Mike 03
Mike 03's JournalExcellent. Last night I heard someone make a similar point about CRT.
Instead of just shrugging it off as a fabrication, Terry McAuliffe could have used that as an opportunity to decode it as racism and directly defend African Americans. (i.e., "Do you folks see what CRT is a euphemism for and what is actually under attack here...?" )
That is a great lesson that we cannot just dismiss the culture wars but we need to explain what they really are and dismantle them at the core, and use them as an opportunity to fight for the minority interest under attack.
"If they see you fighting for them, they will fight for you (at the voting booth)" is the point this person was making. Black Americans in WV didn't' feel like McAuliffe used that opportunity to really fight for them.
Good insight.
This is why the often-cited fact that "we are the majority" (which I hear every day on Progressive radio) isn't as comforting today as it used to be. Wasn't only 15% (?) of Italy Fascist when Mussolini took over? It doesn't take that many people to overthrow a system of government.
Yeah, I was torn by what she did last night.
I was happy that she confronted the media talking points, but she knows better (we all do or at least should).
It used to be no big deal if a state switched Republican and Dem governors once in a while (California did that a lot) because there were certain acceptable parameters you could expect them to govern within. It used to be a governor was restricted to some degree by conventions, norms and standards.
Right now, though, its self-evident that the consequences of such a change are entirely more severe. There's a playbook that Republican governors share, follow and test with the Courts, that is intentionally designed to rapidly de-democractize the state. You roll back any new laws that make it easier to vote then impose new laws that make it more difficult to vote. He'll probably try to restrict women's reproductive freedoms. If he can do so, I guess he'll relax gun restrictions. Since it seems like he has the legislature, he can begin to sabotage the election boards and districts so that it's increasingly unlikely Democrats will win. He's already expressed his desire to remake education, which is really a shame because Virginia had come so far compared to what it was years ago. What used to be ebb and flow is actually veering towards generational changes where red states share playbooks on how to unmake democracy. Expect to see more culture wars, of course. Another test I expect him to fail is the next COVID variant spike, which will also have dire consequences. It will be interesting to see which governors he emulates.
I'm kind of disappointed, reading the comments, how even people here just swallowed that up without much critical thinking or taking into account the vast difference between fifteen years ago and today.
Wasn't the idea based on two options:
The certified votes of states in dispute (battleground states) would not be counted, throwing the vote to the Congress, with each state getting one vote and the number of Trump states outnumbering the Dem states by one, leading to a Trump 'victory'. The idea is that their validity would be contested on Jan 6 in a formal setting.
And then:
Democrats justifiably raise hell, and the states in dispute are told to "go back to the drawing board" and, based on illegitimate claims of election fraud, come up with an alternate slate of electors, also throwing the election to Trump.
It's insanely evil and maybe ridiculous, but I believe that was the thinking.
I think you're dead right. Reading Ezra Klein's book "Why We're Polarized"
radically altered my views about how we can win more elections.
I wish we could get rid of this stereotype of Democratic families sitting around the dinner table carefully going through proposed legislation, discussing how each provision in a bill might save us a few dollars a month. I no longer believe policy is what gets us out to the polls in droves.
Like you are saying, we are emotional beings just like Republicans. We like to be motivated by aspirational ideas and visionary goals. And just like Republicans, we are sometimes more reliably brought out to vote by anger or even rage than by agreement with our own side.
I listened to fourteen hours of coverage and Joy Reid was the ONLY
person I heard raise this as a causative factor.
One of the political strategists said the quiet part out loud when he said, to paraphrase, "We always want the problem to be something simple so we can fix it, so we hope it's a messaging issue."
That really sums it up. They don't want the problem to be the ongoing effort to overthrow our form of government because that's really hard to solve. They also don't want it to be the 400+ voter suppression laws at the state level, because that's also really hard to solve.
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