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Goodguy  9hr ago (text post)   Edited 6hr ago   3706 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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Now let's see if Democrats learn the lesson of "we do well if we focus on the economy, we avoid turbo-woke stuff, and we take advantage of the other side's unforced errors".

Or if they instead decide "ahhhh, 2016-2026 was just a bad dream... the voters are telling us that what we really need to focus on is electing history's first black transwoman President".

It's gonna be the latter. They simply have no incentive to do any soul searching anymore. The party was in tatters in 2024, now the GOP has sawn off its own legs with a chainsaw.

Unlike 2016, 2020 and maybe even 2024, the GOP cannot escape the "racist party" brand. Groypers are no longer an embarrassing subset of Trump supporters in the distant boonies of the internet. Watch the Dems capitalise this "I told you so" and inject every future piece of cultural output with a primer on "how not to be racist!"

the GOP cannot escape the "racist party" brand

Oh, come on, the GOP has always been "[ontologically] evil party" as compared to the opposition's "stupid party".

The reason the Dems get away with it is that they take care to only perpetrate the kind of racism that's popular. Which is how the party of KKK-style white supremacy seamlessly transitions into the party woke-style white supremacy (and gynosupremacy, and homosupremacy) without ever being properly held to account for either.

The reformers, on the other hand, tend to be accompanied by reactionaries who liked the old racism ('stop, go back' is also reform), which results in the new-racists being able to claim those that created the conditions such that old-racism could transition into new-racism are all old-racists.

In which reality were they able to escape the "racist party" brand in 2016, 2020, and 2024? How do you even want to escape it when the people who brand you are calling "there is only one race, the human race" a racist slogan, and "be less white" workshops "antiracsist"?

Watch the Dems capitalise this "I told you so" and inject every future piece of cultural output with a primer on "how not to be racist!"

Oh no, will they continue doing what they have been doing without interruption for over a decade?

Immigration is still probably the Republicans' best issue. For all of the missteps with ICE, that isn't what lost them the election.

The problem is that "fixing the economy" is very difficult, and people disagree on how exactly they're supposed to do that. Whereas nominating woke people for high level positions is simple and easy.

“Fixing” things is easy provided you’re willing to go through the necessary pain to reach a solution. And the presumption that you can treat a problem without changing the things people don’t want to change is politically impossible everywhere but at the margins (which is why so much political “progress” is marginal). When people try and establish a local wind farm in Germany to help with climate change, there are local protests. When people don’t want to execute illegal entrants into the country, there’s little incentive to pay heed to the law. Political solutions are remarkably easy in the abstract. People just don’t want to pay the associated costs for it.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you suggesting that the simple way to fix the economy is to build more wind farms and execute anyone who protests? That seems both unconstitutional and... not very useful.

It's going to be turbo-woke, I would in fact bet on it if Kalshi or a Polymarket had a prediction market on it. But I disagree with you slightly, the policies will be equivalent to that of a black transwoman president, but it will come from a white male christian president. Talarico, but more woke.

Yeah feels if anything the margin here is going to lead to Democrats feeling confident enough to get back to massive silly culture war infighting whilst 2 years of governmental inertia passes by.

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