That is a fascinating idea I’ve not heard elsewhere.
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Samantha Bee covers this here:
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I need to watch her show more often.
There’s something both beautifully righteous and unsettlingly…sad? I’m not quite sure what I want here…about the idea of the descendants of the victims of one of our two foundational national sins possibly saving us from our fascists. I guess we’ve been relying on Black women as a voting block to save us for a while now so it’s only fair (big /s) we start counting on the indigenous population to save women’s healthcare. I just hope if the dems do run with this intriguing and maybe awesome idea, that it comes with a massive influx of cash and health/social services for the tribal communities who’d be the heart of the resistance.
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Thank you for this excellent opportunity to remind people, as so many others here have, that Niemöller was a coward.
But beyond that…I’m not trans but I know people who are. I’m not Black but I know people who are. Anyone who comes for them comes for me too. It’s not simply a matter of standing with them. We are family, we are connected, which is why I may not be a target but I will put myself in the way of those who are.
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The conclusion of this article you linked is seriously flawed.
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“Median voter” is a completely meaningless concept, akin to “median dog” or “median car” or “median European”. Medians describe distributions of single characteristics, and unless there is some way to characterize voters (dogs, cars, Europeans) along a single axis, you can’t pick a midpoint.
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Even if you choose individual characteristics to highlight (age, race, educational attainment), you don’t just pick the majority or plurality and call that the median. A “white” median voter implies that all voters are on a scale of whiteness, that we can pick the middle value of. (If that were actually the case, of course, the median voter would be some color between “white” and “black”.) Median age is the only one of these figures that means anything.
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Even if you pick characteristics that can be described via medians, why privilege some characteristics over others? I see that median income isn’t included in the so-called “median voter”, nor is household size, housing costs/values, etc. And every time you intersect these medians, you describe fewer and fewer actual people.
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As a measure of central tendency, medians cause loss of information – especially when it comes to complex distributions. If you say the median car color is red, what does that usefully tell me?
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Why did this author not specify whether the “median voter” is a man or a woman? If we knew that, should we ignore the other half of the voting population when targeting political strategies? Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet here we are with a white median voter.
This might read as sophistry or pedantry, but I think it’s important to be careful of concepts like “the average X” or “the median Y” when it comes to messy and complicated real-world populations and domains.
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I know nothing about him personally, but the character in his poem certain is, and a self-centered jerk who seemed shocked that leopards would eat his face too. They will. Agree with everything you said. Long conversation with my daughter last night, who works for social services. They had a staff meeting anticipating a “trans support = abuse” law here, and that they would resign en masse if ordered to start investigating trans families. We talked here and agreed that we would absolutely refuse to comply with any sort of “mandatory reporting” law, and if that means we also resign en masse, so be it. It would suck for so many kids around here, but maybe(?) garner a little attention, mostly, though, we are unwilling to sacrifice our souls on their stupid alter.
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She can STILL make a great president.
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Not as hard as we have to vote. So, vote harder, people!
(/s in case it’s not obvious.)
I happily voted for her in the 2020 primary, and would do it again if she ran. I think she’d be a great president.
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I will be voting for, donating to, and volunteering for Rochelle Garza. She is running for Attorney General in Texas
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urbandetail a) claimed the Dems wanted RvW to be overturned and that the Dems could have stopped this. I pointed out that they could Not have stopped this.
Your first two points are ploys they could have tried, but would 100% have failed.
the rest of your points are excellent things that can be done now. Not one of them would have stopped the overturning of RvW.
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We much as many of us here would love to fill Congress with socialists or Marxists, it’s those “establishment Dems” that people end up voting for in most cases. You can certainly blame corporate interests in elections for this, and you can blame Republicans for that. While so-called “establishment Dems” certainly benefit from this too, I don’t see this system changing any time soon. Certainly not for the next few decades while Republicans run the show from behind the scenes in the judiciary. But I’ll take an “establishment Dem”, especially one like Ms. Warren over even a so-called “moderate” Republican any day of the week.
Agree with this. But there’s some nuance here to consider. For the last 5 decades, Republicans have been playing a very different game than Democrats and have been playing it with no regard for laws, ethics, rules, or norms. They are just making it up as they go along and they are perverting the system to uphold their minority-majority advantage.
