Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
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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"?
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...)
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?
I think we can make some fair inferences.
It's also very unsettling that even if Trump is rounding up Schiff and Cheney to have them hung in the public square for treason, libs/Dems will still be here plotting on how they will beat him next election by appealing to the Republicans that disagree with him.
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.
Allies?
You've casted such a wide net a partisan observer can start blaming Trump for Canada's problems or Israel's problems.
If you narrow the scope of your comment and make a specific projection about a specific atrocity that is going to happen then you might have a legit criticism of Trump's decisions.
On a related note about bombastic over the top proclamations... Rep. Cohen of Tennessee stated Trump will be worse than Hitler on TYT recently. MSNBC talking heads have said the same thing. These irresponsible comments lower the credibility of the speaker.
Toronto Jews continue to pour into New York with zero fear of a worse than "Hitler Regime".
Canada's best Tech School is almost all non-white. The best students first choice is always the USA. They have zero fear of white supremacy in the USA.
When people say things like "worse than Hitler" they get induced into the game of Trump Crazy Talk for which he has 60 years experience. They are playing Trump's game... And he knows what he is doing in that game.
Immigrants continue to pour into the country knowing that opportunity awaits them. Their actions speak louder than the words of these MSNBC teleprompter readers.
I am optimistic about the future of the average working American. I am pessimistic about the future of the average working Canadian. I fear for the lives of the average Israeli.
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.
Allies?
You've casted such a wide net a partisan observer can start blaming Trump for Canada's problems or Israel's problems.
No I didn't. I said concern about the well being of the U.S.'s allies won't stop him from committing atrocities. I didn't say any problems other countries have can be blamed on Trump.
If you narrow the scope of your comment and make a specific projection about a specific atrocity that is going to happen then you might have a legit criticism of Trump's decisions.
I'm not criticizing decisions that haven't been made yet. I'm discussing what behavior to expect based on his history to this point.
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.
Allies?
You've casted such a wide net a partisan observer can start blaming Trump for Canada's problems or Israel's problems.
No I didn't. I said concern about the well being of the U.S.'s allies won't stop him from committing atrocities. I didn't say any problems other countries have can be blamed on Trump.
If you narrow the scope of your comment and make a specific projection about a specific atrocity that is going to happen then you might have a legit criticism of Trump's decisions.
I'm not criticizing decisions that haven't been made yet. I'm discussing what behavior to expect based on his history to this point.
It is vague though. Can you Name a possible Trump initiated atrocity that impacts the well being of Canada?
You seriously can't think of something an unhinged chief executive in the U.S. could do that would harm Canada? Hell, even things that harm the environment or world economy as a whole will also harm Canada... it doesn't have to be Canada-specific. I definitely don't think Canada would necessarily be hit first or hardest among allies, but the potential is there. In my current position I shouldn't lay out specific examples, honestly.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently. oBlade put it best, border security, like so much of her agenda, was a part of her campaign, but not a part of her administration. And people noticed.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
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
The first time I noticed the switch I really did laugh out loud, it's so much better than Drumpf lol
On November 11 2024 07:09 micronesia wrote: You seriously can't think of something an unhinged chief executive in the U.S. could do that would harm Canada? Hell, even things that harm the environment or world economy as a whole will also harm Canada... it doesn't have to be Canada-specific. I definitely don't think Canada would necessarily be hit first or hardest among allies, but the potential is there. In my current position I shouldn't lay out specific examples, honestly.
If he goes the actual trade war with China route, there’s no way there’s some knock-on effects and it’s fully contained within interactions between those two nations. As to what that actually looks like, indeed if it’s purely negative for other nations I don’t know. Not my strong area.
If Trump hypothetically pulls out of Ukraine, that’s going to have a lot of knock-on global effects too, especially if it helps Russia outright win that conflict.
It’s oddly enough an angle that doesn’t come up that much, that’s going to be a potentially huge asylum/refugee outpouring, not all that long after Europe (and tbf nations in the Middle East) did a lot of heavy lifting in accommodating those fleeing the Syrian conflict.
Given its general outlook and past history, I would assume Canada would also help out.
Not something I personally consider outrageous, but it’s certainly a plausible scenario down the road. It’s a potential impact anyway.
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.
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.
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: [quote] 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.
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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
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
The first time I noticed the switch I really did laugh out loud, it's so much better than Drumpf lol
MLK had his dream. My much, much less ambitious dream is to have a political conversation with a conservative of whatever stripe who can just straight up criticise Blumpf on a singular issue. That’s it.
Not flip to the Democrats, not change policy positions whatsoever, just an ability to criticise Trump when he contravenes beliefs that they purport to hold.
Crucially this doesn’t rule out the following three possibilities: 1) I disagree with Trump on x thing, overall he’s still my guy. 2) Overall I think Trump is a bit shit, but in a de facto 2 party state and with my beliefs, I still consider the Democrats worse. 3) The Democrats behaving in a performative, self-interested way in and around all things Trump
That’s totally fine. Have at it, it’s not my rather humble imploration.
