Month: November 2020

Well, this Thanksgiving week, I was thankful that Viceroy Trump, who ran for re-election as president mainly to keep himself out of jail, is less likely to get help from the courts than ever, because believe it or not, Republican judges didn’t all buy the legal argument of “Biden votes aren’t legal, so just hand me the election, cause I’m Donald Trump, and I always get my way and I’ve never been told otherwise.” In a general overview, as of November 23, “at least” 38 cases have been filed nationwide and “at least” 26 have been denied, dismissed, settled or withdrawn, including the Pennsylvania case Trump v. Philadelphia Board of Elections, in which the plaintiffs argued that Republican observers were not given access to ballot tabulation, and after Trump’s attorney had to admit that Republicans had a “non-zero” number of vote observers, the judge asked them, “I’m sorry, then, what’s your problem?” And then over the weekend we had the hilarious news that after Team Trump paid $3 million for a recount in Wisconsin, it actually ended up giving Joe Biden more votes.

At this point, the attempt to “stop the steal” by performing an actual steal is done. Not just done: Well done with ketchup.

That of course doesn’t stop scaredy-cat liberals and centrists from worrying that the next fascist can look at what Trump did and make a more serious effort to take over. It’s not an invalid fear in itself. After all, in the short term, Trump is doing everything he can to make his sheep not only doubt the results of this election, but elections in general, turning them against anything that isn’t his brand of cult of personality. And more broadly, the level of support that Republicans got downballot and the fact that Trump did get more votes than last time indicates a real audience for a political movement that is not what we once called “conservative” but is actually reactionary.

But I’ve already gone over why Trump in particular and the Republicans in general are not a good comparison to the Nazis. “Given how many Americans either actively support “alt-right” racism or just don’t care, the real danger of Trump’s election was there was a chance that Trump could have done just as well as Hitler – if in fact he had done just as well as Hitler. Most Germans didn’t really care about (or hate) Jews as much as they cared about getting their jobs and their country’s prestige back. The comparison of the Trump Administration to the Nazi regime would hold up better if the Leader of the movement had even Adolf Hitler’s level of emotional maturity and common sense. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

I’ve often thought that it’s an insult to call Trump a Nazi. It’s an insult to the Nazis. At least Hitler could run an economic recovery for MORE than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody.

Fascism trades on a reputation for competence. This is of course exaggerated. Anybody who wants to bust the illusion of Nazi German efficiency just has to read William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But again, they lasted six years before starting World War II. Mussolini actually lasted a lot longer than that, and Franco ended up dying of old age. The perception is that the fascists just get what they want by bypassing all the petty rituals of democratic government and debate, which is good if you’re a “traditionalist” or other reactionary who perceives a culture war that’s going against you. This disdain for liberalism and power-over-principle mindset is shared by Leninists, even if they have the radically opposite background and goals.

Maybe if there was somebody who had the more appealing features of Trumpism – being an “outsider” who actually WAS going to “drain the swamp”, control immigration and get our trade balances and domestic industry back in order – I might back that person. I have less confidence that that could happen though. Just as most of Trump’s “pro-life” cult are less concerned about prenatal and child care and actually saving innocent life than they are in using abortion as a club to demonstrate their self-righteousness, most of Trump’s appeal is based not on reason and policy, but emotion. Trump has such a huge bond with his audience because they’re the same needy, entitled, emotional personality type that he is. They knew damn well that Mexico wasn’t gonna pay for a wall; they just wanted to HEAR it. So the problem with Trumpism in practice is the same reason that Trumpism in theory isn’t going to work: Whatever genuine substance there might be in Trump’s stated agenda from a right-wing standpoint, the political success of Trump was not based on substance, but on appeal to dysfunction.

This is why despite my qualms about the Democrats and establishment Republicans, I never got on the Trump train, cause I’m Las Vegas, and he’s Atlantic City, and I’ve watched this guy be an obnoxious failure for literally decades.

If this is fascism, I like to call it “whiny fascism.”

