US Politics: Primary Schoolin'

[Liffguard]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

All I’m saying is that I would prefer serious policy wonks running the US Government to the conspiracy kooks and dominionists the Republican Party now offers.  

Sure, all else being equal, so would I. My point was that the conspiracy kooks and dominionists didn't arise in a vacuum. The policy wonks helped lay the foundation.

I suppose my broader concern is that I sense a major current in both the US and the UK that wants to return to a very particular aesthetic of sensibleness/moderation. Not saying that that's where you're coming from, just that the way you phrased your point reminded me of that current.

Who gets to be a "serious" policy wonk? Sorry to make this about the UK, but I have more experience here, and I think the point translates. In 2010/2011, the pundits and think-tanks telling us that austerity was essential were all very "serious", very sensible wonkish people. The student activists and protestors against it were all deeply unserious children apparently. Except the protestors were 100% correct and the pundits were 100% wrong. And now we have Brexit and Grenfell and everything else from the past decade and it doesn't look like getting better any time soon. And yet those same pundits and politicians and think-tanks are still the "serious" people. They have the right connections and it doesn't matter how often they get it wrong, they'll always be the serious people.

Is it any different in the USA?

[TrackerNeil]

2 minutes ago, Liffguard said:

Sure, all else being equal, so would I. My point was that the conspiracy kooks and dominionists didn't arise in a vacuum. The policy wonks helped lay the foundation.

How so?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Liffguard said:

Sure, all else being equal, so would I. My point was that the conspiracy kooks and dominionists didn't arise in a vacuum. The policy wonks helped lay the foundation.

I suppose my broader concern is that I sense a major current in both the US and the UK that wants to return to a very particular aesthetic of sensibleness/moderation. Not saying that that's where you're coming from, just that the way you phrased your point reminded me of that current.

Who gets to be a "serious" policy wonk? Sorry to make this about the UK, but I have more experience here, and I think the point translates. In 2010/2011, the pundits and think-tanks telling us that austerity was essential were all very "serious", very sensible wonkish people. The student activists and protestors against it were all deeply unserious children apparently. Except the protestors were 100% correct and the pundits were 100% wrong. And now we have Brexit and Grenfell and everything else from the past decade and it doesn't look like getting better any time soon. And yet those same pundits and politicians and think-tanks are still the "serious" people. They have the right connections and it doesn't matter how often they get it wrong, they'll always be the serious people.

Is it any different in the USA?

I take your point… thank you.  That said I remain skeptical of populism regardless of the pov it arises from.  

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Liffguard said:

Is it any different in the USA?

Not really. The 'serious' wonks of the 80s were promoting selling drugs for guns to support terrorist regimes that were overthrowing democratically elected governments, they were supporting a massive crackdown on minorities via police states, they were all supporting welfare 'reform' that put more kids in poverty than ever before, they were supporting tax breaks for the rich and trickle-down economics. It was all very serious and agreed-to and there was very little pushback from either side on going this way. 

There were a whole lot of people out there protesting against these things, but they weren't considered 'serious' people out there and were often marginalized. 

Later on we got more partisanship divisions and more loggerheads, but we still didn't have populism.

Now, @Ser Scot A Ellison - if you want to rail against populism say that specifically, but that wasn't what we had in the 90s or the 00s and it was pretty shitty then too. I suspect when you think about government being boring you're thinking not just about the Reagan era but also the GWB era. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Now, @Ser Scot A Ellison - if you want to rail against populism say that specifically, but that wasn't what we had in the 90s or the 00s and it was pretty shitty then too. I suspect when you think about government being boring you're thinking not just about the Reagan era but also the GWB era. 

Do you disagree it is worse now?  Or that Republicans are seeking to destroy the existing structure of the US Government (regardless of how you view problems with that existing structure).

Edited January 23 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Kalbear]

3 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Do you disagree it is worse now?  Or that Republicans are seeking to destroy the existing structure of the US Government?

