With 20-30% of Americans being Right-wing somewhere in the neighborhood of Hitler, and another 30-50% of Americans being Biden-Middle, I am not sure how we can make policies farther Left seem compatible with representative government.
Granted, sometimes the role of government is to drag people, kicking and screaming, into a better era, but then again, Trump would say the same thing about his forced reversion to the Dark Ages. I don’t have a lot of confidence in a revolution of the few leading the many. The over-corrections frighten me.
Let’s also take those statistics with a grain tablespoon of salt, since Republicans vote for Dems in the primaries in open primary states and some register as Dems in order to vote for a spoiler in closed primary states.
Of course, that’s largely irrelevant when it comes down to defunding the police, as long as he doesn’t actively fight the changes on the state and local level.
I know the vast majority of BLM protests aren’t just going to stop if Biden is elected. That will surprise some of the more detached Dems, but anyone who’s spent time with the protests knows the pressure won’t let up until real progress is made.
Yeah. It is easy to forget that before Clinton and the DLC showed up, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party was in control for decades. An exception was Jimmy Carter, who was the center-right of the party in those days, and managed to clinch the nomination over the candidates on his left like Jerry Brown and Mo Udall only because the latter split their support and Carter got support from centrist media elites. (Sound familiar?) However, Democratic candidates before Carter were destroyed in the general election, because the country didn’t consist solely of Democrats.
I was pretty upset when Carter won the nomination in '76, for many of the same reasons people were upset this round when Sanders and Warren were beaten by Biden. However, As much as I hated that Carter abandoned some traditional party objectives (like universal health care and strong corporate regulation), it was nice having a fundamentally decent, honest, competent person in the White House. A return to that would be a really big win.
Well, that was a scary read. I especially cringed at the idea of Republicans doxxing electors as pedophiles to the QAnon folks. It reminded me how underutilized that horrifying tool for terror has been.
I think a big part of keeping things calm would be to inform people simply not to expect finding out the winner on election night. If everyone understands that due to the epidemic it will take a while to find out who won, perhaps the tension wouldn’t peak so much.
Some scenarios, though, like Barr seizing the mail-in ballots, etc., I don’t see how that could end without some major strife. Being who he is, there would be no greater thrill for Trump than to lose the election, but still seize power, i.e. to “dominate” the nation as a whole and take what he wants.
One must hope that enough people in government will remain devoted to the constitutional process, I guess.
The third party voters were, as usual, massively outnumbered by non-voters,
and
The majority of third party voters were never going to vote for the Dems; they were libertarians. If they didn’t vote third party, most of them would have been non-voters or GOP voters.
Well, I think four years of Trump should tell them that a lot of people were willing to not vote for Clinton. I am not sure his theory is holding up. They’re just going to keep appealing to Republicans, because those issues also please the corporate lobbyists and donors.
No matter who wins the election, Pelosi and Schumer and the rest of the Dem establishment grifters will still be rich. Trump does not truly threaten their privileges; a movement towards economic and political justice does.
The argument isn’t about whether or not Trumpism needs to be defeated.
The argument is about whether electoral politics is a realistic means of achieving that goal in the present reality.
“Withhold your votes to force the Dems left” was a strategy that might have worked a few cycles ago, but it’s too late for that now. We’re out of time.
There will be violence, whichever candidate wins. The only question will be whether it will be perpetrated by official and semi-official agents of the regime or by the stochastic terrorists the American right has been fostering.
No-one should be assuming this will be a normal election with a regular transfer of power. We have a chance of a return to liberal-democratic norms in the future if Biden wins, but it’s going to be a long and drawn-out process.
This is scarily true. And people will have to try and find ways to be safe and think about what they’re willing to risk to boot him from the White House when he loses.
It’s good that he’s losing support among the military.
Meanwhile the right is carrying out acts of violence right now. Like, they are literally killing people right now. At some point, we really need to let go of this fiction of a scary bunch of leftists just waiting to incite violence and look at the people who are inciting violence.
At some point, we really need to let go of this fiction of a scary bunch of leftists just waiting to incite violence and look at the people who are inciting violence.