It’s been 8+ years though, searching for my personal golden ticket. My bedroom wall has an almost perfect imprint of my face at this point, given I’m often just driven to headbutt it in frustration.
Let’s take 3 relatively popular concepts in conservative discourse. Strict constitutionalism, a concern about an Imperial Executive branch, and state rights/sovereignty. Arguments I’m pretty familiar with as, I have engaged in good-faith discussions for like, 16/17 years now, and (admittedly more commonly before the Trump epoch), with a good-faith partner.
Trump leaning on people, on pressuring electors to do things like find votes. On tape incidentally, so not stemming from some anonymous tipster, seems to me to somewhat piss all over, to some degree all 3 of those.
So, why is it so difficult to criticise him on it?
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.
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.
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: [quote]
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.
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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
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
The first time I noticed the switch I really did laugh out loud, it's so much better than Drumpf lol
MLK had his dream. My much, much less ambitious dream is to have a political conversation with a conservative of whatever stripe who can just straight up criticise Blumpf on a singular issue. That’s it.
Not flip to the Democrats, not change policy positions whatsoever, just an ability to criticise Trump when he contravenes beliefs that they purport to hold.
Crucially this doesn’t rule out the following three possibilities: 1) I disagree with Trump on x thing, overall he’s still my guy. 2) Overall I think Trump is a bit shit, but in a de facto 2 party state and with my beliefs, I still consider the Democrats worse. 3) The Democrats behaving in a performative, self-interested way in and around all things Trump
That’s totally fine. Have at it, it’s not my rather humble imploration.
It’s been 8+ years though, searching for my personal golden ticket. My bedroom wall has an almost perfect imprint of my face at this point, given I’m often just driven to headbutt it in frustration.
Let’s take 3 relatively popular concepts in conservative discourse. Strict constitutionalism, a concern about an Imperial Executive branch, and state rights/sovereignty. Arguments I’m pretty familiar with as, I have engaged in good-faith discussions for like, 16/17 years now, and (admittedly more commonly before the Trump epoch), with a good-faith partner.
Trump leaning on people, on pressuring electors to do things like find votes. On tape incidentally, so not stemming from some anonymous tipster, seems to me to somewhat piss all over, to some degree all 3 of those.
So, why is it so difficult to criticise him on it?
Is this directed at me in particular? Have I not criticized Trump repeatedly over the years? from tariffs, to foreign policy, to personnel choices, to his behavior after the 2020 election. I do generally fall into camp 2 , I thought my posting here over the years made that very clear.
This conversation started with me pointing out that having Liz Cheney as a surrogate was not actually outreach to Republicans. To which Falling followed up asking why did so many Republicans go for Trump? Now, my answer was light on affirmative reasons to vote FOR Trump instead of AGAINST Democrats, it's true. But perhaps that reflects my own perspective and I haven't had a GOP nominee I've been excited to vote for...ever.
You then asked what could Harris have done to actually reach out and I tied to answer as best I could, but pointed out that in my opinion, rhetoric coming from the left made it almost impossible. It's a fun thought experiment as to what Dems could have gotten from Trump in his first term if they didn't decide on "resistance" from day one. Since then I have been trying to make the case that everyone here is, maybe understandably, fixated on Trump's flaws but need to look to their own side of the aisle to understand why things are the way they are.
Yes, what Trump did was bad. In particular his attempt to pressure Pence into not certifying the election (even though he couldn't have refused) was a thing that I condemn him for. Always have. But your option number 2 remains, and I still consider the slow erosion of our constitutional system that occurs when Democrats are president to be a more pressing long term concern for the nation than a failed (and was always going to fail) election gambit. And I doubt I'm the only one on my side who feels that way.
On November 11 2024 07:09 micronesia wrote: You seriously can't think of something an unhinged chief executive in the U.S. could do that would harm Canada? Hell, even things that harm the environment or world economy as a whole will also harm Canada... it doesn't have to be Canada-specific. I definitely don't think Canada would necessarily be hit first or hardest among allies, but the potential is there. In my current position I shouldn't lay out specific examples, honestly.
fair enough. I think the USA has been a great ally to Canada. The tariffs could hit Canada hard, but I do not think it could be classified as an "atrocity".
I suspect Trump will turn out to be some where between an above average to a below average President. However, the signal to noise ratio of information is decreasing so it will be hard to assess his performance.
I do not think Trump will be great and I do not think Trump will be a disaster. Thing is, this kind of boring view does not generate youtube views or Fox or ABC TV Ratings. People will be screaming into their mics for 4 years.
On November 11 2024 07:59 WombaT wrote: MLK had his dream. My much, much less ambitious dream is to have a political conversation with a conservative of whatever stripe who can just straight up criticise Blumpf on a singular issue. That’s it.
Space Force was a waste of money. I'm not sure if I am a "conservative" or not. I'm a "radical for capitalism" and a David Kelly Objectivist. ( as opposed to an Ayn Rand/Piekoff Objectivist).
