Early in my tenure as a horrified onlooker to Mango Mussolini’s rise as a political figure, I kept expecting political gravity to catch up with candidate Trump. Calling Mexicans rapists right out of the gate? He’s going nowhere. The cruel mockery of a reporter with a disability? That will do it. Disparaging a media-beloved former POW? He just bought a one-way ticket to Craterville. Picking a fight with a Gold Star family? He’s toast. Getting caught on tape bragging about groping women? Sayonara.
And so on. The consequences never fully caught up, and that dynamic persisted during Trump’s mind-blowingly corrupt and calamitous term in office. The sheer volume of scandals, transgressive behavior, rule-breaking, institutional corruption, international humiliations, deadly incompetence, self-dealing, etc., seemed to make focusing on any single issue impossible, so the entirety washed over the nation like a towering wall of sludge, leaving chaos and wreckage in its wake.
You could interpret the 2020 election results as an accountability moment for the demagogue, but it really wasn’t because it was too “normal,” for want of a better word; Trump didn’t receive the overwhelming repudiation the situation demanded because, for a minority but still electorally significant portion of the population, Trump had ceased to be a novelty politician and had instead become the leader of a cult of personality. So the final tally looked like a “normal” Electoral College result.
Like all politicians (and cult figures), Trump derives his power from the masses. That’s why his party refuses to treat him like the deranged and dangerous demagogue that he is; they either worship him themselves or are too cowardly to risk their careers by standing up to him. For our purposes, their motivations don’t matter; only the fact that the Republican Party continues to enable Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic movement is relevant.
But by hitching their electoral fortunes to a demented cult figure, the Republican Party puts its electoral fate in his hands completely. And I mean COMPLETELY — look at this “voter outreach” from the NRCC:
These NRCC fundraising texts are getting intense pic.twitter.com/2Smm3NXCYy
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) October 14, 2021
Like their crazed leader, the Republican Party has thus far avoided the catastrophic consequences that should follow from such a foolish decision. But will they continue to defy political gravity if Trump instructs the cultists not to vote?
Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Republicans will not vote in the midterm and general elections until supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election is “solved.”
“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do,” the former president’s statement read.
As we’ve discussed, the evil opportunists in the party are using Trump’s lunacy and the cultists’ devotion to hollow out democracy at every level so they can seize power indefinitely. We need urgent action at the federal level to safeguard election integrity. But the odds that we’ll get the needed remedies in time aren’t good because of the nihilism and corruption of every Republican and the capriciousness and corruption of at least a couple of Democrats in the senate. It’s an existential problem, IMO.
That said, Trump’s statement raises the possibility that we’ll get help from an unexpected quarter. The narcissist Trump’s fragile ego simply can’t withstand the blow of an election loss. It doesn’t look like convincing the majority of Republican voters that the election was illegitimate is enough balm for his savage butt-hurt. So maybe he isn’t going to stop telling Republican officials that they better somehow overturn long-certified election results to make the Kraken lady’s vision a reality, or the party gets it.
Authoritarian Republicans are deploying mechanisms to rig future elections, but they still need their voters to turn out. Lots of them will regardless of what Trump says. But if he manages to convince a significant portion to stay home in protest, he may just throw enough sand in the gears to derail the rigging scheme. I’m too traumatized by the last five years to expect righteous blowback anymore, and admittedly, it’s a thin reed to hang our hopes on. But wouldn’t it be ironic…
Open thread.
zhena gogolia
I’m not getting my hopes up. My hopes tend more toward medical scenarios.
VOR
TFG was a Gish Gallop of scandal. There was just a non-stop deluge which prevented the media from focusing on a single event for weeks. Nazis are “very fine people”? Next day there was something else.
The Dems have to make 2022 and 2024 referendums on Trump. Either you are pro-democracy or pro-Trump. Republican = Trump cult member, no matter how moderate.
MattF
It’s possible that we’re approaching a run-past-edge-of-cliff moment. But Trump’s threats are fake too.
Chris
Not necessarily. The whole point of the shift that happened in 2020 is that Republicans want to go beyond vote suppression altogether and move on to a far more elite driven model, where state legislatures get to overrule their voters, and tell their electors to vote Republican regardless of what the actual vote count was (citing “concerns” about “election irregularities,” or not even bothering to do that). That and equivalent moves higher up, like the House of Representatives simply refusing to certify the vote count.
That’s the biggest concern, that’s what Trump is trying to bully Republican elites into doing with messages like this, and with a 6-3 fascist majority on the Supreme Court, there’s every reason to believe the judiciary would bless it like they did Bush vs Gore.
catclub
Is he announcing he is not running in 24 here?
Keith P.
So all of these audits are just recounts under a (legally) different name, with the goal being to reverse the official results of the 2020 election.
eclare
@zhena gogolia: That was my first thought when I read the title of the post!
David Anderson
@MattF: It was the same language he used in the Georgia run-off. The special elections for the 2 Senate seats had remarkably high turn-out (~85%ish of November) but there was differential fall-off. The most Trumpy counties had more people who had voted in November not vote in January while Metro Atlanta and the Black Belt had proportionally less turnout fall-off.
That was probably enough to let the Dems squeak out two seats.
Baud
Between Trump and doomsayers on Twitter, it’s a race to see who can discourage their voters the most.
Joe Falco
Irony is dead and has been buried for some time from what I’ve heard over the years. But yes, it’d be poetic that the Republican Party was doomed to electoral oblivion from the very poison it created. I still like to think it was TFG that ultimately delivered the Senate to Democrats through his interference in the Georgia Senate races (plus how much Loeffler tied herself to TFG’s burning effigy during all of 2020). But I don’t want to give too much credit to guys with a lifelong tendency to stepping on their dick. Georgia voters, activists and leaders made it possible and will do so again (fingers crossed) in 2022.
