I am pressed for time, but here is my thesis statement: As much as we can enjoy watching the Republicans collide with each other and try to deal with a President who doesn’t even honor the deals he makes with them, let alone us, this is all window dressing. The GOP will unify in plenty of time for 2018, let alone 2020, whether they’re carrying a banner that says Trump, McConnell, or worst of all, He Who Should Be Obscure by Now.
But, for a number of reasons, most notably lack of political engagement, we don’t necessarily benefit from their troubles. We still have gobs of work to do restoring our own image. Long story short, people still hate all politicians.
That’s it. Happy Friday, and open this thread if you like.
Please share widely!
Trump benefits from a lot of structural forces beyond his control. The GOP is a more ideologically cohesive and radicalized party than we are, it’s base more loyal and more consistent at turning out, and its donors more transactional. The business community from the North Shore Chamber of Commerce to the Koch Brothers will be happy this time around with Trump so long as Wall Street profits show no sign of stopping. The average upper middle class suburban Republican will never vote against their class, even if Trump is guache and appalling. As long as their 401ks and mortgage interest deductions are intact, these massive tax cuts are a gift to his real base of support in the business community.
Bannon is correct that so long as both sides of the culture war keep the volume at 11, liberals are going to be at a disadvantage since it keeps us from having the kitchen table and corruption argument where we should be eating Trumps lunch. This is because gerrymandered districts, the Senate, and the Electoral College overvalue rural voters at the expense of urban ones.
Incumbency also is a huge advantage for fundraising and using the perks of the office to stay in power. Short of economic crashes, Watergate level corruption scandals, or sustained foreign policy failures, more incumbents have been re-elected than defeated throughout our modern history. Close to 70%, including the last three.
Our party can use opposition to Trump to triage Senate loses and maybe retake the House or give Ryan a far less workable minority. A second Trump term is still the likelier outcome in my opinion.
Great comment. Here are some highlights I’d like to put alongside each other:
I’m with you 100%. Both on the analysis and the prescription.
I think the biggest difference is that their activists really view these issues as make or break for America. If they don’t make the calls, knock on doors, etc. America as we know it is lost. We don’t have the same fire in the belly.
A great example is the Coffee Party as a response to the Tea Party. Or when Obama said the fever would break if he got re-elected. Or Hillary saying we would unite rather than divide. Or Jon Stewart saying “if only we could have a reasonable argument we’d win”. Nope. Pat was right that it’s a war for Americas soul-and until we get that mindset we will continue to lose. It’s a war. Politics is all about dividing the electorate and trying to win the bigger pie. We don’t do that if we keep bringing knifes to gun fights or Coffee to tea party’s.
“It’s a fight for America’s soul”.
It is, in fact, a Jihad. It is a Jihad that actually DID begin on the eleventh of September of 2001, more than fifteen years ago. It was no accident that AQ and OBL targeted the center of the world’s financial community, at the heart of downtown New York city.
THAT was the singular moment when we were forced to confront who we are, who we want to be, what we care about, what we do not care about, and so on.
On that moment, each American who claimed to be religious was forced to confront what their religious faith said about everything around us. It was a defining moment in the same way that December 7, 1941 was a defining moment for an earlier generation.
Sadly, unlike that earlier generation, America did NOT rise to the occasion. We, in fact, demonstrated that we were (and are) every bit as hollow, ignorant, racist, sexist, xenophobic, mercenary, and short-sighted as AQ, OBL, and the 9/11 attackers claimed. We wallowed in shallow, trite sentimentalism rather than engaging with the actual situation in the actual real world. We locked up people with Muslim-sounding names rather than face what our bill of rights actually MEANS.
Too many of our public figures spent too much time congratulating the “heroes who ran up the stairs of the burning buildings” and not nearly enough time saying “what do we need to differently now”.
George W. Bush was NOT Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We reacted to the 9/11 bombings with knee-jerk, empty hostility. We absolutely shredded our civil liberties. We told ourselves and the world lies about Muslims, about Americans, and about what makes us “great”. We bombed Afghanistan into the stone age, ignoring that it already WAS in the stone age.
We launched the despicable “War on terror”, and enshrined the moral and intellectual vapidity of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and the entire turn-of-the-century GOP cabal into law and culture.
Then we invaded Iraq — creating today’s “refugee crisis”, ISIS, and the rise of Iran.
As a nation and as individuals, we are losing the Jihad. We have been at war ever since. We no longer even do lip service to core values like justice, peace, freedom (except to rape, exploit, pillage, grope, and of course collect high-capacity weapons and ammunition).
We are in a class war, yes. I have to ask, though, why it is so that so many of us cared so little about that class war when it was only the black, or only Hispanics, or only women who were being plundered. The class war is part of our Jihad. We must fight it. We must also recognize how many are rightfully ahead of us in line to collect the spoils of whatever victories we might gain in the class war.
Those are last will be first, and those who are first will be last. As we wage our class war, do we really BELIEVE those, or are they just more platitudes that we nod our heads about on Sunday morning and leave behind as we walk out the church door?
It is long past time that we — especially those of us who claim to be Jewish or Christian — pay attention to 1 Kings 19:11-12:
It is long past time we stopped looking for salvation in the winds of war, the earthquakes of demagoguery, and the fires of our passion.
It is time we stopped to pay attention to the still small voice within each of us. We are in a fight for our very soul.
We ARE in a Jihad. Not of our choosing, not initiated by us, and a Jihad nevertheless.
Though I think it should be remembered that GWB was pretty good about not making our reaction to 9/11 a war against Islam.
Lol…He started 2 (two!) endless and pointless wars in the islamic world…which at one point i believe he described as a “crusade”.
But not because they were Muslim nations (and I’ll only concede one of them was pointless). Crusade was ill-advised given this history, but I’m referring to his attitude toward domestic Islamophobia.
@not a war against Islam: I think you’re remembering a different GWB from me.
I’m pretty clearly remembering his insisting that it wasn’t and admonishing those who would take it as such.
@admonishing: No doubt. And with about as much credibility as those who insisted, while protesters against Jim Crow were being beaten and hauled away, that “this is not about race”.
It was GWB who coined the phrase “detainees” and hauled Muslims off the street for months and sometimes years at a time without attorneys, without charges, and often without cause. ALWAYS Muslims.
Not a war against Islam? Tell it to Brandon Mayfield.
I don’t like a lot of the ways he conducted the war on terror any more than you do. Yes, a lot of the suspects, detainees, etc. were Muslims, but I still say he never demonstrated anything close the bigotry against a whole faith that we’ve seen from the likes of his current successor.
This is the wackiest post I have ever read here. Tom, please get help.
This just in. I’m not sure I agree with the recommendation, but the data is bad.
The beat goes on. CNN:
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At some point, Americans have to be asked whom they do want governing since I don’t think most of them are anarchists.