Hillary called them “deplorables” and basically got torn apart for it.
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It’s not most. It’s a loud minority. That’s why the party of hope encourages increased turnout and the party of fear employs suppression.
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It’s wild to me; I can’t imagine trying to suppress votes without realizing I’m doing a fundamentally bad thing, therefore I can’t imagine such people successfully convincing themselves that they’re good people.
The Republican Party is morally bankrupt and what scares me is the thought that many of them know it and aren’t concerned. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice!”
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Both US parties routinely argue that not all people should vote. See, for example, felon disenfranchisement (opposed by some Dems, supported by many) and the common discourse regarding “low information voters”.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression are not just Republican things.
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While I don’t agree with felony disenfranchisement, I think it’s safe to say that the Dems who support it aren’t doing so to suppress Republican votes. Only the Republicans are using the voter fraud bogeyman to actively suppress Democrat votes.
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Here’s where the rubber hits the road: let’s assume the very best, huge blue tsunami, everything breaks our way. What changes tomorrow, next week, next month? Nothing. Then next year? At best a break on the speed of our descent into hell. The changes we are looking for will take time and effort, for years to come. The damage the right has done to our country will take a lot of time to repair under the best for circumstances, and you better believe they will fight tooth and nail against it. We need to keep that in mind. As Churchill said, “It is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it might be the end of the beginning.”
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Yup.
As with many other things, Democratic voter-suppression efforts are focused on punching left. The Dems use electoral corruption to block third-party challengers and leftist insurgents.
Mostly via mechanisms other than felon disenfranchisement, however. Support for that is mostly about pandering to racism.
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BTW, listen to the bit of this beginning at 1:09:25 for some stories of voter shenanigans around the Ocasio-Cortez primary.
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I know there are some historians in the mix here, anyone have any recommended reading?
The answer I’m dreading isn’t only “Yes, I will vote based on lies, conspiracy theories, hatred and terror, and I’ll follow the merchants of bigotry to my grave- beyond, if I could!”
It’s also the Americans saying “I won’t bother to vote at all.”
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This is exactly the problem. When we lose, things deteriorate rapidly. When we win, essentially nothing happens- maybe some very small, incremental improvements, which partially repair a bit of the damage while the opposition fights kicking and screaming against even that. Voting is better than nothing, but the system is so broken at this point that it’s not a real long-term solution.
For things to ever get better, really better, we’d need a complete overhaul of our government, our voting, legal, education, immigration, economic, campaign finance and health care systems, as well as the elimination of two-party politics and a more strongly enforced separation of church and state. For any of that to happen, either the extreme right needs to regain some semblance of decency, sanity and rationality, the vast majority of people need to vote (and vote the right way, and have their votes counted fairly), or younger generations have to be better, saner, more compassionate people as the older generations die off- and the more broken the aforementioned systems become, the less likely any of that is to happen.
I’m not sure what the lesson is here- I’m certainly not trying to discourage anyone from voting, or saying there’s no hope. But the task of fixing and healing America is almost unimaginably monumental, so be strong and be prepared to deal with all this shit and much, much worse for probably the rest of our lifetimes.
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Nah, consider where we are relative to 60s-70s. Progress comes, it just comes slowly. They can’t stop it entirely, but they can make a hell of a mess in the meantime.
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I really hope so, but if the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that people didn’t make as much progress during those decades as they thought they had. Still, it’s encouraging to see things like gay rights making steady, strong progress even while so many other things crumble around us. Stuff like that gives me hope.
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Some progress. Not enough, and not secure.
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Always a very thin veneer. Too many of us are still ready to jump back to the 1800s. As they say, if all you have known is privilege, equality feels like oppression. Given leadership like Trump, gets way too easy to throw off tnat veneer
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No argument at all. With our system, “security” when it comes to civil rights is always illusory. The price of democracy is constant vigilance. Can’t be asleep at the switch, never again.
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Man, you’ve got a much higher estimation of him than I do.
I was thinking “giant fucking failure of a slime mold” or maybe “makes lampreys seem pleasant”…
but if we have to get numerical, I’m going to go with 98876971681087031185328581769127391731972916418749816398176381764981764198623981763816209215709165096489751283712971239581257102736091874196108740979461983745108601284619386419876238190649817618641th rate man.
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Hillary’s problem came from walking back from the statement. She was still trying to court the neanderthal tweaker vote.
She should have just doubled down on it and called them the scum of the earth.
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Just bear in mind, the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern States in the 1900’s to 1940’s was pretty much an ethnic cleansing event. People driven away from their homes due to ongoing terror campaigns against their communities by white supremacists
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