The Moar You Know
Got him 30% of the Hispanic vote. The mind reels.
Kent
Trump and the Republicans are sowing the wind. Let them reap the whirlwind. I expect 2022 and 2024 are going to be ripe for creative social media campaigns to convince MAGA voters to stay home. At this point that is where I’d be putting some money. Someone should drop $100 million or so into an Uber-sophisticated social media campaign to convince the MAGAts not to vote.
Do any of you think for an instant they would not do the same thing if the positions were reversed?
MattF
@David Anderson: So… we’re back to trying to read the minds of the marginal voters.
Betty Cracker
@Chris: I agree, but the scheme relies on creating enough ambiguity in the results and sham democratic cover that people outside the cult accept the outcome. I’m not convinced Trump is working with Republican officials to create that scenario. I think he’s a madman they are leveraging to consolidate minority rule indefinitely, but he’s a loose cannon who is focused on himself only in a way that could fuck up their plans. I could definitely be wrong about that!
Brantl
All of this comes back to the fact that if we had only jailed Nixon, as he so rightfully deserved, 95% of these antics would have disqualified this a-hole for office, individually, and many like them both. The rot that was Richard Nixon’s presidency was the start of every bit of this.
West of the Rockies
I recall an article a couple years ago about how Trump supporters supposedly would never accept his sort of behavior from their best friend or son or coworker.
How can his supporters not be infuriated by that NRRC demand for fealty and cash? It’s beyond condescending and insulting.
As a group, they are all so broken. Perpetually enraged, frightened of everything, whiny, and loud… how do they not bore the daylights out of their own spouses, kids, and even themselves?
The mind is boggled.
Brachiator
What? Really?
Oh please, oh please. Let it happen.
West of the Rockies
@The Moar You Know:
Trump supporters of all stripes must be self-loathing rage-bots with Imposter Syndrome.
Brantl
Signing the checks got him 30% of the Hispanic votes.
Another Scott
They’re working on it.
TheHill – Freedom to Vote Act vote next week in the Senate:
They’re laying the groundwork to blow up the filibuster. We’ll actually see if Manchin can deliver any votes, and when he doesn’t whether he gets with the program…
Sinema is a co-sponsor of the For the People Act, so presumably she’s on board with Manchin on this bill as well (but she’s not an original co-sponsor).
I see that there are a lot of voting-rights bills in the House and Senate now. Things will be happening soon, even if they end up being less than what we want…
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
Not really. Hispanic Americans are not ‘Mexicans’ they are Americans. And many of them are as biased against recent undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America as anyone else. Sometimes even more so. Many are also hard-core conservatives who are business owners or work in typical “white working class” professions.
Think about it this way. When people diss and stereotype white conservative MAGAts in places like West Virginia and Kentucky who are mired in poverty and addiction do you agree with them, or do you say … “wait, no, I’m white and those are *my* people. I find that sort of thing offensive” A lot of Hispanic Americans have just as much connection to undocumented Hispanic immigrants as the average urban white professional does to white rural hillbillies from Appalachia. Race or ethnicity isn’t everything.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
I would say the scheme relies above all on shifting norms so that states choosing their electors becomes accepted – in the same way that 90% of the public before Bush vs Gore had no idea that the electoral college could overrule the popular vote, but once the Supreme Court had spoken, everybody was pretty much “oh, okay, I guess that is how it works.” If the SC says “the constitution gives states wide latitude to determine how their elections are run, and while some abuses will probably happen, it simply isn’t in the federal government’s powers to interfere,” I don’t foresee the end result being very different.
And I don’t think Trump is working with Republican officials; I think he’s trying to pressure them, as publicly as possible, by putting them on notice that he’ll fuck them if they don’t double their efforts.
It’s still absolutely possible, of course, that no matter what Republican officials do, he’ll decide it wasn’t enough and that he’s going to sit out 2022, maybe even 2024. If anybody’s that shallow and narcissistic, it’s him.
West of the Rockies
@Brantl:
I’d go back to Joe McCarthy.
Brit in Chicago
This reminds me of that moment in Blazing Saddles when the Black Sherrif holds a gun to his own head and starts making threats.
Baud
@Kent: Thank you.
Chris
@Kent:
And many of them are as biased against recent undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America as anyone else.
Yep. This goes double if the recent immigrants are of a different heritage from the Trump voter in question, i.e. Mexican-Americans dumping on Central Americans…
See also, Irish-Americans, who when the Italians and Jews and other new immigrants started popping up in the early twentieth century, were often as rabidly bigoted against them as any WASP. (Or Italian-Americans today, towards Mexicans. Or…)
ian
The NRCC text is straight up combination of abusive language and scam messaging. Traitor, disloyal, deserter, betrayed… you mean to tell me people still send them money after they been called that?
Also, whoever wrote that needs to see a shrink.
Baud
What happened to all the young people, who last I heard outnumber the olds now?
Kay
It really is wild that Trump can’t accept that he lost and millions of people are just going along with it, including half of Congress.
We don’t know because they’re all such cowardly liars so they didn’t stand up to him , but what if they had not gone along with it? I wonder what he’d be doing and saying now, if it were just him and some of his awful grown children and the most loyal faction of the MAGAS?
Hoodie
This is just turning the Big Lie up to eleven. The plan is “audits” 24/7 in every state where the GOP has the power to institute one of these audits, which we’re already seeing in states like PA, WI and TX. It doesn’t matter what the audit reveals – we can see that already with Arizona. The mere fact of the audit and some GOP fiddling with legislative review of elections will be considered “solving” the problem, so GOP voters will be allowed to vote in states doing so. Any election in a state controlled by Dems or where a Dem governor can prevent such an audit will automatically be suspect. I guess the theory behind this craziness is that this would provide Trump with an argument when he loses the popular vote again in 2024, perhaps by even more than he did in 2020; it will be all those illegal votes in Dem states.
