which is clearly partisan here, but unlikely to make up fake quotes):

Starting at noon on January 6 at a "Save America" rally on the Ellipse, Trump gave a speech in which he repeated false claims of election irregularities and said "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore".

Are you arguing that he expected his followers to fight with prayers and slogans while what they believed to be a hostile coup to remove power from Trump was taking place?

Sure, he told this supporters to stand down eventually, but he had fanned the flames before.

Part of Seattle seceded from the union.

But we did get a great natural experiment in anti-racist policing, which started shooting unarmed black kids in just under two weeks.

The BLM riots were never about challenging the peaceful transfer of power on a national level.

The CHOP/CHAZ incident was pretty openly questioning the sovereignty of the federal and state governments.

So the fact that the BLM riots caused a lot more damage than J6 is besides the point I am making.

If you slice things finely enough it's easy to find some difference between two things which makes their similarity not count.

BLM riots were clearly an attempt to coerce the government through violence, even if the details weren't identical.

The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics.

Really? That's not how I remember things.

In my recollection, each side denies every single election they lose, at least in some respect. Sometimes this is "Obama is a Kenyan", sometimes it's "Hanging Chads", but it is every single election. Sometimes the sitting president sends the FBI to launder oppo research to accuse his replacement of having been elected by Russian election fraud.

Many bitter feelings persisted for years about the Bush Gore election - this isn’t actually all that unreasonable though. The election was genuinely super close, and was in fact decided by the Supreme Court in effect (though Bush did actually most likely win in most permutations of the issue in fact, including Florida overall, we think).

But Gore himself accepted the result, as did most all the prominent Dems. To be more specific it was some variation of “I strongly disagree, but I accept it”. Sending the message similar to “it’s better to be happy/kind than right”. Trump’s message was putting himself above the system so it couldn’t contrast any more clearly (on top of being, you know, factually wrong as well about fraud)

Hiding this difference under the words of “at least in some respect” makes them weasel words, respectfully, despite being facially true.

(And Stacy Abrams is a fucking loser and an embarrassment, but even she kept her criticism to legitimacy, not legality)

Did Trump not accept it and leave office peacefully? I think it is you who is playing word games.

Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf.

Less crying wolf and more underestimating the efficacy of checks in the US political system. It has largely been memoryholed here, but the first Trump admin was constantly going for executive power grabs. He simply had not consolidated power within the GOP to the same degree and was facing a less friendly judicial environment. Likewise, there was an incredible amount of corruption, and while the presidential pardon has never been applied very fairly in practice, Trump was exceptional in the self-serving nature of his pardons.

Unfortunately, it’s clear now that even Trump can learn from his initial mistakes.

But hey, public was dumb enough to vote him in again, so I guess it’s time for us to collectively reap the whirlwind.

  • -14

But hey, public was dumb enough to vote him in again, so I guess it’s time for us to collectively reap the whirlwind.

I'm sorry but as someone else on the left the fault here is entirely that of the Democrats. Kamala Harris was one of the worst candidates I have ever seen, and it looks like Biden did his best to sabotage her as well. Trump didn't even need to bust out the worst of the attack ads because Kamala was so disrespectful and contemptuous of her own base - to say nothing of the genocide she ran on supporting (which multiple post-election studies have claimed was enough to swing the election itself). She hurt her numbers by refusing to go on Joe Rogan, but she was such a charisma void that refusing to go on was actually the right answer - she would have melted down and been unable to respond to basic questions about her past actions or present beliefs.

The problem with that election was not that the public was dumb. The problem was that the DNC ran a candidate that was WORSE than Trump - they ran a terrible campaign for a terrible candidate and got a terrible result. If you actually look at the results of that election in greater detail there's actually a lot to be hopeful for as a left-winger. When they weren't tied to the Democrats, a lot of leftist policy proposals actually went through. Left wing values are generally extremely popular with most people - but the DNC is a terrible expression of those values and so nakedly corrupt that anybody with a soul would find it extremely hard to vote for them in good faith. Remember how Schumer attacked Trump? By calling him a coward who chickened out of starting another war and murdering more people in the middle east. The public was actually doing the right thing in this case by voting for the less bloodthirsty candidate!

I agree that Trump term 2 has been very poor (probably for different reasons) but let's not try and blame the public for this happening. The blame for this result rests squarely on the Democratic party and if the public deserve any blame it is for not recognising that the ghouls in charge of the Democrats needed to be removed from power years ago.

I'm sorry but as someone else on the left the fault here is entirely that of the Democrats.