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.
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.
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: [quote] 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.
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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
The bolded is an unintentionally fantastic representation of the underlying dynamic here. Here you're hypothetically posing that Adam Schiff would be telling you something completely innocuous you already know is true and it would still cause you to react against it. Since at least 2010, old-fashioned conservatives operate as grievance camels, storing up years' worth of abuses and nitpicks and slights that they can draw on to sustain an absolute party loyalty through almost any environmental conditions. I can make an argument for why boosting MAGA candidates can be a reasonable strategy if the establishment Republicans are just as complicit and sometimes slightly more electable, but it's pointless because this isn't actually your reason for hating Democrats, its just ammunition. You have no interest in interpreting charitably and even if I demonstrated conclusively that you were wrong on any particular point, you'd just move on to the next thing to complain about.
This is why not only the Cheney campaigning was a mistake, but any of the policy concessions you're imagining from a more moderate Harris campaign would have been bigger mistakes. It's been demonstrated time and again that these voters have almost bottomless stores of hatred for Democrats to draw on, and that it's their single highest priority in following politics. I mean, one obvious consequence any dreams of Republicans abandoning Trumpism and returning to "principled conservatism" are not just dead but decapitated, a stake driven through their heart, with a slab of concrete poured over the burial site. In theory that ought to bother guys like you that claim to really dislike Trump and wish for Republicans to go back. But that's almost completely absent from your reaction, because you're just happy to see "identity politics" or w/e fail.
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently. oBlade put it best, border security, like so much of her agenda, was a part of her campaign, but not a part of her administration. And people noticed.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else we have to talk about. You really, really hate Democrats, and you like Trump's policies more, so you don't care about him trying to steal an election. You'd probably argue you do still believe in Proposition 1 (and just think it's not under much threat because he didn't succeed and won't have reason to try again), and you don't give a shit about Proposition 2. All the talk about Democrat "credibility" is a useless distraction because everything about this is demonstrably, empirically verifiable without trusting their word for a thing. Unless you're going to try to tell me with a straight face that Trump didn't try to keep power in 2020 after losing, or that he wouldn't have tried to take power if he'd lost this time, then you're not even really disagreeing with any of my analysis.
Most of the rest of this is you stating emphatically what I was already saying you believed, so like, what do you want me to say?
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.
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.
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: [quote] 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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
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
The first time I noticed the switch I really did laugh out loud, it's so much better than Drumpf lol
MLK had his dream. My much, much less ambitious dream is to have a political conversation with a conservative of whatever stripe who can just straight up criticise Blumpf on a singular issue. That’s it.
Not flip to the Democrats, not change policy positions whatsoever, just an ability to criticise Trump when he contravenes beliefs that they purport to hold.
Crucially this doesn’t rule out the following three possibilities: 1) I disagree with Trump on x thing, overall he’s still my guy. 2) Overall I think Trump is a bit shit, but in a de facto 2 party state and with my beliefs, I still consider the Democrats worse. 3) The Democrats behaving in a performative, self-interested way in and around all things Trump
That’s totally fine. Have at it, it’s not my rather humble imploration.
It’s been 8+ years though, searching for my personal golden ticket. My bedroom wall has an almost perfect imprint of my face at this point, given I’m often just driven to headbutt it in frustration.
Let’s take 3 relatively popular concepts in conservative discourse. Strict constitutionalism, a concern about an Imperial Executive branch, and state rights/sovereignty. Arguments I’m pretty familiar with as, I have engaged in good-faith discussions for like, 16/17 years now, and (admittedly more commonly before the Trump epoch), with a good-faith partner.
Trump leaning on people, on pressuring electors to do things like find votes. On tape incidentally, so not stemming from some anonymous tipster, seems to me to somewhat piss all over, to some degree all 3 of those.
So, why is it so difficult to criticise him on it?
Is this directed at me in particular? Have I not criticized Trump repeatedly over the years? from tariffs, to foreign policy, to personnel choices, to his behavior after the 2020 election. I do generally fall into camp 2 , I thought my posting here over the years made that very clear.
This conversation started with me pointing out that having Liz Cheney as a surrogate was not actually outreach to Republicans. To which Falling followed up asking why did so many Republicans go for Trump? Now, my answer was light on affirmative reasons to vote FOR Trump instead of AGAINST Democrats, it's true. But perhaps that reflects my own perspective and I haven't had a GOP nominee I've been excited to vote for...ever.
You then asked what could Harris have done to actually reach out and I tied to answer as best I could, but pointed out that in my opinion, rhetoric coming from the left made it almost impossible. It's a fun thought experiment as to what Dems could have gotten from Trump in his first term if they didn't decide on "resistance" from day one. Since then I have been trying to make the case that everyone here is, maybe understandably, fixated on Trump's flaws but need to look to their own side of the aisle to understand why things are the way they are.