Things that would have been considered radical or fringe back in the 1960s or 1970s have slowly but surely been creeping into mainstream Republicanism. Listen to anything Barry Goldwater said in the early 1960s and it’ll sound awfully Trumpian — steeped in authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry. The only difference being that modern Republicans have abandoned all forms of nuance or “code” and are just coming right out and saying the quiet part out loud. They aren’t quite at the point where they are using unambiguous slurs on national TV at this point (versus thinly veiled ones of course). I have no doubt that soon someone like MTG will use the “f” slur or “n” word on TV and there will be initial shock and outrage, but then others will do it and some other Republican-led crisis will happen and move it into the background eventually simply normalizing that behavior for the right. Think of all the shocking things Trump said or did back in 2015 and since, and how so much of that is now openly normalized on the right?
Furthermore they are using their power to mold and pervert the system to maintain power. The systems put in place by the founders weren’t designed to deal with such a bad faith effort to subvert democracy on such a large scale, so these actions rarely have consequences — and even when they do have consequences the typical response is to “do the same thing only slightly differently”. Just think of all the challenges to gun laws, immigration laws, and of course abortion laws. Things that people knew were either frivolous or blatantly illegal, but they did them knowing that one of these days they would work when the conditions were right, and if they didn’t work there was always a chance at enough precedent to chip away little by little. That’s how we got to where we are today where a gun now has more rights than a woman. As another example, some 10 years ago it would have been shocking for someone to refuse a Congressional subpoena. Now so many people are doing it that it barely merits a mention and we’ve learned that a Congressional subpoena is basically toothless.
These asymmetrical efforts has been continually keeping Democrats on defense, and when you’re continually on defense it’s hard to make progress. Democrats don’t have the same nihilistic tendencies Republicans do, it’s rare to see them resort to the same unethical or blatantly illegal tactics that Republicans do.
Maybe there’s more Democrats could have done starting in the 1960s, but they were kind of busy with things like getting things like civil rights for non-whites and voting laws enshrined into the fucking Constitution and trying to prevent a nuclear war with Russia. In the decades to follow it was one huge crisis after another — most often caused by Republicans. Once back in power Democrats had to clean those messes up, which makes it hard to do other things. Reagan and Bush destroyed the economy in the 1980s through wars, deregulation, slashing taxes for the rich, and so-called trickle down economics. Once Clinton came into power and Democrats got control of Congress, undoing Reagan’s deregulation of the airwaves wasn’t anywhere near as important as just un-fucking the damn economy and trying to address the many other immediate societal problems happening at the time. Meanwhile right-wing interests were buying up all the local TV and radio stations thus allowing their message to be the only one most people hear.
So while I agree with your premise that Republicans have been outplaying Democrats for decades, I disagree with the premise that “if only they knew” or “if only they did more” things would be different. The only way it could have been different is if Democrats resorted to the same unethical and illegal tactics. In many ways I wish they had, but it’s not really in the Democrat mindset to do this, unlike fascist and nihilistic Republicans where the ends will always justify the means.
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Many things.
Biden still hasn’t voiced support for breaking the filibuster.
He has a number of tricks up his sleeve to split some of the moderate Rs off of their party or at least get some R senators in states run by Dem governors to retire early.
The DoJ should be prosecuting 14A Sec 3 violations aggressively.
Speaking of which, Merrick Garland was a shitty AG selection. Too moderate. It turns out he was more a poetic choice than a strategic one. I would ask for his resignation today. Replace with Letitia James.
Once they have 50 real Dems in the Senate, break the filibuster, pass voting rights acts, grant DC and PR statehood, expand SCOTUS, pack court. That should be enough to get us through the midterms.
That’s not both-sidesism; that’s a course of action to preserve our democracy.
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Additional, there has been a strategy by right wing, racist radical groups (who have aligned with the far right religious organizations) to infiltrate the GOP and push the party to the right. These two groups are now their “core” voters, and Trumpism expanded that and mainstreamed it.
And this is the libertarian wing that started with Goldwater. So, it’s the racists, the religious extremists, and anti-government extremists, and they are the basis for Trumpism.