Eunicecycle
@ian: I agree that whoever wrote that is mentally ill. As is anyone who would respond to it with a donation.
Raoul Paste
It’s so bizarre to see that mailer where Republicans demand that the recipients send money. Why, it’s like a fundraising mandate!
I don’t think that the base are the type of folks who like to be told what to do.
Hungry Joe
I suspect that — in part, anyway — these “audits” aren’t intended to overturn the 2020 election; they’re intended to normalize suspicion of election integrity, to get people used to the idea that there’s something funny going on with mail-in ballots/voting machines/whatever. Then, in ‘22 and ‘24 …
CaseyL
Maybe I’m one of the doomsayers; I know I’ve said a few things that have pissed off a lot of people.
But as a country we reached a critical mass of apathy and stupidity a long, long time ago.
Democracy depends on the educated and knowledgeable outnumbering the dumbfucks. Democracy depends on a majority of the people caring about “the common good” enough to give up a little to get a little, knowing how politics works, knowing at least a little bit about how policy works. It depends on a majority of the people caring enough to get up off their butts and vote intelligently!
It didn’t have to be a huge majority, back when more states were what you would call “swing states.” But now we have such an imbalance of representation (thanks to population shift as well as gerrymandering) the majorities for sane governance have to be enormous.
And we simply don’t have that, and the problem isn’t only with RWNJs.
I could trace the decline as far back as 1968. It accelerated in 1980, and was pretty much a done deal in 2000. Getting Bush II in there was the death knell – the vector shift between what we could-have-been and what we turned-out-to-be became an unbridgeable abyss. IMO, we’ve been living on borrowed time ever since.
Oh, I’m not folding my hands. I’ll still vote, and contribute, and do what I can. But I feel like it’s shoveling sand against the tide.
zhena gogolia
@eclare: I meant TFG himself, but you’re right.
Kent
The Democrats absolutely do need to make 2022 and 2024 a referendum on Trump. But they also have to open up the floodgates and pile on with the investigations and prosecutions within Trump-World. That is something the Republicans instinctually understand. And it is what got Trump impeached the first time around (all the Hunter Biden bullshit).
Democrats and their associated media organs should be working 24/7 to make Trump and anyone with a family or business or political association with him absolutely TOXIC. It needs to be an endless drumbeat, not some random one-off Washington Post editorial. If the Republican are going to go all-in with Trump then we need to as well. Make him the most toxic political figure in US history.
zhena gogolia
@CaseyL: You think the 1950s were some kind of utopia? Not for women and lots of non-white people. It wasn’t some kind of golden age.
The Moar You Know
@Brantl: This can’t be overstated. The failure to hold Nixon legally accountable was arguably the end of the rule of law in the United States.
Baud
@zhena gogolia: Yeah, the “democracy” we are trying to protect didn’t really exist in its current form before 1965.
Hoodie
@Kay: I don’t think it’s a matter of Trump not accepting that he lost. I think he knows that he did, he just thinks that a silly thing like the number of votes should not determine who should be in power. His conversation with Raffensburger makes clear he doesn’t think votes are real; they’re just a fiction that you create to gain power. Votes are for little people; what matters is power, and that’s a more complex mix of popular support, media power, intimidation of opponents, etc. It’s like his nonsense about “people are saying . . .” , it’s all just a sales pitch to close the deal with particular people and institutions that have power make it so. In a sense, he’s not completely crazy. Pence could have just refused to accept electors according to the Jeffrey Clark memo, and there is a real possibility they would have gotten away with it.
The Moar You Know
@Brantl: nope. He got 30% in 2016. Slightly less in 2020.
Betty Cracker
@Chris: Good points, but getting people to countenance straight-up substituting state legislatures’ votes for voters’ votes seems like a much heavier lift to me than the Bush v. Gore situation.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Technically speaking, GOP states would be on much safer constitutional ground by not holding any elections and just naming the electors directly. I think it’s harder for them to hold an election and then overturn the outcome.
Baud
@The Moar You Know: Wait, his share of Hispanics went down? Why do I keep hearing the opposite then?
The Moar You Know
@Kent: I know this. I was born and have lived in SoCal most of my life.
The only reason for my surprise is that, well, with Trump it’s always easy to hear the dogwhistle. Because that statement was aimed at Central American illegals and tenth-generation Californios alike. They certainly can tell the difference, but Trump cannot and most of the bigot brigade Republican voters cannot. I’d have thought that obvious, but the election results prove my thinking obviously wrong about that.
The Moar You Know
@Baud: Because I’m an idiot who wasn’t looking at the graph when I posted. It did go up. Just a bit, but it went up. Sorry all!
Chris
@Baud:
Which is also something I can see them doing. But you can always overturn the election by citing “fraud.”
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker: I’m not sure I would agree. People have repeatedly shown that they will gin up and then unconsciously internalize pretty ridiculous rationalizations to undermine democracy. Example is the Senate. Originally, it was just a straight up bribe to get states with lower populations of white males to join the union. This morphed into some bullshit platitudes about the Wisdom of the Founders, rationalizations like the Senate is some metaphorical saucer to cool the passions of the mob in the House. It’s all nonsense – how can anyone say with a straight face that 44 million Californians should have the same number of senators as a few jackrabbits and tumbleweeds in Wyoming? Yet you still hear people mouth these hackneyed rationales for its continued existence. That’s without even touching on atrocities like the filibuster.
