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On November 11 2024 00:30 ChristianS wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On November 10 2024 07:06 Introvert wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On November 10 2024 06:01 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2024 03:12 Introvert wrote:
Guys, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not "Republican outreach." Harris called her a "Republican thought leader" but she was kicked out of her own party! Dems don't like the Cheney family, but Republicans don't like them either! Thr leason from this is not that "outreach" failed, that's the exact wrong way around. Moreover it doesn't answer the question of how Dems lost ground with people they usually do well with! Maybe they are doing something to alienate a substantial chuck of their own voters? Campaigning with Cheney I contend was a net negative. I think they were hoping there was still a substantial number of constitutional conservatives left in the Republican party instead of Trump loyalists. They were wrong. It's depressing watching people like Shapiro, who I once thought had interesting things to say, tie himself into knots trying to support Trump with 'he's bad, but he's incompetent so it doesn't matter and I want the federal government incompetent anyways so that's good." Shapiro, Walsh, heck, even chalkboard-Glenn Beck all saw what a danger Trump posed to their party and wrote articles loudly proclaiming they would never vote for Trump. Every one of them bent the knee and defend and sanewash him to this day. It's sadly funny in the wake of Jan 6, you briefly saw Shapiro think he could separate himself as Trump looked like he was gone from politics. Shapiro flatly called Jan 6 an insurrection and the worst day in American history since 9/11... he has since walked it back once it was clear Trump would return to politics. It's Trump before everything else and so it turned out it did not matter how many former Cabinet members (that Trump himself selected) that came out against him saying he should never lead the country again. Lifelong Republicans, every one of them were secretly Democrats the whole time, the so-called "Uni-party". Trump above all. Stop the steal! They are going to take away your country! (Only not this time???) It's maddening, but so yes, in retrospect there was no point. Trump loyalism has subsumed too much. Having said that, Dick Cheney was never going to help and ought to have been fended off with a very long pole. Something like that "we are grateful for every vote, but we still remember the Iraq war". Or else a more forceful condemnation of the Cheney era of Middle East adventurism. Dick Cheney will always be an anchor to any side he attaches himself. To a lesser degree, so is W Bush. Even if he was supportive of Harris to get rid of Trump "Well, that was some weird s--", I think he was wise to stick with his policy of peacing out of the whole political world and just paint. Hm there's a lot there. First, Cheney was a lap dog for Pelosi on her silly Jan 6 committee. If I recall Pelosi rejected anyone else McCarthy tried to add. She was a willing fool for an enterprise that was not aimed at truth, even if it happened to find some (it was just too obviously partisan to be of any use). Next, Trump won a lot of conservatives over by governing more to the right than they were expecting. I certainly was pleasantly surprised by the Trump presidency for the most part. I haven't listened to Shapiro in ages but my impression was that he was a DeSantis guy before Trump won the nom. A lot of conservatives came around when he's the only game in town. Which brings me to my other point. I have in this thread tried many, many times to point out that Democrats were not giving Republicans, much less conservatives, ANYTHING at all to bring them on board. The Biden admin went all in on things like student loan bailouts, an unconstitutional spending of federal money that dwarfed the amount Trump tried to appropriate for the wall. He was derelict in his duty to protect the nation by allowing an unprecedented crisis at the southern border, with border security and immigration being an issue the right has cared about for two decades now. He and his state level allies threw the book at Trump with all these court cases, only some of which were even plausibly legitimate, even after we found out Biden himself was keeping documents he shouldn't have had. Democrat's advantage on "Democracy" slowly shrunk as all this went on and I think I saw one exit poll where voters trusted Trump more on that! Harris meanwhile gave no olive branch to conservatives on a single thing. Nothing on abortion, nothing on the border, nothing on social or economic issues at all. When she did "moderate" it wasn't believable (e.g. fracking). As I've said so many times, if Democrats really believed that Trump was the next Hitler you would think they would have offered skeptical Republicans something, instead they tried to say "Trump is bad so you MUST vote for us and swallow our entire agenda or else you are a bad person." This is not a winning message and it indicates that most of the rhetoric isn't sincere. There is one final part of this. Trump can only be president for one more term. People are less worried because I don't think any serious person actually believes that he's going to try and steal an election for a third term. Meanwhile, while his election shenanigans are bad, people really don't like Biden or Harris. They remember times as being better under Trump before COVID. All the hair-on-fire antics from Dems in retrospect look silly, as half the crap they said about him turned out to be just noise. Meanwhile his attempt to take 2020 failed. Call it survivorship bias, but that I think is the way it's viewed by many people. TLDR is that Dems didn't even pretend that they had to earn Republican votes, they expected to just get them because of Trump. Harris didn't give Cheney anything, and she didn't have to because Cheney already hated Trump. Not the same for normie Republicans or conservatives. Ultimately the calculus of who was worse was pretty clear for most conservatives. + Show Spoiler +For my own part, I still think that the system is more resilient to Trump's problems then Dems problems in general. Dem expansion of the administrative state and their disdain for federalism is far more dangerous long term.
Edit: like I said the other day about GWB, I think also part of him recalls how the left treated him and how he was the previous Republican Hitler. While he obviously has no love for Trump, I doubt he felt the need to publicly agree with the people who called him all sorts of names.
Maybe wasting my time but there’s some revisionist history that feels worth correcting. First, as I mentioned the other day, Democrats believe in two propositions: - Proposition 1: The president should be whoever won the presidential election.
- Proposition 2: You’d better not vote for any politician who tries to take or keep power in violation of an election result; leaving power in their hands could have really bad consequences.
Thing is, if you’d asked 10 years ago, everybody would have said those propositions weren’t partisan, they were universally held, and in fact so obvious they didn’t even really need to be stated. Prior to Stop the Steal and J6, Liz Cheney was a Republican member of the House in good standing. Well-regarded by the party, occupied leadership positions, probably could have been Speaker or something some day. I seriously doubt Introvert would have had a bad thing to say about her. Then Trump made very clear he didn’t believe Proposition 1; Trump believes the president should be Donald Trump, regardless of who won the election. Among other elected Republicans it was less clear; for a minute there it really looked like the party was finally going to buck Trump over this, and Senate Republicans kind of did, but House Republicans overwhelmingly didn’t. Cheney was one of the only ones that did, and I don’t see any real explanation besides a sincere belief in Propositions 1 and 2. It certainly wasn’t in her self-interest. Then when the J6 committee was starting up, Republicans were offered the kind of equal-representation bipartisan committee rules that Congress has used after, e.g., 9/11. Republicans rejected it. When it got set up under more typical majority-party-favored committee rules, they were still asked to submit members, and they exclusively recommended members clearly intended to undermine the entire project (e.g. Jim Jordan). Cheney was one of a very small number of Republicans around who seemed to think that J6 was, y’know, a crime that should be investigated and punished, so Pelosi put her in but rejected the Republicans who had, essentially, continued shouting “Stop the Steal” that entire day. Fast forward a few years and the Republican party leader had rejected both propositions, and nearly all party elected representatives had rejected both propositions, but what about Republican voters? Didn’t they believe in democracy? Danglars, for instance, came around to something like “in retrospect Biden was the correct choice in 2020” as a direct consequence of J6 before he got banned. Maybe there were still a bunch of Republican voters, perhaps in swing states, that would at least stay home if the election were sufficiently focused on Propositions 1 and 2? This was surely the thinking behind campaigning with Cheney, and I said a few weeks before the election I thought it was a mistake. It was a bet on the principled integrity of Republican voters, and, well, I guess we all already have a decent idea of how good a bet that is. Intro said then and continues to say now “yeah, yeah, democratic norms or whatever, but what policy concessions are you offering me? Make it worth my while!” And even if they were willing to make policy concessions, Republicans have made clear since at least Obamacare that while they’re happy to accept policy concessions, they will under no circumstances actually change their vote as a result of them. TL;DR: All this “Cheney was Pelosi’s lap dog” stuff boils down to Cheney being one of the only Republicans that believes the presidency should be determined by presidential election results, and that anyone who tries to have power by other means shouldn’t be given power. The rest is just name-calling and partisan distractions.
Memory says Cheney never liked Trump and was given a leadership spot to placate her. But even if not true, she was out there talking about abortion with Kamala after being very pro-life. Not sure about those principles...and finally she has bad judgment. Any supposedly serious committee with the likes of Bennie Thompson and Jamie Raskin, along with Russiagate clown Adam Schiff, is rightly considered a partisan enterprise.
On November 11 2024 01:03 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2024 11:18 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 09:55 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 09:21 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 08:11 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 07:06 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 06:01 Falling wrote:On November 10 2024 03:12 Introvert wrote:
Guys, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not "Republican outreach." Harris called her a "Republican thought leader" but she was kicked out of her own party! Dems don't like the Cheney family, but Republicans don't like them either! Thr leason from this is not that "outreach" failed, that's the exact wrong way around. Moreover it doesn't answer the question of how Dems lost ground with people they usually do well with! Maybe they are doing something to alienate a substantial chuck of their own voters? Campaigning with Cheney I contend was a net negative. I think they were hoping there was still a substantial number of constitutional conservatives left in the Republican party instead of Trump loyalists. They were wrong. It's depressing watching people like Shapiro, who I once thought had interesting things to say, tie himself into knots trying to support Trump with 'he's bad, but he's incompetent so it doesn't matter and I want the federal government incompetent anyways so that's good." Shapiro, Walsh, heck, even chalkboard-Glenn Beck all saw what a danger Trump posed to their party and wrote articles loudly proclaiming they would never vote for Trump. Every one of them bent the knee and defend and sanewash him to this day. It's sadly funny in the wake of Jan 6, you briefly saw Shapiro think he could separate himself as Trump looked like he was gone from politics. Shapiro flatly called Jan 6 an insurrection and the worst day in American history since 9/11... he has since walked it back once it was clear Trump would return to politics. It's Trump before everything else and so it turned out it did not matter how many former Cabinet members (that Trump himself selected) that came out against him saying he should never lead the country again. Lifelong Republicans, every one of them were secretly Democrats the whole time, the so-called "Uni-party". Trump above all. Stop the steal! They are going to take away your country! (Only not this time???) It's maddening, but so yes, in retrospect there was no point. Trump loyalism has subsumed too much. Having said that, Dick Cheney was never going to help and ought to have been fended off with a very long pole. Something like that "we are grateful for every vote, but we still remember the Iraq war". Or else a more forceful condemnation of the Cheney era of Middle East adventurism. Dick Cheney will always be an anchor to any side he attaches himself. To a lesser degree, so is W Bush. Even if he was supportive of Harris to get rid of Trump "Well, that was some weird s--", I think he was wise to stick with his policy of peacing out of the whole political world and just paint. Hm there's a lot there. First, Cheney was a lap dog for Pelosi on her silly Jan 6 committee. If I recall Pelosi rejected anyone else McCarthy tried to add. She was a willing fool for an enterprise that was not aimed at truth, even if it happened to find some (it was just too obviously partisan to be of any use). Next, Trump won a lot of conservatives over by governing more to the right than they were expecting. I certainly was pleasantly surprised by the Trump presidency for the most part. I haven't listened to Shapiro in ages but my impression was that he was a DeSantis guy before Trump won the nom. A lot of conservatives came around when he's the only game in town. Which brings me to my other point. I have in this thread tried many, many times to point out that Democrats were not giving Republicans, much less conservatives, ANYTHING at all to bring them on board. The Biden admin went all in on things like student loan bailouts, an unconstitutional spending of federal money that dwarfed the amount Trump tried to appropriate for the wall. He was derelict in his duty to protect the nation by allowing an unprecedented crisis at the southern border, with border security and immigration being an issue the right has cared about for two decades now. He and his state level allies threw the book at Trump with all these court cases, only some of which were even plausibly legitimate, even after we found out Biden himself was keeping documents he shouldn't have had. Democrat's advantage on "Democracy" slowly shrunk as all this went on and I think I saw one exit poll where voters trusted Trump more on that! Harris meanwhile gave no olive branch to conservatives on a single thing. Nothing on abortion, nothing on the border, nothing on social or economic issues at all. When she did "moderate" it wasn't believable (e.g. fracking). As I've said so many times, if Democrats really believed that Trump was the next Hitler you would think they would have offered skeptical Republicans something, instead they tried to say "Trump is bad so you MUST vote for us and swallow our entire agenda or else you are a bad person." This is not a winning message and it indicates that most of the rhetoric isn't sincere. There is one final part of this. Trump can only be president for one more term. People are less worried because I don't think any serious person actually believes that he's going to try and steal an election for a third term. Meanwhile, while his election shenanigans are bad, people really don't like Biden or Harris. They remember times as being better under Trump before COVID. All the hair-on-fire antics from Dems in retrospect look silly, as half the crap they said about him turned out to be just noise. Meanwhile his attempt to take 2020 failed. Call it survivorship bias, but that I think is the way it's viewed by many people. TLDR is that Dems didn't even pretend that they had to earn Republican votes, they expected to just get them because of Trump. Harris didn't give Cheney anything, and she didn't have to because Cheney already hated Trump. Not the same for normie Republicans or conservatives. Ultimately the calculus of who was worse was pretty clear for most conservatives. + Show Spoiler +For my own part, I still think that the system is more resilient to Trump's problems then Dems problems in general. Dem expansion of the administrative state and their disdain for federalism is far more dangerous long term.
