In his last two years in office, Obama went well overboard in attempts to exercise executive authority. It took him six years, and the loss of both houses of Congress, to finally understand that the GOP was not interested in compromise, and his reaction was executive overreach.
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I have found myself moved by their willingness to fight their own party,
Pretty rare occurence in my experience, except for college educated women.
Politics has changed, but is it a fundamental change, or regression to the mean?
Ochs sings, “If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find,” which refers to the FBI’s search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. While searching for the three civil rights activists, Navy divers and FBI agents found the mangled bodies of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19-year-old men who had been kidnapped, beaten and tortured, and then dropped alive into the Mississippi River by Klan members a month earlier. They also found the bodies of 14-year-old Herbert Oarsby and five other African Americans who remain unidentified; none of their kidnappings had attracted attention outside their local communities
I agree with your historical analysis, but question your conclusion - What is driving the Right nuts is that things have been moving slowly but steadily since the mid-'50s towards a more liberal, tolerant and open society. We have Brown vs Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, women in positions of power, gay marriage, the Affordable Care Act and a whole lot more and it’s driven them batshit crazy.
The trick to get past this “last gasp of anger” is to be proud of what’s been accomplished, not pretend that things have crashed and burned. It has for them, which is why they’re reacting so strongly - what we have to do is treat them as the minority that they are. That means with respect, but they don’t get to overthrow democracy just because they don’t like its outcomes…
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Yes the do, and the people who promote culture wars try to pick issues that they can sell in a personal vacuum to people who have never had the necessity of confronting an issue in a personal way. Moral strictness is very easy if you don’t have skin in the game.
A couple of my friends and I are in a debate with a woman we went to high school with over 50 years ago. She isn’t a bad woman, but she has been brainwashed to believe the craziest things. We have made some progress, but she was brainwashed by the professionals running Fox News. I am afraid that a lot of people on this board would simply right her off.
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Among other things, in his last year in office President Obama gave us the Bears Ears National Monument here in Utah. I just wish he hadn’t waited so long, ignoring wilderness advocates lobbying for this. Was it overreach? IMHO it was democracy in action because our so-called representatives ignored the overwhelming majority of Utahns. Like I said, Dems ought to get stuff done and they will have our votes. Think FDR.
In his FIRST year, Trump attacked our Utah national monuments with illegal executive orders. What Obama did was perfectly legal, and the result of a public process. Trump ignored the public, and the law too (Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976).
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I’ve reached the age in life where encountering lost, aimless, misinformed souls teetering on a ledge has me thinking let them lose their balance and plunge into whatever abyss awaits them. Just how much time do any of us have to persuade a denizen of Trumpland they need to see the light and return to sanity? Especially considering your percentage of success will most assuredly be exceedingly grim.
I’ve kicked a sister to the curb. Customers. Business associates. Plagues need quarantined, walled off, avoided. Deprive them of oxygen and new sources of nutrients and they run their course and die off on their own.
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The GOP is absolutely the enemy.
If the author had said “Republican voters aren’t the enemy”, ok, we can work with that concept. But the GOP is a serious threat to democracy.
The author acts like the well known effort to nationalize politics was something that just happened and has no partisan origin.
For example, some Members of Congress have called for the next President to declare a national emergency to address the actual emergency of climate change. They would have the next President replicate the abuses of President Trump by bypassing Congress for the sake of policy expediency. While I deeply appreciate the urgency of the climate crisis,
They obviously don’t appreciate the urgency.
What is this crap?
This is some gross Third Way b.s… I’m all for joining forces with people who have or even still call themselves republicans to stop an authoritarian take over but it’s as if the author is willfully blind.
What good faith acts has the author seen elected republicans make that lead them to think they’re any better than trump? Or is it really just about how it’s packaged? It’s fine to implement or uphold racist policies just don’t be so garish and loud about it?
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My condolences.
It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
It’s nature’s way of telling you in a song
It’s nature’s way of receiving you
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you
It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
It’s nature’s way of telling you, summer breeze
It’s nature’s way of telling you, dying trees
It’s nature’s way of receiving you
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you
It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
It’s nature’s way, it’s nature’s way
It’s nature’s way, it’s nature’s way
It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
It’s nature’s way of telling you in a song, oh oh oh
It’s nature’s way of receiving you
(It’s nature’s way)
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you
(It’s nature’s way)
It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
Something’s wrong, something’s wrong
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I think you are right. The GOP is the enemy, but you are wrong in equating the GOP with the poor powerless souls who are the victims of rightwing propaganda. The GOP politicians and the billionaires who fund the GOP and hate media know exactly what they are doing. They are using very powerful propaganda to influence people to act against their own best interests. They are the enemy.
