This was pretty funny.
You don't need to do much more than say "Huh, one day, SCOTUS hands down a ruling preventing New York from crafting state-level gun restrictions, and then literally the very next day SCOTUS overturns Roe v Wade in the name of states' rights." The outcomes are clearly pre-determined, and the only work is cherry-picking through history and using big words to get there.
And if you don't think that the GOP will agree to get out of each others' way to enact their wildest desires as quickly as possible, sorry, you're wrong. And it's a very effective thing, to be all working towards the same thing, obviously. Pretending like anyone besides maybe a handful of GOP senators would obstruct a GOP executive branch out of some principled stance of worrying about checks and balances, I'm sorry again, do you read? Even headlines?
This analysis is really stupid, because it supposes that there’s a unifying political or legal philosophy that guides the modern GOP, rather than simply a day by day reaction to get the best outcome they can while they can. Clearance Thomas feels no cognitive dissonance ruling for or against states’ rights based solely on whether his people like the outcome. There are, of course, weird exceptions like when they gave like half of Nebraska back to the Indians or whatever. But those cases only work because nobody outside of Nebraska or Oklahoma gives a fuck (the fact that I can’t remember which plains state it was speaks volumes). When it comes to the party line the only thing that matters is the party line, Barrett’s partisan hack protestations notwithstanding.
Thom Hartmann put this shit on Twitter: Just as happened when Pinochet’s militias shot into crowds as he took over Chile, Mussolini’s volunteer militia the Blackshirts killed civilians as he took over Italy, and Hitler’s volunteer Brownshirts did the same in Germany, their allies among the police refuse to intervene. I'm fucking sick of the left. Shit's bad enough out here in reality but for some reason, we need to disasterporn about premeditated and unopposed mass murder. "Yep, we're all set to slaughter the libs and the Fraternal Order of Pigs is just waiting for our sign, too bad we have to wait for Georgia to kick off Krystallnacht!" Oklahoma. It was Oklahoma. And they wouldn't have done it if it had actually helped the Natives out; as it was it required federal intervention for nearly everything.Wolf Blitzer announces that DeSantis has won the election, and millions of people pour into the streets to protest. They’re met with a hail of bullets as Republican-affiliated militias have been rehearsing for this exact moment.
I read a story recently about how prosecutions for violent crime are now at an abysmal pace in the newly expanded reservation, because only tribal or federal courts now have jurisdiction in the area over natives. Gorsuch really put that ruling in noble terms though. Republicans will hit rock bottom one day. I have stopped predicting when that dat will arrive, because I thought that 2006 when the Iraq war went totally off the rails was that moment (then I thought it was 2008-9, then I thought it was 2016, so my predictive powers are nigh on worthless). One thing that separates us from Chile or 1920s Italy is that we're fucking rich, sedentary, prima donnas. Anything that messes with our lifestyle is going to get politicians punished. The women's march happened in the beginning of Trump's terms, but most of the protesting was low stakes, because, after all, for all Trump's bluster and mendacity, people's lives, on balance, were still improving relative to the Great Recession. The fruits of Trump's labor are only beginning to be felt, since it takes a minute for landmark cases to meander through the courts. But now that rubber is meeting the road, and all the Little Mitt Romneys of the suburbs may not be able to get an abortion for their 16 yr old daughter, their behavior is going to change, and fast. The trouble is that even most republicans don't believe this bullshit. The republicans I know, and I know a lot of them, for the most part talk a lot of shit, but in the end care simply and solely about what their tax bill looks like relative to their total compensation. Taxes lower = Good. The equation is that simple. Everything else is window dressing to help justify their complete and total lack of philosophy and empathy. I know some religious ones, too, but they aren't the ones who are going to decide where we go from here. While I won't be surprised if we see an uptick in political violence, it will be limited in scope. No one is going to risk the financial collapse of the nation over social issues. The rhetoric is out of control, though. I just saw that the consumer sentiment index is at an all time low...lower by several points than the depths of covid or the Great Recession when unemployment in Michigan where I live was 17%. SEVENTEEN. It's 4.3% now, pretty much in line with the nation, which