All or nothing

To “make the election a referendum on the Republican Party” might make moral sense, but is electorally pointless. Yes, yes, everybody paying attention knows the Republican Party is noxious – but as Adlai Stevenson apocryphally said, we need a majority.

People persist in having this weird idea that Democrats just need to “find the right message” in order to win elections. There is no evidence that this is true. There is no reason to expect that a message of “democracy is under threat” will sway anyone who hasn’t already long since been convinced. The 1/6 lynch mob was broadcast live on national TV. I myself watched it happen, in real time, as did millions of other Americans. Anybody who could come away from that and not recognize it for what it was is probably unreachable.

re: centrism and majority coalitions, did you read this one?

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/hispanic-voters-are-normie-voters?utm_medium=email

The Shor/Teixera approach is inconsistent with focusing on equity and culture (Clinton 2016?) but not with focusing on democracy. If you have two popular issues, run on both.

The media have universally turned against Biden* after the Afghanistan debacle, even to the point of blaming Biden for inflation, a worldwide phenomenon that has no strong relationship to government spending or control of the economy or “socialism.” Since the elections have been artificially turned into a referendum on the issues created by the media to attack Biden, the Democratic Party will lose.

But as far as I can tell Biden et al. have long ago listened to the real election, the campaign funds and turned so sharply right that Pete Buttigieg is likely the left-wing of the administration.

Two more likely causes for Democratic Party complacency? Their donors, who are by and large the same rich, want this turn and they are—democratically?—responding to their constitutents. The other is that the Democratic Party shares many, many fundamental policy positions, like the need for the Federal Reserve to attack the wage levels of working people, war, well, the list is endless. The notion that Democrats are Godless is also preposterous and many, many people who pride themselves on being liberal believers who are truly nice have long ago picked their side, which is not going to be arrogant atheists.

I’m not sure it’s anything but counterfactual to claim “Thaelmann” elected the Nazis (especially since they never actually won a majority, sound familiar?) Alliances aren’t like wars, it takes two. It is by no means certain the Social Democrats were ever going to ally themselves with Communists in 1932 than they did in 1919 or 1933. It’s not clear that the real objection isn’t to the very existence of the KPD and a separate platform, that the left is always supposed to be subordinate to the so-called center. I recall somebody at Lawyers Guns and Money still peeved that the Liberty Party “elected” Polk!

J-D,

Sorry, you are right, “no sign they do anything” was hyperbolic, and I over-reached.

What I am trying to say is that the Democratic party has in its complacency waited much too long and that they still show what I would call a major under-reaction to the severity of the situation.

On “too late”, the way to save American democracy is to build a time machine and go back to before a handful of reactionary billionaires and radio/tv hosts were allowed to achieve control over much of the media, without any rules in place to stop them from broadcasting hate and lies 24/7. At the latest, set the time machine to Obama’s first two years. George W. Bush’s first election provided all the evidence needed that the electoral system is broken, partisan judges will help steal elections, and that if nothing was done right then, any future Republican victory is potentially the end of fair and meaningful elections.

And so it came, Trump tried. The only reason democracy isn’t entirely over yet is that he is comically inept. A more competent president might have been elected a second term, giving them more time to push that transition forward, and it is likely that whoever succeeds Trump will be more competent. (Difficult to be less so, really.)

And even if the For the People Act were passed, unchanged, again one has to consider, what if two thirds of the states simply do not implement it, and judges strike it down? “There is nothing in the constitution about not gerrymandering or about states having to send electors that reflect voting results, so this is an over-reach of the federal government into state rights.”

As for the under-reaction, the fact that the likes of Manchin are having an argument about the filibuster right now, and that the party isn’t bringing to bear whatever blackmail or bribe they have to get them to behave, shows that they do not act as somebody would who actually realises that democracy is at stake for at least a generation.

But maybe they will, and I would be very happy to be proved wrong. Three months left.

Abortion is certainly a handy cudgel to use against the deranged candidates of the right, especially when they go so far as deny it to victims of rape or incest, or to claim that it is never necessary to save the life of the mother.

The Democrats have some positive policies to offer as well, and Dark Brandon has had a good week or two, both in terms of legislative progress and death to terrorists. Appearances to the contrary, unemployment and crime are at or near historic lows, and inflation seems to be easing.

Speaking of inflation, the status of the war in Ukraine is likely to be relevant, since it’s more strongly supported by the left than the right. Then there are the January 6 hearings, which continue to make the Republicans look ridiculous, and the legal vulnerabilities of the former guy are becoming suddenly salient. Who knows how this will all work out?

