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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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I really don't like making grand pronouncements (I think it's a bit narcissistic) but since I seem to have a reputation on The Motte I think it's only fair to take my licks:

  • Midterms were worse than I thought. I would have guessed 49-53 Senate seats for Dems and 220-230 seats in the House.
  • The collapse is so bad that I think it necessitates some new theories about how American politics works. I.e. I don't think Trump's record right now is worse than Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2010 or Biden in 2022. Voters clearly disagree? Inflation reached 8% in 2022, gas right now is lower adjusted for inflation than it was under Obama.
  • Obviously, Iran is very unpopular. I still accept Trump's judgment that it was the right thing to do and I still believe that the war is (plainly) a military success. (Call me crazy!)
  • Trump is a fighter and is going to strike back. I think all calls for his impeachment or step down are bad politics and also bad reads of Donald Trump.
  • Texas with Blue governance would be worse value than California or Illinois, because you don't even have the nice beaches and beautiful cities. But predictions that Texas is about to precipitously decline are overblown. (Texas has a lot of hot smart and beautiful people.)
  • I think the AI buildout will probably not stop, although it will have to reassess. I maintain that AI is so powerful that it's bad for Democrats to hand it over to Republicans even if it polls extremely well in the short and medium-term. I expect that a lot of AI Pause rhetoric will merely grease the wheels for Dems and tech to come to a new arrangement.
  • A lot of my friends who were loyal Trump guys are crashing out now. I do think it's still too soon to call this the death of MAGA, and there is no going back to the old establishment Republican consensus.
  • We're probably closing the window, globally, on a 10-year exuberance of populism and replacing it with something else. To those inclined to gloat, I suspect that whatever comes next will actually be worse for everybody. (For example, imagine a MAGA-Groyper fusion.) (You're going to miss Trump when he's gone.)
  • I think the Groypers might be earning a place in the future.
  • There have been a lot of predictions about Dems undergoing a realignment 10 years after the Republican realignment. I don't think this will happen at all. DSA and center-lib-left Dems will coexist quite peaceably in the way that only political allies that hate each other can.
  • The results were worse than I expected and losing will carry a lot of political consequences. But I maintain that midterms still matter for very little. The powers that Democrats are unlocking for themselves (such as imperiling the future of a Republican SCOTUS) are weak compared to the powers of the president.
  • I do not believe that Democrats are on the cusp of a permanent one-party state or any other despair narratives I see on the right. I don't think this will be true even if they do win in 2028.

Blah blah blah, words words words, excuses excuses, feel free to get your licks in now.

Texas still has a conservative (well, technical split) legislature, so that’s a small glimmer of hope.

Texas Dems flipped the state house.

Yes but Republicans kept the senate. They can still block a lot of bullshit. (And a lot of the “democrats” are conservative on certain things, im pretty sure some of them helped get the abortion ban passed)

Sure, but if you're a local business, you sometimes need things from the state government in a way that you don't from Washington. You need a relationship with your local state rep and your governor/AG/commissioner of such and so, you need a functioning state government to pass laws and do things for you.

Texas business interests can't just sit out the next however many years and wait for Republicans to come back. They're going to have to form relationships with Democrats.

You need a relationship with your local state rep

I'm curious how valuable those are in Texas, given that its legislature meets only 6 months every two years (plus whenever the governor calls a special session). Could go either way.

The things businesses need from state legislators aren't necessarily things relating to legislation. Whenever you're dealing with red tape and need a department to take action on something, even if that action is uncontroversial, pressure from a legislator can be the difference between a permit application sitting on a bureaucrat's desk for six months to moving to the top of the to-do pile. I know from government employees that they will respond fairly quickly once a politician gets up their ass about something. A personal example, not state but Federal, is that a nonprofit I sit on the board of recently had its 501(c)(3) status revoked due to not filing annual disclosures. We had filed the disclosures, and the IRS hadn't sent a letter of revocation (we found out when someone tried to donate and it got flagged by Schwab). Trying to resolve the matter through the IRS Exempt Organizations hotline got us nowhere; when we submitted the proof that we had filed, we were supposed to get a decision in 30 days. After the 30 days was up, we got a letter requesting an additional 60 days. After that 60 days was up, we got a letter requesting another 60 days. All the while some serious grant money was being held up because of this, and my personal contacts at the IRS office in Pittsburgh were unable to do anything. After contacting the local rep's office we got in touch with their IRS liason, who was able to resolve the matter within a week. Going back to the state level, we now had to apply to solicit funds within the state, which is a much more complicated process than the IRS disclosure. At that point, with the clock ticking, we reached out to the state senator's office to ensure that the application would be reviewed quickly, and we were able to get our grant money. To be clear, the board of this organization is left-wing, but we operate in a heavily Republican area, and all our legislative contacts are Republicans who support our mission.

To contrast this, one of the board members has a second home in Colorado, which was for a time in Boebert's district. He was telling me about how some local water authority needs to meet with the rep once a year to get certain basic things. Boebert insisted on a conference call instead of the meeting, and it was clear after the first one that she was bored, not paying attention, and didn't understand what they needed. What was normally a straightforward process turned into a nightmare of dealing with various state and Federal agencies because Boebert was too lazy or stupid to make the requisite phone calls. I posted elsewhere about Camera Bartolotta, and, though I don't live in her district anymore, she's one of the few Republicans I've consistently supported because she's dedicated to basic constituent services. One of the things that concerns me about upstart politicians who are more focused on ideology than public service is that they're good at having a public profile but bad at doing basic things to help people.

I find constituent services quite bizarre. Why should it take talking to an elected legislator who has zero de jure power over the executive, to get shitty bureaucrats to simply do their jobs. It seems like it's just building a parallel government inside of legislator offices and it would be much better if people just did their jobs.

I know this is true though, I have some experience with asking senators or reps for help with immigration forms. It seems it's a mostly nonpartisan thing, since it seems to act as a parallel bureaucracy and doesn't involve much greasing of palms. I actually wonder how much of this is truly done out of individual legislator offices versus just some pooled resource that legislators forward all this mail to.

I'm sure that if you run a very partisan coded organization though you might just get ghosted by the legislator though.

Boebert was too lazy or stupid to make the requisite phone calls.

I'm glad Boebert lost, she was the last of the "MAGA Barbies" and they hurt the Republican brand in countless ways.

I've heard it's quite a valuable relationship at the federal level, but I was wondering if that still holds for a less-active legislature like the Texas system. Do Texas legislators make those calls when they're not in session, and do the civil servants feel responsible to pick up?

I remember Abbot called a bunch of special sessions in the past few years and the legislature did fuck all during them. Maybe they didn't want to be bothered to do their jobs.

Alot can change in 2 years but there's not much that businesses will want from the government that the democrats are willing to give, and that the republicans haven't already given.

See my above comment. It's not about legislation, but constituent services.

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