US Politics- Enemy at the Gaetz

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

2024 is lightyears away and the Republican party is in somewhat of a crisis. I doubt Trump's walking through that door to save them.

Sorry, huge fucking citation needed. How is the Republican party in a crisis? They almost took back the House, barely lost the senate, barely lost the POTUS, made major gains  in state legislatures across the board, are passing absurd voting rules across the board, and have not remotely been punished for cheering on an actual armed insurrection against the US Capitol. 

Where are you seeing that they're in crisis? What remote indications are there that people have even remotely changed their minds about anything?

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Who was the other poster here alongside you saying it was always going to end in violence years ago? Wishful thinking is not what I traffic in. 

AND YET

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Biden already has said he intends to run for reelection, so this is all kind of pointless.

Sorry I missed this.  Biden said he intends to run for reelection at his first presser, aye, but he had to say that.  He can't announce he's not going to run until after the midterms.  I don't think Biden has decided whether he's going to run again or not, at all.  (Same goes for Trump, btw.)  Especially considering Biden's history, it's very much up in the air whether he runs for reelection.  Much more so than any (eligible) incumbent in the modern era - hell probably ever IRT first term presidents.  Including LBJ, who of course didn't end up running for reelection.  That's why I raised the hypothetical.

[DMC]

57 minutes ago, Karlbear said:

made major gains  in state legislatures across the board

This is a gross overstatement.  The GOP took control of both chambers in the New Hampshire legislature.  And that's it.  By almost any metric, the 2020 state legislature elections maintained the status quo, rather remarkably so.  The expectation was that the Dems would make gains, and obviously that didn't happen, but that doesn't mean in the slightest that the GOP made "major gains across the board."

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 hours ago, Karlbear said:

Sorry, huge fucking citation needed. How is the Republican party in a crisis? They almost took back the House, barely lost the senate, barely lost the POTUS, made major gains  in state legislatures across the board, are passing absurd voting rules across the board, and have not remotely been punished for cheering on an actual armed insurrection against the US Capitol. 

Where are you seeing that they're in crisis? What remote indications are there that people have even remotely changed their minds about anything?

Name a single win Republicans have had in the last three months. Everything has gone south for them. They have no agenda. They have no leader. They have no future one can clearly see. All the press they're getting is bad. And now they're picking a fight with their corporate overlords, who are increasingly moving away from them. Republicans are in a really bad place right now and they're still tying themselves to the sinking stone that is Trump. 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

31 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Name a single win Republicans have had in the last three months. Everything has gone south for them. They have no agenda. They have no leader. They have no future one can clearly see. All the press they're getting is bad. And now they're picking a fight with their corporate overlords, who are increasingly moving away from them. Republicans are in a really bad place right now and they're still tying themselves to the sinking stone that is Trump. 

In a sane, well structured democracy they'd be in deep trouble. But they have gerrymandering/natural geographic advantage propping them up in the House (and statehouses), the Senate's basic ridiculousness propping them up in the Senate, the Electoral College giving them an intrinsic advantage in every Presidential election, and they have the Supreme Court for a generation. It's honestly hard to imagine how much bad press it would take to sink them. And their corporate overlords are not going to abandon them over this voting rights stuff, their involvement in which is basically just performative. When the time comes they'll fund both sides as they always do to maintain access. 

[DanteGabriel]

Don't forget that the Republicans have cornered the market on the most powerful and inexhaustible political resource in America: white racial resentment.

[Zorral]

10 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

it was always going to end in violence years ago

Curious to know what you call the seditionists attack on the Capitol and those dead from that, the endless violence against African Americans and now, again, Asian Americans, the mass shooting that have been a permanent part of the national life nearly daily except for the short-time closed window of shutdowns, cop riots, an arrest nearly daily ever since the Big Attack on the Capitol of crazies with auto weapons, bombs, etc.  

10 hours ago, S John said:

Actually think no Trump on Twitter is helping at least somewhat

 Plus when he is in the national non-echo chamber bubble news, it's for yet more grifting and threatening and investigation of criminal activities.

9 hours ago, Ormond said:

so the total PERCENTAGE of non-Hispanic Whites has decreased.

That's what the article is reporting. These are the places from where the Capitol seditionists came from, as Fez pointed out earlier he witness himself in the place where he lives, where this is kind of population increase has gone on as well.

[S John]

On 4/6/2021 at 2:04 PM, S John said:

 

I have to somewhat take issue with this part though:

Dallas, Collin, Harris - along with counties like Bexar, Travis, Tarrant, Denton, etc are all among the most populated counties in the state in general. If you randomly sampled 36 Texans I imagine you’d get at least 20 from the above counties. I don’t doubt that white anxiety plays a role with these people, but I think drawing the connection in this instance is really flimsy.