AND about (we) –

‘We’ are a nonprofit based in Germany and the US – fighting against ‘trump’
(the Worlds New Word for: Utmost Right Wing Racist Science Denying Stupid)
ANONYMOUS –
(as members had been threatened by Trumpers)
AND – as some of our members are young and very creative Communication Designers – we run this fight like a game where every member can host under our many Internet handles whatever she or he likes to post -(some of US are still learning English) – as long as it does the utmost possible damage to ‘the philosophy of trump’

AND YOU CAN WIN!
(in joining US) like memberX who won a year supply of Aperol by turning 32 Republican Multipliers against ‘trump’ at the last election and memberY – who managed with thousand and thousands of Tweets to deconstruct the idiotic idea -(of not only Glenn Greenwald) – that Democrats and Republicans are the same.

So – guys –
If y’all really serious ‘fighting the philosophy of trump’ why don’t you join US? –
and/or why doesn’t this whole blog make a serious effort to UNITED write against the Right Wing Racist Destroyer of our Democracies.
(CT has our e-mail)

no more on this thread, please

‘He wrote me beautiful letters and we fell in love.’

Did North Korea’s Kim Jong-un use a honeypot trap to get nuclear secrets from Donald Trump?

There’s an interesting asymmetry here in the description of the two strategies. One is presented as ‘appeal to these people’, the other is ‘do this‘.

Evaluating a strategy requires looking at the fully written out claim. The one that says we are going to do or say this, which we hope will appeal to these people. So the question is, given a narrative of ‘Republicans are a threat’, who is that going to appeal to? You’d better hope the answer isn’t solely Democratic party staffers and loyalists.

In my experience, the subset of Republicans prepared in principle to consider the possibility of Trump being bad generally rely on the theory that other Republican politicians will prevent him from doing anything truly serious[1], and so none of this matters as much as taxes being lower than they would otherwise be. Perhaps the key thing about those middle-class Republican voters is they have a much higher opinion of, and trust in, Republican politicians than seems plausible from the outside. I suspect the key to that trust is the politician’s long-running success, unique in the Western world, of actually keeping tax implausibly low.

As such, if you want to win over that group of people, you need evidence that their assumptions are wrong, their hopes are not justified, and their fears are. For example, that a Republican politician who claims to be a Trump loyalist is actually what they claim they are, and not merely lying to win over Trumpists support. You need to persuade them that when a Republican politician states their position on abortion, that is what they actually mean, and will do.

This is more difficult than you might think, as there are few tools available to persuade the cynical that they are not being lied to.

[1] Which is not a completely unjustified position; the insurrection was, after all, called off before there was an actual shooting war.

“I suspect the key to that trust is the politician’s long-running success, unique in the Western world, of actually keeping tax implausibly low.”

Also the success in keeping Americans unaware of what people in other countries get for their tax money. (Almost) free health care and education, not just the shiniest military in the world.

Given the enabling features of the Constitution and the nature of the Supreme Court, a right-authoritarian government entrenching itself in power is very likely. One interesting question is whether or how the US might escape from such a government. Outside Latin America fascist and quasi-fascist regimes do not have a good track record for longevity. For instance, how would the regime deal with resistance from the Democratic states – which are the wealthy areas of the country?
Then there is climate change. By 2035 some varying combination of fire, flood, drought, crop failure, sea encroachment and infrastructure degradation will be the annual norm. These people have no ability or interest in enhancing state capacity other than in coercion (we see in the UK now, in Australia under Morrison and in the US under Bush and Trump rapid declines in state capacity). Looting the state impacts even the ability to coerce (see Putin and the Ukraine war). Does it all tip over?

“It’s now clear that unless they are stopped Republican officials in most states are ready to overturn any election result they do not like.”

I’m not sure it’s “most states” where R officials are up to overturning election results to their liking, but since they only need to flip results in a half dozen states at most to control the WH and Congress, yes, they have an iron grip on enough states to control succession to federal office no matter how the people vote.

The presidency tends to get the most attention, but these half dozen R states can control succession to enough Senate and House seats as well to control those chambers by refusing to allow a final determination of election results in as many seats the Ds in these states seem to have won as is necessary for the Rs to have a majority at the opening of the next Congress. Both chambers have rules that seat on opening day only those whose elections have been finalized by their states. After opening day, a simple majority can accept or reject any election results the states then send them for these seats not finalized by opening day. An R majority on opening day created by selective refusal to finalize D election victories can perpetuate itself by the simple expedient of not admitting any of the Ds who may ever be eventually declared election winners.