Yes, what Trump did was bad. In particular his attempt to pressure Pence into not certifying the election (even though he couldn't have refused) was a thing that I condemn him for. Always have. But your option number 2 remains, and I still consider the slow erosion of our constitutional system that occurs when Democrats are president to be a more pressing long term concern for the nation than a failed (and was always going to fail) election gambit. And I doubt I'm the only one on my side who feels that way.
It wasn’t intended as such no
Historically, conservatives I’ve had the most productive discussions with have been either strict constitutionalists, various stripes of libertarians or highly religious. I may not agree with conclusions, but there’s a recognisable framework that I can throw my mind into parsing. And if they stick to what they claim, I can predict their positions pretty well.
Hence my examples were sorta drawn from there, but weren’t intended to be personally directed at you, so apologies if that impression was conveyed.
There’s criticism and there’s criticism. Perceptually anyway. ‘Yeah that’s kinda bad, anyway here’s 17 points about how the other lot are bad’ doesn’t quite feel that way.
Part of why I used to quite regularly listen to say, Ben Shapiro was that I wanted some insight into that kinda segment of society. Which in ways I did get. He used to criticise Donald Trump while not really giving a single inch to the Democrats, until he stopped doing so because wider Conservatism lost any kind of bollocks.
I asked for an example, you gave me one re outreach, I actually agree with you on immigration, I think broadly Dems have serious issues here, not just with actual policy but on messaging too. The latter is less on the party itself, but in totality in terms of wider cultural discourse.
We’re admittedly coming at it from very different angles. My position is the relatively rare left wing anti-immigration one. Which isn’t innately anti-immigration incidentally, but more that we should be trying to equalise global conditions rather than relying on ‘move to a richer country’ as an outlet valve. There’s also some concession for cultural clashes, I also believe the working class tend to have to suck up what negative externalities there are, the wealthier tend to see most of the benefits.
I also, if you recall somewhat agree with you on religious exemptions. I’m a bit of an arch-secularist rather than anti-religious, despite being a godless heathen myself.
When folks are talking ideas and policy, actually some accommodation can be found. The second Donald Trump is involved this just evaporates.
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.
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.
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: [quote]
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.
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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
The bolded is an unintentionally fantastic representation of the underlying dynamic here. Here you're hypothetically posing that Adam Schiff would be telling you something completely innocuous you already know is true and it would still cause you to react against it. Since at least 2010, old-fashioned conservatives operate as grievance camels, storing up years' worth of abuses and nitpicks and slights that they can draw on to sustain an absolute party loyalty through almost any environmental conditions. I can make an argument for why boosting MAGA candidates can be a reasonable strategy if the establishment Republicans are just as complicit and sometimes slightly more electable, but it's pointless because this isn't actually your reason for hating Democrats, its just ammunition. You have no interest in interpreting charitably and even if I demonstrated conclusively that you were wrong on any particular point, you'd just move on to the next thing to complain about.
This is why not only the Cheney campaigning was a mistake, but any of the policy concessions you're imagining from a more moderate Harris campaign would have been bigger mistakes. It's been demonstrated time and again that these voters have almost bottomless stores of hatred for Democrats to draw on, and that it's their single highest priority in following politics. I mean, one obvious consequence any dreams of Republicans abandoning Trumpism and returning to "principled conservatism" are not just dead but decapitated, a stake driven through their heart, with a slab of concrete poured over the burial site. In theory that ought to bother guys like you that claim to really dislike Trump and wish for Republicans to go back. But that's almost completely absent from your reaction, because you're just happy to see "identity politics" or w/e fail.
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently. oBlade put it best, border security, like so much of her agenda, was a part of her campaign, but not a part of her administration. And people noticed.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else we have to talk about. You really, really hate Democrats, and you like Trump's policies more, so you don't care about him trying to steal an election. You'd probably argue you do still believe in Proposition 1 (and just think it's not under much threat because he didn't succeed and won't have reason to try again), and you don't give a shit about Proposition 2. All the talk about Democrat "credibility" is a useless distraction because everything about this is demonstrably, empirically verifiable without trusting their word for a thing. Unless you're going to try to tell me with a straight face that Trump didn't try to keep power in 2020 after losing, or that he wouldn't have tried to take power if he'd lost this time, then you're not even really disagreeing with any of my analysis.
Most of the rest of this is you stating emphatically what I was already saying you believed, so like, what do you want me to say?
The truest thing the Donald ever said was he could shoot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care.
If you’re not taking it from me, listen to the Dear Leader
On November 11 2024 09:19 WombaT wrote: Part of why I used to quite regularly listen to say, Ben Shapiro was that I wanted some insight into that kinda segment of society. Which in ways I did get. He used to criticise Donald Trump while not really giving a single inch to the Democrats, until he stopped doing so because wider Conservatism lost any kind of bollocks.
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.
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.
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: [quote]
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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
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
The first time I noticed the switch I really did laugh out loud, it's so much better than Drumpf lol
MLK had his dream. My much, much less ambitious dream is to have a political conversation with a conservative of whatever stripe who can just straight up criticise Blumpf on a singular issue. That’s it.