Edit: like I said the other day about GWB, I think also part of him recalls how the left treated him and how he was the previous Republican Hitler. While he obviously has no love for Trump, I doubt he felt the need to publicly agree with the people who called him all sorts of names.
Ok some earnest questions. What concessions could Harris reasonably give to Conservatives that don’t piss off her base? You are one person and not an avatar of course, can you think of any? I struggle. It’s a little more of a ‘wider left’ thing than a Harris thing, as well, I feel. No matter what x political does will be dwarfed in a load of culture war stories, but that caveat aside. What threshold does Trump have to exceed to lose seemingly even moderate conservatives? Lose need not mean flipping, just not supporting or defending the man. It could even take the form of having misgivings with the Democrats and believing they’re indulging in politically expedient prosecutions. At the same time as considering Trump had transgressed. Jan 6th wasn’t sufficient? What actually would be? It’s difficult to envisage much compromise on all of much, while still relatively centrist by European standards, within the US what would be a gap between two centre right parties, or a centre right and a far right one, or a centre right and centre-left elsewhere and one of policy disagreements becomes a chasm. And a growing one. Secondly, I’m sure I’m not alone, and indeed I’m sure this charge will be levied in the opposite. It’s not that I don’t believe what others believe, it’s that I no longer believe what those others believe what they say they believe either. I’m talking broadly here on a purely individual level this isn’t the case, but as a political grouping If I make some compromise with someone who stresses they’re a (insert political belief system here), sometimes you gotta do these things. If however, said individual does something that contradicts the rationale for previous compromises because it benefits them, I’d be foolish to do another compromise on the same basis as the first. Rightly or wrongly I think there’s also a big perception that Republicans are full of shit. I mean I could bring up Merrick Garland for the 18 millionth time, but that 1-2 punch was just breathtakingly disingenuous stuff. While I do try to understand people with different views than myself I don't know that I could answer the question of what the left should have put on the table. I could answer maybe what just enough people on the right might have accepted...those things would be in line with what I outlined. I've already mentioned abortion recently, but it's clear that Dems actually viewed that issue as a way to win so they felt no need to slow down. Establishment-y writers like Matt Yglesias point out how Biden allowed more energy development than anyone thought (although he scuttled a bunch and Trump would/will allow more) but Biden barely talked about it. Or they could have acknowledged that the border was in crisis and moved to fix it (like the Trump admin did in the second half of his term). Could have forsworn paying off the student loans of people who Republicans think don't need it and don't particularly like. Maybe it is impossible now, but remember Bill Clinton got wrecked in the 1994 midterms and did an about face (the era of big government is over!). but perhaps dems can't do that anymore. Listen, in this country there's just no way a dem is going to get a large number of GOP votes (and vice versa) but on the margins who knows? They didn't even try, so I don't know how much theory crafting to do. And I'm not shocked, the progressive worldview involves seeing people who disagree with them as bad people that can't have legitimate points or concerns. Perhaps in the age of Trump this is more true on both sides, but I think the overwhelming dominance of the progressives in our societal institutions makes them very loath to consider compromise. That being said, the diversity of Trump coalition gives hope. There are plenty of former Democrat voters who are willing to give the GOP a chance, and that will have an effect on both parties, even if I don't like all the policies that will come from that. (so maybe what I said at the top of the last paragraph is not entirely true). All this is just a way of saying that I don't know if I could build a platform for Harris to do such a thing. But I do think that if everyone on her side really believed Trump was Hitler 2, she would have had a LOT of leeway from the left to make concessions. Maybe that shows that many on the left don't believe what they say either  I will say, and this applies to what Sadist wrote as well, we are talking about appealing to GOP voters-- not politicians. I view the situation with Congress differently as you can imagine. But the idea is not to appeal to some legislator for a deal and then have them stab you in the back, what I'm talking about is being open-minded enough to give Republican voters something, or at least cause them to feel like they can stay home and not vote for Trump. It would be hard, the overbearing cultural dominance of the left creates a siege mindset among many on the right and as I said above, seems to encourage those on the left to press forward. R.e. Jan 6, I think of a lot of people on the right don't hold Trump responsible for that, and I'm leaning in that direction. At least I don't hold him directly responsible, his failure was not doing something about it (it's still true that DC leadership turned down an offer for more police that day beforehand). In my mind at least the stolen election gambit and Jan 6 are related but not identical things. It was a riot, not a coup. What about Trump continuing to question the legitimacy of the election subsequently? I think the ‘it was a riot not a coup’ has some plausibility, but the man continued to rabble rouse on this to this day. I think the left (or indeed the centre) could build bridges on immigration certainly. That’s probably the area. It’s certainly an area they’ve been crushed on in many a recent election, my UK included. I think it’s a stupid horse to hitch yourself to, depending on how you do the messaging and what policies you advocate for. It’s also a topic you can somewhat message differently for the same policy, to different groups. It’s an asymmetric phenomenon as well. It’s generally poor areas that become the landing point for heavy (relatively) unskilled migration. They may not be proficient in the language. The middle class and up tend to deal with more highly skilled economic migrants. Those aren’t the same thing. I remember reading a piece the Guardian did on this quite vividly. Notable right wing rag. There was the father who lived in one of the poorest areas of London. Couldn’t stress enough he had no issues with race, or people immigrating. But for him specifically well his daughter was at school with a bunch of newly arrived migrant children who didn’t speak the language. Teachers tried their best but it’s a tricky scenario. Middle class folks don’t ever really have to deal with that kind of issue. While I feel the right too frequently involve xenophobic sentiment equally it’s been a long, long bugbear that the left ignore any kind of issue whatsoever. So maybe that’s the area where you could find some kind of common ground if you mediated for the more extreme impulses of either pole. Trump will never concede that of course, but it was interesting how on Joe Rogan he seemed like he didn't really want to talk about 2020. I just think he didn't want to act against people he thought were on his side.Immigration is actually a really good example of something where just doing the bare minimum expected, not even conceding ground!, would have benefited dems. If they hadn't created a crisis and then denied it that might have been something to assuage the concerns of the chunk of people who had immigration as their top issue. Idk if you've seen this little tidbit but Trump won Starr county in Texas, a 97% Hispanic county that has voted dem in every election since 1896. At one point Obama won it with 84%. So I think that's a good example of do-no-harm that really would have helped. But because of the Dems insistence that anything Trump did was bad, they couldn't keep the border secure. They wouldn't even have to debate against deportations if they had just done a good job in the first place. The ‘of course’ being quite some telling phrasing. It’s sort of a ‘well I know Trump will do egregious things but hey I’ll shrug and say Trump gonna Trump, you know what he’s like’. That element I would also believe, I don’t expect him to concede either, but it doesn’t mean we can’t both believe he SHOULD do that. Ultimately in the aftermath of January 6th there was considerable pushback within his own party, which subsequently dissipated. And from Conservative pundits. Were they bullshitting now or were they bullshitting then? This has knock-on effects. I’m curious what the rest of my ‘fellow travellers’ believe, while Trump in isolation does worry me, this slavish loyalty, or at least reluctance to criticise that worries me just as much in combination. If Trump can basically do anything, even things counter to what segments of his support claim to believe and not take any kind of hit, where’s the political leash? That potential check on his worst impulses seemingly doesn’t exist. Furthermore it moves compromise and civility from already very difficult, to effectively impossible. If memory serves you weren’t even a Trump voter this time around. Unsure indeed if you’ve ever voted for him. Also to clarify I’m not talking about criticising him in his entirety, or indeed not voting for him, more the reluctance to actually criticise him for well, basically anything he does. You really can’t level that same crit at the left, indeed perhaps perpetual factional infighting is detrimental to electoral success, but it certainly happens.
I didn't vote for him but as I've made clear I really, really, realllllly, wanted Kamala to lose.
What Trump did was bad, but I will say that unfortunately a lot of Republicans believe him when he days it was stolen, so they don't see what happened the same way you do. They simply don't accept your premise...but part of that is because, as I said, it doesn't seem like many Dems do either.
I guess I'm trying here to summarize what I've been saying for a while now. Dems have used very heated rhetoric but continued on with business as usual. You have GH criticizing this from the left, but even to most voters it rings hollow. For eight years now the nation has been subject to Trump hysteria from Democrats that went nowhere. Boy who cried wolf. His attempt to change electors failed (and had no chance of succeeding in the first place). Meanwhile the nation is dissatisfied with current leadership. Biden promised a return to normalcy, to bring the temperature down, and be a transitional candidate. Instead he thought he was FDR and implemented policies that backfired spectacularly. Dems neutralized their advantage on Democracy by going after Trump with a stupid case in NY, and case in GA plagued by prosecurotial misbehavior, and a case in Florida that made Biden look like a huge hypocrite with the documents.