The idea that Trump could have “used his powers for Good, not Evil” or that he was put in office to do anything other than be Trump, reminds me of what is probably the most hilarious single panel in a superhero comic ever. It’s when Spider-Man is in the Savage Land and has to confront Sauron, a mad scientist who’s used his genetic wizardry to turn himself into a humanoid pterodactyl. And he explains his mad scheme to turn the rest of the human race into dinosaurs like himself, and when Spider-Man realizes that this technology could work, he says “Wow, that’s amazing! But with your science, you could do something constructive! You could cure CANCER!” And Sauron says, “But I don’t WANT to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”

Adam Serwer said that for the Trump Organization, “the cruelty is the point.” It would be just as accurate to say that the failure is the point. Trump won because he bonded with a certain spectrum of people who, despite their individual privilege or lack thereof, still cast themselves as put-upon victims because they belong to a cultural establishment that is currently unfashionable. And they wanted Trump to do what he’s done his entire life: fail upward, making life that much worse for everyone else, yet continue to get away with it. It was their revenge on a system that wouldn’t let them get away with individual failures. The fact that they are among the people being hurt by Trump’s incompetence doesn’t matter, because now their identity fusion is so complete that as long as Trump is winning, whatever he does is okay. However, Trump is no longer winning, and without immunity from prosecution, he may no longer be able to get away with his shit.

We can already see where the Republicans’ apparently invincible coalition is showing cracks. Trump, in his way, is determined to make sure that if he doesn’t have the White House, no one else will get to enjoy anything – including Republicans. His campaign to make The Church of Jesus Trump Latter-day Suckers doubt the validity of the election in the long-term is intended to undermine Joe Biden’s authority as President, but in the short term it really serves to undermine those voters’ faith in the election process at exactly the point that they need to get people out to the polls in Georgia to re-elect their two Republican Senators in a runoff, because if they both lose, the Democrats get an even 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris will break ties. Given Republican obstructionism, Democrats probably still won’t get to actually do much in the Senate, but that technical majority would mean that Democrats control important committees, and it means that Mitch McConnell would no longer be Majority Leader. And it would just be the SADDEST thing in the world to see Mitch McConnell cry.

And that’s all because a lot of people, not just Trump, can’t seem to understand that an election that did so well for Republicans down ballot did so badly for Trump. Trump himself can’t seem to understand it. Granted, there’s a truly AMAZING scope of stuff that he can’t understand, but it is confusing. There was a really good article about the Michigan recounts from Tim Alberta in Politico last week. When Trump called Michigan state Republican leaders to the White House, “As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.

“I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”

But as I said last time, it’s actually fairly simple once it’s explained: The presidential election, even if it isn’t a straight national popularity poll, is the only federal election where everyone in the country votes in the same race. All the other races are statewide for Senate or per Congressional district. So even if the presidential votes are determined state-by-state, all the winning candidate has to do is get enough high-elector states. Last time, Hillary Clinton didn’t get those “firewall” states that Trump took, and Biden took them back. This is perfectly consistent with Trump winning Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, where other Republicans also won.

This goes along with the simple point that it was indeed possible for conservative voters to vote for their favorite Congresscritter down ticket but either vote Biden or not vote for president at all. Given the huge increase in votes for both Democrat and Republican presidential tickets, this split-ticket voting isn’t the only factor in the result, but it was a factor. In a local Pennsylvania news article several voters were interviewed and told reporters that it came down to trusting their local Congressman and not trusting Trump. “Jim Hagan, 68, of Chalfont, Bucks County, has a simple answer. His distaste for Trump did not extend to others in the GOP. ‘Although I voted for Mr. Trump in the previous election, I was very dissatisfied with his performance,” he said. “I think he completely dropped the ball on the COVID thing.’

“Hagan is a longtime Republican. He’s retired now, but his old job in the chemical industry allowed him to do a lot of international travel. Lately, he said, he has mourned what he sees as a loss of U.S. standing on the world stage. This cycle, Hagan said he voted for Biden and one other Democrat: Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who kept his seat.

“I like the way he does the job,” he said of Shapiro. “He’s very professional at it. He doesn’t seem to play partisan politics in the job, and I thought he was very proactive in doing the right thing for the people of Pennsylvania.” The mixed results were also reflective of the fact that in this election, Pennsylvania no longer uses the ‘straight-ticket’ voting option where a person can just choose the slate of candidates offered by their party all the way down. One political analyst said “returns in at least some counties showed higher turnout for the presidential race than down-ballot ones, which means some voters must have voted for president, but kept the rest of their ballot blank.”

Which indicates that on some scale the opposite problem may occur in some voting areas, where people are more enthused to turn out for the presidential contest than the other races. And that’s part of the problem Trump is creating for the cult of personality that used to be a mainstream political party. In the Politico article, Tim Alberta said: “(as mailed and early votes came in), two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.” He cites the case of Ronna McDaniel, nee‘ Romney, who was an experienced and respected figure in Michigan politics, but “(that) changed after Trump’s 2016 victory. Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable. Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.”