Least attention goes to state offices, but the power to control succession to those offices is the most central to a scheme of the perpetual side-stepping of election results. A legislature that can decide that elections to its membership are valid or not, and the same for state election officials, has become an oligarchy that hand picks the next generation of all-powerful oligarchs.

The first take here is that it is a bit paradoxical to point out at the beginning that elections don’t matter in the US any more, then urge as the solution winning the next election. My idea is that this is a paradoxical suggestion, not a mistaken one. It actually is important to get more votes, everywhere in the US, at the next election, but the aim is not to control succession to office by winning the election, because we agree that plan won’t work. The aim is to force the Rs to either back off from, or set in motion, their mechanism for ignoring the results of elections they lose. If it’s the latter and they go for it, people in the political middle in the US will accept that the current administration has no possible response other than suspension of habeas corpus and the detention of all the R office-holders involved in trying to steal these elections.

I even agree that our side should run the election on exactly this issue you propose — “Are we to have succession to public office by popular election, or by the whim of the current R leadership in half a dozen states?” Make that the issue in the election and the Rs will either be frightened off actually attempting to steal the election, or they will go ahead, and we will have prepared the battlefield for what comes next as well as it can be prepared. But I think you really have to frame the question very clearly as one of R sedition, the crime of advocating ideas that threaten a clear and present danger of the overthrow of the govt.

John – how do you feel about your ‘cautious optimism’ on climate now? (Comment 29 of the post you link) .

steve t johnson: I’m cautiously optimistic about US aggression abroad. The Trumpists’ appetite for war (as opposed to bellicose rhetoric) seems rather weak.

Peter T@27 suggests the “Trumpists'” don’t have much appetite for war. But it seems to me that the assassination of Soleimani proved conclusively the Trumpists’ antiwar credentials are strictly fictional, propaganda, posturing, excuses, whatever you want to call it. The US government under Trump himself deliberately risked a military confrontation that could have escalated beyond control.

We already live in a regime where what’s really happening is a mystery to the population. But the gossip is that it was resistance from the military high command that persuaded Trump from openly attacking Iran. Cheap talk from Trump about beautiful letters from Korea is worth the paper it was printed on.

Again, there is no Chinese wall between foreign and domestic policy. Trump wanted the army in the urban areas (we know that code, don’t we?) summer 2020 to restore “order,” and I firmly believe that meant for the election too. The gossip is that it was Milley who basically refused. It is politely overlooked that formally the military violated chain of command, as near as I can tell, to get orders from Pence to move into D.C. and put a final halt to the attempted coup. I suppose the thought is to make up for not investigating the role Gens. Pyatt and Flynn and other officers played in holding back the National Guard.

The careful avoidance of all efforts to investigate the military I suppose reflects the militarism of the current system, where the military is quasi-independent. The effort by the previous Secretaries of Defense to head off the coup by their public intervention against an open role in partisan politics does show I think that Trump’s warmaking propensities are far more questionable. The notion Tucker Carlson is both a true political leader in his own right and truly antiwar on principle strikes me as, well, lacking a due measure of cynicism about personalities. It’s true of course that some of this is guesswork as the military, as I’ve said, is a quasi-independent force and the laity are not privy to the sanctum. But in many respects the rank and file are economic refugees, de facto mercenaries. Mercenaries fighting with the dedication of citizen solders simply isn’t to be expected. Macchiavelli complained about that centuries ago.

For the future, though it sharply pains the pro-war commitments of everyone else, the close cooperation between the US, directly and through NATO with the Ukrainian military will strengthen the worst tendencies within the officer caste in the US. Plus of course, purging the upper ranks of the military and the FBI etc. seems to be a new urgent priority for the Trumpers. The ranks are too diverse to fit easily into the Christian Nationalist version of Janissaries that some elements of the officer caste seem to want it to be.

Don’t want to be quarrelsome in the pushback on this, but I think the record speaks ill. Yes, frauds want to whine about Trump didn’t officially start any wars (as if trade wars/sanctions aren’t wars, which I’m sorry, they are!) But neither did Carter and the Trumpers don’t respect that. They don’t even accept Biden pulling out of Afghanistan, even though Trump set that up in the first place (as a poison pill I think, but who knows for sure?) Tells us what they really value I think.