Jeffro
But Kay, for these folks, he really is their god-king, The Voice of White Supremacy. And yet, he’s one-and-done. They can’t begin to process what that says about their gullibility, much less how they view themselves as White People going forward.
Old Man Shadow
It’s really just depressing how much garbage and how many garbage people there are out there. But I’ll turn that depression into more cynicism and anger and keep fighting.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: You’re right, but I don’t think they’ll do that because they’re afraid they couldn’t get away with it.
debbie
I’ve onlooked this asshole since 1978. This is who he always was.
mrmoshpotato
Wow. I know better than to think that’s farce. These assholes are fucking deranged.
catclub
I think a read of “The Authoritarians” is in order. They do.
Brachiator
@VOR:
I am not certain what the best strategy might be. The problem is that for Republicans, irrational nonsense has become mainstream.
I have noticed that many Republicans actively deny that Biden administration efforts to restore the economy and to deal with the pandemic are working, even as they benefit from them.
They gin up anger and resentment against phantom issues. Like their avatar and hero Trump, they enjoy living in their own special bubble of ignorance and fear.
Democrats have accomplished a great deal since the election. We need to get out the vote to keep moving in the right direction.
debbie
NPR’s On Point is covering school board melees. It turns out Freedomworks and Heritage are training the MAGATs to run for school boards. Heritage insists the teacher unions are teaching CRT to children, no matter what anyone else says.
Too Eeyore? //
Betty Cracker
@Hoodie: True — Americans internalize a lot of nonsense. But or the sake of my own sanity, I’m still clinging to the notion that people wouldn’t accept being told that regular citizens don’t get to participate in national elections except through their state reps and/or congressional reps as proxy.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: Pointing out facts is not being an Eeyore. Since I am a prime complainer, let me say what bothers me in that vein. It’s two things. First, not recognizing that there are good things happening as well as bad. Second, actual pronouncements of doom or assumptions that all GOP efforts will be successful and all Democratic efforts will fail. Others’ MMV.
catclub
I really wish an interviewer could ask Trump “Was the Virginia 2020 election stolen from you, too?”
How about California? Illinois?
Because he is incapable of saying “No, I lost there legitimately.”
Geminid
@debbie: Republicans in Virginia are trying to make the bugaboo of Critical Race Theory a winning issue in the next month’s election. It may be getting some traction.
CaseyL
@zhena gogolia: The 1950s were when the modern Civil Rights movement really started. The reason the movement succeeded was that enough people were horrified by what they saw going on in the South; horrified and willing to vote in the politicians and policies that changed it.
Ditto modern feminism: Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique based on her research in the late 1950s.
The 50s weren’t utopia; they were an incubator.
catclub
yes, the Georgia senate elections are just short of an electoral miracle.
And Trump helped it happen. he could do that again.
TheQuietOne
Keep in mind that most Republican run states think they can do anything they want. Here in Missouri we had gotten medical pot and Medicaid expansion on the ballot and the Leg. subverted the will of the voters until taken to court. They are going for that tactic in 2024 in my opinion.
lowtechcyclist
I think this is something the Dems should jump on: that the Republican Party – not Trump himself, or any particular Republican, but the GOP itself – is calling people traitors for nothing more than failing to support Trump with the amount of enthusiasm they think is appropriate.
Make them own this. Wrap it around their fucking necks.
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker: That’s where the Big Lie is important. You convince your voters that the only way their votes really count is by making sure other peoples’ votes don’t count. Sure, those other people will bitch about their votes being invalidated, but they’re not real Americans anyway and what are they going to do about it? It’s not much different than the GOP narrative around government services; my Medicare is a God-given right but your Medicaid is a giveaway to worthless moochers.
Burnspbesq
@Brantl:
Not necessarily. That controversial Texas Monthly article was large.y accurate in its depiction of Tejanos as self-identifying as non-Hispanics. Whites and Tejanos along the border are united in opposition to refugees being welcomed. And they’ll vote Republican as long as Trump and Abbott, however implausibly, promise them The Answer.
Another Scott
@Baud:
IANAL, but wouldn’t the 17th Amendment and similar things argue against that? If state legislatures cannot appoint Senators, why would they be able to appoint electors?
Cheers,
Scott.
Van Buren
@Geminid: Anecdotally, it is getting traction, as my 87 year old Virginia Republican mother absolutely refuses to believe me that neither I nor any other elementary school teacher is indoctrinated little kids with CRT.
Why would they be talking about it on FOX if it weren’t happening?
Old School
@catclub:
Trump lied that there were millions of illegal votes in California in 2016. Why would 2020 be different?
Gvg
That threat memo is so extreme that I wonder if Trump world has reason to expect indictment or subpoenas soon. He no longer has the protection of the Presidency and needs it back.
Also people aren’t paying as much attention to him anymore. Even attacks on Biden are people paying attention to his rival. It could be just that. He doesn’t want to run on 2024, he wants to stay President. Right from the start he was talking about more terms than 2. He doesn’t know how to end that white hot spot light he loves.
But still, I think it is so odd the way he can’t let go.
TheQuietOne
@Gvg: He can’t let it go because the size of his rallies tells him he won. No really!! I believe he’s actually said that.
Baud
@Geminid: @Van Buren:
Race is always going to be their bread and butter.
Chris
@Another Scott:
Why would it? The 17th specifies senators; it doesn’t say anything about anyone else.
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
I absolutely agree many, many good things are going on. These people frighten me though.
I guess Wisconsin’s audit is beginning? I hope taxpayers aren’t paying for that bullshit.