This has of course extended to the post-election period, where McDaniel told confidants she had no reason to suspect voter fraud but nevertheless felt obliged to enforce the Trump dogma: “If this sounds illogical, McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job. It’s bad enough that despite an enormous investment of time and resources in Michigan, McDaniel was unable to deliver her home state for the president. If that might prove survivable, what would end McDaniel’s bid instantaneously is abandoning the flailing president in the final, desperate moments of his reelection campaign. No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.”

The article describes how one of the two Republicans on the Michigan election certification board voted with Democrats (while his Republican colleague abstained) and received actionable threats that required the involvement of the Michigan State Police. The former Republican state party head who recommended him to the board is now out of favor in the next race for the chairmanship because he had recommended the guy who refused to go along with Trump’s scheme. But this need to subordinate facts to political loyalty is not working, or not working with enough people, in the Great Lakes states Trump needed to turn the result, and it is actively working against the Republican Party in Georgia. “Driven by Trump’s insistence that Georgia’s elections are indelibly rife with fraud, conspiratorial MAGA figures are calling for a boycott of the two Senate runoff races, slated for Jan. 5, that will determine which party controls the upper chamber. Their reason: The two GOP candidates, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are not only insufficiently pro-Trump, they may be complicit in Georgia’s electoral fraud. It doesn’t matter that both candidates are essentially lock-step with Trump, or that there is no evidence of links to electoral malfeasance. On Twitter and its less-restrictive alternative Parler, Trump’s more hardline followers have linked the duo to the president’s favorite — and untrue — voter-fraud theories. Hashtags like #CrookedPerdue and #CrookedKelly are flying around. The two lawmakers’ Parler accounts are brimming with posts accusing them of being secret “liberal DemoRats.”

Because it doesn’t matter how conservative the two Senators are or how conservative the Secretary of State is or how conservative Governor Brian Kemp is, the Trumpnik definition of “conservative” is “I agree with everything Donald Trump says.” If he says the moon is made of green cheese, your only choice is to say it’s American or Swiss. And then of course he’s going to say it’s Monterey Jack, and you’ll be cast into the Abyss. You can’t keep up even if you wanted to. And I think a huge part of why the institutional Party is pushing back on Trump’s need to deny reality is that they’re getting sick of trying to keep up. At the same time, a large section of the Party IS still trying to do so, because they don’t see any other options.

This gets to a broader point that I don’t think the Left gets and that the Right is not willing to acknowledge. For any political movement to really get anywhere and really have popular support in this country, people have to imagine it as synonymous with mainstream opinion. The Right was a lot more successful in this regard under Reagan and even the Bushes than it is under Trump. In 1984, Reagan didn’t need to cheat or make the courts step in to hand him the Electoral College. He won 49 states the old-fashioned way. Even after Reagan-Bush, Bill Clinton felt obliged to say, “the era of Big Government is over.” If the Right is so obsessed with the Left dictating the terms of the “culture war”, and so obsessed with letting politicians pick their voters instead of the other way around, it is a tacit admission that they are losing the majority. The Republican Party of 1980 and 2000 may have been propped up by Religious Right reactionaries, but neither they nor the Beltway politicians would have come begging to Trump. Because they wouldn’t have needed to. Now they do.

Put directly, if Republicans and their ideas were still as popular as they were under Reagan or even under GW Bush, they wouldn’t need Trump. They had more mainstream support when they could still appeal to both the financial class and blue collar folks, but for several years they’ve been playing this game where they had to appeal to the most fire-breathing fanatics to win primaries then tack to moderates and the investor class to win general elections, and by the time the Tea Party turned into MAGA redcaps, they’d managed to catch on. In the meantime they’d managed to alienate most people who weren’t either redcaps or in the financial class, and the only reason this “Big Tent” still holds together is that Donald Trump is the only Republican who can seriously pose as both an elitist and a populist.

When the redcaps and the more sensible people had the same goals, everything was great. For them, at least. But now that the fortunes of elections have diverged for Donald Trump and his party as a whole, the Republican rank and file are now being asked to choose between the two. It seems as though Trump and his family are trying to head off the potential issue, with Trump announcing that he’s going to be campaigning in Georgia for the Senators, but it’s still causing damage. And the fact that he let things get to this point just confirms that he sees the Party as something that serves his interests and not vice versa. Which may be another reason some Republicans are no longer that supportive.

It gets back to that old Vox website question of whether Trump is a fascist. And while at the time, and even after a 2020 update, the expert consensus was that while Trump is an actual danger to democracy, he can’t be called a fascist because fascism is a collectivist movement and Trump is too much of an individualist to create such a movement. That may seem like little distinction given how many individuals are willing to subsume themselves in Trump’s cult of personality. But to the extent that Mussolini and other Fascists did explain their philosophy, it is an explicitly collectivist movement which foremost holds that one must have loyalty to something greater than oneself, namely the State. Trump clearly doesn’t have loyalty to his own party, let alone America. Reagan may have given us the 11^th Commandment, but the First Commandment of the Trumpnik is “I am the LORD thy Trump, thou shalt have no principles above me.”