Not flip to the Democrats, not change policy positions whatsoever, just an ability to criticise Trump when he contravenes beliefs that they purport to hold.
Crucially this doesn’t rule out the following three possibilities: 1) I disagree with Trump on x thing, overall he’s still my guy. 2) Overall I think Trump is a bit shit, but in a de facto 2 party state and with my beliefs, I still consider the Democrats worse. 3) The Democrats behaving in a performative, self-interested way in and around all things Trump
That’s totally fine. Have at it, it’s not my rather humble imploration.
It’s been 8+ years though, searching for my personal golden ticket. My bedroom wall has an almost perfect imprint of my face at this point, given I’m often just driven to headbutt it in frustration.
Let’s take 3 relatively popular concepts in conservative discourse. Strict constitutionalism, a concern about an Imperial Executive branch, and state rights/sovereignty. Arguments I’m pretty familiar with as, I have engaged in good-faith discussions for like, 16/17 years now, and (admittedly more commonly before the Trump epoch), with a good-faith partner.
Trump leaning on people, on pressuring electors to do things like find votes. On tape incidentally, so not stemming from some anonymous tipster, seems to me to somewhat piss all over, to some degree all 3 of those.
So, why is it so difficult to criticise him on it?
Is this directed at me in particular? Have I not criticized Trump repeatedly over the years? from tariffs, to foreign policy, to personnel choices, to his behavior after the 2020 election. I do generally fall into camp 2 , I thought my posting here over the years made that very clear.
This conversation started with me pointing out that having Liz Cheney as a surrogate was not actually outreach to Republicans. To which Falling followed up asking why did so many Republicans go for Trump? Now, my answer was light on affirmative reasons to vote FOR Trump instead of AGAINST Democrats, it's true. But perhaps that reflects my own perspective and I haven't had a GOP nominee I've been excited to vote for...ever.
You then asked what could Harris have done to actually reach out and I tied to answer as best I could, but pointed out that in my opinion, rhetoric coming from the left made it almost impossible. It's a fun thought experiment as to what Dems could have gotten from Trump in his first term if they didn't decide on "resistance" from day one. Since then I have been trying to make the case that everyone here is, maybe understandably, fixated on Trump's flaws but need to look to their own side of the aisle to understand why things are the way they are.
Yes, what Trump did was bad. In particular his attempt to pressure Pence into not certifying the election (even though he couldn't have refused) was a thing that I condemn him for. Always have. But your option number 2 remains, and I still consider the slow erosion of our constitutional system that occurs when Democrats are president to be a more pressing long term concern for the nation than a failed (and was always going to fail) election gambit. And I doubt I'm the only one on my side who feels that way.
It wasn’t intended as such no
Historically, conservatives I’ve had the most productive discussions with have been either strict constitutionalists, various stripes of libertarians or highly religious. I may not agree with conclusions, but there’s a recognisable framework that I can throw my mind into parsing. And if they stick to what they claim, I can predict their positions pretty well.
Hence my examples were sorta drawn from there, but weren’t intended to be personally directed at you, so apologies if that impression was conveyed.
There’s criticism and there’s criticism. Perceptually anyway. ‘Yeah that’s kinda bad, anyway here’s 17 points about how the other lot are bad’ doesn’t quite feel that way.
Part of why I used to quite regularly listen to say, Ben Shapiro was that I wanted some insight into that kinda segment of society. Which in ways I did get. He used to criticise Donald Trump while not really giving a single inch to the Democrats, until he stopped doing so because wider Conservatism lost any kind of bollocks.
I asked for an example, you gave me one re outreach, I actually agree with you on immigration, I think broadly Dems have serious issues here, not just with actual policy but on messaging too. The latter is less on the party itself, but in totality in terms of wider cultural discourse.
We’re admittedly coming at it from very different angles. My position is the relatively rare left wing anti-immigration one. Which isn’t innately anti-immigration incidentally, but more that we should be trying to equalise global conditions rather than relying on ‘move to a richer country’ as an outlet valve. There’s also some concession for cultural clashes, I also believe the working class tend to have to suck up what negative externalities there are, the wealthier tend to see most of the benefits.
I also, if you recall somewhat agree with you on religious exemptions. I’m a bit of an arch-secularist rather than anti-religious, despite being a godless heathen myself.
When folks are talking ideas and policy, actually some accommodation can be found. The second Donald Trump is involved this just evaporates.
In your other post after this I agree with you that Trump was right about shooting people on 5th avenue. But I am equally convinced that Trump could singlehandedly cure cancer and people on the left would find something to criticize. I consider myself a small-government constitutionalist. But here's the thing. I'm not anywhere close to a majority in my own party, let alone the country. I have to make do, and having a Dem party gone off the rails is bad, just as is having a GOP that has lost its way.
