Am I supposed to be listening to the dude speak, or listen to the incredibly loud music?
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The idea that Biden will swerve right to do the Republicans’ bidding is an enduring brainbug on the left, I see. If you will actually look at Biden’s history as a politician, instead of reading scare stories about how he’s a “worthless centrist”, you’ll see he is not going to do anything like that. You may well be disappointed with the real Joe Biden, and think he’s not progressive enough. But if you’re criticizing the man, then actually do so, instead of attacking a strawman version of him.
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I don’t have to read scare stories about Biden, because I got to vote against him each of the five times he ran for the nomination.
At least when he could be bothered to stay in the race until my primary date.
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Sounds like it’s going to be a pretty big bummer for you if Biden wins, huh? Sorry for your loss.
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I just wish that the establishment Dems were as capable and willing to make vicious and effective ads like this as the Lincoln Project is. If Biden wins, I have no doubt that these militarist moneyCons will show up to collect on the debt they think they’re owed. Sadly, I think he’ll pay them back at least in part – even if he goes back to Third Way business as usual without their asking they’ll consider that reward enough.
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Honestly I think it’s far better for the Democrats to leave the attacks to third parties. It gives them a lot of cover in the narrative; they’re free to focus on taking the high road and welcoming people in. But also – divisive politics are part of the problem. Wishing the Democrats success from running attack ads is kind of counter to that goal. The real hope is that once they’re in power, they enact measures that help to change the environment that’s producing this divisiveness.
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I’d argue that the problem is much less one of divisiveness and much more one of a strain of white nationalism and a literal madman have taken hold of one of the major political parties and are currently in control of most of the levers of government. I think these people need to be utterly defeated and discredited politically more than they need to be understood or bargained with.
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The environment that produced this divisiveness predates 2016 by almost a quarter century. The GOP has been dealing in utter and near-proud bad faith since Gingrich became speaker. Il Douche is just the logical outcome of that kind of party culture, even if some of them are upset that he’s saying things out loud that endanger their racist and classist racket.
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Country Clubs have nothing to offer if everybody is trash talking out loud.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about how history will consider Trump if (god willing) he is defeated in November, and I wonder how much weight will be given to the logical through-line running from things like Gingrich, Palin, McConnell, and a bunch of other GOP data points of extreme bad faith, and how much they’ll think of him as being something sui generis that isn’t just a product of his time. Something different that changed our course in a way that we couldn’t have anticipated.
It just seems he’s so perfectly wrong for this point in history; all his superpowers seem to line up perfectly with the worst and most self-destructive aspects of our country, with our likely decline as a superpower over the next century being put in fast-forward. It just a perfect storm of shit–we were uniquely vulnerable to his brand of demagoguery right now, and his brand of demagoguery is especially damaging right now.
Or he might win another term and then we’ll know for sure, I guess.
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Sincere question: what “measures” do you think the Democratic Party could enact that would help end the divisiveness? I can think of several good-faith efforts at bipartisanship they attempted In recent years, including modeling the ACA around the proposal that was first put forth by the GOP and the Heritage Foundation, and nominating centrist Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court vacancy. But the GOP has made it astoundingly clear that they just don’t want to play. If the source of divisiveness is basically all coming from one side, what can be done?
When Obama was in office I remember seeing a number of opinion pieces saying how he needed to work harder to reach across the aisle and forge a better working relationship with people like Mitch McConnell, without explaining how that could be done beyond what he had already been doing. At some point you just need to give up and move on until the other side has a change of heart. Walloping them with a landslide victory might help speed that change of heart along, but I’m not sure what else might do it.
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If the Lincoln Project stops making the ads then hopefully the Dems will step up to fill the void. But right now, Republicans are far more likely to listen to someone from their own party telling them Trump is bad than they are to listen to Democrats telling them Trump is bad.
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Kind of annoying with the Mozart playing rather loudly in the background.
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Yes. I had a longer response where I ballparked it at longer than that but I just didn’t want to get into the whole thing.
Yes, and the joy of this is that there are a handful of Republican loyalists (at least they were loyal, I’m guessing they would be again) who are finally, belatedly, coming to this same realization. The whole idea is larger than I really want to get into right now but I don’t think it’s fair to reduce people to a single political axis. I am sure that I will remain in disagreement with the LP folks about many things, but their enthusiasm for some kind of basically decent and functional government seems genuine, and I am genuinely in with them in that fight.
Please don’t stop pointing out their problematic pasts, etc. etc. Let’s fight those fights later.
IMO dealing with it at the political level is attacking the symptom, not the cause. I can’t say for sure what would work, this is where I’d defer to folks who’ve studied it more than I have, but I would consider enacting legislation creating a duty of care in the media.
That’s especially tricky in this era of internet “what even qualifies as media anyway”, but it needs to be possible to hold people who are chronically repeating misleading half-truths and outright lies to account.
Electoral reform may also help; I don’t know what the balance of the evidence is about that. I’ve seen other thoughts.
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Requiring compromise only from a single side, like the GOP always does of the Democrats and the Democrats always require of the left wing, is what has dragged the Overton window over to the point that we don’t even debate about a literal torture prison that’s been operating in the open since 2001.
I’ve enjoyed most of the LP videos shown here so far. The tone has been pretty spot on. But the tone in these was off. Caught between snark and piss-take. For my money he’s not actually a very good story-teller/reader, either. His emphasis was off in a few places and the whole thing would have been better had it just been done straight.
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I know the pace of progress is frustrating, but what you’re complaining about is a radical oversimplification. There have been a lot of setbacks in the last quarter century. There have also been a lot of advances. Some of those advances have occurred as the result of concerted efforts by progressives; others have occurred as the result of concerted efforts by the centrist, “third way” wing of the Democratic party that you’re eager to toss under the bus; still others have occurred as the result of actions by–GASP–Republicans.
We would not have marriage equality in the United States now if not for the justices nominated by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama–and one nominated by Ronald Reagan. We would not have coverage for preexisting conditions if not for the efforts of the Obama/Biden administration and at least one justice nominated by George W. Bush. Bush was a warmonger and a terrible president, but he also understood the importance of humanitarian assistance and helped avert humanitarian disaster in Haiti and fought to reduce the spread of HIV in Africa. Bill Clinton was certainly a perjurer, likely a rapist, and willing to sell out minorities in a doomed effort at bipartisanship with a Gingrich-led bad-faith House majority. He’s also the reason we even have occasion to be concerned about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health, and he pushed hard for universal healthcare.
There will always, ALWAYS be issues on which we could be doing better (or doing anything at all). Just as that’s no excuse to stop trying to do better on those issues, it’s no excuse to pretend that all things are the same or worse than they were in 2001.
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Yeah, I lived through the heyday of Third Way politics. Hell, I even voted for it in the form of Clinton I. And that’s why I see it for what it is: an excuse to compromise on ideals you don’t really have in service to policies that your base doesn’t want in order to appeal to people who won’t vote for you.
Yes, that’s how you end up with DADT, which you could argue was the first step towards open serving in the military (I don’t but I’ll concede it for now). But it’s also how you end up with the 1994 Crime Bill, which expanded the carceral state that people are marching in the streets against right now.
Constant pre-emptive compromise with a side that constantly shows its bad faith is a good way to show your constituency that you are unserious and unworthy of support, and it’s showing that it’s also a great way to Weimar your way right out of a democracy.
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I stopped watching the first one midway for this reason. I wonder though if it was intentional, for the audience? He seemed to be laboring hard for the mis-cadences.
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“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” —a notorious philosopher who somehow outlasted fascism.