Howling emotionalism, a perpetual sense of victimhood and a need to pick on the weak may be prerequisites of fascism, but they are not traits exclusive to fascism, and they are certainly not the only defining traits, especially if you want your fascist paradise to actually succeed. The other thing the movement needs, again, is actual popular support. Republicans used to have that, but now that they don’t, the only way the sane people can have a national platform is to attach to Trump’s cult of personality. But that means becoming the Party of Trump, and it’s pretty clear that a party that consists ONLY of Trump and his priorities isn’t going to get anywhere with the rest of the country, especially when so many people have clearly decided they can have the Party without Trump.

All of which means that Trump, or even “Trumpism”, to the extent that such a thing exists, is an unlikely vehicle for the success of American Fascism. For one thing, the fact that events have shown fascists what to do and what not to do in pushing authoritarianism now means that more liberal people also know what methods could be used to undermine democracy, and they will now have the opportunity to be on guard.

But that assumes they will take advantage of that knowledge. Ay, there’s the rub.

For all our talk about how America has a written constitution, as opposed to an “unwritten constitution” of precedents like Britain, the real danger that Trump represents wasn’t his approach to the election, because everyone knew he was gonna stamp his little feet and whine if he didn’t get his way. The danger was how much of the apparently sacred system of government was really just a set of “norms” and when approached by a thug with no norms or sense of the sacred, all our written laws are useless. Because the “norm” is that nobody enforces them. We have never dared to have a political apparatchik defy a congressional subpoena – until now. We have never had a president since Nixon refuse to release his tax returns – until now. We have never had a president refuse to put his business assets in trust – until now. We have never had a president flout the laws against nepotism that were put in place after JFK made Bobby Kennedy Attorney General, because the fact that the laws existed meant no president wanted to take the political risk for flouting them. But now we know there is no political risk.

Even before Trump, the “guardrails of democracy”, such as the Congress and the media, have been far too deferential to the president and far too indulgent of the idea that the president can do whatever he wants because he’s the president. And if my liberal friends would tell me that Obama relied on executive orders precisely because of Republican obstructionism, that just reveals the problem. This government, like the Roman Republic it was based on, has no counter to a squabbling and dysfunctional Senate other than to give the executive officer more and more power. This is a nation of men, not laws.

That is the real problem. That always HAS been the real problem.

The fact that the closest thing we’ve had to a fascist leader in American history is a whiny little child just stands to reason, because the President of the United States, Trump notwithstanding, is by far the most spoiled head of government in the developed world. We let the president do more things than any other head of government would do. And while Donald Trump may not actually like to work, and according to some sources was shocked that he did get elected, once he did become president, that status fused to his identity the same way the redcaps fused to their hero, because if the premise of the modern presidency is “the president can do whatever he wants, because he’s the president”, this status became the most objective rationale for Trump’s existing desire to believe “Donald Trump can do anything he wants, because he’s Donald Trump.”

And in terms of that old cliche, “government should be run like a business”, well, most major companies these days are run as corporations, which means they are collective entities, not the private concern of one individual, and are technically responsible to shareholders. Trump has never run a corporation. All of his businesses are family outfits. So to speak. If one were to apply the analogy of a corporation, if Trump is the CEO, he technically has a Board (Congress) and shareholders (voters), but they don’t hold him accountable. Of course, ultimately “shareholders” did hold him accountable, but only after the Republican Senate directly abnegated its responsibility to do so under impeachment. But that’s what happens when half of the Board members think the CEO is their boss and not an officer subject to their review.

Needless to say, you do not want a government that caters to the mindset of a Donald Trump and is run the way Donald Trump runs his businesses, but that is exactly what we have. It’s just that nobody noticed it was a problem before because up until now the President was not to the government what a malignant tumor is to the body, only without the brains.

Of course, given that Democrats themselves are loath to give up the premise of an unaccountable president when it’s THEIR guy in charge, the idea of limiting the office may seem a bit much. But then, when impeachment happened, a lot of them discovered that even such laws as there are have no provision for enforcement. That needs to change. We need to make sure that Congress has real subpoena power, meaning the legal authority to enforce it. We need to lift this bullshit unwritten privilege that the FBI isn’t allowed to indict a sitting president, as if the most powerful person in the world with access to the most sensitive information should be the only American who’s not under surveillance. We need to STOP SENDING THE MILITARY TO WARS WITHOUT A DECLARATION OF WAR. In other words, we need the rest of the government to do its job and not let the President do everything.