@Ormond I did post about that same paragraph (quoted above) though I took issue with a slightly different aspect of it.

if you took the population of Dallas, Collin, Harris you are already nearly at 1/3 of the population of Texas. Then the author notes that these counties combined with 3 more counties (which are not named but must have had growing populations to support the demographic trends angle) produced 20 of the 36 Texans involved in the insurrection. To me this would be pretty much expected regardless of demographic trends just based on the population distribution of the state.

I don’t doubt that these Texans were drawn to insurrection, at least in some part due to white resentment, but IMO whoever did the analysis at WaPo is making a big stretch there in tying white resentment to the data they actually presented. They are attempting to draw an insightful conclusion from a piece of data which is probably not far off from randomly sampling 36 Texans and finding that 20 of them were from 3 of the most populous counties + 3 other growing counties.

 

[Kalbear]

8 hours ago, DMC said:

This is a gross overstatement.  The GOP took control of both chambers in the New Hampshire legislature.  And that's it.  By almost any metric, the 2020 state legislature elections maintained the status quo, rather remarkably so.  The expectation was that the Dems would make gains, and obviously that didn't happen, but that doesn't mean in the slightest that the GOP made "major gains across the board."

This was the article that prompted that statement, and you're right - they didn't have major gains. They just won most everything that mattered. 

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-won-almost-every-election-where-redistricting-was-at-stake/

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

24 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Curious to know what you call the seditionists attack on the Capitol and those dead from that, the endless violence against African Americans and now, again, Asian Americans, the mass shooting that have been a permanent part of the national life nearly daily except for the short-time closed window of shutdowns, cop riots, an arrest nearly daily ever since the Big Attack on the Capitol of crazies with auto weapons, bombs, etc.  

I think you missed the context there. I didn’t say it ended in violence years ago, I said years ago that the Trump Administration would inevitably end in violence.

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Name a single win Republicans have had in the last three months. Everything has gone south for them. They have no agenda. They have no leader. They have no future one can clearly see. All the press they're getting is bad. And now they're picking a fight with their corporate overlords, who are increasingly moving away from them. Republicans are in a really bad place right now and they're still tying themselves to the sinking stone that is Trump. 

Immigration, which is arguably their biggest policy. Biden is very much underwater there and most of the press is against him loudly there. 

Also, a crisis is only a crisis if it results in bad outcomes. All of what you said is true, and was true in 2020, and they'll still retake the house and be able to restrict voting rights for a generation. None of what you said matters at all. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

In a sane, well structured democracy they'd be in deep trouble. But they have gerrymandering/natural geographic advantage propping them up in the House (and statehouses), the Senate's basic ridiculousness propping them up in the Senate, the Electoral College giving them an intrinsic advantage in every Presidential election, and they have the Supreme Court for a generation. It's honestly hard to imagine how much bad press it would take to sink them. And their corporate overlords are not going to abandon them over this voting rights stuff, their involvement in which is basically just performative. When the time comes they'll fund both sides as they always do to maintain access. 

The Senate is always going to be a problem, and yes the courts have been packed, but that can be solved and undone with time. I don’t share your long term concerns with the House and state legislatures, and the WH is close to becoming a lock for Democrats. But these are structural issues. I’m talking about the actual party. They have no policies. They only oppose things, including very popular ideas. They’re shrinking their base. It’s a dying party and that’s why it’s lashing out. It won’t die tomorrow, but they have no obvious path going forward into the future as their base dies off and young voters continue to overwhelmingly support Democrats.  

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The Senate is always going to be a problem, and yes the courts have been packed, but that can be solved and undone with time. I don’t share your long term concerns with the House and state legislatures, and the WH is close to becoming a lock for Democrats. But these are structural issues. I’m talking about the actual party. They have no policies. They only oppose things, including very popular ideas. They’re shrinking their base. It’s a dying party and that’s why it’s lashing out. It won’t die tomorrow, but they have no obvious path going forward into the future as their base dies off and young voters continue to overwhelmingly support Democrats.  

I've been hearing this dying party thing since 2008. Still ain't true. 2020 had the most votes for Republicans ever in a high turnout year and they barely lost- in the midst of a disastrous pandemic, economic failure, horrible press and worsening demographics. All of that was needed to have Biden win by 40k total votes, dems barely eek out a victory in the house and get a tie in the Senate (which likely wouldn't have happened if Georgia didn't have runoff rules).

And this is evidence of dying? 

