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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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No, not bullshitting their way through to the White House with policies and promises that could never be and caving in to the unrealistic demands of a voter base with harmful but nice sounding policies is a smart move.
However it doesn't excuse the Democrats to find policies that work and make them sound appealing to the indecisive voter base. Trump won because he was willing to bullshit his way and tell everyone what they wanted to hear, which isn't something any decent politician should be doing, it never ends well.
Inter arma enim silent leges
It's already to late for things to "end well" in the traditional sense. It's very possible by this time next year the EU will have gone the way of the USSR. In fact, I'd be very surprised if the EU exists as more than a legal fiction 2 years from now. What is needed now is damage control, which means taking back power. Outside of a coup (which brings us to another impasse) resulting from Trump refusing to pay the military, the only way I see that as remotely likely is with a more tempered and restrained populist message. Which will probably end in disaster in plenty of cases, but with a somewhat lower chance of World War III starting.
edited 30th Nov '16 3:40:33 PM by CaptainCapsase
So who do you guys think the Republicans will elect in 30 years to be the next Reagan? Trump is the new Reagan, with all the social consequences that come with that. In 30 years he will be worshiped as a God among the right just like Raygun is today. I'm betting it will be B.O.B, (Yes the flat Earth pop-singer) who will say "I called the Earth flat before we knew big science was hiding everything!" and will decry all progress we manage to get back in the next 30 years.
Seriously though, who do you guys think the next Pop Celebrity will be to get the Republican nomination?
THE RIGHT: Captain America is but a figment of our imaginations. Seriously. He is a fictional character. He is not real. He means NOTHING. Now Donald Trump; he's a true paragon of Repub— ahem, American values if we've seen one, yes sir! And he actually exists. Just a FYI.
They might have had something with the first half, if only in the sense that they were least being creative, but the second half drags them right into the gutters. As it should.
What rough beast is slouching to Bethelem waiting to be born?
I don't know...things tend to get worse and worse.
The thing about Reagan and Trump is that both of them started as Democrats and turned Republicans. They came from liberal parts of America. Reagan from California, Trump from New York. Reagan is West Coast, Trump is East Coast. So I think they both had a sense of how the conservatives looked on the outside and had an internalized way of blurring the boundaries. That's something media people instinctively understand.
They both used the same campaign slogan of making American great again. Between the two, I'd say Reagan is a honest ideologue while Trump is entirely cynical. Reagan also had mental illness while in office. I don't believe Reagan was personally corrupt the way Trump is. I mean I don't know too much about him personally. As an actor, he was quite good in Don Siegel's The Killers where he plays a Corrupt Corporate Executive Big Bad who slaps Angie Dickinson around...his last film role and one that prefigured his administration.
Trump more or less is the real-life version of that character Reagan played in that movie. And what I think he tapped into was the South Park Republican base which tended to blur the lines. He knew that Dubya was finished, his legacy discredited by Obama's Presidency (Obama's opposition to the Iraq war was a big part of his campaign) and there needed to be a right-wing insurgency. So he found a way to bring that outside view inside. There's also the whole stand-up comedian aspect to Trump...something that he probably picked up from Obama himself: like all the appearances Obama did on skits and comedy shows, the parody video with Spielberg's new biopic, that White House Correspondents Dinner where Obama roasted Trump. There's also the fact that Jon Stewart and John Oliver and others became these new sources for news and information. The fact that news was becoming so absurd that satire was essentially becoming documentaries. So I think Trump is a reflection of that media landscape.
Remember mass media cuts both ways. JFK's telegenic qualities and LBJ's Daisy ad paved the way for Reagan's similarly telegenic and movie star appearance and the various Republican attack ads.
I dislike the way 'Left' and 'Right' become all-encompassing terms; where a strong stance on literally any issue defines you as an adherent to one of two arbitrarily, ill-defined and perpetually shifting philosophies.