And given that Democrats will be the Senate minority or only technically a majority, I don’t count on them getting such reforms through the Senate in the next few years. Unless of course, Texas finally goes blue along with Georgia and that whole “Southern Strategy” the Republican Party has been based on for the last fifty years just crumbles.

It ought to be a really simple lesson, but apparently it isn’t. So briefly: If you don’t want the President to be a fascist dictator, then don’t let him have that level of power, even when he’s on your team. And if you don’t want an all-powerful government destroying your freedom and rights, then don’t let the government become all-powerful.

Some of you may already be familiar with the term “Pyrrhic victory,” but in case you’re not: In the days of Antiquity, when the Roman Republic was starting to take over the Italian peninsula, the Italian city of Tarentum (modern Taranto) recruited Pyrrhus, a king of western Greece, to help them resist the Romans. In the Pyrrhic War (280-275 BC) Pyrrhus’ skills as a general led him to victories over the Romans, but the losses were costly. And while his mercenaries were in limited supply, the Romans had a vastly greater manpower reserve. Eventually, at the Battle of Asculum, Pyrrhus realized that. When one of his people told him they had won the day, Pyrrhus looked at the battlefield and said words to the effect of “another such victory and we are lost.”

Well, here we are.

We now have probably the third-worst possible result of Election 2020: The worst, of course, would be a clear Trump victory that would also secure the Senate. Although no one had expected Democrats to lose the House, at least until this week. Either way, Trump and Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell would have gotten to do whatever they wanted and Nancy Pelosi would be just as powerless to stop them as she is now.

The second worst result would have been if the Democrats’ famous “blue wave” had taken the Senate and expanded the House lead but the Electoral College still secured the presidency for Trump. Then Trump would still retain his toxic influence over the government and the culture, but then Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would be able to hem him in and Mitch wouldn’t be able to protect him. Not only that, Trump would still get the blame for every rotten thing in the government.

What we have coming up is the third worst possible result where the “blue wave” smacked up against the reality of Republican base support, just as it did in 2018 Senate races, but Joe Biden still gets the Electoral College. He’s still got to deal with McConnell, and he’s not going to get much if anything done through the Senate. And all the while, in his next two years, Republicans will be doing their damndest to keep this country bass-ackward and then blame Biden as the figurehead of the Democrats, and quite likely take back the House in the 2022 midterms as a result. And that will set up a humongous effort for Republicans to take back the whole thing in 2024.

And while Trump’s toxic influence would still be removed from institutional authority, unless he’s immediately indicted and effectively prosecuted by the State of New York, he will run again and quite likely win. And if he can’t, you know Donald Trump Jr. is waiting in the wings to wave the bloody shirt for dear old Dad. And I’ve seen Don. He’s not senile, he’s slightly less idiotic than his Dad, and he’s actually a decent public speaker.

You know why I say Democrats are the people who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse? This is why.

Let me first go over the good news: The Biden plan DID work.

It was expected that with the coronavirus, it would be harder to vote in person (almost as if Trump let the virus run wild during an election year so it’d be harder to vote against him), and it was expected that as a result, Democrats would have to concentrate on mail-in voting while Trump implicitly and explicitly told his people to vote in person, even though many affluent Republicans (like Trump himself) had normally voted by mail for convenience. This set up a “red mirage” that caused Election Night to show a huge lead for Trump in critical states like Pennsylvania. But since mail-in voting was a thing even before coronavirus, Trump couldn’t declare that mail-in ballots were “cheating” and therefore couldn’t stop them from coming in. And much to his apparent surprise, most of them weren’t for Trump. And that’s how Biden won Pennsylvania, created run-offs in Georgia, and maintained his lead in Arizona and Nevada.

In short, Trump played himself.

The plan to rely on changing demographics to pull away red states ultimately did not work in Florida, Texas or North Carolina. But it is sorta working in Georgia, and it definitely worked in Arizona.

This doesn’t change the fact that it has not yet worked for Florida, Texas and North Carolina, and it may not work as the Democrats expect it to, partially because a lot of brown and black people “of color” do not assume themselves to be Democrats just because, while a lot of white people DO assume themselves to be Republicans just because.

A libertarian (and black) Facebook friend turned me on to this article by Umair Haque: “America’s Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State“. Example quote: “White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way. “Voting conservative” after all doesn’t mean nearly the same thing in Europe or Canada. There, even conservative parties agree on the basics — people should have healthcare, education, retirement, that the only point of the public purse isn’t endless war and death machines. Conservatism in America is off the charts, and so “voting” that way carries a very different meaning. It means that White Americans are the rich world’s most regressive, ignorant, and self-destructive political bloc — by such a long way that they might as well not be in the rich world at all.