And again, if Dems REALLY believe half the crap they said they could have made all sorts of compromises to at least make skeptical voters feel like they could stay home. Whine all you want that it's unfair, but in my opinion dem overreacting to Trump since 2015 apparently made it impossible for Dems to compromise and impossible for non-dems to take their warnings seriously. Meanwhile Americans are dissatisfied with the current administration and the nominee who is a part of that administration gave them no reason to think anything would be any better with her in charge.
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On November 11 2024 02:50 Mohdoo wrote:
I had an interesting thought experiment and I was hoping you all could help me find any errors.
If Trump was compromised by Russia, it’s possible the strict anti-coup rules of the military would prevent any investigation or whatever from occurring during his presidency. After Trump’s presidency, I think we all agree every single intelligence agency would be doing everything they can to determine if he was compromised or a threat to US interests and influence. And I think we can all agree the US has the capability to conclusively determine the answer to the question beyond any doubt.
If the US intelligence agencies determined he is an actual risk and actually compromised, they will kill him before inauguration. It may sound insane, but I think it’s true. I think there’s no way our intelligence or military organizations would allow transfer of power to a foreign adversary. It is equivalent to being conquered. However, since it’s possible trump simply dies of other causes between now and then, it is possible they would wait until the actual last moment before doing anything. So even if they have their finger on the trigger between now and January 20, they would still be incentivized to do nothing just in case a freak miracle takes place.
Conclusion: If he is actually inaugurated January 20, it will mean Trump is not a threat to the US.
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. (1) Maybe they think they can protect him from the kompromat, or (2) maybe they can't just murder an elected official no matter how bad it seems, and they'll have to manage the situation instead of assassinating the man.
But even if you're 100% correct about how the intelligence agencies work, Trump not being compromised by Russians doesn't mean he can't be a threat to the US.
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On November 11 2024 02:50 Mohdoo wrote:
I had an interesting thought experiment and I was hoping you all could help me find any errors.
If Trump was compromised by Russia, it’s possible the strict anti-coup rules of the military would prevent any investigation or whatever from occurring during his presidency. After Trump’s presidency, I think we all agree every single intelligence agency would be doing everything they can to determine if he was compromised or a threat to US interests and influence. And I think we can all agree the US has the capability to conclusively determine the answer to the question beyond any doubt.
If the US intelligence agencies determined he is an actual risk and actually compromised, they will kill him before inauguration. It may sound insane, but I think it’s true. I think there’s no way our intelligence or military organizations would allow transfer of power to a foreign adversary. It is equivalent to being conquered. However, since it’s possible trump simply dies of other causes between now and then, it is possible they would wait until the actual last moment before doing anything. So even if they have their finger on the trigger between now and January 20, they would still be incentivized to do nothing just in case a freak miracle takes place.
Conclusion: If he is actually inaugurated January 20, it will mean Trump is not a threat to the US.
Did you stay up all night watching Bourne movies or what?
Idk that I sign onto And I think we can all agree the US has the capability to conclusively determine the answer to the question beyond any doubt. or If the US intelligence agencies determined he is an actual risk and actually compromised, they will kill him before inauguration. and certainly not If he is actually inaugurated January 20, it will mean Trump is not a threat to the US. but as long as we’re just killing time, fun story: prior to the Russian Revolution the Socialist Revolutionary Party had a terrorist wing called the SR Combat Organization which was run for years by a double agent who was working for the Secret Police. Yevno Azef carried out some really high profile assassinations, up to, like, the tsar’s family, all the while taking a paycheck from the Okhrana. Eventually disgruntled Okhrana agents started trying to “whistleblow” on him to the Socialist Revolutionaries but they kept not believing these spooks trying to tell them one of their senior leadership was a double agent.
To me the moral of the story is that you should never make any assumptions about what these cloak-and-dagger organizations will or won’t tolerate, but I suppose YMMV.
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On November 11 2024 02:50 Mohdoo wrote:
I had an interesting thought experiment and I was hoping you all could help me find any errors.
If Trump was compromised by Russia, it’s possible the strict anti-coup rules of the military would prevent any investigation or whatever from occurring during his presidency. After Trump’s presidency, I think we all agree every single intelligence agency would be doing everything they can to determine if he was compromised or a threat to US interests and influence. And I think we can all agree the US has the capability to conclusively determine the answer to the question beyond any doubt.
If the US intelligence agencies determined he is an actual risk and actually compromised, they will kill him before inauguration. It may sound insane, but I think it’s true. I think there’s no way our intelligence or military organizations would allow transfer of power to a foreign adversary. It is equivalent to being conquered. However, since it’s possible trump simply dies of other causes between now and then, it is possible they would wait until the actual last moment before doing anything. So even if they have their finger on the trigger between now and January 20, they would still be incentivized to do nothing just in case a freak miracle takes place.
Conclusion: If he is actually inaugurated January 20, it will mean Trump is not a threat to the US. Remember guys, don't do drugs.
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On November 11 2024 03:05 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 00:30 ChristianS wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On November 10 2024 07:06 Introvert wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On November 10 2024 06:01 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2024 03:12 Introvert wrote:
Guys, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not "Republican outreach." Harris called her a "Republican thought leader" but she was kicked out of her own party! Dems don't like the Cheney family, but Republicans don't like them either! Thr leason from this is not that "outreach" failed, that's the exact wrong way around. Moreover it doesn't answer the question of how Dems lost ground with people they usually do well with! Maybe they are doing something to alienate a substantial chuck of their own voters? Campaigning with Cheney I contend was a net negative. I think they were hoping there was still a substantial number of constitutional conservatives left in the Republican party instead of Trump loyalists. They were wrong. It's depressing watching people like Shapiro, who I once thought had interesting things to say, tie himself into knots trying to support Trump with 'he's bad, but he's incompetent so it doesn't matter and I want the federal government incompetent anyways so that's good." Shapiro, Walsh, heck, even chalkboard-Glenn Beck all saw what a danger Trump posed to their party and wrote articles loudly proclaiming they would never vote for Trump. Every one of them bent the knee and defend and sanewash him to this day. It's sadly funny in the wake of Jan 6, you briefly saw Shapiro think he could separate himself as Trump looked like he was gone from politics. Shapiro flatly called Jan 6 an insurrection and the worst day in American history since 9/11... he has since walked it back once it was clear Trump would return to politics. It's Trump before everything else and so it turned out it did not matter how many former Cabinet members (that Trump himself selected) that came out against him saying he should never lead the country again. Lifelong Republicans, every one of them were secretly Democrats the whole time, the so-called "Uni-party". Trump above all. Stop the steal! They are going to take away your country! (Only not this time???) It's maddening, but so yes, in retrospect there was no point. Trump loyalism has subsumed too much. Having said that, Dick Cheney was never going to help and ought to have been fended off with a very long pole. Something like that "we are grateful for every vote, but we still remember the Iraq war". Or else a more forceful condemnation of the Cheney era of Middle East adventurism. Dick Cheney will always be an anchor to any side he attaches himself. To a lesser degree, so is W Bush. Even if he was supportive of Harris to get rid of Trump "Well, that was some weird s--", I think he was wise to stick with his policy of peacing out of the whole political world and just paint. Hm there's a lot there. First, Cheney was a lap dog for Pelosi on her silly Jan 6 committee. If I recall Pelosi rejected anyone else McCarthy tried to add. She was a willing fool for an enterprise that was not aimed at truth, even if it happened to find some (it was just too obviously partisan to be of any use). Next, Trump won a lot of conservatives over by governing more to the right than they were expecting. I certainly was pleasantly surprised by the Trump presidency for the most part. I haven't listened to Shapiro in ages but my impression was that he was a DeSantis guy before Trump won the nom. A lot of conservatives came around when he's the only game in town. Which brings me to my other point. I have in this thread tried many, many times to point out that Democrats were not giving Republicans, much less conservatives, ANYTHING at all to bring them on board. The Biden admin went all in on things like student loan bailouts, an unconstitutional spending of federal money that dwarfed the amount Trump tried to appropriate for the wall. He was derelict in his duty to protect the nation by allowing an unprecedented crisis at the southern border, with border security and immigration being an issue the right has cared about for two decades now. He and his state level allies threw the book at Trump with all these court cases, only some of which were even plausibly legitimate, even after we found out Biden himself was keeping documents he shouldn't have had. Democrat's advantage on "Democracy" slowly shrunk as all this went on and I think I saw one exit poll where voters trusted Trump more on that! Harris meanwhile gave no olive branch to conservatives on a single thing. Nothing on abortion, nothing on the border, nothing on social or economic issues at all. When she did "moderate" it wasn't believable (e.g. fracking). As I've said so many times, if Democrats really believed that Trump was the next Hitler you would think they would have offered skeptical Republicans something, instead they tried to say "Trump is bad so you MUST vote for us and swallow our entire agenda or else you are a bad person." This is not a winning message and it indicates that most of the rhetoric isn't sincere. There is one final part of this. Trump can only be president for one more term. People are less worried because I don't think any serious person actually believes that he's going to try and steal an election for a third term. Meanwhile, while his election shenanigans are bad, people really don't like Biden or Harris. They remember times as being better under Trump before COVID. All the hair-on-fire antics from Dems in retrospect look silly, as half the crap they said about him turned out to be just noise. Meanwhile his attempt to take 2020 failed. Call it survivorship bias, but that I think is the way it's viewed by many people. TLDR is that Dems didn't even pretend that they had to earn Republican votes, they expected to just get them because of Trump. Harris didn't give Cheney anything, and she didn't have to because Cheney already hated Trump. Not the same for normie Republicans or conservatives. Ultimately the calculus of who was worse was pretty clear for most conservatives. + Show Spoiler +For my own part, I still think that the system is more resilient to Trump's problems then Dems problems in general. Dem expansion of the administrative state and their disdain for federalism is far more dangerous long term.
Edit: like I said the other day about GWB, I think also part of him recalls how the left treated him and how he was the previous Republican Hitler. While he obviously has no love for Trump, I doubt he felt the need to publicly agree with the people who called him all sorts of names.
Maybe wasting my time but there’s some revisionist history that feels worth correcting. First, as I mentioned the other day, Democrats believe in two propositions: - Proposition 1: The president should be whoever won the presidential election.
- Proposition 2: You’d better not vote for any politician who tries to take or keep power in violation of an election result; leaving power in their hands could have really bad consequences.