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If a circus master trains a bunch of monkeys to bite you to death you don’t pity the poor monkeys as they’re dragging you down onto the sawdust and biting away at your arms and legs. You damned well better figure out a way to vanquish the monkeys before moving on to the person that trained them.
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No. The Right as it is now needs to be disenfranchised and rendered irrelevant to politics. And fuck “respect”; enough of the goddamned olive branches to people who want others to suffer. Tolerance to intolerance has proven to be useless. If they are going to act like this they forfeit any chance to play victim
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Exactly.
Civil rights weren’t won because people compromised.
I believe in making space for people to be wrong & have discussion but that doesn’t mean we should compromise values like the belief that people should be treated fairly with dignity.
More people agree with left of center/right politics. We have the numbers. I don’t believe in writing anyone off but we have limited resources and it seems counterproductive to fight for “civility” & “compromise” in the face of actual evil, as people are dying over Republican policy.
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And that is what I am trying to do. I take it your solution relies on dehumanizing them which allows you to take inhuman action against them. Personally I don’t think we have the luxury of dehumanizing and treating them as less than human without dehumanizing ourselves.
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Oh no, I’m fully cognizant they’re execrable, irredeemable humans.
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Good to hear. I thought you said they were monkeys.
One of the problems with being a Christian is I am not allowed to believe anyone is irredeemable.
Good catch. This author has so much Republican framing it’s hard to believe their other line about not knowingly engaging with republicans until recently. I’m a full blown leftist and I’ve never not knowingly engaged with republicans throughout my life.
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Analogies, by their nature, are but flawed, imprecise attempts at making a subject relatable.
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Right. As the author stated, there are, of course, Republicans that believe in democracy - something we know intellectually, but probably forget from time to time. However, you’d be hard-pressed to find any such Republican that also holds national office, or at least any that do so while admitting publicly to their support of democracy (at which point you’d be forgiven for questioning the depth of their supposed support).
Indeed, such Republicans, elected or otherwise, seem to be quite rare in the wild. And even when you do find one who might claim to to be such - say a never trumper - you often see them, as an example, touting the same old trickle down economic principles that helped get us here in the first place.
No, I’d argue that it seems like the Republican party has gone beyond the point of being saved. And those Republicans who claim to actually believe in democracy would be more effective if they left the party and perhaps focused on forming a new conservative party, one based in reality, which means a party that (and this is a far-from exhaustive list): agrees that taxes need to be increased on the wealthy (and then argues for a lower increase than progressives do), that money needs to be kept out of politics (and perhaps differs with progressives on how this should be done), that climate change is an existential crisis (and then perhaps disagrees on some of the particulars of confronting it), and that strongly affirms that everyone has a right to vote (no room for disagreement here, not if they’re truly small-d democrats).
Actually, I’d be really really surprised to find any high-level Republican of any sort that agrees with all of the above. Instead, I suppose I can take it on faith that there are are a few Republican voters out there who believe in democracy (though, upon finding one, I’d be suspicious that they are maybe confused as to what party their views actually align with).
All of that aside, the author makes a good point that Democrats, upon their much-to-be-hoped for re-acquisition of the Senate and WH, need to pay attention to strengthening our democracy and not fall prey to taking any of the same shortcuts the GOP has been taking. That’s going to be hard given the GOP will be fighting tooth and nail against all of the truly vital things that need to be done.
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I think you missed where I explicitly avoided doing that when I said I thought we can work with the concept that Republican voters are not the enemy.
I don’t have a problem with poor whites who voted for trump. I find it really unfortunate that they’re held up as the stereotype of the trump voter and often mocked by liberals for lack of education (& rural signifiers). It’s the middle class suburbanite trump voters and the centrists and billionaires who want nothing to change that get my disdain. The vulnerable right winger will probably change, become pretty well inoculated against scapegoating once their basic needs are met.
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