@ trader joe
What you call last week’s “half assed spending bill” contained significant provisions on climate change and prescription drugs. I haven’t been participating in the thread but just thought I’d point that out.

@Omega Centauri 30

Isn’t it a problem of party discipline then?

Pharma companies were dancing in the Streets and stocks ripped on the news – that’s how I can tell it doesn’t do anything.

How can you tell that pharma companies were dancing in the Streets?

TJ 28: Clinton became president in 1993 and Obama in 2009. The Dem trifectas you are alluding to span all of six years (out oft he last 40+). Apart from that, you are correct that the Democrats in government did enact important legislation, although not nearly as much as their electoral mandate justified, and this is due to Republican obstruction, politically motivated interference from a right wing dominated judiciary, and the political irresponsibility of a few Dem Senators who represent a tiny number of constituents but get to decide every detail of what legislation can be passed.

@37 TM
That is precisely my point – 6 years out of 40 is probably as good as you can expect as far as having any sort of a mandate. When you have them, you have to act upon them. Blaming the other party for being in opposition is sour grapes – Ds do the exact same thing when they are in opposition. Its why its called politics not teamwork.

Fair point on my rounding of the years in majority, clearly the President piece doesn’t begin until the year after.

@38 J
Its in no way Republicans fault that the Dems can’t get their own party in-line. Indeed whether you like or don’t like the so called ‘inflation reduction act’ it has 0% Republican content in it – the compromise that was reached was entirely of the Ds own making and reflected at a minimum a lack of leadership and a complete lack of vision. The bill achieved could have been done a year ago with the hopes of building on it this year or passing something additional. Perhaps Biden can get some lame duck legislation through post November because odds of retaining the House are minimal at best (Senate is probably a toss-up).

I don’t think any of us are smart enough to project very well how the US is going to look after the current storm breaks, because US politics is going to be quite different than anything we have observed, and any reliable “laws” we use to interpret nature are always descriptive and not prescriptive. For my part I will wait until the new regime has operated for at least a while before I start formulating any such laws of it behavior, but I certainly don’t begrudge others their speculations.

In contrast to uncertainty about the world after the storm breaks, as the crisis nears the laws that dictate that it will break and govern how it will break, become ever more clear. We’ve already past the point at which the tragedy of 1861 can be replayed as farce. That the sun set on 1/7/21 with Trump still in office closed the last possibility that we could have a consensus in the US that 1/6 was a harmless farce. You can point to the day in 2/21 that Rs in the Senate failed to muster from their caucus enough votes to convict Trump on impeachment as the really final decision point, but we already knew they were going to acquit rather than quit him, because 25th-ing him or impeaching him on 1/6 or 1/7 would have been an easier way for them to get rid of him as an ongoing political threat.

The Rs couldn’t let him go because they had already sunk way too much of their own credibility into the idea that Trump was a brilliant and beneficent leader to be able to denounce him as the malignant idiot that he actually is without losing all credibility forever and categorically. They are stuck with Trump Really Won as the defining credo of their party, categorically, rigidly, to the point that even a talented comer like Liz Cheney had to walk the plank.

It is unusual in anything as complex and messy as politics that we get to any point this rigid and categorical. This is why we are in the unusual position of being able to make firm predictions about the inevitability and even mechanism of the crack-up that destroys the current regime of US governance. Our politics has become simpler than physics.

It is still, however, the physics of quantum rather than classical mechanics. The Rs desperately have to keep the box with Schrodinger’s cat sealed, they have to maintain that Trump Really Won, but that just means that they have to avoid like the Plague the consequences of that belief, that Trump is the rightful president and that 1/6 was justified patriotism and not insurrection. They have to at the same time maintain that 1/6 was a grave tragedy because the winner of the election was cheated out of his victory rather than the farce it sure seems to have been (a farce in terms of its success, and not in terms of the four who lost their lives, of course), and also that it was not an actual viable plot to seat the real winner as president, but just the farce of some tourists who got out of hand and trashed the Capitol. This is a tricky needle to thread, because if 1/6 was the tragedy of a nearly successful coup, and a success made possible only by the widely public advocacy that Trump Really Won, then their continued advocacy of that idea makes them guilty of sedition. This is especially so because their continued advocacy for Trump Really Won includes this practical set of measures that makes a successful coup next time a clear and present danger, that they have since 1/6 passed in a half dozen states new legislation allowing popular elections they lose to be bypassed. It’s not sedition unless the advocacy for overthrowing the govt has a workable plan attached to it, a plan that has some reasonable chance of success.