I disagree with neither - I disagree with the notion that somehow going back to boring politics is a requirement or is a good thing. There is a lot of non-boring things that are happening right now that I absolutely agree should continue to be non-boring, and are at best Trump-adjacent. 

What I do not want to do is go back to a time where the government largely agreed to fuck people and the environment and other countries over largely unanimously. My feeling is that you would be okay with that as long as it meant you weren't having to fear for someone openly autocratic taking over; as long as they did so quietly and slowly, via the courts and lifetime judicial appointments (which is the standard Republican policy and has been since the 90s) you were okay with it.

[Jaxom 1974]

13 minutes ago, Liffguard said:

Sure, all else being equal, so would I. My point was that the conspiracy kooks and dominionists didn't arise in a vacuum. The policy wonks helped lay the foundation.

Policy Wonks or a combination of the rise of social media and the idea that journalism has been turned into entertainment akin to a sports broadcast? 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, Kalbear said:

My feeling is that you would be okay with that as long as it meant you weren't having to fear for someone openly autocratic taking over; as long as they did so quietly and slowly, via the courts and lifetime judicial appointments (which is the standard Republican policy and has been since the 90s) you were okay with it.

Your feeling is inaccurate.  We’ve needed serious structural change for a very long time.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Policy Wonks or a combination of the rise of social media and the idea that journalism has been turned into entertainment akin to a sports broadcast? 

I read a television Journalist (I wish I could remember who) who said: “the worst day for Journalism was the firs time a television newsroom made a profit.”

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Your feeling is inaccurate.  We’ve needed serious structural change for a very long time.

Then that's not going to go back to a boring system! You aren't going to have boring government when you're massively changing the courts, the way you elect presidents, the way you're electing representatives. That's a fundamentally radical set of changes which would mean a very non-boring system for quite a while. 

To me 'boring' is very much a synonym of 'conservative', and you can't really do any of that deep structural change while wanting to have conservative government.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

To me 'boring' is very much a synonym of 'conservative', and you can't really do any of that deep structural change while wanting to have conservative government.

Wonderful.  That isn’t what I ment by “boring”.  Perhaps “serious” would have been a more apt word to use.  

[for the record I’ve had plenty of people call my desire for structural change “boring”.  My mistake is perhaps assuming those who pay more attention to policy would find that interest and desire “boring”.]

Edited January 23 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[drawkcabi]

2 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Donald Trump has a big problem ahead
A whole swath of GOP voters appears firmly committed to not voting for Trump in November.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/23/trump-moderate-republicans-problem-00137112

 

In the face of the Rational National piece I posted earlier, among other things, that article relieves some stress
So does this one which directly confronts how unreliable polls have become especially with the younger generation and also how Gen Z will turn out big for Biden:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2024/01/11/gen-z-vote-biden-trump-2024-election/72152010007/

But I can't help/stop worrying. 
I see stupid YouTube polls made and Trump gets like 80% and Biden less than 20%
But then I remind myself YouTube is infested with bots and Russians.

Yeah, the legit polls data collecting are outdated because they dont use cell or smartphones but the general feeling of voting 3rd party or not voting persists...like in the air

It doesnt feel like enougn people realize how horrible and how pretty much end of everything catastrophic Trump winning would be.

I'm still shook from 2016 and that makes me not trust America not to be stupid. (Double negative but it best encapsulates what I mean.)

If you made a cartoon X-Ray of my brain you'd see one of those balancing scales with "Biden's got this!" on one side and "Uh-Oh" on the other, each side continually going up and down, each having weight constantly added or taken away, and I see it going like that through the end of the election...

[Jaxom 1974]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Wonderful.  That isn’t what I ment by “boring”.  Perhaps “serious” would have been a more apt word to use.

If you truly want, "serious" government, then it seems imperative that we re-elect Andrew Sheppard!