I’m quite comfortable blaming both the Democratic Party for being an incompetent embarrassment yet again as well as the general public for deciding that Trump’s flaws were somehow less glaring than Kamala.

Kamala was so disrespectful and contemptuous of her own base - to say nothing of the genocide she ran on supporting

Remember how Schumer attacked Trump? By calling him a coward who chickened out of starting another war and murdering more people in the middle east. The public was actually doing the right thing in this case by voting for the less bloodthirsty candidate

Ah yes, let’s stick it to the DNC and those fake lefties who aren’t sufficiently supportive of the Palestinians by… helping the GOP opposition that’s even less sympathetic to the Palestinians win the elections and get into power.

Because surely that’ll help, somehow.

Fucking hell, sometimes I think we lefties deserve to lose for being unable to think strategically.

even less sympathetic to the Palestinians

Trump's policy was explicitly kinder to the Palestinians than Biden (and by extension Harris, who said she supported Biden's position and wouldn't change anything) - Trump at least promised and achieved a minute ceasefire for a day or two. Biden and Harris' position was explicitly that they wouldn't do anything at all to stop the Israelis or hold them back.

Because surely that’ll help, somehow.

Yes, it will in fact help. What's the point of voting for the Democrats when there is no functional difference between them and the republicans? Sending a signal that the electorate will not vote for the same old moribund and corrupt geriatrics who have been profiting from business as usual helps to either destroy the party (so it can be replaced) or reform it so that it actually presents a compelling vision for the future. Harris, Schumer, Pelosi - none of these people can inspire the base and every single establishment democrat politician is incapable of creating a compelling vision of the future because their obligations to wealthy donors, lobbyists and interest groups are so strong that they are unable and unwilling to do anything but make existing problems worse.

The only left wing politician in the US right now who is capable of getting people excited is Zohran Mamdani, and the democrats are doing their absolute best to destroy him. Even the "vote blue no matter who" crowd are changing their stripes and doing their best to attack him so the usual sex offenders and genocide-defenders (Cuomo quite literally joined Netanyahu's legal team!) get back into power and keep the gravy train running.

If you actually care about left wing political goals rather than simplistic tribalism the only path forward is to either take a long march through the DNC to realign it with the wills of the left-wing base (which is a path that can most definitely win elections) or completely destroy it and start over, like Mexico did. If you've seen what Morena has done for Mexico, I want that for you in the USA as well - building more hospitals and infrastructure instead of deliberately starving children to death and blowing up Yemeni prayer circles.

I'd quibble whether a ceasefire that quickly ended actually made a meaningful difference, but honestly that's not why I'm responding.

There are centrist Dems and Progressive Dems. Mamdani can excite the progressives and piss off the centrists, even beyond the DNC party figures.

That and even Progressives aren't single issue. Trump is very much not identical to Dems on other issues Progressives care about, such as Ukraine, LGBT, social safety net/homelessness, and so on.

If they were willing to accept Trump to try and force Dems to realign, I suppose that's their choice, but the daily protests suggest that if that's what they were thinking they aren't happy with the result.

Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede

Sigh. My generally reliable long-term memory superpower is kicking in again.

HE LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, MOM:

For instance, Abrams at various times has said the election was “stolen” and even, in a New York Times interview, that “I won.” She suggested that election laws were “rigged” and that it was “not a free or fair election.” She also claimed that voter suppression was to blame for her loss, even though she admitted she could not “empirically” prove that. While she did acknowledged Kemp was the governor, she refused to say he was the “legitimate” governor.

Well, probably not. But he was echoing the same sentiment. And I can reiterate my spiel how the 2018 elections in Florida sure looked like they came close to being 'stolen' too.

In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas.

When almost every single person he appointed to help him due to "traditional political advice" backstabbed him, usually immediately after exiting the administration, why the hell would he repeat that mistake?

Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.

Oh boy, time for my generally reliable medium-term memory superpower.

Remember Biden (or someone using his pen) pardoning his own son for literally ANY criminal acts he might have done "during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024...". Curious that he'd pick that particular period of time.

How fucking "plausible" is that deniability.

I'd love for us to return to a better equilibrium but that requires BOTH sides to agree to such a return.

But if your contention against Trump is that HE broke these particular norms that were up-until-then sacred... well I'm not convinced in the slightest.

For instance, Abrams at various times has said the election was “stolen” and even, in a New York Times interview, that “I won.” She suggested that election laws were “rigged” and that it was “not a free or fair election.” She also claimed that voter suppression was to blame for her loss, even though she admitted she could not “empirically” prove that. While she did acknowledged Kemp was the governor, she refused to say he was the “legitimate” governor.