The Ds have to keep Schrodinger’s cat in the box because of this problem with prosecuting for sedition, that the advocacy for overthrow of the govt has to have a concrete plan behind it. Eugene Debs was never going to create any danger of the overthrow of the US govt, so his prosecution for sedition was a gross miscarriage of justice. It was undertaken precisely because Debs was clearly too unpopular to present a threat of overthrow of the govt, thus persecuting him was popular, and a consensus in favor of persecuting him even unjustly could be safely assumed to exist among potential jurors and judges in the appeals chain.

We’re unlikely to get Trump on seditious conspiracy. They didn’t have to conspire on any particular plan, because people who have been convinced by the public advocacy of public officials that Trump Really Won already knew their patriotic duty to Stop The Steal, and on 1/6 the only way to do that was to storm the Capitol. No complex plan had to be conspired at. And insofar as some such planning of particular actors performing particular acts might have been involved in the events of 1/6, would you include Trump in the planning loop for anything more complex than ordering fast food? Trump’s guilt, if any guilt is ever to be found in him for 1/6, is entirely as the public advocate of Trump Really Won from the Oval Office, from a position of the highest public credibility. The Ds are not going after him and his party for sedition because no jury and no appeals chain from which Rs could not be excluded is ever going to be convinced that his advocacy for Trump really Won is anything but patriotism, and the prosecution anything but an act of sedition and treason against the true president. Our side is stuck calling what he and the Rs are doing sedition (effectively, we shy from the label because of past miscarriages of justice in that label’s name), but it absolutely cannot open the box by sedition prosecutions, so we cannot act as if we believed that 1/6 was anything more than a case of tourists getting out of hand at the Capitol that one time.

So 1/6 was either a tragedy or a farce, but neither party is willing to force the issue, to act and speak consistently as if it was the one versus the other. We both speak and act as if it were one or the other at any given moment, whichever causes us the least distress and dissonance at that moment. Of course keeping the cat locked in the box does not make the uncertainty dissipate into irrelevance. Instead the power of how that day is characterized only grows. The Rs in power again will have to treat the current D trifecta as if it was obtained by fraud and enforced by at least threat of state violence. The Rs will not at this point even be able to avoid seizing power by way of their state legislatures ignoring election results, if that is what it takes to break the tyranny of the Steal. The Ds will either have to let the Rs do this, steal the next election legally, or finally treat them and these laws as seditionists who have committed acts of sedition.

The only way the box stays sealed and we never find out if the cat is dead or not, is if the issue of 1/6’s status is never forced because the Rs actually win all the elections from now until, what, a generation from now, however long it takes for everyone to forget 1/6.

The alternative is to make the election a referendum on the Republican Party, including Trump, the insurrection, the Supreme Court, and Christian nationalism. The starting results of the abortion referendum in Kansas suggest that if the election can be framed in these terms, the Democrats had a strong chance of winning and of forming a coalition that can win again in 2024.

The people who ran the campaign in Kansas actually used a much different framing, I think, one designed at least partly to appeal to Republicans. An example:

The anti-amendment campaign has even implicitly compared abortion regulations to mask mandates — casting them both as an attack on Kansans’ personal freedom.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-abortion-vote-in-kansas-looks-like-its-going-to-be-close/

But JQ also says:

Mobilising single-issue pro-choice voters is part of the strategy. But, as far as possible, the aim should be to present the attack on abortion rights as part of a comprehensive package of opposition to freedom and democracy.

I’d say the Kansas result might better support the “opposition to freedom and democracy” framing better than the “referendum on the Republican Party, including Trump, the insurrection, the Supreme Court, and Christian nationalism” framing.

That isn’t to say the “referendum on the Republican Party, including Trump, the insurrection” part in particular is wrong, though. I don’t see how this could even be avoided, either in 2022 or 2024.

The best thing the Democrats have going for them, really, is that the head of the Republican party is very, very unpopular with the electorate as a whole. And I assume that the January 6 stuff and the “stop the steal” stuff is very unpopular as well.

The way Trump and January 6 have stayed in the news seems like free advertising to me. But if the Democrats are going to add their own spin to Trump’s own efforts in this regard, I for one hope it’s more in line with what would appeal to those low-education voters (of all races, not just white) Shor talks about, not the high-ed ones that don’t need convincing.