Why should not denying climate change make one further to the left of the GOP, despite being closer to them than the Democrats everywhere else? Why should that be placed on a political spectrum at all, when it's absence is really just a sign of the GOP's craziness that isn't really reflected anywhere else in world?
The argument against Captain America is obvious: "Captain America is a drug-addicted steroid junkie and an insult to our brave fighting men who go on combat with no superpowers. He's an embarrassing fantasy created by liberals who don't know what combat is."
It's pro-military, anti-liberal elite, and its got Drugs Are Bad. Perfect.
Well "Left" and "Right" are not really philosophies.
The words "right" and "left" come from the French Revolution in the period of 1789-1791. It referred to the seating arrangements of the National Assembly. The conservative faction, i.e. priests/nobles/royalists sat on the Right, and the Moderate-Liberals sat on the Left. Ideological differences between them, i.e. distributing church property, giving citizenship rights to all, voting rights to only a few, recognizing Jews as equal to Catholics...all of them were issues that divided them. And over time that divide became spread to other countries and coalesced to the present understanding. You had similar distinctions in the Roman Republic between Optimates and Populares. Both are words that started as pejoratives used by conservatives like Cicero and his ilk. They saw the Gracchi and their descendants like Caesar, as "populares" who were advocating stuff like distribution of land, expansion of citizenship and rights for veterans.
In the USA, the partisan divisions have never really been in the same light. In the 1790s you had Federalists versus Anti-Federalists and neither of them is specially right or left wing by today's standards. Then there's Jacksonian Democrats...who nobody on the left today wants to touch with a ten foot pole. The Republican Party of the 1850s-1870s became the first American party that was seen as leftist globally. Garibaldi/Marx/John Bright/Hugo all saw them as being on the same page as them. Georges Clemenceau of France, who was a journalist in America at the time said the Radical Republicans were going after the south "with the wrath of Robespierre" and he meant that as compliment. This was the Golden Age of the Republican Party, their Glory Days, when they were the party of Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens and Grant.
But after Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Republicans became a pro-business Northern liberal party and didn't push anti-racism anymore. Then you had the progressive movement under clowns like William Jennings Bryan, and until FDR you didn't have a Left-Wing mainstream political party anymore.
So in a way the so-called Neoliberal consensus between Democrats-Republicans from Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II is more in keeping with history than the Left-Right debates from the ideological period of FDR-Nixon
It's a useful way of understanding politics. That's all.
edited 30th Nov '16 4:14:02 PM by JulianLapostat
You know, this whole discussion reminds me once again how archaic much of the American electoral system is. Which, I would think, puts a bit of a wrinkle into the position of yours that America is by its very nature a white supremacist society no different than it was in the 1950s (which naturally begs the question of why you even bother with political activism). It's political system certainly is biased in that direction, and it's entirely possible a more democratic system would've brought about some other catastrophe, but it wouldn't have given us Trump.
edited 30th Nov '16 4:46:17 PM by CaptainCapsase
Nancy Pelosi's victory shows House Democrats don't think they need to change to win:
Basically: The House Democrats think the party will be able to take advantage of Republicans trying to ramrod through a highly unpopular socio-political agenda, as well as harness the fact Trump is one of the most hated presidents entering office in history, to their advantage.
Basically they're banking on "Being in charge places different pressures and expectations on the party in charge. Republicans will be expected to actually run the government. And people will burn them for it if they don't run it as they voted them to."
i.e. the whole "The party in charge loses seats during Mid-Terms." rule of thumb.
That's unlikely to work. Assuming he doesn't do anything insane, Trump will have a relatively good economy, and while it won't be a huge difference from what we have under Obama, confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. I also seriously doubt the GOP is actually going to try and ban abortion or gay marriage; that's been a "carrot" to lead their base along for decades, and GOP lawmakers unlike their constituents are pragmatic.
Plus there's the whole matter of voter suppression likely being way worse than it was this election.
edited 30th Nov '16 4:54:15 PM by CaptainCapsase
@cap: you seem to bank a lot on the republicans not doing things they very clearly said they'd do. If your cabinet is full of people saying "we should get rid of gay marriage" it would be odd if that didn't come up.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?