Thing is, if you’d asked 10 years ago, everybody would have said those propositions weren’t partisan, they were universally held, and in fact so obvious they didn’t even really need to be stated. Prior to Stop the Steal and J6, Liz Cheney was a Republican member of the House in good standing. Well-regarded by the party, occupied leadership positions, probably could have been Speaker or something some day. I seriously doubt Introvert would have had a bad thing to say about her. Then Trump made very clear he didn’t believe Proposition 1; Trump believes the president should be Donald Trump, regardless of who won the election. Among other elected Republicans it was less clear; for a minute there it really looked like the party was finally going to buck Trump over this, and Senate Republicans kind of did, but House Republicans overwhelmingly didn’t. Cheney was one of the only ones that did, and I don’t see any real explanation besides a sincere belief in Propositions 1 and 2. It certainly wasn’t in her self-interest. Then when the J6 committee was starting up, Republicans were offered the kind of equal-representation bipartisan committee rules that Congress has used after, e.g., 9/11. Republicans rejected it. When it got set up under more typical majority-party-favored committee rules, they were still asked to submit members, and they exclusively recommended members clearly intended to undermine the entire project (e.g. Jim Jordan). Cheney was one of a very small number of Republicans around who seemed to think that J6 was, y’know, a crime that should be investigated and punished, so Pelosi put her in but rejected the Republicans who had, essentially, continued shouting “Stop the Steal” that entire day. Fast forward a few years and the Republican party leader had rejected both propositions, and nearly all party elected representatives had rejected both propositions, but what about Republican voters? Didn’t they believe in democracy? Danglars, for instance, came around to something like “in retrospect Biden was the correct choice in 2020” as a direct consequence of J6 before he got banned. Maybe there were still a bunch of Republican voters, perhaps in swing states, that would at least stay home if the election were sufficiently focused on Propositions 1 and 2? This was surely the thinking behind campaigning with Cheney, and I said a few weeks before the election I thought it was a mistake. It was a bet on the principled integrity of Republican voters, and, well, I guess we all already have a decent idea of how good a bet that is. Intro said then and continues to say now “yeah, yeah, democratic norms or whatever, but what policy concessions are you offering me? Make it worth my while!” And even if they were willing to make policy concessions, Republicans have made clear since at least Obamacare that while they’re happy to accept policy concessions, they will under no circumstances actually change their vote as a result of them. TL;DR: All this “Cheney was Pelosi’s lap dog” stuff boils down to Cheney being one of the only Republicans that believes the presidency should be determined by presidential election results, and that anyone who tries to have power by other means shouldn’t be given power. The rest is just name-calling and partisan distractions. Memory says Cheney never liked Trump and was given a leadership spot to placate her. But even if not true, she was out there talking about abortion with Kamala after being very pro-life. Not sure about those principles...and finally she has bad judgment. Any supposedly serious committee with the likes of Bennie Thompson and Jamie Raskin, along with Russiagate clown Adam Schiff, is rightly considered a partisan enterprise. I have never in my life asked anybody to like Liz Cheney. I don’t like Liz Cheney. But notably, “never liked Trump” isn’t something you principled conservatives are supposed to dislike, and jumping to the abortion stuff is really just confirming you don’t actually give a shit about Propositions 1 and 2. You just want policy to go your way.Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 01:03 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 11:18 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 09:55 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 09:21 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 08:11 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 07:06 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 06:01 Falling wrote:On November 10 2024 03:12 Introvert wrote:
Guys, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not "Republican outreach." Harris called her a "Republican thought leader" but she was kicked out of her own party! Dems don't like the Cheney family, but Republicans don't like them either! Thr leason from this is not that "outreach" failed, that's the exact wrong way around. Moreover it doesn't answer the question of how Dems lost ground with people they usually do well with! Maybe they are doing something to alienate a substantial chuck of their own voters? Campaigning with Cheney I contend was a net negative. I think they were hoping there was still a substantial number of constitutional conservatives left in the Republican party instead of Trump loyalists. They were wrong. It's depressing watching people like Shapiro, who I once thought had interesting things to say, tie himself into knots trying to support Trump with 'he's bad, but he's incompetent so it doesn't matter and I want the federal government incompetent anyways so that's good." Shapiro, Walsh, heck, even chalkboard-Glenn Beck all saw what a danger Trump posed to their party and wrote articles loudly proclaiming they would never vote for Trump. Every one of them bent the knee and defend and sanewash him to this day. It's sadly funny in the wake of Jan 6, you briefly saw Shapiro think he could separate himself as Trump looked like he was gone from politics. Shapiro flatly called Jan 6 an insurrection and the worst day in American history since 9/11... he has since walked it back once it was clear Trump would return to politics. It's Trump before everything else and so it turned out it did not matter how many former Cabinet members (that Trump himself selected) that came out against him saying he should never lead the country again. Lifelong Republicans, every one of them were secretly Democrats the whole time, the so-called "Uni-party". Trump above all. Stop the steal! They are going to take away your country! (Only not this time???) It's maddening, but so yes, in retrospect there was no point. Trump loyalism has subsumed too much. Having said that, Dick Cheney was never going to help and ought to have been fended off with a very long pole. Something like that "we are grateful for every vote, but we still remember the Iraq war". Or else a more forceful condemnation of the Cheney era of Middle East adventurism. Dick Cheney will always be an anchor to any side he attaches himself. To a lesser degree, so is W Bush. Even if he was supportive of Harris to get rid of Trump "Well, that was some weird s--", I think he was wise to stick with his policy of peacing out of the whole political world and just paint. Hm there's a lot there. First, Cheney was a lap dog for Pelosi on her silly Jan 6 committee. If I recall Pelosi rejected anyone else McCarthy tried to add. She was a willing fool for an enterprise that was not aimed at truth, even if it happened to find some (it was just too obviously partisan to be of any use). Next, Trump won a lot of conservatives over by governing more to the right than they were expecting. I certainly was pleasantly surprised by the Trump presidency for the most part. I haven't listened to Shapiro in ages but my impression was that he was a DeSantis guy before Trump won the nom. A lot of conservatives came around when he's the only game in town. Which brings me to my other point. I have in this thread tried many, many times to point out that Democrats were not giving Republicans, much less conservatives, ANYTHING at all to bring them on board. The Biden admin went all in on things like student loan bailouts, an unconstitutional spending of federal money that dwarfed the amount Trump tried to appropriate for the wall. He was derelict in his duty to protect the nation by allowing an unprecedented crisis at the southern border, with border security and immigration being an issue the right has cared about for two decades now. He and his state level allies threw the book at Trump with all these court cases, only some of which were even plausibly legitimate, even after we found out Biden himself was keeping documents he shouldn't have had. Democrat's advantage on "Democracy" slowly shrunk as all this went on and I think I saw one exit poll where voters trusted Trump more on that! Harris meanwhile gave no olive branch to conservatives on a single thing. Nothing on abortion, nothing on the border, nothing on social or economic issues at all. When she did "moderate" it wasn't believable (e.g. fracking). As I've said so many times, if Democrats really believed that Trump was the next Hitler you would think they would have offered skeptical Republicans something, instead they tried to say "Trump is bad so you MUST vote for us and swallow our entire agenda or else you are a bad person." This is not a winning message and it indicates that most of the rhetoric isn't sincere. There is one final part of this. Trump can only be president for one more term. People are less worried because I don't think any serious person actually believes that he's going to try and steal an election for a third term. Meanwhile, while his election shenanigans are bad, people really don't like Biden or Harris. They remember times as being better under Trump before COVID. All the hair-on-fire antics from Dems in retrospect look silly, as half the crap they said about him turned out to be just noise. Meanwhile his attempt to take 2020 failed. Call it survivorship bias, but that I think is the way it's viewed by many people. TLDR is that Dems didn't even pretend that they had to earn Republican votes, they expected to just get them because of Trump. Harris didn't give Cheney anything, and she didn't have to because Cheney already hated Trump. Not the same for normie Republicans or conservatives. Ultimately the calculus of who was worse was pretty clear for most conservatives. + Show Spoiler +For my own part, I still think that the system is more resilient to Trump's problems then Dems problems in general. Dem expansion of the administrative state and their disdain for federalism is far more dangerous long term.
Edit: like I said the other day about GWB, I think also part of him recalls how the left treated him and how he was the previous Republican Hitler. While he obviously has no love for Trump, I doubt he felt the need to publicly agree with the people who called him all sorts of names.