From that WaPo article, I agree that she sounds just like Trump, and I find her just as terrible for it. Likewise, there is a special place in hell for all the SJ people who claim that Trump and Musk rigged the 2024 election. Still, on the national level, outright election denial was very rare before Trump.

Remember Biden (or someone using his pen) pardoning his own son for literally ANY criminal acts he might have done "during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024...". Curious that he'd pick that particular period of time.

I agree that that was far worse than anything else I can remember from his presidency. That was Biden taking a shit on the oval office carpet on his way out of the door. Especially since the alternative would not have been to just park his son outside the US for the Trump presidency, where he would be safe from any just or unjust prosecution by Trump's DoE -- since Hunter Biden was never Trump's arch-enemy on a level Snowden/Assange were for the US security apparatus.

Still, while Biden was not great (and is reason enough to change how pardons work), Trump is on a whole different level. I vaguely recall a story about some crypto bros who were facing federal charges for one thing or another which went away once they spent a suitable amount of money on Trump's shitcoins. Or him accepting a 200M$ jet from Qatar which will go to his presidential library (how many copies of The Art of the Deal can you fit in a building, anyhow?)

Hillary Clinton concocted an absurd baseless theory about Russia stealing the election that led to a years long witch hunt. She also claimed it made Trump illegitimate. Seems like an order of magnitude worse “election denialism.”

She also claimed it made Trump illegitimate

I don’t think Hilary Clinton ever claimed that Trump was the lawful winner of the 2016 election. She whined a lot about how it was unfair, (which was IMO disgraceful but not as disgraceful as claiming the election was stolen was) but I don’t think she ever claimed that she was actually the real winner.

Am I wrong about that? If so, can you provide any sources?

Election denial of various forms has been a notable and escalating feature of most elections of my adult life. In 2000, Both the Grassroots and elite Blues did not accept the legitimacy of W's victory, and were not shy about saying so; You may have heard of a guy called Michael Moore, he made a documentary alleging (among many other things) that Bush hacked the election. There was less of this in 2004, but it was certainly still present, as was the widespread certainty that Bush would find a way to suspend further elections and rule as a dictator permanently (and no few "just kidding... unless..." references to assassinating him; the inimitable Tim Kreider's "Sic Semper Fuckwads" was a personal favorite, as is 303, a mass-market comic book about how Bush did 9/11 and wouldn't it be neato if a russian spetznaz veteran sniped his head off.)

2008, my side won, but the Reds had the birther conspiracy theory. 2012, I'd mostly checked out on; my side won again, birtherism was spent IIRC, if there was an election meme I wasn't aware of it. 2016, the left went in hard on the election being illegitimate, including through various organs of the federal government coordinating efforts with the media, activist class, and democratic leadership, and 2020 we had "election fortification" and Jan 6th.

I vaguely recall a story about some crypto bros who were facing federal charges for one thing or another which went away once they spent a suitable amount of money on Trump's shitcoins.

To be clear, your claim is that Trump pardoned criminals because they donated to him, and you believe that this is a new low in presidential pardoning?

Still, on the national level, outright election denial was very rare before Trump.

Are we including the hanging Chad conspiracies in this comparison or no? If not, what makes them substantivel different?

What conspiracies are you talking about?

It's been 25 years, but I remember Democrats being quite certain that the governor of Florida pulled a fast one during the recount, and that the supreme court "handed" Bush the presidency. Usually all of this was expressed in conjunction with a belief that the Iraq war was repayment for that gift.

There was a major discussion about this on askreddit within the past few days. They're still on it with the same rhetoric and claims.

The 2000 election process was a disaster, but the Supreme Court did hand Bush the Presidency, although in some senses it was already in Bush's hand.

To recap: the result was razor thin, and an automatic machine recount made it even thinner, with Bush in the lead by 300 or so votes. Florida law provides for manual recounts, but with differing legal standards across counties. Gore's team asked for a narrow recount across four counties that it believed would get them to a win (though, not known at the time, it would have given Bush the win); the Florida Supreme Court ordered a broader statewide recount of all undervotes (that, not known at the time, would have given Gore the win, by a couple dozen votes). To my mind, the fairest recount would have been a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which would have given Bush the win. But the process, such as it was, was headed toward something that would have given Gore the win, though that wasn't known at the time.