This is another great point that people don’t seem to get… Democrats are still operating from the old liberal consensus model, that the government can and should play an active role in people’s lives, and that the way to make government better is to be actively involved in governance. But that’s a major difference… the far right has been seeking local offices, but to destroy those offices, while when democrats run, they do it to be productive.
On some level, while these sorts of analysis can be useful for future actions, arguing that they should have had a different tactic THEN presumes that they should have KNOWN what would happen. Well, none of us have a crystal ball. We’re all looking in hindsight now, and that of course is 20/20.
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Agreed, but unfortunately the AG has to be confirmed by Congress. The whole confirmation process has become just another partisan circus versus in the past when it was largely a formality. There’s no way James would have been confirmed so we got the boring centrist instead.
I would have loved to see a radical appointee. Someone that would aggressively fix things and then make it so no future AG can ever repeat what people like Nixon and Trump tried to do with the DOJ. Things like enshrining into law that a President is not immune from prosecution or investigation while in power, make it illegal for the President to order the DOJ to do anything (or at least make it so there no expectation of privilege and it must become public record), requiring congressional impeachment to remove the AG, and to make it illegal for the DOJ to work on the president’s behalf for any reason.
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Which reminds me of the one thing in the past that most strikes me as relevant now: the Obama administration didn’t aggressively fight McConnell’s unconstitutional act of not considering his nomination of Merrick Garland. The relevant text in the Constitution requires the senate to “-advise and consent” which does not include “ignore and decline.” The administration should have gone to the mat over that violation.
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I’m not talking in the past, I’m talking NOW. Get James in there as a direct response to the stonewalling of the Jan6 commission and overturn of Roe. we need a wartime AG, not a reconciliation AG.
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Indeed.
Democrats go into public service so make the government work for the people and to use the levers of government to improve people’s lives.
Republicans go into public service to enrich themselves and their friends, while using the levers of government to destroy it from within while sucking it dry.
The entire time, right wing interests have successfully exploited their ownership of the airwaves and used blatantly illegal tactics on social media to convince a huge amount of people to vote against their own self-interests by voting for Republicans. Convincing many that unions are bad, non-white immigrants are bad, corporate regulations are bad, the military is unquestionably good, climate change is fake, taxes for the rich are bad, socialism is bad, secularism is bad, socialized medicine is bad, and poor people just rich people that need to work harder — and anybody who disagrees with these things is unpatriotic and thus is not a “real American” and should leave.
How do you really compete with that?
ETA fixed typo that was accidentally making logically inconsistent point. Thanks @chenille for pointing it out!
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Agree. This was a huge mistake, but I also imagine McConnell could have just forced the issue and ran out the clock on this. But, I do wish there had been more effort here.
But, how? Garland would have to quit or be fired. He could try to appoint James as acting AG in lieu of a confirmation that would likely fail (and then be forced do like Trump and keep appointing “acting” AGs until he leaves office). This would also be a hugely risky thing to do. It would be a blatantly political move that could lead to mass revolt or resignations, and otherwise cause huge chaos that could render the DOJ ineffective at doing anything which would be a huge disaster. In the end I also don’t see it moving the needle on R-v-W.
There’s plenty of other things Biden and the DOJ can try, and sincerely I hope they try these things. Just telling us to vote harder definitely won’t change things.
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I might be in a different country but I’m a 40-something white person who didn’t finish college because of ill health and lives in an unfashionable suburb (the bits of Oxford that don’t get advertised as tourist destinations).Before that I grew up in a very unfashionable Northern English city just a few minutes walk away from the countryside, and not many more minutes away from some of the least populated areas of England.
Yet I ended up further left than Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, with a strong opposition to social authoritarianism. Maybe this whole median voter idea is bullshit like @MrShiv says.
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He was a WWI U boat officer, Weimar Republic Freikorps member, early and enthusiastic NSDAP voter, protestant priest and a concentration camp prisoner after the church and the party clashed. But he never really denounced the Nazis before his imprisonment, just disagreed with them on church politics.
Certainly a wrong’un but I don’t quite understand the charge of cowardice. The reason he didn’t stand up to the Nazis early on was that he agreed with them. That’s unimaginably wrong, but not cowardly.
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