Ok some earnest questions. What concessions could Harris reasonably give to Conservatives that don’t piss off her base? You are one person and not an avatar of course, can you think of any? I struggle. It’s a little more of a ‘wider left’ thing than a Harris thing, as well, I feel. No matter what x political does will be dwarfed in a load of culture war stories, but that caveat aside. What threshold does Trump have to exceed to lose seemingly even moderate conservatives? Lose need not mean flipping, just not supporting or defending the man. It could even take the form of having misgivings with the Democrats and believing they’re indulging in politically expedient prosecutions. At the same time as considering Trump had transgressed. Jan 6th wasn’t sufficient? What actually would be? It’s difficult to envisage much compromise on all of much, while still relatively centrist by European standards, within the US what would be a gap between two centre right parties, or a centre right and a far right one, or a centre right and centre-left elsewhere and one of policy disagreements becomes a chasm. And a growing one. Secondly, I’m sure I’m not alone, and indeed I’m sure this charge will be levied in the opposite. It’s not that I don’t believe what others believe, it’s that I no longer believe what those others believe what they say they believe either. I’m talking broadly here on a purely individual level this isn’t the case, but as a political grouping If I make some compromise with someone who stresses they’re a (insert political belief system here), sometimes you gotta do these things. If however, said individual does something that contradicts the rationale for previous compromises because it benefits them, I’d be foolish to do another compromise on the same basis as the first. Rightly or wrongly I think there’s also a big perception that Republicans are full of shit. I mean I could bring up Merrick Garland for the 18 millionth time, but that 1-2 punch was just breathtakingly disingenuous stuff. While I do try to understand people with different views than myself I don't know that I could answer the question of what the left should have put on the table. I could answer maybe what just enough people on the right might have accepted...those things would be in line with what I outlined. I've already mentioned abortion recently, but it's clear that Dems actually viewed that issue as a way to win so they felt no need to slow down. Establishment-y writers like Matt Yglesias point out how Biden allowed more energy development than anyone thought (although he scuttled a bunch and Trump would/will allow more) but Biden barely talked about it. Or they could have acknowledged that the border was in crisis and moved to fix it (like the Trump admin did in the second half of his term). Could have forsworn paying off the student loans of people who Republicans think don't need it and don't particularly like. Maybe it is impossible now, but remember Bill Clinton got wrecked in the 1994 midterms and did an about face (the era of big government is over!). but perhaps dems can't do that anymore. Listen, in this country there's just no way a dem is going to get a large number of GOP votes (and vice versa) but on the margins who knows? They didn't even try, so I don't know how much theory crafting to do. And I'm not shocked, the progressive worldview involves seeing people who disagree with them as bad people that can't have legitimate points or concerns. Perhaps in the age of Trump this is more true on both sides, but I think the overwhelming dominance of the progressives in our societal institutions makes them very loath to consider compromise. That being said, the diversity of Trump coalition gives hope. There are plenty of former Democrat voters who are willing to give the GOP a chance, and that will have an effect on both parties, even if I don't like all the policies that will come from that. (so maybe what I said at the top of the last paragraph is not entirely true). All this is just a way of saying that I don't know if I could build a platform for Harris to do such a thing. But I do think that if everyone on her side really believed Trump was Hitler 2, she would have had a LOT of leeway from the left to make concessions. Maybe that shows that many on the left don't believe what they say either I will say, and this applies to what Sadist wrote as well, we are talking about appealing to GOP voters-- not politicians. I view the situation with Congress differently as you can imagine. But the idea is not to appeal to some legislator for a deal and then have them stab you in the back, what I'm talking about is being open-minded enough to give Republican voters something, or at least cause them to feel like they can stay home and not vote for Trump. It would be hard, the overbearing cultural dominance of the left creates a siege mindset among many on the right and as I said above, seems to encourage those on the left to press forward. R.e. Jan 6, I think of a lot of people on the right don't hold Trump responsible for that, and I'm leaning in that direction. At least I don't hold him directly responsible, his failure was not doing something about it (it's still true that DC leadership turned down an offer for more police that day beforehand). In my mind at least the stolen election gambit and Jan 6 are related but not identical things. It was a riot, not a coup. What about Trump continuing to question the legitimacy of the election subsequently? I think the ‘it was a riot not a coup’ has some plausibility, but the man continued to rabble rouse on this to this day. I think the left (or indeed the centre) could build bridges on immigration certainly. That’s probably the area. It’s certainly an area they’ve been crushed on in many a recent election, my UK included. I think it’s a stupid horse to hitch yourself to, depending on how you do the messaging and what policies you advocate for. It’s also a topic you can somewhat message differently for the same policy, to different groups. It’s an asymmetric phenomenon as well. It’s generally poor areas that become the landing point for heavy (relatively) unskilled migration. They may not be proficient in the language. The middle class and up tend to deal with more highly skilled economic migrants. Those aren’t the same thing. I remember reading a piece the Guardian did on this quite vividly. Notable right wing rag. There was the father who lived in one of the poorest areas of London. Couldn’t stress enough he had no issues with race, or people immigrating. But for him specifically well his daughter was at school with a bunch of newly arrived migrant children who didn’t speak the language. Teachers tried their best but it’s a tricky scenario. Middle class folks don’t ever really have to deal with that kind of issue. While I feel the right too frequently involve xenophobic sentiment equally it’s been a long, long bugbear that the left ignore any kind of issue whatsoever. So maybe that’s the area where you could find some kind of common ground if you mediated for the more extreme impulses of either pole. Trump will never concede that of course, but it was interesting how on Joe Rogan he seemed like he didn't really want to talk about 2020. I just think he didn't want to act against people he thought were on his side.Immigration is actually a really good example of something where just doing the bare minimum expected, not even conceding ground!, would have benefited dems. If they hadn't created a crisis and then denied it that might have been something to assuage the concerns of the chunk of people who had immigration as their top issue. Idk if you've seen this little tidbit but Trump won Starr county in Texas, a 97% Hispanic county that has voted dem in every election since 1896. At one point Obama won it with 84%. So I think that's a good example of do-no-harm that really would have helped. But because of the Dems insistence that anything Trump did was bad, they couldn't keep the border secure. They wouldn't even have to debate against deportations if they had just done a good job in the first place. The ‘of course’ being quite some telling phrasing. It’s sort of a ‘well I know Trump will do egregious things but hey I’ll shrug and say Trump gonna Trump, you know what he’s like’. That element I would also believe, I don’t expect him to concede either, but it doesn’t mean we can’t both believe he SHOULD do that. Ultimately in the aftermath of January 6th there was considerable pushback within his own party, which subsequently dissipated. And from Conservative pundits. Were they bullshitting now or were they bullshitting then? This has knock-on effects. I’m curious what the rest of my ‘fellow travellers’ believe, while Trump in isolation does worry me, this slavish loyalty, or at least reluctance to criticise that worries me just as much in combination. If Trump can basically do anything, even things counter to what segments of his support claim to believe and not take any kind of hit, where’s the political leash? That potential check on his worst impulses seemingly doesn’t exist. Furthermore it moves compromise and civility from already very difficult, to effectively impossible. If memory serves you weren’t even a Trump voter this time around. Unsure indeed if you’ve ever voted for him. Also to clarify I’m not talking about criticising him in his entirety, or indeed not voting for him, more the reluctance to actually criticise him for well, basically anything he does. You really can’t level that same crit at the left, indeed perhaps perpetual factional infighting is detrimental to electoral success, but it certainly happens. I didn't vote for him but as I've made clear I really, really, realllllly, wanted Kamala to lose. What Trump did was bad, but I will say that unfortunately a lot of Republicans believe him when he days it was stolen, so they don't see what happened the same way you do. They simply don't accept your premise...but part of that is because, as I said, it doesn't seem like many Dems do either. I guess I'm trying here to summarize what I've been saying for a while now. Dems have used very heated rhetoric but continued on with business as usual. You have GH criticizing this from the left, but even to most voters it rings hollow. For eight years now the nation has been subject to Trump hysteria from Democrats that went nowhere. Boy who cried wolf. His attempt to change electors failed (and had no chance of succeeding in the first place). Meanwhile the nation is dissatisfied with current leadership. Biden promised a return to normalcy, to bring the temperature down, and be a transitional candidate. Instead he thought he was FDR and implemented policies that backfired spectacularly. Dems neutralized their advantage on Democracy by going after Trump with a stupid case in NY, and case in GA plagued by prosecurotial misbehavior, and a case in Florida that made Biden look like a huge hypocrite with the documents. And again, if Dems REALLY believe half the crap they said they could have made all sorts of compromises to at least make skeptical voters feel like they could stay home. Whine all you want that it's unfair, but in my opinion dem overreacting to Trump since 2015 apparently made it impossible for Dems to compromise and impossible for non-dems to take their warnings seriously. Meanwhile Americans are dissatisfied with the current administration and the nominee who is a part of that administration gave them no reason to think anything would be any better with her in charge.
And once again, it’s very clear that given a choice between a moderate Democrat and a Republican who will try to hold onto power after losing an election, Republicans have no difficulty deciding they want the latter. Indeed, if you don’t care about Propositions 1 and 2, there’s some pretty obvious upside to an arrangement where when Republicans win elections they get power, and when Democrats win elections Republicans might just get power anyway. Why roll the dice on a recount in Florida if you can just get it handed to you by SCOTUS? If you don’t give a shit about “consent of the governed” the only downside would be if there was going to be some electoral penalty to it, and this election made pretty clear that wasn’t the case.
The “unfortunately, many Republicans really believe 2020 was stolen” stuff is just another flavor of the “many people are saying” bullshit and it’s a waste of everyone’s time. The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. It’s inevitable that we’ll get some J6ers in elected office because within Republican orthodoxy they’re now saints and martyrs. How can another Republican candidate compete with that kind of bravery and self-sacrifice in the name of the cause?
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The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic.
Obviously not one predicated on Prop 1&2. Particularly after you lose to them in what would presumably be the last free and fair election they would allow.
Did you have some way to get to a "yes"?
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On November 11 2024 04:00 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. Obviously not one predicated on Prop 1&2. Particularly after you lose to them in what would presumably be the last free and fair election they would allow. Did you have some way to get to a "yes"?
I dunno, maybe? Trump probably dies in office, and it’s a little unclear what “not allowing a free and fair election” looks like. It requires a lot of government propaganda machinery that Trump might not care enough to build. Maybe Democrats are so lost in the wilderness that they don’t feel the need to do too much cheating for a few cycles, and by the time that changes their ideology has rotated to some new conceptions of power.
But I mean, it’s not exactly a good question to have to ask, and I wouldn’t describe any paths to “yes” as particularly likely.
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Northern Ireland22831 Posts
On November 11 2024 03:40 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 03:05 Introvert wrote:On November 11 2024 00:30 ChristianS wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On November 10 2024 07:06 Introvert wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On November 10 2024 06:01 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2024 03:12 Introvert wrote:
Guys, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not "Republican outreach." Harris called her a "Republican thought leader" but she was kicked out of her own party! Dems don't like the Cheney family, but Republicans don't like them either! Thr leason from this is not that "outreach" failed, that's the exact wrong way around. Moreover it doesn't answer the question of how Dems lost ground with people they usually do well with! Maybe they are doing something to alienate a substantial chuck of their own voters? Campaigning with Cheney I contend was a net negative. I think they were hoping there was still a substantial number of constitutional conservatives left in the Republican party instead of Trump loyalists. They were wrong. It's depressing watching people like Shapiro, who I once thought had interesting things to say, tie himself into knots trying to support Trump with 'he's bad, but he's incompetent so it doesn't matter and I want the federal government incompetent anyways so that's good." Shapiro, Walsh, heck, even chalkboard-Glenn Beck all saw what a danger Trump posed to their party and wrote articles loudly proclaiming they would never vote for Trump. Every one of them bent the knee and defend and sanewash him to this day. It's sadly funny in the wake of Jan 6, you briefly saw Shapiro think he could separate himself as Trump looked like he was gone from politics. Shapiro flatly called Jan 6 an insurrection and the worst day in American history since 9/11... he has since walked it back once it was clear Trump would return to politics. It's Trump before everything else and so it turned out it did not matter how many former Cabinet members (that Trump himself selected) that came out against him saying he should never lead the country again. Lifelong Republicans, every one of them were secretly Democrats the whole time, the so-called "Uni-party". Trump above all. Stop the steal! They are going to take away your country! (Only not this time???) It's maddening, but so yes, in retrospect there was no point. Trump loyalism has subsumed too much. Having said that, Dick Cheney was never going to help and ought to have been fended off with a very long pole. Something like that "we are grateful for every vote, but we still remember the Iraq war". Or else a more forceful condemnation of the Cheney era of Middle East adventurism. Dick Cheney will always be an anchor to any side he attaches himself. To a lesser degree, so is W Bush. Even if he was supportive of Harris to get rid of Trump "Well, that was some weird s--", I think he was wise to stick with his policy of peacing out of the whole political world and just paint. Hm there's a lot there. First, Cheney was a lap dog for Pelosi on her silly Jan 6 committee. If I recall Pelosi rejected anyone else McCarthy tried to add. She was a willing fool for an enterprise that was not aimed at truth, even if it happened to find some (it was just too obviously partisan to be of any use). Next, Trump won a lot of conservatives over by governing more to the right than they were expecting. I certainly was pleasantly surprised by the Trump presidency for the most part. I haven't listened to Shapiro in ages but my impression was that he was a DeSantis guy before Trump won the nom. A lot of conservatives came around when he's the only game in town. Which brings me to my other point. I have in this thread tried many, many times to point out that Democrats were not giving Republicans, much less conservatives, ANYTHING at all to bring them on board. The Biden admin went all in on things like student loan bailouts, an unconstitutional spending of federal money that dwarfed the amount Trump tried to appropriate for the wall. He was derelict in his duty to protect the nation by allowing an unprecedented crisis at the southern border, with border security and immigration being an issue the right has cared about for two decades now. He and his state level allies threw the book at Trump with all these court cases, only some of which were even plausibly legitimate, even after we found out Biden himself was keeping documents he shouldn't have had. Democrat's advantage on "Democracy" slowly shrunk as all this went on and I think I saw one exit poll where voters trusted Trump more on that! Harris meanwhile gave no olive branch to conservatives on a single thing. Nothing on abortion, nothing on the border, nothing on social or economic issues at all. When she did "moderate" it wasn't believable (e.g. fracking). As I've said so many times, if Democrats really believed that Trump was the next Hitler you would think they would have offered skeptical Republicans something, instead they tried to say "Trump is bad so you MUST vote for us and swallow our entire agenda or else you are a bad person." This is not a winning message and it indicates that most of the rhetoric isn't sincere. There is one final part of this. Trump can only be president for one more term. People are less worried because I don't think any serious person actually believes that he's going to try and steal an election for a third term. Meanwhile, while his election shenanigans are bad, people really don't like Biden or Harris. They remember times as being better under Trump before COVID. All the hair-on-fire antics from Dems in retrospect look silly, as half the crap they said about him turned out to be just noise. Meanwhile his attempt to take 2020 failed. Call it survivorship bias, but that I think is the way it's viewed by many people. TLDR is that Dems didn't even pretend that they had to earn Republican votes, they expected to just get them because of Trump. Harris didn't give Cheney anything, and she didn't have to because Cheney already hated Trump. Not the same for normie Republicans or conservatives. Ultimately the calculus of who was worse was pretty clear for most conservatives. + Show Spoiler +For my own part, I still think that the system is more resilient to Trump's problems then Dems problems in general. Dem expansion of the administrative state and their disdain for federalism is far more dangerous long term.