A critical issue, though, was the differing standards between different counties. The SCOTUS came in, stayed the recount decision, and then ruled 5-4 that there wasn't enough time to create a fair, uniform standard, and because of that the recount had to be halted entirely, giving the election to Bush.

Didn't Jeb recuse himself from being involved in the recount? And I don't actually understand how the Iraq War would benefit Jeb or the Supreme Court; the conspiracies there were all about Cheney and Halliburton.

The election conspiracy theories I remember all revolved around either "recounting punch cards sucks" (which makes a little sense: you have votes that can be changed by a fingernail, and you're going to get as many grubby hands on them as possible?) or "recounting electronic voting machine records is pointless, and also they suck" (which makes a lot of sense).

Those were all mainstream narratives.

The tinfoil conspiracies involved Bush invading Iraq to steal priceless (and sometimes alien) artifacts on behalf of various shadowy cabals.

Blues generally did not consider the 2000 election victory of George W Bush to be legitimate. Problems with the ballots and voting machines resulted in a protracted and highly contentious recount, ultimately ending with a lawsuit which the Supreme Court decided in favor of George W. Bush. Many, many blues from all strata of Blue culture believed that Gore had won the election, only to have his victory stolen by the Republican machine. This objection was inescapable in popular culture from 2000 to 2008, and I'd imagine that for most people who lived through the era as politically-engaged adults, the event is indelible in the hippocampus.

No less than HRC herself claimed that W Bush was "selected, not elected".

A developer for one of those voting machines testified on record that he was asked to put in a backdoor into one of those machines.

How much stock should we put in that? Plenty of whistleblowers in other contexts have turned out to be shady self-promoters, and I've honestly come to mostly disregard them without further evidence: Rebekah Jones seems to have pretty thoroughly shown herself as untrustworthy. On the other hand, I can think of examples that brought evidence and have demonstrably paid for their choices -- Manning and Snowden come to mind first.

There were enough people who still deny the results of the 2004 election that Politico ran a compare-and-contrast with the Trump 2020 deniers. Doubt in the integrity of the election has been around nearly as long as I've been politically aware.

Most of them don’t get into government buildings while the process is ongoing, do they?

Imagine if Gore had spent Dec. 11 holding speeches on the Mall and telling them to go peacefully protest outside the Supreme Court. If a few hundred of them broke in, demanding a particular verdict, I’d call that categorically different from “doubt in the integrity.”

(I actually don’t know what Gore was personally doing in the weeks after the election. Presumably there were some public appearances.)

Or him accepting a 200M$ jet from Qatar which will go to his presidential library

He did not. The jet was accepted "unconditionally". It's probably a white elephant anyway.

I think this is a fair take. My issue with it is that I have hard time believing a course correction of necessary magnitude can actually be done in another way. Certainly there are a lot of smart people who can theorize and think of good and less messy ways to do it, but there lies in wait an equal or greater number of smart people on the other side who are hellbent on suing, prosecuting, and rhetorizing against those ways who are already embedded within the institutions that need the reform. This system, as I see it now, is designed to do two things simultaneously A) dull any scalpel meant to cut out the bad parts, and/or B) complain that a cleaver was used while saying "A scalpel would have sufficed and done less damage!", knowing full well the scalpel has not been allowed to cut for quite some time.

So, when critics argue that Trump's methods are too messy, I hear "Why don't we try the things that have been proven not to work?"

It's totally understandable to be concerned, but there is critical number of our best and brightest who are all-in when it comes to their secular religion that they see as objective reality. Requesting they renounce it could be temporarily effective, but history is not on the side of people making that request. Better they be reminded that there is a very large portion of the population who do not believe what they believe and that they will wreck shop if necessary to make sure a proper counter balance is put back into place.

If there is a less messy and workable alternative, sign me up.

I understand the logic. My intuition of fascist power grabs is something like... there is a degree of bludgeon where you can break the democratic checks and balances of the country by moving fast enough that they simply cannot keep up with you; you create new institutions faster than they can be found illegitimate, and by the time they would be they have amassed enough power that the old institutions are no longer adequate to contain them.

I agree that "correcting" America, from a right-wing view, requires a bludgeon of a certain size. My worry is that this size exceeds the point where this bludgeon can also be used to abolish America-in-the-constitutional-sense, and if that is the case then this bludgeon must absolutely not be allowed to exist. I understand that right-wingers say "well I don't see how else it can be done", and to be frank, if it's between your political goals and the authority of the constitution, then it should not be done. In a democracy there's things that you just shouldn't get even if you want it and win the presidency, and both new and questionably accountable police and military deployment against internal "enemies" should be very much on that list. This goes triply if you've previously shown a very shaky respect for term limits.