I'll give my quick hypothesis - the US and the world are going to be facing major crisis after crisis in the next 20 to 40 years, and without a particular single source of agreed-upon enemies to blame. People in those times will gravitate towards xenophobia, hate, fear, and desperation to embrace authoritarian rule. And those values are what the republican party and media are all about. That is their policy plank. And it is going to get a lot more popular.

[Kalbear]

Oh hey, look at this report which gives me confirmation of my world views

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/intelligence-globe-future-crises-/2021/04/08/303c350e-97df-11eb-962b-78c1d8228819_story.html

[Zorral]

53 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think you missed the context there. I didn’t say it ended in violence years ago, I said years ago that the Trump Administration would inevitably end in violence.

I didn't get that.  Apologies.  I said the same thing; actually I've been saying the whole trajectory of US politics since Bushwa2 -- if not at least since Reagan -- was going to out-and-out civil war, and here we are.  We're not wearing blue and grey uniforms, with the battlefields confined literally to large spaces of ground, forest and swamp, but more like what began that war, in Kansas-Nebraska-Missouri -- and to a different kind of flavor California in the 1850's.  The violence ever escalated.

In the meantime we have this, out of the Atlantic Monthly -- limited clicks:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/

Quote

 

... He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications ...

The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem ... The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg. ....  “We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. ...

....One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones. The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said. “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”....

.... Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle. Turchin excludes the ultimate violent incident, the Civil War, as a “sui generis event.” The exclusion may seem suspicious, but to a statistician, “trimming outliers” is standard practice. Historians and journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers—­because they are interesting—and sometimes miss grander trends....

This latter, regarding societies built on war which means destroying smaller scale societies, bookends the thesis and trajectory with the new history of white supremacy 4-part docu-series on HBO, Raul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes, which debuted last night on HBO.  All four parts are available for viewing on HBO Max.  I watched the first two last night.  It's not as though I don't know all this material very well, but to SEE it, so elegantly composed, accompanied by a witty use of music -- not at all contemporary with the events but making appropos commentary, as well as structured in untraditional manner -- it's strong stuff.  The reviewer on the Roger Ebert site said it's as if Peck decided to create a filmic version of the 1619 Project -- which will further enrage those who are already enraged that the 1619 Project exists -- and continues to exist.

 

 

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

That's what the article is reporting. These are the places from where the Capitol seditionists came from, as Fez pointed out earlier he witness himself in the place where he lives, where this is kind of population increase has gone on as well.

Perhaps that is said in some part of the article you did not quote, but it is NOT how what you quoted is phrased. The article definitely says that the White population declined in these counties, NOT just that the percentage of the population that was White declined. And that's wrong.

Of course that is the fault of the newspaper, not you. 

[Zorral]

2 minutes ago, Ormond said:

some part of the article you did not quote

As you know it's not possible, nor is it a good idea, to repost the whole article.  The link is there though for the whole article to be read!  But it does seem from long observation that people hardly read what one does repost here, much less bother to click and read the whole thing (people do so though, commonly, in the Covid threads, which is terrific).

In the meantime, going back to previous barred from committing twits: If he was allowed back into the reality-based media, and that non-reality enabling social media -- the media across the board would be banging on non-stop about every single jab of his pudgy little fingers, which would be dreadful for mine, and the nation's, mental health. I'm just now beginning to let go some of the four years of non-stop abuse and terrorism he committed on us all.  

[Ormond]

4 minutes ago, Zorral said:

As you know it's not possible, nor is it a good idea, to repost the whole article.  The link is there though for the whole article to be read!  But it does seem from long observation that people hardly read what one does repost here, much less bother to click and read the whole thing (people do so though, commonly, in the Covid threads, which is terrific).

In the meantime, going back to previous barred from committing twits: If he was allowed back into the reality-based media, and that non-reality enabling social media -- the media across the board would be banging on non-stop about every single jab of his pudgy little fingers, which would be dreadful for mine, and the nation's, mental health. I'm just now beginning to let go some of the four years of non-stop abuse and terrorism he committed on us all.  

Yes, I know you linked to the entire article. However, it is from the Washington Post, and I do not have a subscription to that paper so they will not let me read it.  I certainly would have read it if I could have done it for free, but if I start subscribing to newspapers which aren't in my home town I would soon be spending way more money on that than I should. 

[Zorral]

3 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I would soon be spending way more money on that than I should. 

I certainly do that. But I justify it by 'work.'

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 hours ago, DMC said:

This is a gross overstatement.  The GOP took control of both chambers in the New Hampshire legislature.  And that's it.  By almost any metric, the 2020 state legislature elections maintained the status quo, rather remarkably so.  The expectation was that the Dems would make gains, and obviously that didn't happen, but that doesn't mean in the slightest that the GOP made "major gains across the board."

While true the Democratic Party desperately needs to improve its game on the State level.