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Goodguy  11hr ago (text post)   Edited 8hr ago   3948 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?

There is "racist", then there is racist. The difference lies in whether normie voters find those accusations credible.

The GOP convincingly argued that woke activists had rendered the word practically meaningless. When everything from immigration restrictions to perfectly innocuous statements about affirmative action could attract the accusation, it became relatively easy to dismiss the charge as ideological overreach. You bring up perfectly fair criticisms of that rhetoric. My point is not that Democrats have been saying the same things for ten years. It's whether the conduct being criticised, and the public's willingness to believe the criticism, have changed. "Racism is based" is simply not a winnable position in a culture that prides itself for its multi-racial heritage. You could get away with it if you delivered on the economy though. Now it's a double whammy.

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

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