There's plenty to criticize on the right and when I'm in a space like that I do so. Conservative media was so afraid of Trump, and always has been, that many of them avoided saying anything negative. But this is a team sport, and it's not like only the GOP has "rally around the flag" instincts. Look at all the criticism GH gets for not voting for Biden/Harris in his deep blue state. It's just a reverse of the other side, Trump is *so bad* you should swallow your misgivings and support the less bad option. I get that people on the left hate Trump (like I hate Democrats, apparently) but I'm tying to provide an alternative view. If you are someone like Ben Shapiro you have two goals 1) succeed in your business, 2) advance your cause. Being thrown out of the tent is bad for both.
Trust me, I wish Trump was gone. Although given the way this election has gone I'm very interested to see the future of the country. The way this election went could indicate some very interesting things for the future.
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.
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.
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: [quote]
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.
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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
The bolded is an unintentionally fantastic representation of the underlying dynamic here. Here you're hypothetically posing that Adam Schiff would be telling you something completely innocuous you already know is true and it would still cause you to react against it. Since at least 2010, old-fashioned conservatives operate as grievance camels, storing up years' worth of abuses and nitpicks and slights that they can draw on to sustain an absolute party loyalty through almost any environmental conditions. I can make an argument for why boosting MAGA candidates can be a reasonable strategy if the establishment Republicans are just as complicit and sometimes slightly more electable, but it's pointless because this isn't actually your reason for hating Democrats, its just ammunition. You have no interest in interpreting charitably and even if I demonstrated conclusively that you were wrong on any particular point, you'd just move on to the next thing to complain about.
This is why not only the Cheney campaigning was a mistake, but any of the policy concessions you're imagining from a more moderate Harris campaign would have been bigger mistakes. It's been demonstrated time and again that these voters have almost bottomless stores of hatred for Democrats to draw on, and that it's their single highest priority in following politics. I mean, one obvious consequence any dreams of Republicans abandoning Trumpism and returning to "principled conservatism" are not just dead but decapitated, a stake driven through their heart, with a slab of concrete poured over the burial site. In theory that ought to bother guys like you that claim to really dislike Trump and wish for Republicans to go back. But that's almost completely absent from your reaction, because you're just happy to see "identity politics" or w/e fail.
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently. oBlade put it best, border security, like so much of her agenda, was a part of her campaign, but not a part of her administration. And people noticed.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else we have to talk about. You really, really hate Democrats, and you like Trump's policies more, so you don't care about him trying to steal an election. You'd probably argue you do still believe in Proposition 1 (and just think it's not under much threat because he didn't succeed and won't have reason to try again), and you don't give a shit about Proposition 2. All the talk about Democrat "credibility" is a useless distraction because everything about this is demonstrably, empirically verifiable without trusting their word for a thing. Unless you're going to try to tell me with a straight face that Trump didn't try to keep power in 2020 after losing, or that he wouldn't have tried to take power if he'd lost this time, then you're not even really disagreeing with any of my analysis.
Most of the rest of this is you stating emphatically what I was already saying you believed, so like, what do you want me to say?
You are still so hung up on 2020 that you missed the entire thrust of the post. But as a quick aside, Adam Schiff was the propagator of BS Russia collusion, and so when Pelosi appoints him to the Committee, that's how I know *she* doesn't care about the truth, so I dismiss it. Meanwhile you are attempting to draw an entire psychological inference from a fairly common expression.
***
I didn't say I didn't care. And I didn't vote for him, I don't know what more people want from me. Am I supposed to jettison my entire worldview because of Donald Trump? I've already watched people on both sides of the aisle do that and I have no interest in surrendering my faculties for a such a stupid reason.
My disagreement with you is that you ignoring everything else. If you really believed Trump is Hitler there is a lot more Dems could have done. Again, one reason the left no credibility on this is because they already burned it. But also they don't actually believe it. What does it say about the left that they couldn't, say, let go of abortion absolutism to stop Hitler? You are saying "why even try, the right doesn't mean it anyways" and I'm saying "the left obviously don't mean it, they haven't even tried." Clinton managed to moderate himself after 94. Apparently dems can't do that anymore.
On November 11 2024 09:19 WombaT wrote: Part of why I used to quite regularly listen to say, Ben Shapiro was that I wanted some insight into that kinda segment of society. Which in ways I did get. He used to criticise Donald Trump while not really giving a single inch to the Democrats, until he stopped doing so because wider Conservatism lost any kind of bollocks.
Shapiro still criticizes Trump all the time.
As I’ve said, there’s criticism and there’s criticism.
Hey perhaps he’s scathing, in which case I’m wrong. I stopped listening when he completely lost his balls and backtracked on his own criticism he made after January 6th
I don’t even blame him, you can’t properly criticise the Dear LeaderTM if your business is being a conservative politician or conservative political commentator.
The only conservatives I find with the capacity to actually do that are primarily academics who do a podcast on the sides for funsies.
Within folks in that domain that I’ve discovered like I think Glenn Lowry can do this, or at least his more liberally minded co-host John McWhorter will do it if he isn’t.