it at 3.6%, and people feel they're in a worse situation economically than at the worst economy since pre WWII. That can only be explained by political rhetoric, and the social media echo chambers that amplify and further distort it. Gerrymandering only works insofar as the margins are thin. You can take a 50/50 state like NC and turn it into 9-1 GOP Congressional seats. But you can't do that to a 55-45 state, and that will happen at some point when the mendacious nature of the GOP starts hurting people lives. It's up to Democrats to be the adults. Don't get bogged down in rhetorical fights. Come up with modest, workable, appealing policy proposals and stick to them. Stop calling literally everyone a bigot. There are a lot of bigots in America, but politics is the art of compromise and like it or not, you need some bigots on your side, so shut the fuck up with the antagonism, and simply work to ensure that bigotry is contained rather than eradicated. If all this requires making an unholy alliance with Mitt Romney or Susan Collins or even Satan's Spawn herself Liz Cheney, then so be it. Offer one of them a cabinet position prospectively before the election to show you're serious about expanding the appeal. And shut the fuck up about a civil war. As the Dalai Lama once said, the lesser of two evils means LESS EVIL. Let's aim for less evil and appreciate that we don't live in 1970s Chile or 1920s Italy which were by and large poor countries with ruined economies. Sorry for the rant. This was going to be a very short reply, but then I started venting.
It's good to vent, particularly when you aren't surrounded by people accusing you of thoughtcrime for not fearing Trump enough. My own sister launched into a screaming fit when I refused to agree in 2016 that Donald Trump was going to put homosexuals in concentration camps. Someone on Twitter was dunking on Liz Cheney by pointing out that she voted with Trump more often than Elise Stefanik did. And it's like duh, that's what makes her a good Republican. Republicans are never going to stop voting Republican, because what makes a Republican a Republican is being Republican. Libertarians mostly vote Republican because ultimately they only give a shit about taxes and know and understand that laws about drugs or whatever don't fucking matter to them, they're white. The problem the Republican Party has had since the CIvil Rights Act is most of their voters vote Republican because the Republican brand has been about curtailing the rights of Darkies for more than 50 years. You're right, though - the crazies have been running things for long enough that they're curtailing the rights of the Captains of Industry and that's just tedious. I read a tedious book about politics whose name i can't remember that argued during the '50s, '60s '70s and '80s, there were liberal democrats, conservative democrats, liberal republicans and conservative republicans. It was too stupid to point out that LBJ nuked the shit out of that the minute he said brown people have rights. You can run on that for a while; California was a reliably red state until they stomped the darkies too hard. Arizona, of course, did the exact same thing and are now full-crazy so it doesn't have to go that way? But the only reason Arizona exists is because Barry Goldwater colonized it. I maintain that the political battle of our time is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between Republicans and Fascists. The core platform of the Republican Party no longer espouses Republican values, nor does it generate money from Republican donors. It serves ideologues and racists only and you can only fundraise off them so much because Charles Koch cares more about his money. If the Republicans wish to survive they need to wrest control from the fascists.
I had to think about that But seems about right. Thinking about it don’t more have the democrats really given or clarified and questions on rights? Seems like most rights issues are solved at the courts. So Supreme Court could take away 100 years of progress if they wanted to. Go as far back as reinstate separate but equal and Jim Crow laws.
Problem is? It's impossible to be a bleeding-heart neoliberal. Things the Democrats have done since Kennedy: - Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cost LBJ the presidency, cost the Democrats the South ever since. - Watergate hearings. Cost Democrats Iran, which ultimately cost Carter the presidency. - Robert Bork. Created Mitch McConnell, cost the Democrats concealed weapons laws, roe v wade and government bureaucracies in one fucking weekend. - Obamacare. Cost the house and senate. I would argue that Nixon blowing up Breton Woods crushed British and American labor, created trickle-down economics and nudged the Gini Coefficient on a trajectory towards feudalism. The Democrats opted to be the "party of civil rights" in the '60s and then utterly failed to do anything with it for sixty goddamn years.
