- Where, Pinker asks, are the liberals who are willing to say that liberal democracy has worked? That environmental regulations have slashed air pollutants while allowing Americans to drive more miles and burn more fuel? That social transfers have reduced poverty rates fivefold? That globalization has allowed Americans to afford more food, clothing, TVs, cars, and air-conditioners? That international organizations have prevented nuclear war, and reduced the rate of death in warfare by 90 percent? That environmental treaties are healing the hole in the ozone layer?
Fer real, dawg? Republicans won three safe districts. They won them by much smaller majorities than anyone predicted; that they were contested at all is terrifying if you're republican. The only reason they were ever up for grabs at all is that the Republicans figured they couldn't lose. Fuckin' Dubya wasn't doing this bad until Katrina. http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/xmyfbzqeteow-uo_x9bcea.gif (mk - fix fucking gif renders already) Really? A republican majority in house and senate and you're going to give credit to a tax bill to Trump? Fuckin' executive orders are a bitch, for sure, but it's not like that's somehow the fault of the liberals. You mean the massive stock market valuation bubble? Yeah, you definitely do. All depends on how you count, Tom. This shit ain't complex. Trump wins by county: Opioid deaths by county: Unemployment rate by county: http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/unemployment.gif Poverty by county: What did the Democrats give them? Globalism. What did the Republicans give them? isolationism, xenophobia, someone to blame and empty promises. It's all gonna be roses until they figure out how empty the promises are.Democrats who yearn for President Trump to be taken down should examine this list of Republican strengths: victories in all three contested special elections for the House of Representatives this year;
Trump’s 82 percent approval rating among Republican voters;
his success with the current tax bill;
his swift evisceration of key regulatory policies;
the Gorsuch appointment to the Supreme Court;
economic growth of over 3 percent in the last two quarters;
the Dow Jones topping 24,000;
and the unemployment rate dropping to 4.1 percent.
I am quoting Stenner — and later in this column, the public policy analyst Eric Schnurer — at length because they both make arguments about complex ideas with precision and care.
Do you normally read Edsall? He's well reasoned the majority of the time. He seems to have jumped off the deep end of despair, however. His data in this piece is countermanded by your (correctly) pointing out that Democrats made red districts competitive, and furthermore made republicans spend way more money that they thought they'd have to defending Montana and suburban Atlanta. But of course they still lost. Because the energy well is too deep. The problem at hand is explained mostly by the big sort. Instead of living in one two party country, we're living in two one party countries. No one has ever explained the trap of living under one party rule better than Kundera in The Joke. Similarly to the communists, the GOP (and the Democrats to a lesser extent) have decided that loyalty to the ideology is paramount, so they've encouraged a system where going against orthodoxy gets you excommunicated. In this situation, everyone tries to out do themselves to show that they're the most righteous. Steps can be taken toward further purity but not backward to debate and reason. In The Joke, "Long Live Trotsky" was enough to get a true believer sent to a work camp. In the GOP, suggesting that carbon dioxide is a pollutant can do the same (metaphorically). Same goes for taxes, public education, 'political correctness', etc. Ideological purity on all these issues is the only way to ensure survival and acceptance, and when a purer-than-thou candidate shows up, you'd best adapt (e.g., Luther Strange, who by almost all reasonable analysis is a right wing extremist, yet fell short in the shithole that is Alabama). (I could go on a long diatribe about ideological purity in the democratic party, but their issues are less existential, IMO.) Unemployment or drugs didn't cause people to vote Trump. People vote Trump and do drugs and have high unemployment because everyone who had the chance has already moved to New York and L.A. and Seattle. The only way to make those areas competitive again is to get their economies growing, and the only way to do that is to attract human capital. I'm sure as fuck not moving there, and I don't know anyone who would.
Edsall is one of the very few people I follow on Twitter, believe it or not. But this essay is a stinker. There's a fundamental untruth in it: that if the Democrats are losing, the Republicans must be winning. It's more accurate to say that the Democrats successfully quelled their rebellion while the Republicans were overwhelmed. That, combined with the power of rural districts, leaves a lot of right-wing reactionary dead-enders with a lot of electoral power. It's a two-year or four-year or six-year cycle, though. The Tea Party has only been through two presidential elections and a midterm. I don't think the guys who voted Trump to power are going to like what they get out of it. Insurrections are oppositional in nature. "Throw the bums out" can just as easily apply to the bums you just voted in.
It struck me less as untrue and more as truthy, which sucks because truthiness has normally been the domain of the right. The left is getting there, and Trumpism seems to be driving it. I like to think facts (in context) still matter to the left, but the last few direction is troubling. God help us if that's where we're headed.
It struck me as wanting to be salty, and wanting to yell at someone else about the problems. both the Democrats and the Republicans have been lying to the poor for decades, but the Democrats kinda sorta feel bad about it. it's that ambivalence that has left them crushed and despondent. IT'S FUCKING STUPID. There are so many more poor people in the United States than rich people, so if they want power fuckin' rally behind the fuckn' poor people. I'm almost willing to give them a bye over the fact that it used to be hard to scare up individual donors and if you're looking for whales you're looking for the rich by definition but fuckin' Bernie Sanders. The Democrats should have been just as gobsmacked by Bernie Sanders as the Republicans were by Trump but instead of going "oh shit we have lost our base" they went "it's Hillary's turn damn the torpedoes full speed ahead" and here we were, living in fear of Twitter.
I'll buy that. I'm starting to hate the Democratic party a lot. And also gullible moron liberals a lot. All these lessons to be learned and all the leadership give a fuck about is Al Franken. If anyone should be resigning it should be their entire leadership team.
The New York Times had a telling breakdown. Of Republicans polled, 53% gave a fuck about sexual harassment allegations. Of Democrats, 77%. If I were a Republican operative, I'd observe that my 53% are 100% of the people I'm likely to lose before long anyway while the Democrats can't afford to piss off three quarters of their constituency. It's really fucking scary that the Republicans are kinda willing to let things go Jedi v. Sith, with themselves as the Sith.
Did you know there was a fourth monkey in the band, "Do no evil"? The gesture was hiding the genitalia.