Well, I guess it’s not that amusing, but it is human nature. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s hard to see the impact that it is having until it’s almost or actually is too late. Brooks and the other Never-Trumpers like Joe Scarborough, may have taken a bit too long to realize the flaws of the Gingrich Revolution and the manipulation of the the Tea Party movement because they were perhaps too caught up in the struggle against the onslaught of creeping liberalism, but at least they now realize the damage that the American conservative movement has wrought. If nothing else, they deserve to be pitied instead of ridiculed. We’re all capable of being caught up in something before we realize all of the ramifications.
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Because the people who will vote for him don’t know any of that. According to Fox News and right wing radio, he’s doing a heckuva job.
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Basically it boils down to the natural advantage of incumbency and the current strong economy. Trump does not need to win a majority of voters nationwide, only a slim plurality in a few key states.
Given the crowded race on the Democratic side and the lack of a strong, unifying opponent (at the moment), it’s very possible for El Trumpo to squeak out a second improbable win.
The flaw in your questioning is the assumption that there’s no way that for a reasonable person to vote for Trump again given his horrific actions. History has shown us time and time again that people, in large numbers, are not at all rational.
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The thing Republicans have done that will most contribute to our undoing is turning the language and attitudes of bigotry towards their political opponents. On one hand, political positions are not protected in most cases, and shouldn’t be because Republicans would be the first to cry discrimination at any criticism of their policies. On the other hand, they’ve convinced their followers to treat “liberal,” “progressive” and “Democrat” as identities to be reviled on their face instead of labels for clusters of policy positions to be considered and debated. It’s an extension of the way “socialist” and “communist” (accurately applied or no) were “safe” forms of bigotry in the US for decades, and it is a dangerous equivocation, selecting the rules of policy when it suits them (which it decreasingly does) and rules of identity when it benefits them.
People who seriously wonder why black musicians are allowed to use the “n-word” and they aren’t, and feel somehow oppressed by this, get an outlet for their urge to build themselves up by belittling strangers, and get to feign ignorance at the strange coincidence that the Hispanic woman and the Muslim woman just happen to be the very worst of “liberals,” but they can’t name a single thing “liberals” stand for apart from bullshit conspiracy theories passed to them in GIF form on Facebook.
I honestly don’t know that there’s a way back from this. It wasn’t conscience that led Germans to suddenly forget their past enthusiastic Nazi sympathies. It was defeat. For a nation with the military might of the US to fall to fascism is largely unprecedented in world history, as even Rome at its zenith didn’t have the force projection potential of the modern US. The world’s strategy will have to be containment, not confrontation, which makes America’s fascist future an agonizingly slow spiral into North Korea-like isolation, increasingly reliant on depriving the public to maintain overwhelming military power, then blaming America’s “enemies” (internal and external) for the privation. We are already on that curve and have been for decades.
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Autocorrect on my computer wanted to correct Trumpist to strumpet.
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Three words: Bernie For President.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/fox-news-bernie-sanders-town-hall-viewership-numbers
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51 votes isn’t a stretch. The 2020 Senate elections lean Dem.
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Something I haven’t heard an analysis on is the effect of felon enfranchisement in Florida. With the re-enfranchisement of 1.6M Floridians, disproportionately minorities, it’s unlikely that Florida will ever go R again. Margins of victory for Republican presidential candidates in Florida have gotten narrower and narrower. Dropping in a huge new voting pool that, demographically, skews 533,000 towards Democrats probably seals the deal. That’s 29 electoral votes. That’s tied for 3rd most behind California and Texas.
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I’m cautiously optimistic but keep in mind Warren and Bernie are progressive. You can’t assume all Ds will vote with them even on reasonable measures.
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Stacking the court isn’t a policy. It’s straight-up X’s and O’s, shirts vs skins two-party politics. Even Joe Manchin will go along with it.
The key words here are “at the moment”. It’s currently April 2019. The first Democratic primaries start in February 2020, eight months from now. The actual election itself is on November 3rd 2020, a year and a half from now.
It’s still way too early to do more than guess wildly about things.
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Trump’s SCOTUS picks are forever compromised by their #MeToo associations, the Roberts court will be forever illegitimate
LOL, what? Does the author think that a single Trump voter is bothered by those associations or considers the Court “illegitimate?”
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The day the GOP was stupid enough to let Trump run for the nomination is the day that the Republican Party DIED. It no longer exists, replaced completely by the Trump Swamp Cult Party.