End welfare for the rich. So no more free sports stadiums. Ending welfare for the rich lowers government expenses and they can take that savings and use it to eliminate income tax for anyone who does not own or have a mortgage on a house. If it is possible to eliminate income tax altogether... for everyone ... do it.
If the government books do not balance off of that then introduce consumption based taxes. Introduce a Good And Services Tax similar to what Canada has so that people buying Porsches, Maseratis and $500 Steak Dinners at Palace Restaurants pay a lot extra for their extravagances. Make the tax high ... not 5% like Canada has. Obviously, this kind of tax does not apply to grocery store food or rent or public transit expenses.
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.
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.
On November 11 2024 01:03 WombaT wrote:
On November 10 2024 11:18 Introvert wrote:
On November 10 2024 09:55 WombaT wrote: [quote] 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?
Is it principled to give your imprimatur to a committee with truth challenged Dems like Schiff? if he told me the Pacific was salty I'd have to drive to beach and take a gulp to make sure. Is it principled to repeat the lies about these pro-life states because you are now endorsing Kamala? Meanwhile remember how House dems money spenders boosted "MAGA" candidates against their moderate Republican opponents because they wanted to have an easier time defeating them? Sorry, people with principles don't validate such behavior.
MAGA is so dangerous that we're going to risk having more of them. That also is another data point for "Democrats don't believe their own propaganda."
To be fair, Kamala doesn't believe it either, but apparently some on her staff did.
Near the end of the call, campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon teared up, according to a recording obtained by Axios.
"I don't like emotion, I don't do that," she said before choking up. "You are great people who have done a great thing, and you came really close." During the call, Harris told staffers: "Yeah, this sucks....We all just speak truth, why don't we, right? There's also so much good that has come of this" campaign. The message didn't resonate with some Harris staffers: "It was detached from the reality of what happened," one said. "We are told the fate of democracy is at stake, and then the message was, 'We'll get them next time.' "
I will try to put this yet another way. Democrats have zero, nay, they have negative credibility on another Trump. Meanwhile, in the eyes of voters, Trump has actual credibility. When Trump was president the economy was doing well, immigration was controlled, and there were no big foreign wars. Meanwhile dems pissed away their advantage on how they were better for "Democracy" through the aforementioned court cases.
Meanwhile, for most of the border crisis dems (including the DHS secretary) we're telling us the border was secure. People saw how much stuff costs are the market, they saw what was happening at the border, they see a war in Ukraine that Dems have invested a lot of political capital into, and they made a choice. You can argue for why all of those things are more complicated than that, but the problem is Dems have been saying things that turned out to be false. Many of them about Trump, from starting WWIII to Russian collusion. I don't blame voters for not believing them anymore. And Republican voters in particular have a well-founded disdain for the mainstream press.
You and WombaT are so focused on election stuff, but there was no coup! People's lives didn't meaningfully change! Meanwhile no mea culpas for Biden's failures. And when they finally did get around to acknowledging the problem at the border, we have people like Magic and New Sunshine completely skipping over how we got the problem in the first place and then blaming someone who isn't even president for why, years in, it wasn't fixed. Meanwhile Kamala Harris can't name a single thing she would have done differently.
No credibility. And even now apparently no self-reflection and no introspection.
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
The first time I noticed the switch I really did laugh out loud, it's so much better than Drumpf lol
MLK had his dream. My much, much less ambitious dream is to have a political conversation with a conservative of whatever stripe who can just straight up criticise Blumpf on a singular issue. That’s it.
Not flip to the Democrats, not change policy positions whatsoever, just an ability to criticise Trump when he contravenes beliefs that they purport to hold.
Crucially this doesn’t rule out the following three possibilities: 1) I disagree with Trump on x thing, overall he’s still my guy. 2) Overall I think Trump is a bit shit, but in a de facto 2 party state and with my beliefs, I still consider the Democrats worse. 3) The Democrats behaving in a performative, self-interested way in and around all things Trump
That’s totally fine. Have at it, it’s not my rather humble imploration.
It’s been 8+ years though, searching for my personal golden ticket. My bedroom wall has an almost perfect imprint of my face at this point, given I’m often just driven to headbutt it in frustration.
Let’s take 3 relatively popular concepts in conservative discourse. Strict constitutionalism, a concern about an Imperial Executive branch, and state rights/sovereignty. Arguments I’m pretty familiar with as, I have engaged in good-faith discussions for like, 16/17 years now, and (admittedly more commonly before the Trump epoch), with a good-faith partner.
Trump leaning on people, on pressuring electors to do things like find votes. On tape incidentally, so not stemming from some anonymous tipster, seems to me to somewhat piss all over, to some degree all 3 of those.
So, why is it so difficult to criticise him on it?
Is this directed at me in particular? Have I not criticized Trump repeatedly over the years? from tariffs, to foreign policy, to personnel choices, to his behavior after the 2020 election. I do generally fall into camp 2 , I thought my posting here over the years made that very clear.