“I don’t mean any of that as an insult, by the way. I mean it objectively, literally, factually. You’d think that by now White Americans would have figured out that voting against their own standards of living ever rising just because it meant black and brown people would have public goods too was…imbecilic. Especially watching Europe and Canada rise and prosper. They’ve had more than half a century to figure that out. But they still haven’t. What else do you call the inability to learn from the world and history but…ignorance?”

Now, Haque is a brilliant writer, but I often find him not only anti-American but overly despairing. But again, he is a brilliant writer. And as much as I wanted to disagree with the premise, the harder and harder it was to refute. How can I disagree with it when we’ve got almost a quarter million dead already from Trump Virus because he personally has told so many people that a $3 mask is possessed by evil spirits?

How can I disagree with it when at least three times in the last two weeks of the campaign, Trump bussed in supporters to watch him talk in front of Air Force One and then didn’t pay for the buses to take them back to their cars, literally leaving them out in the cold? Those people turned around AND VOTED FOR TRUMP!

These are the people who went out after the election to parrot the line “STOP THE COUNT” in Arizona, where Trump needed to count all the votes to still have a chance!

It’s not just a case of not wanting black and brown people to have public goods. Maybe it was once, but it’s gotten worse than that. These people have internalized their own bass-ackwardness to the point that they want to inflict it on the rest of the country, if not the world. Like I said in the first campaign: “When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”

The fact that some Americans are trapped in an existential hellhole because of deliberate political strategies, some of which they voted for, isn’t the point anymore. Because now that’s their identity. And identity is everything.

It doesn’t matter that both Biden and Obama are both a lot closer to Eisenhower or even Nixon Republicans than anybody in the Republican Party today, all “conservatives” care about is stopping the guy who they’re told is a socialist.

“What does ‘socialist’ mean to you?”
“Someone who wants to control our economy! Someone who wants to control our schools! Someone who wants to take our guns! Someone who praises Communist dictators! Someone who only wants THEIR party controlling things! Someone who says that anybody who disagrees with him ought to be jailed or beaten up!”

“Oh, so like Trump?”

“Yes! Wh- NO!”

“Socialism” isn’t the point here. Geez Louise, the first retirement system in Germany was created by Bismarck. The point is that you’re acting on tribalism and negative partisanship, and your favorite demagogue knows which buttons to push to make you act like good little robots, and you end up endorsing all the things you say you oppose, because all he had to do was switch the labels.

This is illustrated by a pretty good article by Alex Pareene in The New Republic, where it’s pointed out that in some respects it doesn’t really matter if Joe Biden is too left-wing for the country or not left-wing enough for “progressives.” “Huge percentages of voters support government-sponsored health care, more state intervention in the economy, and more government support for clean energy. We have, of course, just learned some important lessons about the limitations of public opinion polling, but these majorities are too large to be completely dismissed as mere polling errors. That Democrats cannot translate robust support for their central policies into consistent electoral victories suggests that something is amiss in the democratic accountability feedback loop. It is of course true that on many of these issues, like health care, the Democratic Party firmly rejected the left’s popular proposals in favor of a confusing and diluted alternative. That is what Democrats nearly always do. Perhaps that is what the electorate punishes them for. But that same electorate also regularly elects Republicans, who are very vocally opposed to all of those fine, popular ideas.”

The author goes on: “Faced with this dilemma, some commentators have insisted that Democrats just need to shut up about everything else in their great big platform and talk solely of dollars and cents. There is a liberal version of this argument, articulated by people like Mark Lilla: that Democrats should abandon their commitment to “identity” issues. And there is a left-wing version of this argument (caricatured by its opponents as “class reductionism”): that leftist politicians should focus on material concerns to the exclusion of all else.

“But what if the argument itself is moot? What if it barely matters what Democrats “talk about” or “campaign on”? What if this is less a problem of political messaging or positioning than of political education, information access, and ubiquitous propaganda? In other words, if the Democrats actively try to abandon “identity issues,” will anyone in this political environment actually stop associating them with “identity issues”? If they ran a strictly class-focused campaign, how many marginal voters would hear their messaging and believe it?

“It seems possible, in other words, that voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.

“This is not uncharted territory. Writing, in 1979, about the United Kingdom’s “swing to the Right,” the sociologist Stuart Hall argued that it could be explained (in part) by the fact that, once in power, social democratic parties became parties of the state, rather than parties of labor, as the state intervened to put the “national interest” above the “class struggle,” disciplining labor on behalf of the markets.