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I’m not sure what you mean by this reply. I feel like when I make a well intentioned post that explains my thinking, you don’t listen to my logic and just rephrase what you think.
As I previously stated, if the Democrats pack the court, further administrations can do so as well.
(And we can’t say that violates norms if we do it).
So “packing the court” is not a long term solution.
I also pointed out that the supply of experienced judges is extremely limited so after multiple court packings, you’d have inexperienced justices more likely to vote along party lines being selected.
While the courts are not perfect, many “conservative” judges are conservative in the traditional sense, and the judicial branch remains the “last man standing” with an executive branch that’s out of control and a congress that’s thoroughly bought and paid for by oligarch money. And that’s on both sides of the aisle.
So even if you think you’re ok with establishment neolibs running the court thinking that they’d eliminate gerrymandering, ditch the electoral college, and bring back democracy, you need to keep in mind that judges voting along the Democratic partly line would also make votes that would piss off happy mutuants.
“Democrat” judged would vote against the illegality of mass surveillance, voting for drone murder, vote for compelling backdoors in software, vote for “zero rating” (a harmful practice that exacerbates monopolies) and other sorts of things that a conservative (in a judicial sense) judge wouldn’t allow.
A progressive president would still be surrounded by neoliberals, and the pipeline of judges would be neoliberals.
(Neoliberals who might, say, shoot down progressive reforms as did the SC when FDR was in office)
TL;DR: Packing the court won’t have the effect you think it will.
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Exactly, it’s never-ending. Which is why I vote for secession, even though it’ll never happen. The whole “united” bit was a nice idea but it’s never been an accurate description. We should allow states to secede and form unions, let cities and towns declare independence. We’re all adults…why keep fighting this endless back-and-forth battle of wills?
Republicans have already violated multiple norms to effectively pack the current court by refusing to hold hearings on Garland, and they were willing to hold that seat open for another eight years if Clinton had won in 2016. They’re already demolishing other Senate traditions by restricting debate on administrative appointments from 30 hours to two, so they can jam through as many nakedly partisan, plainly unqualified nominees as they can after leaving so many positions intentionally vacant under Obama.
Every time Democrats have held to the fungible, non-codified traditions of an institution, Republicans have used their time in power to corrupt, erode, and eradicate them. We may be spiraling toward a Roman-style End of the Republic where the center fails to hold and all that’s left is the pursuit of power, but having one party bound and determined to uphold The Old Ways while the other party exploits loopholes and just outright ignores precedent to gain and then consolidate their grip on power is not going to do anything to slow the collapse, and unless Democrats are actually willing to put up a fight, a whole lot of people are going to get hurt along the way (and in the meantime we’re careening headlong into a climate disaster that will ultimately make all of this bickering a pointless exercise anyway, but guess who’s the biggest thing standing in the way of addressing that, too?). The institutions people keep looking toward to save us have already been corrupted.
Let’s be absolutely clear here: Republicans are the ones actively perverting our democratic institutions for their own political ends. Democrats punching back in defense of those institutions and trying to counter their perversion is not the same thing.
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Hey, I’ll have you know the GOP are vociferously against all these things and would immediately demand impeachment…
…if a Democrat did it.
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Disagreement isn’t an insult.
I’ve outlined a mechanism for avoiding the tit-for-tat.
Inexperienced, or at least young judges would be part of the point. Get some 30-something justices in there to give the move some staying power.
You’re describing the SCOTUS in 1985. That ship has sailed. Scalia, Thomas, and Gorsuch are political appointees, with no resemblance of judicial conservative in their rulings. Kavanaugh isn’t even that, he’s just a boy-man ball of hate.
First off, I don’t think you understand what “neolib” means, and if you’re painting me with that brush, you’re way off.
Second, when it comes to judicial matters “neoliberal” has very little bearing on how justices rule, since most of the questions posed to the court relate to constitutional issues, not economic. Very few of the most important SC rulings in the past century would fall under economic philosophical lines. And the exception proves the rule, so to speak, with Citizen’s United dissenters (Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor) all having been nominated by “neoliberal” presidents (and one Republican!).
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Check the state-by-state percentages of voters in presidential elections for the past several decades, and you’ll see that there are no states where the differential between D and R voters are greater than 70-30 either way. DC is the only area where that is not true (90-ish% D). There are only a handful of states where the difference is even as high as 60-40, and those states are disparate and blended geographically. Secession is a nightmare, socially, geographically, and economically, and would leave political minorities stranded in a “country” controlled by their likely oppressors.
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Not so cultured as pearls, I think.
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