Edit: like I said the other day about GWB, I think also part of him recalls how the left treated him and how he was the previous Republican Hitler. While he obviously has no love for Trump, I doubt he felt the need to publicly agree with the people who called him all sorts of names.
Maybe wasting my time but there’s some revisionist history that feels worth correcting. First, as I mentioned the other day, Democrats believe in two propositions: - Proposition 1: The president should be whoever won the presidential election.
- Proposition 2: You’d better not vote for any politician who tries to take or keep power in violation of an election result; leaving power in their hands could have really bad consequences.
Thing is, if you’d asked 10 years ago, everybody would have said those propositions weren’t partisan, they were universally held, and in fact so obvious they didn’t even really need to be stated. Prior to Stop the Steal and J6, Liz Cheney was a Republican member of the House in good standing. Well-regarded by the party, occupied leadership positions, probably could have been Speaker or something some day. I seriously doubt Introvert would have had a bad thing to say about her. Then Trump made very clear he didn’t believe Proposition 1; Trump believes the president should be Donald Trump, regardless of who won the election. Among other elected Republicans it was less clear; for a minute there it really looked like the party was finally going to buck Trump over this, and Senate Republicans kind of did, but House Republicans overwhelmingly didn’t. Cheney was one of the only ones that did, and I don’t see any real explanation besides a sincere belief in Propositions 1 and 2. It certainly wasn’t in her self-interest. Then when the J6 committee was starting up, Republicans were offered the kind of equal-representation bipartisan committee rules that Congress has used after, e.g., 9/11. Republicans rejected it. When it got set up under more typical majority-party-favored committee rules, they were still asked to submit members, and they exclusively recommended members clearly intended to undermine the entire project (e.g. Jim Jordan). Cheney was one of a very small number of Republicans around who seemed to think that J6 was, y’know, a crime that should be investigated and punished, so Pelosi put her in but rejected the Republicans who had, essentially, continued shouting “Stop the Steal” that entire day. Fast forward a few years and the Republican party leader had rejected both propositions, and nearly all party elected representatives had rejected both propositions, but what about Republican voters? Didn’t they believe in democracy? Danglars, for instance, came around to something like “in retrospect Biden was the correct choice in 2020” as a direct consequence of J6 before he got banned. Maybe there were still a bunch of Republican voters, perhaps in swing states, that would at least stay home if the election were sufficiently focused on Propositions 1 and 2? This was surely the thinking behind campaigning with Cheney, and I said a few weeks before the election I thought it was a mistake. It was a bet on the principled integrity of Republican voters, and, well, I guess we all already have a decent idea of how good a bet that is. Intro said then and continues to say now “yeah, yeah, democratic norms or whatever, but what policy concessions are you offering me? Make it worth my while!” And even if they were willing to make policy concessions, Republicans have made clear since at least Obamacare that while they’re happy to accept policy concessions, they will under no circumstances actually change their vote as a result of them. TL;DR: All this “Cheney was Pelosi’s lap dog” stuff boils down to Cheney being one of the only Republicans that believes the presidency should be determined by presidential election results, and that anyone who tries to have power by other means shouldn’t be given power. The rest is just name-calling and partisan distractions. Memory says Cheney never liked Trump and was given a leadership spot to placate her. But even if not true, she was out there talking about abortion with Kamala after being very pro-life. Not sure about those principles...and finally she has bad judgment. Any supposedly serious committee with the likes of Bennie Thompson and Jamie Raskin, along with Russiagate clown Adam Schiff, is rightly considered a partisan enterprise. I have never in my life asked anybody to like Liz Cheney. I don’t like Liz Cheney. But notably, “never liked Trump” isn’t something you principled conservatives are supposed to dislike, and jumping to the abortion stuff is really just confirming you don’t actually give a shit about Propositions 1 and 2. You just want policy to go your way. Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 01:03 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 11:18 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 09:55 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 09:21 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 08:11 WombaT wrote:On November 10 2024 07:06 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2024 06:01 Falling wrote:On November 10 2024 03:12 Introvert wrote:
Guys, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney was not "Republican outreach." Harris called her a "Republican thought leader" but she was kicked out of her own party! Dems don't like the Cheney family, but Republicans don't like them either! Thr leason from this is not that "outreach" failed, that's the exact wrong way around. Moreover it doesn't answer the question of how Dems lost ground with people they usually do well with! Maybe they are doing something to alienate a substantial chuck of their own voters? Campaigning with Cheney I contend was a net negative. I think they were hoping there was still a substantial number of constitutional conservatives left in the Republican party instead of Trump loyalists. They were wrong. It's depressing watching people like Shapiro, who I once thought had interesting things to say, tie himself into knots trying to support Trump with 'he's bad, but he's incompetent so it doesn't matter and I want the federal government incompetent anyways so that's good." Shapiro, Walsh, heck, even chalkboard-Glenn Beck all saw what a danger Trump posed to their party and wrote articles loudly proclaiming they would never vote for Trump. Every one of them bent the knee and defend and sanewash him to this day. It's sadly funny in the wake of Jan 6, you briefly saw Shapiro think he could separate himself as Trump looked like he was gone from politics. Shapiro flatly called Jan 6 an insurrection and the worst day in American history since 9/11... he has since walked it back once it was clear Trump would return to politics. It's Trump before everything else and so it turned out it did not matter how many former Cabinet members (that Trump himself selected) that came out against him saying he should never lead the country again. Lifelong Republicans, every one of them were secretly Democrats the whole time, the so-called "Uni-party". Trump above all. Stop the steal! They are going to take away your country! (Only not this time???) It's maddening, but so yes, in retrospect there was no point. Trump loyalism has subsumed too much. Having said that, Dick Cheney was never going to help and ought to have been fended off with a very long pole. Something like that "we are grateful for every vote, but we still remember the Iraq war". Or else a more forceful condemnation of the Cheney era of Middle East adventurism. Dick Cheney will always be an anchor to any side he attaches himself. To a lesser degree, so is W Bush. Even if he was supportive of Harris to get rid of Trump "Well, that was some weird s--", I think he was wise to stick with his policy of peacing out of the whole political world and just paint. Hm there's a lot there. First, Cheney was a lap dog for Pelosi on her silly Jan 6 committee. If I recall Pelosi rejected anyone else McCarthy tried to add. She was a willing fool for an enterprise that was not aimed at truth, even if it happened to find some (it was just too obviously partisan to be of any use). Next, Trump won a lot of conservatives over by governing more to the right than they were expecting. I certainly was pleasantly surprised by the Trump presidency for the most part. I haven't listened to Shapiro in ages but my impression was that he was a DeSantis guy before Trump won the nom. A lot of conservatives came around when he's the only game in town. Which brings me to my other point. I have in this thread tried many, many times to point out that Democrats were not giving Republicans, much less conservatives, ANYTHING at all to bring them on board. The Biden admin went all in on things like student loan bailouts, an unconstitutional spending of federal money that dwarfed the amount Trump tried to appropriate for the wall. He was derelict in his duty to protect the nation by allowing an unprecedented crisis at the southern border, with border security and immigration being an issue the right has cared about for two decades now. He and his state level allies threw the book at Trump with all these court cases, only some of which were even plausibly legitimate, even after we found out Biden himself was keeping documents he shouldn't have had. Democrat's advantage on "Democracy" slowly shrunk as all this went on and I think I saw one exit poll where voters trusted Trump more on that! Harris meanwhile gave no olive branch to conservatives on a single thing. Nothing on abortion, nothing on the border, nothing on social or economic issues at all. When she did "moderate" it wasn't believable (e.g. fracking). As I've said so many times, if Democrats really believed that Trump was the next Hitler you would think they would have offered skeptical Republicans something, instead they tried to say "Trump is bad so you MUST vote for us and swallow our entire agenda or else you are a bad person." This is not a winning message and it indicates that most of the rhetoric isn't sincere. There is one final part of this. Trump can only be president for one more term. People are less worried because I don't think any serious person actually believes that he's going to try and steal an election for a third term. Meanwhile, while his election shenanigans are bad, people really don't like Biden or Harris. They remember times as being better under Trump before COVID. All the hair-on-fire antics from Dems in retrospect look silly, as half the crap they said about him turned out to be just noise. Meanwhile his attempt to take 2020 failed. Call it survivorship bias, but that I think is the way it's viewed by many people. TLDR is that Dems didn't even pretend that they had to earn Republican votes, they expected to just get them because of Trump. Harris didn't give Cheney anything, and she didn't have to because Cheney already hated Trump. Not the same for normie Republicans or conservatives. Ultimately the calculus of who was worse was pretty clear for most conservatives. + Show Spoiler +For my own part, I still think that the system is more resilient to Trump's problems then Dems problems in general. Dem expansion of the administrative state and their disdain for federalism is far more dangerous long term.
Edit: like I said the other day about GWB, I think also part of him recalls how the left treated him and how he was the previous Republican Hitler. While he obviously has no love for Trump, I doubt he felt the need to publicly agree with the people who called him all sorts of names.