Not to be flippant, but how do you respond to “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”?

Because increasingly to anyone who even has a shade of American nationalism in their body, the actions of the blue tribe writ large are unambiguously suicidal / homocidal (depending on your perspective on who’s included) to the American Nation as traditionally defined up until now or the very recent past.

I think not just that the constitution is a suicide pact, but that every nationstate is a suicide pact practically by definition. That's what it means to hand off the monopoly of force to the state.

This also illustrates that the alternative to law and order is either banditry or civil war.

From the page you linked:

Constitutions are chains with which men bind themselves in their sane moments that they may not die by a suicidal hand in the day of their frenzy.

Senator John Stockton, 1871

The constitution should be treated as much closer to a suicide pact than feels reasonable if you don't think about the long term. It is not a literal suicide pact, but if you want to do something unconstitutional and you also don't have sufficient support for the thing for an amendment, that's a sign that you should perhaps not do the thing, and instead you should do something constitutional, or you should change the amendment until it is popular enough to pass.

His election denial

The democrats literally decided they didn't like democracy so forgoed a primary and that is AFTER stacking the previous primary and fucked Bernie up the ass. These same people used the state to concot a Trump/Russia influence fiasco lied to FISA courts multiple times and spied on trump. These same people used their FBI connections in Twitter to burry the Laptop story. You're just going to have to do better than muh election denial and muh threat to our democracy.

...and that is AFTER stacking the previous primary and fucked Bernie up the ass.

Can you please explain how Bernie received an ass fucking? The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race, not that he was the victim of forced sodomy. I am very curious to know if that was not the case.

The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie was positioned to pull a 'biggest minority in a divided field' win in the Super Tuesday primaries, where he was outpolling most competitors. This was after a strong early showing in contests, where to date Biden had been underperforming. This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority. The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.

In 2020, things might have been different for Bernie since he was posed to do well on Super Tuesday, but do very poorly in later conferences where Biden had strong alliances with the southern black political machine Democratic parties. The Bernie party wing's bet was that they could leverage the momentum in early wins to build endurance and carry the campaign past this predictable barrier, where it might then open back up to a more even primary split once it went to more progressive regions.

The reason this didn't happen wasn't because Bernie's popularity dived, but because nearly all the major Democratic candidates at the time pulled out of the race and endorsed Biden, rather than split the field. Biden didn't get more popular as much as he had less competition for the centrist party vote, and so was able to win these early contests, and then cement victory with the Southern wing conferences, and thus cement the win. This was widely seen at the time as the Democratic establishment, which is to say Obama wing of the party that dominated at the time, pulling strings and applying pressure to the candidates who dropped out in favor of Obama's former VP.

Where the ass fuckery charge comes in is not only the Party establishment coordination in stage-managing the primary pool to shape primary outcomes, but also/especially the caveat of 'most' people pulling out. One of the main candidates who did not pull out at the time was the only one who was splitting Bernie's vote more than Biden's vote. Elizabeth Warren was also running on the progressive/left-wing track, despite herself having no chance to beat Biden either. This was likewise thought to be a quid-pro-quo of sorts between Warren and Biden, with Warren's network getting plenty of key postings in the administration. Had the left united behind Bernie, who was far less of a party man than Warren, it would have been the Bernie wing getting such posting potential during negotiations.

Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.

I like this post and think that's a very good read of the situation - but I also think you're leaving out some of the things that got the Bernie base so pissed off. There was real malfeasance on the part of the DNC when it came to Bernie, especially in 2016. Wasserman-Schulz and Donna Brazile were forced to resign from the DNC after Wikileaks released the internal emails showing they were actually conspiring to fuck him over (and then Debbie at least immediately joined the Clinton campaign). The Bernie crowd really were taken for a ride by the DNC and the lawsuit they lost had the party make some really unpleasant (but legally excellent) claims to boot. I am honestly not sure if there was enough support for Bernie to get him elected, but there's no denying that the DNC put a finger on the scale in a way that torched their relationship with his supporters.

Thanks, I appreciate the explanation.

Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.

I think I can understand a feeling of betrayal from the process on an emotional level but I'm not sure I really get it. For instance, I didn't just donate to Amy Klobuchar, I made her tater tot hotdish recipe. It was pretty good. But I didn't feel like her dropping out of the race well before my state's primary represented the DNC betraying me or nefariously preventing me from picking my preferred candidate. Weaker candidates dropping out and consolidating behind a more popular candidate with similar views is just an actual part of the primary process as it exists. It would be interesting to see the effects of switching to some kind of one day primary-palooza where every state votes simultaneously but that is not, and never has been, how the primaries work.