This conversation started with me pointing out that having Liz Cheney as a surrogate was not actually outreach to Republicans. To which Falling followed up asking why did so many Republicans go for Trump? Now, my answer was light on affirmative reasons to vote FOR Trump instead of AGAINST Democrats, it's true. But perhaps that reflects my own perspective and I haven't had a GOP nominee I've been excited to vote for...ever.
You then asked what could Harris have done to actually reach out and I tied to answer as best I could, but pointed out that in my opinion, rhetoric coming from the left made it almost impossible. It's a fun thought experiment as to what Dems could have gotten from Trump in his first term if they didn't decide on "resistance" from day one. Since then I have been trying to make the case that everyone here is, maybe understandably, fixated on Trump's flaws but need to look to their own side of the aisle to understand why things are the way they are.
Yes, what Trump did was bad. In particular his attempt to pressure Pence into not certifying the election (even though he couldn't have refused) was a thing that I condemn him for. Always have. But your option number 2 remains, and I still consider the slow erosion of our constitutional system that occurs when Democrats are president to be a more pressing long term concern for the nation than a failed (and was always going to fail) election gambit. And I doubt I'm the only one on my side who feels that way.
It wasn’t intended as such no
Historically, conservatives I’ve had the most productive discussions with have been either strict constitutionalists, various stripes of libertarians or highly religious. I may not agree with conclusions, but there’s a recognisable framework that I can throw my mind into parsing. And if they stick to what they claim, I can predict their positions pretty well.
Hence my examples were sorta drawn from there, but weren’t intended to be personally directed at you, so apologies if that impression was conveyed.
There’s criticism and there’s criticism. Perceptually anyway. ‘Yeah that’s kinda bad, anyway here’s 17 points about how the other lot are bad’ doesn’t quite feel that way.
Part of why I used to quite regularly listen to say, Ben Shapiro was that I wanted some insight into that kinda segment of society. Which in ways I did get. He used to criticise Donald Trump while not really giving a single inch to the Democrats, until he stopped doing so because wider Conservatism lost any kind of bollocks.
I asked for an example, you gave me one re outreach, I actually agree with you on immigration, I think broadly Dems have serious issues here, not just with actual policy but on messaging too. The latter is less on the party itself, but in totality in terms of wider cultural discourse.
We’re admittedly coming at it from very different angles. My position is the relatively rare left wing anti-immigration one. Which isn’t innately anti-immigration incidentally, but more that we should be trying to equalise global conditions rather than relying on ‘move to a richer country’ as an outlet valve. There’s also some concession for cultural clashes, I also believe the working class tend to have to suck up what negative externalities there are, the wealthier tend to see most of the benefits.
I also, if you recall somewhat agree with you on religious exemptions. I’m a bit of an arch-secularist rather than anti-religious, despite being a godless heathen myself.
When folks are talking ideas and policy, actually some accommodation can be found. The second Donald Trump is involved this just evaporates.
In your other post after this I agree with you that Trump was right about shooting people on 5th avenue. But I am equally convinced that Trump could singlehandedly cure cancer and people on the left would find something to criticize. I consider myself a small-government constitutionalist. But here's the thing. I'm not anywhere close to a majority in my own party, let alone the country. I have to make do, and having a Dem party gone off the rails is bad, just as is having a GOP that has lost its way.
There's plenty to criticize on the right and when I'm in a space like that I do so. Conservative media was so afraid of Trump, and always has been, that many of them avoided saying anything negative. But this is a team sport, and it's not like only the GOP has "rally around the flag" instincts. Look at all the criticism GH gets for not voting for Biden/Harris in his deep blue state. It's just a reverse of the other side, Trump is *so bad* you should swallow your misgivings and support the less bad option. I get that people on the left hate Trump (like I hate Democrats, apparently) but I'm tying to provide an alternative view. If you are someone like Ben Shapiro you have two goals 1) succeed in your business, 2) advance your cause. Being thrown out of the tent is bad for both.
Trust me, I wish Trump was gone. Although given the way this election has gone I'm very interested to see the future of the country. The way this election went could indicate some very interesting things for the future.
GH gets a lot of criticism, but he still says it. Zambrah also. Others also
I’m not American so it’s different as I have no direct skin in the game, I’ll also slam the Dems frequently. I’ve slammed Labour. I’ve slammed Tony Blair and his lapdogging on Iraq. Labour cabinet ministers literally resigned over that issue in protest at the time.
One may think the left are wrong on many an issue, but they sure as fuck hold their own to some kind of account. Not like this well, effective cult around Trump
Ben Shapiro stands to lose a lot if he takes a stand and his audience abandons him, I absolutely understand that.
But this isn’t an impediment random conservative on the internet really has.
On November 11 2024 09:51 WombaT wrote: Ben Shapiro stands to lose a lot if he takes a stand and his audience abandons him, I absolutely understand that. But this isn’t an impediment random conservative on the internet really has.
Not many believe Shapiro has much integrity after the Owens debacle. "his audience" knows he is far from a pure soul.
I think Owens wanted out of her contract early and Shapiro wanted her to keep on working 60 hours a week.
EPT