Ok some earnest questions. What concessions could Harris reasonably give to Conservatives that don’t piss off her base? You are one person and not an avatar of course, can you think of any? I struggle. It’s a little more of a ‘wider left’ thing than a Harris thing, as well, I feel. No matter what x political does will be dwarfed in a load of culture war stories, but that caveat aside. What threshold does Trump have to exceed to lose seemingly even moderate conservatives? Lose need not mean flipping, just not supporting or defending the man. It could even take the form of having misgivings with the Democrats and believing they’re indulging in politically expedient prosecutions. At the same time as considering Trump had transgressed. Jan 6th wasn’t sufficient? What actually would be? It’s difficult to envisage much compromise on all of much, while still relatively centrist by European standards, within the US what would be a gap between two centre right parties, or a centre right and a far right one, or a centre right and centre-left elsewhere and one of policy disagreements becomes a chasm. And a growing one. Secondly, I’m sure I’m not alone, and indeed I’m sure this charge will be levied in the opposite. It’s not that I don’t believe what others believe, it’s that I no longer believe what those others believe what they say they believe either. I’m talking broadly here on a purely individual level this isn’t the case, but as a political grouping If I make some compromise with someone who stresses they’re a (insert political belief system here), sometimes you gotta do these things. If however, said individual does something that contradicts the rationale for previous compromises because it benefits them, I’d be foolish to do another compromise on the same basis as the first. Rightly or wrongly I think there’s also a big perception that Republicans are full of shit. I mean I could bring up Merrick Garland for the 18 millionth time, but that 1-2 punch was just breathtakingly disingenuous stuff. While I do try to understand people with different views than myself I don't know that I could answer the question of what the left should have put on the table. I could answer maybe what just enough people on the right might have accepted...those things would be in line with what I outlined. I've already mentioned abortion recently, but it's clear that Dems actually viewed that issue as a way to win so they felt no need to slow down. Establishment-y writers like Matt Yglesias point out how Biden allowed more energy development than anyone thought (although he scuttled a bunch and Trump would/will allow more) but Biden barely talked about it. Or they could have acknowledged that the border was in crisis and moved to fix it (like the Trump admin did in the second half of his term). Could have forsworn paying off the student loans of people who Republicans think don't need it and don't particularly like. Maybe it is impossible now, but remember Bill Clinton got wrecked in the 1994 midterms and did an about face (the era of big government is over!). but perhaps dems can't do that anymore. Listen, in this country there's just no way a dem is going to get a large number of GOP votes (and vice versa) but on the margins who knows? They didn't even try, so I don't know how much theory crafting to do. And I'm not shocked, the progressive worldview involves seeing people who disagree with them as bad people that can't have legitimate points or concerns. Perhaps in the age of Trump this is more true on both sides, but I think the overwhelming dominance of the progressives in our societal institutions makes them very loath to consider compromise. That being said, the diversity of Trump coalition gives hope. There are plenty of former Democrat voters who are willing to give the GOP a chance, and that will have an effect on both parties, even if I don't like all the policies that will come from that. (so maybe what I said at the top of the last paragraph is not entirely true). All this is just a way of saying that I don't know if I could build a platform for Harris to do such a thing. But I do think that if everyone on her side really believed Trump was Hitler 2, she would have had a LOT of leeway from the left to make concessions. Maybe that shows that many on the left don't believe what they say either I will say, and this applies to what Sadist wrote as well, we are talking about appealing to GOP voters-- not politicians. I view the situation with Congress differently as you can imagine. But the idea is not to appeal to some legislator for a deal and then have them stab you in the back, what I'm talking about is being open-minded enough to give Republican voters something, or at least cause them to feel like they can stay home and not vote for Trump. It would be hard, the overbearing cultural dominance of the left creates a siege mindset among many on the right and as I said above, seems to encourage those on the left to press forward. R.e. Jan 6, I think of a lot of people on the right don't hold Trump responsible for that, and I'm leaning in that direction. At least I don't hold him directly responsible, his failure was not doing something about it (it's still true that DC leadership turned down an offer for more police that day beforehand). In my mind at least the stolen election gambit and Jan 6 are related but not identical things. It was a riot, not a coup. What about Trump continuing to question the legitimacy of the election subsequently? I think the ‘it was a riot not a coup’ has some plausibility, but the man continued to rabble rouse on this to this day. I think the left (or indeed the centre) could build bridges on immigration certainly. That’s probably the area. It’s certainly an area they’ve been crushed on in many a recent election, my UK included. I think it’s a stupid horse to hitch yourself to, depending on how you do the messaging and what policies you advocate for. It’s also a topic you can somewhat message differently for the same policy, to different groups. It’s an asymmetric phenomenon as well. It’s generally poor areas that become the landing point for heavy (relatively) unskilled migration. They may not be proficient in the language. The middle class and up tend to deal with more highly skilled economic migrants. Those aren’t the same thing. I remember reading a piece the Guardian did on this quite vividly. Notable right wing rag. There was the father who lived in one of the poorest areas of London. Couldn’t stress enough he had no issues with race, or people immigrating. But for him specifically well his daughter was at school with a bunch of newly arrived migrant children who didn’t speak the language. Teachers tried their best but it’s a tricky scenario. Middle class folks don’t ever really have to deal with that kind of issue. While I feel the right too frequently involve xenophobic sentiment equally it’s been a long, long bugbear that the left ignore any kind of issue whatsoever. So maybe that’s the area where you could find some kind of common ground if you mediated for the more extreme impulses of either pole. Trump will never concede that of course, but it was interesting how on Joe Rogan he seemed like he didn't really want to talk about 2020. I just think he didn't want to act against people he thought were on his side.Immigration is actually a really good example of something where just doing the bare minimum expected, not even conceding ground!, would have benefited dems. If they hadn't created a crisis and then denied it that might have been something to assuage the concerns of the chunk of people who had immigration as their top issue. Idk if you've seen this little tidbit but Trump won Starr county in Texas, a 97% Hispanic county that has voted dem in every election since 1896. At one point Obama won it with 84%. So I think that's a good example of do-no-harm that really would have helped. But because of the Dems insistence that anything Trump did was bad, they couldn't keep the border secure. They wouldn't even have to debate against deportations if they had just done a good job in the first place. The ‘of course’ being quite some telling phrasing. It’s sort of a ‘well I know Trump will do egregious things but hey I’ll shrug and say Trump gonna Trump, you know what he’s like’. That element I would also believe, I don’t expect him to concede either, but it doesn’t mean we can’t both believe he SHOULD do that. Ultimately in the aftermath of January 6th there was considerable pushback within his own party, which subsequently dissipated. And from Conservative pundits. Were they bullshitting now or were they bullshitting then? This has knock-on effects. I’m curious what the rest of my ‘fellow travellers’ believe, while Trump in isolation does worry me, this slavish loyalty, or at least reluctance to criticise that worries me just as much in combination. If Trump can basically do anything, even things counter to what segments of his support claim to believe and not take any kind of hit, where’s the political leash? That potential check on his worst impulses seemingly doesn’t exist. Furthermore it moves compromise and civility from already very difficult, to effectively impossible. If memory serves you weren’t even a Trump voter this time around. Unsure indeed if you’ve ever voted for him. Also to clarify I’m not talking about criticising him in his entirety, or indeed not voting for him, more the reluctance to actually criticise him for well, basically anything he does. You really can’t level that same crit at the left, indeed perhaps perpetual factional infighting is detrimental to electoral success, but it certainly happens. I didn't vote for him but as I've made clear I really, really, realllllly, wanted Kamala to lose. What Trump did was bad, but I will say that unfortunately a lot of Republicans believe him when he days it was stolen, so they don't see what happened the same way you do. They simply don't accept your premise...but part of that is because, as I said, it doesn't seem like many Dems do either. I guess I'm trying here to summarize what I've been saying for a while now. Dems have used very heated rhetoric but continued on with business as usual. You have GH criticizing this from the left, but even to most voters it rings hollow. For eight years now the nation has been subject to Trump hysteria from Democrats that went nowhere. Boy who cried wolf. His attempt to change electors failed (and had no chance of succeeding in the first place). Meanwhile the nation is dissatisfied with current leadership. Biden promised a return to normalcy, to bring the temperature down, and be a transitional candidate. Instead he thought he was FDR and implemented policies that backfired spectacularly. Dems neutralized their advantage on Democracy by going after Trump with a stupid case in NY, and case in GA plagued by prosecurotial misbehavior, and a case in Florida that made Biden look like a huge hypocrite with the documents. And again, if Dems REALLY believe half the crap they said they could have made all sorts of compromises to at least make skeptical voters feel like they could stay home. Whine all you want that it's unfair, but in my opinion dem overreacting to Trump since 2015 apparently made it impossible for Dems to compromise and impossible for non-dems to take their warnings seriously. Meanwhile Americans are dissatisfied with the current administration and the nominee who is a part of that administration gave them no reason to think anything would be any better with her in charge. And once again, it’s very clear that given a choice between a moderate Democrat and a Republican who will try to hold onto power after losing an election, Republicans have no difficulty deciding they want the latter. Indeed, if you don’t care about Propositions 1 and 2, there’s some pretty obvious upside to an arrangement where when Republicans win elections they get power, and when Democrats win elections Republicans might just get power anyway. Why roll the dice on a recount in Florida if you can just get it handed to you by SCOTUS? If you don’t give a shit about “consent of the governed” the only downside would be if there was going to be some electoral penalty to it, and this election made pretty clear that wasn’t the case. The “unfortunately, many Republicans really believe 2020 was stolen” stuff is just another flavor of the “many people are saying” bullshit and it’s a waste of everyone’s time. The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. It’s inevitable that we’ll get some J6ers in elected office because within Republican orthodoxy they’re now saints and martyrs. How can another Republican candidate compete with that kind of bravery and self-sacrifice in the name of the cause?
Again this.
People didn’t get the complete bullshit inclination from nowhere that the election was potentially going to be stolen. They got it from above, and other individuals with at least some potential to disavow it and nip it in the bud, chose not to.
Indeed I’m not even expecting folks to cross the aisle. Just be critical, and I mean actually critical of their own people, when said people cross lines they claim to be important.
Not an at best ‘hm yeah I guess that was kinda bad, maybe, I guess? Anyway here’s 7 paragraphs on why the Dems are shite’.
At least politicians and conservative commentators have some excuse, given how unpopular it is to even vaguely criticise the Dear Leader. Regular Joes and Janes don’t face such potential consequences. They just choose not to.
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On November 11 2024 04:11 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 04:00 GreenHorizons wrote:The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. Obviously not one predicated on Prop 1&2. Particularly after you lose to them in what would presumably be the last free and fair election they would allow. Did you have some way to get to a "yes"? I dunno, maybe? Trump probably dies in office, and it’s a little unclear what “not allowing a free and fair election” looks like. It requires a lot of government propaganda machinery that Trump might not care enough to build. Maybe Democrats are so lost in the wilderness that they don’t feel the need to do too much cheating for a few cycles, and by the time that changes their ideology has rotated to some new conceptions of power. But I mean, it’s not exactly a good question to have to ask, and I wouldn’t describe any paths to “yes” as particularly likely.