This is the vicious cycle. Liberals use the courts to expand rights, so conservatives do everything they can to stack the judiciary against the liberals. Congress can fix a lot of these problems summarily, but they won’t, because they lack courage to make choices. It’s much easier to vote that air should be clean and then delegate the mechanism of how to clean the air than it is to craft a meaningful law that will inevitably piss off some constituents.
Liberals use culture to expand rights. Culture always belongs to the liberals. That's why every judiciary in every country everywhere is more conservative than the culture: it's a conservative backstop and always has been. The problem is that you can't run for congress without spending half a million dollars and you're going to earn a salary of $174k a year for two years while you fundraise half a million dollars to protect your right to earn $174k a year. The democrats don't even hide it anymore. Where's my dead horse? There are 435 representatives. Electing them cost $1.13b. Limit a representative to 60,000 constituents and suddenly there's 5500 of them. If the funding doesn't change? That's a $20k investment for a $174k job. Does that change the demographic any?
Can we also reduce the compensation to something like $90k/year? It shouldn't be almost 3x the median U.S. salary. Maybe that would further help attract people who see it as a public duty instead of folks looking to profit. I know it's a demanding job, though, or it should be, so I dunno. It's actually not much of a concern, in terms of costing the taxpayer. You could fund 5,500 reps at $175k/year for less than a billion a year, which is peanuts, in the grand scheme of things, considering the benefits of expanding the House. Abolish or at least reform the Senate, end the electoral college system, and institute an impartial algorithm to handle re-districting. I liked mk's idea about placing limits on the ratio of district perimeter to district area. Invite international oversight in making the U.S. objectively more democratic (not that American exceptionalism would ever allow for that). We can dream, right?
Although Yang has done/said some kinda boob-ish stuff in more recent years, he did have some interesting ideas. And he wanted to institute term limits, I'm guessing? Is there something about banning former politicians from the labor pool intended to target revolving-door-style corruption, or is it solely to offset the negative implications (at a personal level) of instituting term limits?
I think he launched a third party because the Democrats refused to take him seriously. I don't think it was the right move. He was probably four years behind Pete Buttigieg, now I'm not so sure. Yang didn't have any problems with career politicians. He just wanted that career to be their career. His argument was that if you made the job itself pay enough that people wanted to stay in it, and that if the retirement was cushy enough that they were not permitted to lobby at all afterwards (I misspoke - he didn't require them to never work again, he wanted them to never be able to register as a lobbyist), you would get more "pure" politicians and fewer people leveraging the revolving door. I've seen term limits come up for forty years. I've yet to see a legitimate mechanism whereby term limits could be instituted. Shit's obviously broken but even if term limits did fix it, I don't know where we'd buy the glue.
It is. That's the whole point. You don't spend $500k to get a $175k job, you spend $500k to get on the board of directors of Dropbox and to end up at a sweet, sweet K-street lobbying firm. Which is utterly ineffective if you cease to be the representative from Dallas and instead become the representative from 87629.
100% correct. Yes, we absolutely need to get lobbying money of politics, and you'd think it'd be a bipartisan thing, but notsomuch. Expanding the House would also help with the lobbying problem. It would complicate the logistics and reduce the amount given to each politician, making them less betrothed to lobbying interests, generally. Unless companies spent about 10x what their current lobbying budgets are. Some might? The idea of this SCOTUS re-interpreting the Citizen's United ruling is hilarious though. sobbing intensifies I know you know all this, but for posterity. People do apparently lurk.
Thom Hartmann sucks. He's always sucked. I wish KBCS would drop his show from their syndication and give me music or something for that timeslot instead.
Believe it or not, he was the sanest voice on Air America. But that was a looooooooong fucking time ago. I tried reading a couple of his books and couldn't.