Betty Cracker
@Hoodie: Do you think people who DON’T think that way will accept having their individual right to vote taken away though? Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think most people would just blithely accept that. Ordinary citizens being able to choose candidates in elections at every level is ingrained in our national self-image too.
Geminid
@Baud: “Woke” is a particularly good dog whistle. I hear Republicans use the word way more than I ever saw Black people doing.
Burnspbesq
My money is still on the Reaper solving the Trump problem for us if the DAs in New York and Atlanta don’t. He’s still a stroke waiting to happen, and he’s careless enough to get a second round with COVID.
Baud
@Geminid:
Dems need black Virginians to come out, so one hopes the focus on race will help.
Another Scott
@Chris: That’s why I mentioned “similar things”. Like Clause 42 which specifies that the US and all states have a republican form of government (people shall vote). The history of the 17th Amendment probably is related to that.
Understanding that lawyers are paid to argue any side, this seems pretty clear-cut to me and is probably one of the reasons why we haven’t had these coup-by-reactionary-minority issues in the past.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Burnspbesq
@debbie:
It is, and it’s going to be just as much of a dumpster fire as Arizona.
The former Supreme Court justice the Republicans in the Legislature hired to oversee it gave up the game; he said on the record that he knows almost nothing about election law.
Soprano2
@The Moar You Know: I have always thought the Nixon pardon was a huge mistake, and led directly to Iran-Contra and all the rest. People have said to me that Nixon paid a price because he had to resign, and I say “Sure, but for what he did he should have gone to jail, and instead he got to live a cushy life and be rehabilitated as an “elder statesman” in his later years. It was wrong, and made others think they could get away with the same kind of stuff, and then they did it with Iran-Contra”.
Kay
@Geminid:
Ugh. I was afraid of that. It felt sticky to me when it started. It’s hard to decide what to do about these panics. There’s a group that says ignore them because if you don’t all you’ll do is defend and another group that says take them head on. It just seems like a guess to me, which way to go.
The basic premise is a disaster for schools though. It is not true that it would be best if “parents” decided what is taught in schools. That’s a horrible idea. Putting aside even that there’s no consensus among “parents” and never, ever will be, parents aren’t the only stakeholders in public schools. It’s an insane idea. It will be a big collection of junk because there’s no one to ascertain quality or set priorities.
It’ll be weird, dumb “patriotic” education along with “cursive!”
You put 100 public school parents in a room and say “set the curriculum” I guarantee it will be garbage. I was on a school council and we couldn’t even get consensus on whether people should be hitting students with paddles. There was a pro-hitting faction.
Why does everyone have to insist they know how to do everything? They can’t run a school. They’ll be bad at it. That’s why they hired someone else to do it.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
Based on the record, I would have to say that I kind of do. A lot of people won’t, but when you combine the 45% whose only principle is “Republicans are entitled to rule together” and add the tons of “too broad-minded to take their own side in a quarrel” and “both sides do it anyway” turd blossoms, plus a very long ingrained belief in the “normal” population that whatever the Supreme Court says goes… I think a bunch of people would be furious, but would then be dismissed as sour-grapes partisans who’re just upset because they lost, and by the next election, the whole process would have become normalized.
Chris
@Another Scott:
“A republican form of government” is vague enough to mean whatever the fuck the Supreme Court justices want it to mean, especially in the age of “we’re a republic not a democracy” being the catch-all phrase that excuses all antidemocratic behavior. Heck, I can easily see that clause be invoked to justify antidemocratic behavior: “you choose your state governments, but they get to choose [X, Y, Z], that’s how the constitution works so we don’t just have mob rule.”
The bottom line is that existing rules on the topic of whether states can overrule their voters is murky as hell, and when you combine that with a hyperpartisan Supreme Court with a record of doing whatever the fuck it wants to make the answer be “whatever Republicans want,” it’s really hard to be optimistic.
scav
@CaseyL: You do understand why the (reiterated) promise of rights, equality and better things in times to come would begin to wear after a while, and why holding up periods of incubation — but not tangible — rights as golden ages would be insufficient. Oh, if we’re only good and lucky enough, we might get empty promises again!
Soprano2
I cannot echo this enough. I asked one of my co-workers if the reason she thinks Trump couldn’t have lost was because almost everyone she knows loves him and voted for him, and she told me that was a lot of it. To them he’s the best, most popular president in the world, and it’s unpossible that Joe Biden got more votes because who on Earth voted for him, not anyone they know!! I did point out to her that I voted for Biden, as did some of my other co-workers, but she still wasn’t moved. No way that many people voted for him, she said. (She’s also one of those people who thinks whole cities were burned down by BLM and Antifa.) You also see this in the way the press treats the relative popularity of Biden and Trump. They treat the highest popularity numbers Trump ever had as being a disaster for Biden! They cannot “see” the people who voted for Biden because so many of them aren’t the “regular” white person who votes. Why weren’t they constantly saying that Trump’s popularity numbers were a disaster? Because the “regular white person” voted for Trump! They may not even know that’s why they do it, but that’s why.
Soprano2
@debbie: I listened to that show today, I was beside myself with anger at how she didn’t really push back on that Heritage guy’s lies. I think I commented too much on Facebook. They mostly ignore those comments as far as I can tell.
Kay
@Geminid:
“CRT” in schools is why I know I would be a bad pol.
Q: “Should parents decide what is taught in public schools?”
A: “God, no. Absolutely not”
My campaign would crash and burn 4 hours after launch.
Geminid
@Baud: I think Black Democrats will come out, and white Democrats as well. Youngkin is trying to win by attracting Independents who were freaked out by trump, and have been repelled by the tea party cranks and bible thumpers infesting the state Republican party. Youngkin tries to steer clear of issues like women’s rights and gun safety, projecting the image of a pragmatic guy who just wants things to work better, although he is very concerned about crime and the way Woke Liberals have hamstrung law enforcement.