Trump isn't really the threat though at this point. He was just the not so disguised Trojan Horse. The threat is/was Project 2025 "inside" (it had a banner draped across the chest).
I don't understand how/why libs/Dems think Bannon and the rest of the Project 2025 crew are going to even give them real midterm elections let alone another Presidential election. I think a lot of the work you're imagining Trump maybe not doing we knew project 2025 is supposed to do and impeding them requires an opposition libs/Dems have no intention of mounting.
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Northern Ireland22831 Posts
On November 11 2024 04:11 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 04:00 GreenHorizons wrote:The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. Obviously not one predicated on Prop 1&2. Particularly after you lose to them in what would presumably be the last free and fair election they would allow. Did you have some way to get to a "yes"? I dunno, maybe? Trump probably dies in office, and it’s a little unclear what “not allowing a free and fair election” looks like. It requires a lot of government propaganda machinery that Trump might not care enough to build. Maybe Democrats are so lost in the wilderness that they don’t feel the need to do too much cheating for a few cycles, and by the time that changes their ideology has rotated to some new conceptions of power. But I mean, it’s not exactly a good question to have to ask, and I wouldn’t describe any paths to “yes” as particularly likely.
I think there are two things at play here, Trump winning pretty uncontroversially, and Trump being both in a second term, and getting on a bit in age.
I think it’s possible to believe he’s only an existential threat to genuine democracy if he loses, and he doesn’t really give enough of a shit to destroy the Republic given he’s not particularly ideological.
I’m not a silver lining, optimistic kind of guy, I think there’s a world where it’s a regularly shit Presidency, he’ll sail off into the sunset after and you can repair the damage at some future juncture.
I mean wait and see, but of course remain vigilant.
The alternative really doesn’t bear thinking about. If it ever came to it that Trump did something so egregious that it wasn’t even hugely debatable that he had to be forcibly removed, it would still be beyond unpopular with a huge segment of the population.
The Democratic Party, even folks like myself would prefer to ride out the 4 years and hope for the best, while simultaneously thinking Trump has a dictator streak.
Because the alternative, I don’t really seeing it looking as anything but, at best unbelievably disruptive political protest, and at worst some kind of legitimate civil war
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On November 11 2024 04:25 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 04:11 ChristianS wrote:On November 11 2024 04:00 GreenHorizons wrote:The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. Obviously not one predicated on Prop 1&2. Particularly after you lose to them in what would presumably be the last free and fair election they would allow. Did you have some way to get to a "yes"? I dunno, maybe? Trump probably dies in office, and it’s a little unclear what “not allowing a free and fair election” looks like. It requires a lot of government propaganda machinery that Trump might not care enough to build. Maybe Democrats are so lost in the wilderness that they don’t feel the need to do too much cheating for a few cycles, and by the time that changes their ideology has rotated to some new conceptions of power. But I mean, it’s not exactly a good question to have to ask, and I wouldn’t describe any paths to “yes” as particularly likely. Trump isn't really the threat though at this point. He was just the not so disguised Trojan Horse. The threat is/was Project 2025 "inside" (it had a banner draped across the chest). I don't understand how/why libs/Dems think Bannon and the rest of the Project 2025 crew are going to even give them real midterm elections let alone another Presidential election. I think a lot of the work you're imagining Trump maybe not doing we knew project 2025 is supposed to do and impeding them requires an opposition libs/Dems have no intention of mounting.
Yeah, we’ll certainly get a parade of Claremont fiends trying their hand at implementing minority rule. I don’t really have that high an impression of those guys’ competence, though, FWIW. Maybe this looks more like a Nixonian “dirty tricks” campaign than, like, cheating vote totals? I don’t know, I’ve never tried to implement fake elections, I’m not sure how hard it is.
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On November 11 2024 04:34 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 04:25 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2024 04:11 ChristianS wrote:On November 11 2024 04:00 GreenHorizons wrote:The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. Obviously not one predicated on Prop 1&2. Particularly after you lose to them in what would presumably be the last free and fair election they would allow. Did you have some way to get to a "yes"? I dunno, maybe? Trump probably dies in office, and it’s a little unclear what “not allowing a free and fair election” looks like. It requires a lot of government propaganda machinery that Trump might not care enough to build. Maybe Democrats are so lost in the wilderness that they don’t feel the need to do too much cheating for a few cycles, and by the time that changes their ideology has rotated to some new conceptions of power. But I mean, it’s not exactly a good question to have to ask, and I wouldn’t describe any paths to “yes” as particularly likely. Trump isn't really the threat though at this point. He was just the not so disguised Trojan Horse. The threat is/was Project 2025 "inside" (it had a banner draped across the chest). I don't understand how/why libs/Dems think Bannon and the rest of the Project 2025 crew are going to even give them real midterm elections let alone another Presidential election. I think a lot of the work you're imagining Trump maybe not doing we knew project 2025 is supposed to do and impeding them requires an opposition libs/Dems have no intention of mounting. Yeah, we’ll certainly get a parade of Claremont fiends trying their hand at implementing minority rule. I don’t really have that high an impression of those guys’ competence, though, FWIW. Maybe this looks more like a Nixonian “dirty tricks” campaign than, like, cheating vote totals? I don’t know, I’ve never tried to implement fake elections, I’m not sure how hard it is.
You don't have to fake them if you don't have them because your drafting of the proud boys to round up millions of immigrants has degenerated into needing to declare martial law and suspend elections indefinitely.
EDIT: notwithstanding, they won the popular vote, the US might just "democratically" desire fascism (I know...)
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Blumpf has come out shooting when it comes to the Senate leadership vote.
He wants to use recess appointments to quickly fill MAGA positions (basically, the majority leader puts the Senate in recess, which allows the president to make appointments without Senate confirmation, because otherwise an opposing party could just recess the Senate and hamstring the president completely). The advantage is strategic - it makes stalling tactics by the minority party, like maximizing debate time even when a candidate is already going to be nominated, ineffective in the short term.
Even if appointed this way, the appointments are only secure for the 2 years until the next Congress, meaning the 120th in 2027-2028.
According to current rules you need 51 to confirm anyone, the problem is the history of filibustering and stalling since Obama's 2nd term that Republicans and Democrats have both used to just block the president from having the executive branch they want when they lose.
People seem to be pushing Rick Scott hard. Has Rand Paul's vote.
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1855692242981155259
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United States24475 Posts
On November 11 2024 04:43 GreenHorizons wrote:
You don't have to fake them if you don't have them because your drafting of the proud boys to round up millions of immigrants has degenerated into needing to declare marital law
Wait when did we switch to discussing JD Vance?
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On November 11 2024 04:43 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 04:34 ChristianS wrote:On November 11 2024 04:25 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2024 04:11 ChristianS wrote:On November 11 2024 04:00 GreenHorizons wrote:The question in front of us now is whether a democratic system can remain stable when one of the two parties doesn’t believe in Propositions 1 and 2, and in fact, celebrates their previous attempts at stealing an election as heroic. Obviously not one predicated on Prop 1&2. Particularly after you lose to them in what would presumably be the last free and fair election they would allow. Did you have some way to get to a "yes"? I dunno, maybe? Trump probably dies in office, and it’s a little unclear what “not allowing a free and fair election” looks like. It requires a lot of government propaganda machinery that Trump might not care enough to build. Maybe Democrats are so lost in the wilderness that they don’t feel the need to do too much cheating for a few cycles, and by the time that changes their ideology has rotated to some new conceptions of power. But I mean, it’s not exactly a good question to have to ask, and I wouldn’t describe any paths to “yes” as particularly likely. Trump isn't really the threat though at this point. He was just the not so disguised Trojan Horse. The threat is/was Project 2025 "inside" (it had a banner draped across the chest). I don't understand how/why libs/Dems think Bannon and the rest of the Project 2025 crew are going to even give them real midterm elections let alone another Presidential election. I think a lot of the work you're imagining Trump maybe not doing we knew project 2025 is supposed to do and impeding them requires an opposition libs/Dems have no intention of mounting. Yeah, we’ll certainly get a parade of Claremont fiends trying their hand at implementing minority rule. I don’t really have that high an impression of those guys’ competence, though, FWIW. Maybe this looks more like a Nixonian “dirty tricks” campaign than, like, cheating vote totals? I don’t know, I’ve never tried to implement fake elections, I’m not sure how hard it is. You don't have to fake them if you don't have them because your drafting of the proud boys to round up millions of immigrants has degenerated into needing to declare marital law and suspend elections indefinitely. EDIT: notwithstanding, they won the popular vote, the US might just "democratically" desire fascism (I know...)
Also a possibility! What a world of possibility we have in front of us.
I don’t know how to predict what this is actually going to turn into and I don’t think anyone else does either. Trump has the most evil of impulses but is also extremely old and supremely lazy. The people under him have just as evil of impulses and a lot more energy, but they’re still not particularly competent and Trump tends to cycle them out near-instantly. RFK Jr., for instance, has the potential to immediately destroy the healthcare industry by banning a bunch of medicine or mandating Reiki or something, but I think it’s more likely he gets Scaramucci’d before he gets a chance to do anything.
Historically Trump has not particularly cared about the fortunes of congressional Republicans, he’d prefer to do everything by executive order anyway, so I could see some Claremont toadies approaching him about rigging 2026 and him just kind of blowing them off. On the other hand I could see him immediately firing everyone at the Justice Department that refuses to charge Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney with treason, then slowly expanding the target list to include everyone in politics that is not embarrassingly loyal to Trump. Who knows?
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United States24475 Posts
On November 11 2024 05:02 ChristianS wrote:
I don’t know how to predict what this is actually going to turn into and I don’t think anyone else does either.
Things usually end up not quite as bad as you feared but not as good as you hoped. In this case, I'm not so sure.
Trump essentially has a mandate to "do whatever you want, regardless of the law." He also has absolutely no morals or ethical considerations he takes into account. He also has a base that will forgive pretty much anything he does so long as he claims to be doing it "for them." The only things to stop Trump from committing horrible atrocities are incompetence or clear lack of personal benefit, not concern about the well being of the American people or their allies.
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I'm starting to think everyone is brainwashed in the US. The amount of echochambering is completely off the charts.
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Northern Ireland22831 Posts
I must confess, Drumpf bloody annoyed me, but man despite myself Blumbf cracks me up every time. I hope I can conquer this one day
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On November 11 2024 04:59 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2024 04:43 GreenHorizons wrote:
You don't have to fake them if you don't have them because your drafting of the proud boys to round up millions of immigrants has degenerated into needing to declare marital law Wait when did we switch to discussing JD Vance?
I caught that. Well played.
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On November 11 2024 06:21 WombaT wrote:
I must confess, Drumpf bloody annoyed me, but man despite myself Blumbf cracks me up every time. I hope I can conquer this one day
It's probably from new data, suggesting Blumbf came before Drumpf! I must say, they're doing good research.
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EPT