“In the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives,” he wrote, “the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful, bureaucratic imposition. And this ‘experience’ is not misguided since, in its effective operations with respect to the popular classes, the state is less and less present as a welfare institution and more and more present as the state of ‘state monopoly capital.’”

“The Democratic Party, unlike most of its left-of-center brethren in the developed world, has never been a true labor party, but it seems plausible that many voters view it as a party representing a state that never helps them, even as they, personally, practically beg for a large and powerful state that would step in to improve their lives.

“The question Democrats now face is whether saying they will empower the state to improve people’s lives will actually work on anyone.”

This goes to a point that I’ve frequently made. One of the reasons that Republicans can succeed with an apparently counterintuitive strategy to not broaden their base is that this means they only have to appeal to a certain group of people, whereas the Democrats have to simultaneously be the party of woke socialists and the default NotRepublican party for everybody else, including a lot of us who might be Republican if they hadn’t gone insane. In that environment, branding, negative partisanship and team identity are everything. And just as left-wing “parties of labor” eventually become “parties of the state” when they become successful, the formerly Hamiltonian Republican Party switched to a Jeffersonian, anti-Big Government stance with Democratic hegemony, and in their crusade against the other party, they’ve become against any government initiative at all, even as they cling to the perks of government all the more desperately.

And yet it works on precisely the biggest victims of government neglect, precisely because the party that identifies with government is in turn identified with all the areas in which Big Government has failed “flyover country”, the inner cities and everywhere else. And in turn, the party that is conspicuously anti-government and is very transparent about seizing power only to raid the community piggy bank still gets support because at this point, the victims of government expect to get screwed, they just want THEIR team to be the ones screwing them.

It’s a lot like Russia, which is of course one of Trumpworld’s main cultural role models.

Which is where you have the mainstream Democrats like Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D.-Va) saying “don’t say socialism ever again” and socialist Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying “I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss” and – bear with me here – they’re BOTH right.

Remember my axiom: “It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.”

AOC also said in her New York Times interview: “I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this (loss of House races) internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

“I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns. … And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.”

The reporter asked her, “So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy? ” Ocasio-Cortez responded: “These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

“If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

“Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”

The moderate centrists are right in saying that if the Democrats are tied to socialism, they’re doomed. The socialists like AOC are right in that ‘socialism’ isn’t even the fucking point. Her core question: “These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?”
Because Democrats, for some silly reason, still focus on policies, and Republicans focus on branding. And if there’s one thing that Trump is genuinely good at, it’s branding.
We used to think that nobody in America could go along with fascist sympathizers, “white nationalists” and the rest of the human fungi, but look at us now. All they had to do was have the right branding. All that took was the same skill set it took to convince people that a six-time bankrupt career swindler was a financial and administrative genius who “tells it like it is” cause he played a billionaire on NBC.

Whereas a lot of “radical socialist” ideas like a $15 minimum wage have support in a lot of states, including Florida, where Democrats lost the presidential election. Just as “radical” ideas like gay marriage have widespread support now, and (for the moment) legal status, just as interracial marriage used to be some abominable Communist plot to corrupt our pure Christian bloodlines. Mind, those things are still horrible Communist plots where some people are concerned, but they’re no longer literally unthinkable.

The alternative-to-being-right doesn’t actually CALL itself fascist, of course. They wrap themselves in “traditional values”, “making America great again” and all the other stuff that no one should object to. The Left still hasn’t figured out how to make what they want synonymous with what the country as a whole wants, in the way that Reagan or even Trump did.

And I think a large part of that is that the left spectrum, especially the institutionalists who still run the Democratic Party, have no better definition of “socialism” than the libertarians have of “libertarianism.”

And just as (L)ibertarians have not done enough to dispel the public perception of libertarianism as “Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine” and the “conservatives” are actually promoting a perception of their politics as making everyone else suffer for the sake of their greed and sadism, leftists haven’t figured out that (especially in this duopoly system where all politics has to be filtered through mainstream parties), they can’t sell “socialism” as though it meant the same thing to the rest of the country that it seems to mean to them. I can go on Facebook until I’m figuratively blue in the face and tell people that libertarianism is not a conservative plot to turn the country into serfs and kill Roe vs. Wade so that women will be forced to give birth so that Charles Koch can go to the maternity wards and eat the babies, but when a lot of the people I’m debating are invested in promoting that assertion, I’m going uphill. But those people don’t understand that the rest of the country has come to think of “socialism” as synonymous with Leninism, and when they try to define it as a social democratic movement (which incidentally is NOT socialism, in that leftist parties in the EU don’t intend to destroy the capitalist system that they need to finance their public funding), they’re going uphill versus the rest of the country. It certainly doesn’t help that a lot of these guys (like Bernie Sanders) DO praise Communist dictators and DO want to take our guns. Not to mention that, again, Democrats seem at odds themselves as to what they really mean by these terms. And if you haven’t defined your terms, the enemy will define them for you.