Soprano2
I was always amazed that the school board had to OK the teachers my father hired. My father got a specialist degree so he could be a school superintendent, and yet 9 people who might not even have a high school education could tell him whether or not he could hire someone. We wouldn’t tolerate this in any business, but we let it happen in our schools.
cmorenc
@The Moar You Know:
That was in part because there’s disproportionate admiration of machismo across Hispanic culture. True, Trump’s version of machismo is well, cheesy and a punching-down bullying variant, but it seems to still work with too many Hispanics despite their ethnicity being on the receiving end of much of Trump’s nastier bullying. That said, there is no contradiction with that observation and the fact that Hispanics are not uniform across-the-board in culture or background origin, e.g. Cuban Hispanics in Florida tend to differ (and be much more Republican-leaning) than from Central American-origin.
Gravenstone
@Betty Cracker: Trump’s ego will never allow another Republican to hold the office he befouled. He will consider anyone else holding that position to be illegitimate and will rail against even the potential of them taking the office. The ultimate in “taking his ball (followers) and going home” behavior. May it spell the ruin and end of the contemporary Republican party along the way.
Geminid
@Kay: Terry McAuliffe said something like what you describe, and Republicans are now bashing him with his own words. McAuliffe could have said this better. He was correct, but impolitic.
Soprano2
My mother’s e-mail inbox gets e-mails like that now, because I refuse to spend the time it would take to unsubscribe her from all the political stuff. Their fundraising e-mails seem a lot more desperate than the ones I get from Democrats. Her inbox is about 95% political crap, 5% other. I found out about three things I needed to address from going through them (over 2,700 e-mails!), so it was useful, but only up to a point. I’m about ready to have AT&T shut down her Internet. I think I’ll have to ask them to shut down her e-mail address too. I guess I’ll find out.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
The Answer to Life, the Universe, and the U.S. Government?
Gotta admit, this is the first time I’ve seen this bizarre way of referring to part of the Constitution. Article IV, section 4, yes. Clause 42, no. I wouldn’t even know where to find Clause 42, except that I know you were talking about the guarantee of a Republican form of government.
Gravenstone
@Hungry Joe: Republicans have been questioning the “integrity” of elections for decades now. They can’t believe that anyone would vote for candidates other than themselves, so it must be rigged. The fraudits are just turning that behavior up to 11.
Kay
@Geminid:
Oh, why though? Why don’t people ever appreciate frankness? I do.
It IS a dumb idea that parents should decide curriculum, besides being completely unworkable. Why do we always have to do this coddling? If they’re screaming at him “parents should decide!” why can’t he say “No, they shouldn’t.”?
They just say these ridiculous things, these slogans, and then everyone has to defer to them and act as if we’re all taking it under advisement. They were heard. He rejects what they said.
Betty Cracker
@Gravenstone: I hope that’s true, and Trump has said some things that support that theory. (Like saying he’d totally kick Ron DeSantis’s ass in the 2024 GOP primary if he [Trump] runs.)
Gravenstone
@Geminid: “Woke” does a lot of heavy lifting. I see it pretty frequently in use by people lamenting they can’t be as casually and openly misogynistic as they want/have been. It’s become a shorthand for anyone who laments the inability to remain an abject asshole to others and not get called on it.
Hoodie
@Chris: This. You don’t have to convince all people, just enough people and, more particularly, people in the right places. Rerun 2020, except put a Trump crony in Raffensburgers’s office, a Trump crony in that seat held by the Republican that voted to certify the votes from Detroit, etc., make Mike Pence even more craven than he already is or let him not talk to Dan Quayle, you get a different result. A bunch of people will buy into that result or won’t give a shit. You already have evidence of this in the form of Republicans who have done a 180 since initially condemning Trump after 1/6. People can be talked into anything, especially if they view it out of fear or as being in their personal interest.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Our school board completely defers to the superintendent on his or her hires, because they hired the superintendent. That makes sense to me. It also makes one person accountable instead of a committee if the one person hires bad people.
Geminid
@Kay: McAuliffe’s words may not hurt him, Republicans just think they will. McAuliffe was a little clunky in the way he expressed the idea. His pal Bill Clinton would have found a way to say it better.
Kay
It is a mystery to me why any public school teacher is still voting Republican. The absolute malice towards teachers, specifically, from Republicans is amazing and it’s not just the crt panic or masks, they have been doing this for decades.
Chris
@Gravenstone:
I say this every time the topic comes up, but:
I spent years on the right-wing blogosphere back when I still believed it was important to “know what the other side was thinking,” and a little noted recurring topic that would come up from time to time is the question of Who Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Vote. And they’re not talking about illegal immigrants and released ex-convicts. Answers that came up in these conversations would be “dual citizens” (you can’t trust their (((dual allegiances)))); “citizens who live overseas” (they’re all Democrats); citizens born to illegal immigrants (no reward for people who shouldn’t have been born here to begin with); citizens born here to any non-citizens at all (birthright citizenship is evil and clearly not what the amendment intended anyway); women (they’re all Democrats); Muslims (Islam is a political ideology not a religion); people who don’t pay income taxes (no other taxes count because shut up that’s why); and people who haven’t served in the military (admit it, you knew the Heinlein nerds were going to pop up somewhere).
It didn’t come up all that often, and usually it was spontaneous in a comments section not in response to a post. But it’s notable that when it did come up, I never saw anybody push back on it, ever. And it’s notable that, as I said, everybody knows perfectly well that the people they’re talking about haven’t broken any laws by voting and are completely entitled to vote under the laws of the current system. They just think that’s wrong, because universal suffrage is wrong, because, to make a long story short, people who aren’t them don’t deserve the privilege of voting.