The thing is, it's going to be extremely difficult to actually accomplish that. They'd need constitutional amendments or a stacked supreme court in fact, and the former requires them to win even more elections while the latter would take several years.
edited 30th Nov '16 4:58:56 PM by CaptainCapsase
Yeah. They'd have to bring a case before the court that requires new evidence for the Supreme Court. The way it was ruled basically made it unassailable to Republicans in a way will make them hiss and howl for ages.
Any religious liberty bill is likely to get them howled on on the phones by major corporations who will threaten all sort of arm twisting on the Republicans.
While the Republicans may not be able to overturn Roe vs Wade (since I'm pretty sure that would require someone to take it to trial again, I don't think Congress can just overrule a Supreme Court decision, and the SC doesn't change their official rulings unless a case is brought before them) they can double and triple down on what they've been doing; defunding the fuck out of Planned Parenthood and making it as difficult as possible. When it's extremely onerous to engage in an action, that's in effect as good as making it illegal would be in the end. They've already brought up legislation regarding "religious freedom" to guarantee the right of businesses and government employees to not issue marriage licenses or host weddings for gay people.
Making something onerous to do is the next best thing to making it illegal, and can be just as hard if not harder to undo.
Also yeah, it would be weird if they banged that drum and then didn't pursue it when they gained power. Regardless of what we think of their principles, lots of politicians do, in fact, try to follow through on most of their promises. This is a conversation we've had before.
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The point is, the things the Republicans can be expected to do in the short term won't produce the kind of catastrophic backlash that Pelosi is hoping for.
They would do it if they were safe from electoral backlash, but Republicans are much better at playing the long game than democrats.
edited 30th Nov '16 5:02:26 PM by CaptainCapsase
Whoa...just because I say white supremacy is part of America's deep structure and is part of a long continuity doesn't mean there hasn't been changes from the 50s to now. Do I have to nuance everything I say. I take it for granted some people can parse the general tone I am trying to say.
The whole "A more perfect union" thing. The fact that progress will always be under threat of reversal/setback and reprisals only heightens why we must defend and fight for progress. It's valuable, fragile and should not be taken for granted. That's the existential justification for it.
It could be that a Popular Vote election would also send Trump to the White House. Certainly nasty people can win the popular vote and do win it in some parts of the world, like in India.
But the fact is the reality in America in terms of town-country divide, the history of the Electoral College and what it was built for, the long disenfranchisement of African-Americans, and the fact that Obama won big because he managed to get huge voter turnout shows that the reality is repressive tendencies are rigging the system against the general interests of the people.
More importantly a true popular franchise base would mean that every vote in every state counts. And you would need political parties to shift accordingly. The Republicans would have to change their platform in that new system because One Person, One Vote means they can't neglect the 47% that Mitt Romney foolishly mentioned in that speech.

In so far as conservative politics is about slow and cautious governance and against excessive reforms that can harm institutions, I agree with quote unquote conservatives. Today the only one who is like that is Angela Merkel, who is these days more pro-Immigrant than the woman who leads a German party called "The Left". A German peculiarity I gather, the Left has never had any real victories in governance, while social democracy has consensus among Moderates and Conservatives.
In America, almost nobody is really conservative as in the original definition. The Republicans are a death-cult who are willing to throw out laws and institutions that have been here for generations. Like Paul Ryan wants to chuck out not only Obamacare but Medicare and Medicaid even if that could harm their own constituency. They are also gutting the EPA, the house that Richard Nixon built, and the climate agreements that Reagan and Bush the First signed up for.
Environmentalism was one of those concepts that used to have an agreement among conservatives. And the Left were a little slow and hesitant to get on board with it.
In Europe, Marine le Pen, accepts climate change. That makes her, a looney-tune and nasty right-winger by French standards, more on the Left than the current GOP.
edited 30th Nov '16 3:23:36 PM by JulianLapostat