Very good thread, thanks for weighing in :). We are saying basically the same thing, in different words and formatting. Thanks for pointing out how well the GOP strategy embodies "reactionary" politics, too many folks are unfamiliar with what that word means. The ability of reactionary fascists (because is one possible without the other?) to harbor so much unaddressed cognitive dissonance is a feature of fascism, not a bug. And yeah, the resulting stupidity seems to always eventually lead to destabilization and collapse, but MAGA's still able to get their rocks off today. Are status quo dems losing because of their refusal to react quickly enough to radical reactionaries? I'm sure that the Fed is (perhaps unintentionally) low balling the inflation numbers, but the media seems remarkably susceptible to overly simplistic right-wing messaging, despite all of the accusations that our media landscape is almost entirely left-leaning. Almost every single American seems incapable of understanding that the quantitative easing instituted under Trump are what has led us into hyperinflation under Biden. And it's not like I or many others had better ideas to get us out of the covid pickle without inflation following, besides better targeting of relief funding, I guess. But "it's the economy stupid" is obviously going to rail Biden in 2024, unless things get much, much better very quickly. Not betting on it. And we have no large progressive outlets, of course, because progressivism is decidedly anti-corporations, and America is now a corporatocracy. Also lol yeah, five or six people on SCOTUS may genuinely have no idea about some of the implications of overturning Roe. Still, a very large measure of cruely. On top of the lack of empathy seems to be a related idiocy; the inability to game things out using hypothetical scenarios. How many (tens of?) thousands of women will die before Thomas and Alito begin to feel something akin to regret (I almost typed "remorse", but nah)? Will we see women and/or abortion providers sentenced to death?? Not sure if you heard, but our literally criminal AG (everyone knows this story, I hope) wants to make it so TX can't legally do it in the butt or get a beej (Dear Ken; Hands stuff only and forever is a loathe position. I daresay we intend to make callous the hands of your mistresses). My mom, the other day was like "Oh no, they won't repeal gay marriage. Only Thomas seems to be in favor of that" and I wanted to jump through the phone and shake her by the shoulders. The theocrats are very emboldened, at the moment, and an alarmist perspective is currently yielding the best predictions. And the impetus for action. I hope. Now I'm ranting. edit: How funny is it that Catholic fundamentalists, a superminority of our population, are the majority controlling the GOP's shiny new branch of government, in a country founded by Protestants attempting to escape the Catholic Church, and now the Protestants are firmly aligned with the other radical Christian theocrats against a dangerously bogus perception of The Other? Oh, it's not funny? Oh. I worry that fascism is inevitable, because it's probably the surest way to sustain or even further increase the current wealth disparity, and the wealthy have clearly already seized the American political apparatus. My profileski says I'm a doomer, but I'm still voting, preaching the anti-fascist word afk, and looking to get more involved at the community level.
You, like many liberals, fail to understand conservatism. Your basic problem is here: what if there was no cognitive dissonance Try that on. What if conservatives think conservatively because they have no problems with cognitive dissonance? What would the causes of that be? What would the outcomes be? From a psychological - rather than rhetorical - standpoint, cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant physical sensation caused by two or more ideas that are in conflict. Cognitive dissonance, from a psychological standpoint, is relieved by discarding one or the other of the ideas. This in turn causes a backlash effect whereby the afflicted loses affinity for the entire sphere of ideas adjacent to the conflict. Liberals say "cognitive dissonance" a lot because liberals require a consistent worldview. For example, it is very hard for liberals to appreciate that Dick Cheney legitimately had the country's best intentions in mind when he pushed for the invasion of Iraq because liberals have enough affinity for other people in other countries that invasion requires a threshold of evil. Liberals have difficulty seeing good in the TSA or CBP because liberals see the evils perpetrated by both organizations against others. Liberals require a consistent logical framework they can explain to themselves and explain to others. "I am good, I want good, those who govern in my name must also be good because if they do evil, I am responsible for evil." Conservatives are utterly unmoved by cognitive dissonance because conservatives do not require a consistent worldview. They require loyalty and consistency. Liberals constantly fret about whether liberals are doing evil - conservatives take, as a base condition, that conservatives cannot be evil. If a conservative does it, it is good. Not that they don't have doubts? But "doubt" is not the base condition the way it is with liberals. This is why conservative defenses against cognitive dissonance are so lightweight - they don't need to be any firmer. The "caravan" does not need to be actual if there are