“Millions of illegals voting” and “we’re a republic not a democracy” is simply the politically correct spin they put on it when not talking amongst themselves. They know perfectly well that it’s not because of “fraud” that they lose elections. They simply think you and me and anybody else who hasn’t been vetted by them don’t deserve to vote.
Betty Cracker
@Hoodie: I agree about the danger of putting partisan actors in charge of tabulating votes, and I agree that if you rerun 2020 with the right stooges in place, we would be screwed. But we were discussing a more specific and arcane question when I said people wouldn’t stand for it at #57. Specifically, I don’t think people would put up with being cut out of electing officials directly. I could be wrong, but I stand by that.
Kay
@Geminid:
But we should be able discuss this. It is not true at all that parents should decide what’s taught in public schools. He doesn’t have to accept a dumb, glib premise that no one actually thought through before they started barking it out like seals. The loudest and most threatening “parents” (although in this case they’re not even parents) should under no circumstances design public school curriculum. Why? Because it will be a sucky, chaotic, low quality mess riddled with their bias and personal obsessions.
Geminid
@Gravenstone: What makes “woke” such a dog whistle is that it suggests the Black slang that it in fact, I believe, came from. Some white people have a lot of fear and disdain for Black culture. I have a white acquaintance who used to go on and on about gangster rap, pronouncing it “gangsta.” I asked a young Black man about the contempory prevalence of gangster rap, and he told me it had gone out of style ten years before.
Soprano2
@Chris: I’m surprised I don’t see “people who don’t own property” on your list. I think some of them want to go back to the “original intent” of the Constitution, when only property owners were allowed to vote. They think that if that was the criteria, they would control everything everywhere. It’s like the people who own businesses in our city but don’t live here who want to vote in municipal elections. I tell them “Move to Springfield, then you can vote in our elections”. They want to tell us how to run the city they don’t live in. They want to have their business here because that’s where their customers are.
Soprano2
@Gravenstone: This is what Bill Maher means when he complains about it, that he can’t tell misogynistic jokes anymore. He complains a lot about how comedians can’t play college campuses anymore because the students are so offended about everything. I think it’s mostly that he’s lazy and doesn’t want to come up with new material. I don’t think Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert would have any problem at all playing college campuses.
Chris
@Soprano2:
Oh, I think that’s what “people who don’t pay income tax” is supposed to mean. They do specifically tie that one to the founding fathers’ “people who don’t own property;” I suppose the income tax is considered the best threshold to evaluate whether they have enough “skin in the game.”
This is also by far the most mainstream one, by the way. The other arguments are mostly ones I never hear unless they think no one else can hear them, but “poor people shouldn’t vote, they’ll just vote themselves more welfare and destroy America” is absolutely an argument they make out loud all the time.
Kay
I’m pleased they know they have to deliver on this, because they do.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: They don’t vote.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I think it depends on the state you’re looking at.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: In some places, Republicans are smart enough to do some nut-picking and find examples of lesson plans, corporate training modules, etc., that really are kind of out there, which they use to scaremonger. I think that’s how these issues can then gain traction among people who aren’t hardcore Republicans.
schrodingers_cat
Quiz:
Who said this and when?
Feckless Democrats is a trope for the Right and the Left and even many self declared Democrats.
Old School
@schrodingers_cat:
Is the quiz open book?
Google tells me that Rick Perlstein tweeted it on Nov 10, 2020.
Mike in NC
Retired Vice Admiral Mike Franken (my old shipmate) has declared his candidacy for the Iowa senate seat occupied by 88-year-old Chuck Grassley. Nobody that age should be anywhere near our politics. I’m going to send him a small donation each month via ActBlue.
bmoak
@Hoodie: Wisconsin was one vote on the State Supreme Court away from tossing Dane (Madison) and Milwaukee Counties.
Baud
@Mike in NC:
?
Brant
@West of the Rockies: McCarthy was discredited and washed up while in office.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t know who said it, but I don’t disagree. “Feckless Democrats” is a trope when applied to the entire party, and it’s a less accurate trope right now than it’s ever been in my experience. But there are individual Democrats who can reasonably be described as “feckless” (although I think “corrupt” is more accurate) who certainly appear to prefer consensus with Republicans over democracy.
Maybe Schumer’s move to file cloture on the voting rights bill will prove Senators Manchin and Sinema aren’t as “feckless” as they appear, but I sure wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
Mai Naem mobile
@debbie: remember the not dead Koch saying that he realized that the Kochs had contributed to the polarization in this country but yet he continues with the polarization.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker:
Impatient Twitter is wrong again… TheHill:
(Emphasis added.)
But, but feckless Democrats won’t do anything, Impatient Twitter told me so!!11
Cheers,
Scott.
Aziz, light!
@Burnspbesq:
I’ll say here again that Trump will be sounding his barbaric yawp until he’s 90 just to spite us.
Okay, 85.
Mai Naem mobile
@Mike in NC: watching Grassley during Donnie’s rally the other day and the clip from OAN I think he’s ripe for the picking. You have to have a lot of things go right but I think the right Dem candidate could knock the guy off. At the same time I also worry about the same thing happening to Pat Leahy on our side.
Geminid
@Mike in NC: When Admiral Franken ran for the nomination to run against Joni Ernst in the last cycle some Iowa jackals spoke highly of him as a politician. Right now people rate Iowa as a safe seat for Republicans, but I wouldn’t say Grasley’s reelection is a certainty.
schrodingers_cat
@Old School: You win. This man is supposedly a serious commentator and a historian.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: You agree with Perlstein, that elected Dems would have let the Orange Clown be President after he lost?