[Jace, Extat]

Scott, you didn't say a damn thing wrong. Stop backpedaling, man.

[Zorral]

4 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Perhaps “serious” would have been a more apt word to use.

You can't get more serious than white male sexually-coded humiliation of other males.

The Emasculation of Ron DeSantis by the Bully Donald Trump
The former president’s brutal, yearlong campaign of humiliation helped torpedo the Florida governor’s White House hopes and left his next moves in politics uncertain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/us/politics/desantis-trump-humiliation.html

Quote

 

Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.

In front of enormous rally audiences, Mr. Trump painted Mr. DeSantis as a submissive sniveler, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.

In a series of sexually charged attacks, Mr. Trump suggested — without a shred of proof — that Mr. DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that perhaps he was a pedophile.

He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave Mr. DeSantis whining for “mommy.”

Mr. DeSantis shied from fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had portrayed himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political brawlers, but he pulled his punches in the most important race of his life.

Now he is both defeated and debased. His departure from the race on Sunday was a far fall from grace after opening his campaign as the heir apparent in a Trumpified Republican Party. Rehabilitating that reputation as he considers his next political move will require plenty of repair work with donors and Republican voters, thanks to Mr. Trump’s ruthless parade of insults over 242 days on the campaign trail.

“I don’t care if he’s a Republican,” Mr. Trump said of his belittlement of Mr. DeSantis at a November gathering of the Republican Party of Florida — the governor’s home turf. “We hit him hard, and now he’s like a wounded falling bird from the skies.”

But even more crushing was Mr. DeSantis’s response, or lack thereof. ....

 

 

[Ormond]

The young man who runs the "Let's Talk Elections" channel on YouTube, who has seemed to me to usually know what he is talking about, has a recent video where he says that recent polls of New Hampshire voters show them saying they would vote for Biden over Trump in a general election at almost exactly the same % points they actually did in 2020. His argument is that New Hampshire voters start paying close attention to the election cycle earlier than those in other states do, and so he thinks this predicts that voters nationally will end up back at about the same place next November they were in 2020. Since that election was so close, it's still a worrisome prospect, but less dire than a lot of national Biden vs. Trump polls right now are predicting.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

You can't get more serious than white male sexually-coded humiliation of other males.

The Emasculation of Ron DeSantis by the Bully Donald Trump
The former president’s brutal, yearlong campaign of humiliation helped torpedo the Florida governor’s White House hopes and left his next moves in politics uncertain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/us/politics/desantis-trump-humiliation.html

 

Trump is DeSantis as a schoolyard bully.

[Zorral]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Trump is DeSantis as a schoolyard bully.

They both are.  So are the congressional fascists, and that includes 'their' women like MTG.  And many other politicians and officials, and non-officials across the country.  This is why Their greatest self-fulfillment dream is to punch people in the face and have nothing happen in return.

[Tywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Policy Wonks or a combination of the rise of social media and the idea that journalism has been turned into entertainment akin to a sports broadcast? 

Policy wonks have fucked up left and right. However, they're better than the crop we're getting now which are braindead know-nothing social media influencers turned into politicians who want celebrity and power. Things have gone seriously wrong. 

[Kalbear]

43 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Policy wonks have fucked up left and right. However, they're better than the crop we're getting now which are braindead know-nothing social media influencers turned into politicians who want celebrity and power. Things have gone seriously wrong. 

Eh.

In general policy wonks - particularly on the conservative side - have controlled things quite well and have continually gotten more of what they want. Those wonks now effectively dictate the exact list of candidates for judicial nominations verbatim. They regularly draft legislation for states and even for federal government that can circumvent or abolish precedents that they care about. There's a lot of noise about the MTGs and Trumps as far as them doing heinous things and corrupt bullshit, and that's bad in and of itself - but the wonkiness has been working well for 30+ years for conservatives, and more importantly the social media influencers that you're talking about largely get their marching orders from them.