pictures that can support the idea of a caravan. George W Bush may have only won the 2000 election by 538 votes but he won. Liberals can't say there was zero voter fraud of any kind whatsoever in the 2020 election, therefore there was widespread voter fraud. This is the principle reason all the ex-republicans - the Lincoln Project, Joe Walsh, George Conway, etc - whinge about like a bunch of goddamn ex-mormons. Conservatives aren't immune from cognitive dissonance, it just takes a lot more of a push to get them to question a worldview whose central tenet is "leadership is always correct." This is also the principle reason the Republicans spent 2015 and 2016 decrying Trump from the rooftops and 2017-2022 licking his boots: it's not about what's done, it's about who does it. That, by the way, is the simplest definition of fascism, as pointed out by Hannah Arendt, as described by Mussolini: unity over ideology. Mussolini didn't go all the way to L'etat, c'est moi but he implied it. Arendt defined fascism as belief in the individual over belief in the idea. I've read two or three people argue in print that Republican fascism started at Nixon - a Republican political establishment would freely argue that the President is not above the law; a fascist political establishment would argue that the President is the law. Which, incidentally, is William Barr's guiding legal theory. Only reason he got out of there is his thinking is "the president is in charge" rather than "Donald Trump is in charge." I keep harping on this: The strength of the Republican Party is directly proportional to the strength of Donald Trump. It will be that way until they pick a new leader. This is the fundamental political struggle of our time: will the Republicans find someone to rally around who believes in someone other than themselves? Will the Democrats (and let's be honest - the bureaucrats; I'm a big fan of the deep state) be able to paint Trump red enough that he piddles off into nothing? You're right - it's a feature not a bug. But you persist in thinking about it in terms of "I think like this, therefore they're not thinking". The Fed exists to keep businesses businessing. if you ask Wallerstein the country doesn't matter, what matters is the economic system - from a cultural perspective, modern American society extends back to the Dutch in like 1550, passes through English mercantilism and shifts to the United States around WWI. Strauss-Howe Generational Theory also counts generations back to 200 years before the founding of the United States. And that there represents a fundamental problem: in a capitalist system, it's the capital that matters. The Fed? The Fed is the interface between the money and the people who want to tear it all down in order to stop the cotton gins. Of course they gerrymander the shit out of the statistics. And look - this is an important insight. The Republican Party has been the party of business since its inception in 1854. Missouri Compromise set a line north of which slavery was banned, south of which slavery was permitted. Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise because Northern industrialists knew industrialization had an edge over manual labor but not one over slave labor. Republicans came about to ban slavery everywhere not because it was immoral (not entirely because it was immoral) but because a slave economy will never make profits the way an industrialized economy will. These are the same guys picking fights with Disney now. Democrats grabbed the Civil Rights mantle in 1964 and lost the south. Republicans have been about wedge issues ever since. Eventually they would land on wedge issues so wedgy that not even Exxon Mobil can back 'em. We're lookin' at it, boyo. The Supreme Court wants to ban gays. 20% of GenZ identifies as LGBT. How's that gonna work out? And I mean, you have to consider what "law" means to the privileged white. It means "thing I can be charged with if I fuck up, and then I'll have to hire a lawyer or something." Death penalty against abortion providers? Yeah there'll prolly be a show trial or two. It'll be the same culturally-poignant, legally-irrelevant misadventure as the Scopes Trial or Jammie Thomas. These things matter to liberals, they fucking don't to conservatives. This is why "owning the conservatives" isn't a thing - conservatives know that logical inconsistencies bug the shit out of liberals and don't bother conservatives in the slightest. Implications of overturning Roe? Liberals give a shit about that. Conservatives just know their team wins. And that's literally all that matters. Democrats, in their current incarnation, are never going to win. If you look at it, the Democratic Party is the party of rich white people who can tolerate poor people. The Republican Party is the party of rich white people who can't. Eventually, though, the poors rise up. We're at an inflection point. The Democrats have been shown to be utterly ineffectual. Their past 40 years have amounted to nothing. The Republicans, on the other hand, have been shown to be too effectual. Their past 40 years have amounted to a massive cultural isolation and a business climate that's hostile to business. If you aren't Charles Koch you want a healthy EPA because they're the thing that levels the playing field between you and Charles Koch. But we all fight the last war. So very few people are paying attention to what's going on because they're all preoccupied with what happened.to harbor so much unaddressed cognitive dissonance