Even after he was proven wrong?
dopey-o
Sadly I think voting rights legislation is our last hope against decades of GOP dominance, and the resulting catastrophies.
FUD over “Irregularities” (read Black People Voting) readies the ground for republican legislatures to switch or withhold Blue electoral votes, pushing the matter to the House, where 26 votes for Trump will outweigh 24 votes for Biden.
Two Democratic senators must help abolish the filibuster, or voting rights will be lost. And with them, the republic.
They have already told us their plan. Believe them!
Bill Arnold
The NRCC is saying that Americans who have not donated to the NRCC are traitors. (The 15 minute grace period has expired.)
Wow.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: IIRC, they were saying the exact same things in their mailers that were (WaPo) signing people up for monthly donations by default. They’re going to keep doing it until it stops working – that’s the way grifters operate.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Mai Naem mobile:
Yes. What a dick.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: Your anonymous quote “quiz” framing obscured the context as intended, but I think the hypothetical he offered is sound because right now, the power to effect a future coup would require the cooperation of Democrats who prize consensus over democracy and demonstrate that by refusing to protect the integrity of the vote.
The coup attempt in 2020 failed, thank dog. The guardrails cracked and bent but ultimately held because all Democrats and a sufficient number of Republicans weren’t on board.
Could it succeed in the future? Sure, if the tiny percentage of Dems who are feckless thwart the will of the overwhelming majority who understand the danger and want to address it. They know we can’t rely on Republican ineptitude and rare glimmers of integrity indefinitely.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: What context are you talking about? I quoted him in the entirety. He was wrong then.
What you are saying is that elected Democrats are guilty until proven innocent. Because sometime in the future one or more of them might be feckless.
No party in the world can clear that bar of perfection I am afraid.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: The context of that quote is the 2020 attempted coup, whereas the topic of discussion in this thread is the need to protect against future coup attempts. I didn’t share Perlstein’s apparent doubts that elected Dems would oppose the 2020 coup attempt (and was in fact unaware of them since he’s not someone I routinely follow), but the hypothetical he offered isn’t wrong. The operative word being hypothetical.
Nope. I said nothing of the sort. I expressed skepticism that two specific Democrats, Manchin and Simema, will join the rest of the caucus to protect the country from future coup attempts by carving out a filibuster exception to protect the vote. I think it’s well-founded skepticism since it’s based on repeated statements that came out of their own mouths, but we’ll see.
catclub
@schrodingers_cat: If Perlstein had ended with “Yes, they do have the power to execute a coup” then he would be wrong. I do not know if he said that as well.
The quote as given is describing the terms of ‘if they can do it, this is how it will happen.” It not making a firm prediction as I read it.
I was going to Guess FDR for who said it.
Chris Johnson
The single most important thing to know about Trump, the Republicans that back him, and the Russians running them, is this: they are not supposed to win.
They’re supposed to become terrorists, and be constantly waging war on us so Russia doesn’t directly have to. They were supposed to lose and become terrorists in _2016_.
They’re still supposed to lose and become terrorists. The smart ones are trying to cash in as hard as they can, and lock in whatever personal fiefdoms they can, while they can. But I think they know they’re not supposed to actually win. They’re supposed to trash the place, make inconceivable amounts of money, and run away.
Ruckus
@TheQuietOne:
Worse.
They are telling their voters – and everyone else, that the history of this country has been wrong from the beginning, that citizens do not have the wisdom or the right to vote for the federal government, because the majority doesn’t want republicans r
uiningrunning said government. The premise was, over 200 yrs ago, that if the ruling was done by the royal class, or the upper class or the land owners, most people would end up with nothing. Everyone had to be able to vote for the things and people that made their lives better. Conservatives hate that concept because if the situation is clear, IOW no faux news or their brethren lying sacks of shit, people will vote for a more democratic government. And that leaves them with nothing. That is why they didn’t say their crap out loud.trump, being who he is, always says the crap out loud. And it worked, because the haters had been waiting to hear all of that crap for decades. Hate/racism is their first priority and that had been sort of pushed into the background, until trump.
Ruckus
@Chris Johnson:
Interesting position.
Not sure I agree, but I’m also not sure I don’t. I can see that if the wealthy powers that be wanted one of their own in charge, that trump and his massively racist followers would not fit that bill. They could make the noise and say the crap out loud, but actually make anything work to the advantage of the uber wealthy? And they proved that they are incapable of that last part. trump is actually a failure and always has been, he just had enough start up money to make that less obvious. But if you look at the projects that he’s been a part of they are all just holding their own at best and mostly relatively massive failures.
Uncle Cosmo
Oh, they’ve already done it at least once (my guess is many more times as well) on a lower level. In the 2010 rematch between MD Governor Martin O’Malley and the GOP incumbent he beat four years earlier (Bob Ehrlich), thousands of robocalls went out late on Election Day to registered Democrats (mostly AA) in Baltimore City, to “inform” them that “Governor O’Malley has this won, you don’t need to vote.” Confused voters who called Democratic HQ triggered a quickly produced response recorded by the late Congressman Elijah Cummings that went out telling them they dang well did need to vote, for every Democrat on the ballot! **
And BTW, you know that bullshit the Florida GOP pulled by bankrolling a candidate with the same last name as the Democratic incumbent? They’ve been pulling that sort of crap for generations (though they’ve only been putting serious $$$ behind it recently).
Goddamned motherfucking sonsofbitches….
** The bastard the Thugs funded to work this con was one Julius Henson, an AA political prostitute from Baltimore City, nominally a Democrat but only too happy to take GOP cash to the tune of $112,000. Here’s background from the 2012 Baltimore Sun.