Now, am I saying that branding is all there is? That Americans, even ones with brains, don’t engage with political issues beyond the surface and only make political decisions in shorthand? That you can get some of them to eagerly devour wet camel shit if you’ve convinced them that that is consistent with their existing programming?

Well, I’M not saying that, I’m saying that’s what the election results are telling me. How else could Trump and his party have gotten as many votes as they did when people knew that a Trump victory would mean rewarding the government that allowed coronavirus to spread, and would continue a policy that would mean no progress and no national policy on the virus, causing continued death and the continued retardation of our economic recovery as a direct result?

Democrats from FDR on did take ideas that their opponents called radical socialism and they did make them part of mainstream American thinking. It’s not impossible. It’s just not possible with the current mindset. What that party needs is someone who can take supposedly radical ideas that are in fact being entertained by voters and make them acceptable to the country at large.

Which is why in retrospect Joe Biden, the old-school guy who is accommodating the New Left (or being used by it, depending on your viewpoint) really was the best candidate the Democrats could’ve had this year. I think he is to the Democrats what Tom Brady is to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Way past his prime, and his team really doesn’t have what it takes to get where they ultimately want to go, but they’re still a lot better off with him than they were four years ago.

The scare among the Trumpnik cult is that Biden is just a tool or a stalking horse for the radicals and that they needed Republicans to act as a counter to that, blanking out the point that Trump, the alleged outsider, was the stalking horse for radical anti-democrats and reactionaries to sell something that could not be sold otherwise. There was a Markos Moulitsas/Daily Kos article on Monday: “There’s nothing “shy” about these people or their support for Trump, yet pollsters aren’t catching them. They turn out for Trump, but they didn’t turn out for Republicans in 2017, 2018, or 2019. Remember, last year Democrats picked up governorships in the blood-red states of Louisiana and Kentucky. … (Yet Republicans stormed back this year) because Trump was at the top of the ballot. So again, who are these people who only vote for Trump, otherwise ignore the Republican Party (despite Trump’s pleading), and don’t talk to pollsters? The hidden deplorables aren’t Republican. They aren’t even conservative. They’re apolitical, otherwise ignoring politics, because their lives legitimately suck.”

Which is exactly what I’m saying. The “Trump voter” isn’t necessarily a Republican voter. The reason polls turned out so well for Democrats in 2018 and the Kentucky election and turned out so badly this time was that the Trump voters didn’t turn out then and did turn out this time. Even when they have brains, they don’t engage with issues except on the surface, and even if they are in the abstract against corruption and two-party shenanigans and for ‘progressive’ ideas, they end up endorsing the most corrupt and regressive candidate cause they’ve bought into his spiel.

By the same token, a lot of the left spectrum who “shoulda” turned out for Hillary Clinton last time and didn’t, did turn out this time for Biden, just as they turned out for Obama, because each of these people is a symbol of what their parties represent, and people preferred Trump to the Democrat last time (despite her superior record and policies) because she represented something negative, and people voted in Biden over Trump this time, because Trump’s negatives increased and Biden represented more positives than negatives.

Remember, however much liberals whine about how un-democratic the Electoral College is, it IS the only federal election in which every voter in the country has a say. Every other election race is per House district, or per state. It’s just that the Electoral College filters results state-by-state instead of as a direct national popularity poll. So as you look state-by-state, a lot of voters decided they preferred their Republican Senator or didn’t want their Democratic Representative. But when you look at the Electoral College, when you combine the 100 Electors assigned for the Senate to all the votes for House districts, you get a national consensus where Joe Biden, like Trump in 2016, got at least 306 Electors because the high-Elector states went for Biden, including Arizona and Georgia, which could have gone either way.

It’s almost as if the public at large can’t stand either party and didn’t want either one of them to win, even knowing that one of them was going to win the White House.

So: Woke socialism is NOT popular. Being anti-Trump just for the sake of being anti-Trump is not popular. But neither is Trump ultimately that popular. Yet politics aside, we need to protect the Constitution and human rights. And there does seem to be some grass-roots sentiment for reducing government control over our personal choices, including the right to marry.

Hey- anybody know of a non-leftist political party that believes in liberty and human rights?