Warren staying in the race through Super Tuesday probably did hurt Bernie. Presumably Sanders was the second choice of some fraction of her voters. But as you note, she represents a more institutional strain of the left and (although we'll never know) it's unlikely that enough of her voters would have gone with him to change the outcome. It's just as likely that the majority of her voters would have gone to Biden.

If primary voters wanted Sanders they could have had him. They did not. The fact that voters picked the more centrist candidate - and that there were other more centrist politicians in the race with non-negligible support in the first place - shows where the actual center of gravity was in the party. Bernie would not have won regardless of what the DNC did.

Bernie would not have won regardless of what the DNC did.

Sure, though whether his wing would have won the nomination is besides the point to whether his wing would have won a stronger and more prominent place in the administration that followed. But there's losing a fair contest, and there's losing a rigged contest, and there's losing a contest the managers swear is fair but then get exposed for rigging. @FirmWeird recalls some additional shenanigans I'd forgotten of exposed DNC issues.

The issue isn't mitigated because 'well, the Bernie wing wouldn't have won the nomination anyway.' That's a results-focused paradigm that only cares about the winner. A large part of the point of democratic contests is to persuade the losers of the election of the legitimacy of their defeat, so that they can work together afterwards. A betrayal of trust that doesn't actually change the results is just as bad for the people it disillusions as a betrayal that does change the results, the only difference is the degree or number of people it disillusions.

Whether Sanders would have built momentum after a better super Tuesday is a fair question. But it was a question that could not be answered because of deliberate efforts to prevent it from being asked.

And preventing it from being asked had tangible and visible effects on the trajectory of the Democratic Party, upto and including how rather than increase the leverage and influence of the economic-left/populist wing of the Party (the Bernie wing), the Biden consolidation then led to Biden compromising with the culture-left wing of the party, such as on DEI and trans-issues. This included manning decisions such as his promise to have a woman as his vice president, which followed progressive stack logic which led to Harris, who was a disaster.

I'm not making a claim that if everyone else had stayed in but Warren dipped out for the good of the populist-left then Bernie Sanders might have become Vice President. But the nature of a proportional representation system is that the people with the bigger proportions of the voter base get more influence in forming the next government, and if you want a coalition of people bought into the premise, conspiracies that their efforts are being conspired against don't exactly lead to inter-party trust, and do lead to the sort of inter-party conflict that followed.

This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority.

The Republican primaries are mostly winner-takes-all outside the early states, so a candidate with a plurality of the vote in a divided field can get a majority of the delegates and the nomination (this is also how McCain won the nomination in 2008). The Democratic primaries are proportional everywhere, so if a candidate is persistently getting a plurality but not a majority of the votes the Dems are headed for a brokered convention. Bernie was not doing well enough to win the nomination on delegate count, and had no plausible route to win it except a deal with Warren. (Either for her support in the primaries, or for her delegates at the convention)

The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.

The is the strategy Hilary Clinton used unsuccessfully against Obama in 2008, whereas Obama focussed on delegate counts all the way back to Iowa and New Hampshire. Bernie had the money, organisation, and name recognition to go all the way to the convention, as did whoever turned out to be the leading establishment candidate. He didn't need attention or endorsements - he needed delegates. And in proportional primaries he gets roughly the same number of delegates regardless of how the anti-Bernie vote is split.

It is not how Trump won 2016. By the start of 2016, it was obvious that (absent some kind of blow-up) Trump, Cruz, and Rubio all had the resources and support to go to the convention, and Cruz and Rubio didn't drop out until they were mathematically eliminated. Once winner-take-all primaries started, Trump was consistently winning 2/3 or more of the delegates available each week. Cruz and Rubio didn't do a deal to stop Trump because they hated each other as much as they hated Trump, and in any case it is unlikely either of them could have delivered enough votes with an endorsement to let the other beat Trump. Trump because his narrow pluralities in winner-take-all states got him delegates, not because they got him headlines.

i guess what happened to Trump with the spying and Russia collusion hoax had plausible deniability so people see it as tolerable whereas because Trump is brutish in the way he acts he doesn't receive the same benefit of the doubt.

Then those people are rewarding effective corruption. Further, how do their opinions change now that more and more of the spying and hoaxing are being revealed with actual documentation?

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