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Everyone knows this, but most Republicans are still going to hold their noses and vote for the guy. It's unreal.
It goes to show how republicans are cowards. They don't want the wrath of MAGAs so they nominate him hoping he'd just lose and go away.
They also know that with no Trump, they lose all the crazies, and the crazies are the only thing even keeping them in the game right now. So they pandered to them, and drove away all the vaguely normal Ron Swanson types who might have voted for them in the dim and distant past.
They need to go away, and regroup, and come back with something that isn't... this.
They know how to vote.
The fascists can always wait, they only have to win once.
I'm subjected to a few hours of Fox News/right-wing YouTube a week, and it's certainly felt like the vibe has shifted. Reading between the lines with some of the talking heads, it sounds like they'd rather Trump lost and the GOP made gains in both the House and the Senate.
They can still run the party status quo ante that way for at least a little while. If Democrats get through voting rights legislation, the GOP will be forced to come up with an actual party platform beyond "loot the treasury."
It's also what the dems are playing into by chasing the center and the voters who are on the fence to swing the top of the ticket, but don't support downticket candidates. If the dems want anything more than the white house, they need to excite their base. Trump is trying to scare her away from being a progressive by calling her "Comrade Kamala".
The Reaganites are eager to get back to the business of cutting corporate taxes and welfare and the highly profitable war on peace. They don't wanna deal with Chumps drama anymore.
Glass cannon build.
I’ve been saying since the primaries that the best plausible scenario was for Trump to get the nomination, then botch the election and drag the weirdos and loyalists in his party down with him.
Trump has spent years purging anyone that was moderate, even slightly principled, or just willing to put the good of the country ahead of his gigantic ego. Not to mention the way they treat the party’s warchest as their personal piggy bank, and it’s rank and file staff and volunteers as disposable. He’s made a party that’s blindly loyal to him, and which is a huge threat to the country, but which is ultimately far less effective as a party.
A more normal candidate would likely be dominating the race given public opinion on the current administration and the economy, to say nothing of the obscene amount of money being thrown around. But instead, Trump looks like he will cause the Republicans to underperform for the fourth time in a row.
If Trump loses dramatically enough and drags his people down with him, the party will likely collapse in on itself as opposing factions get locked in a power struggle. Plenty of big donors just want lower taxes and to not have to deal with regulations, and they will probably want to shift the party away from the MAGA weirdness and back towards something normal that isn’t going to alienate voters on all sides of the aisle. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of the more prominent anti-trump Republicans suddenly got a big boost in support, and a lot of Trump’s parasites suddenly find themselves getting driven out.
Best scenario for who?
I think the best scenario for everyone is that Trump loses, Dems win Congress control back, and Harris absolutely fucking nails this job and gets another term.
The best scenario is that the Republicans get destroyed so hard they stop being a party, and leftists take over, thus making democrats the right wing of mainstream politics while remaining approximately where they are on policy.
The best scenario is that the Republicans get destroyed so hard they stop being a party, and leftists take over,
I think it's already been proven that D will fight against leftists way harder than they fight against R. I'll never trust a Republican as long as I live after what the past 8 years have shown me lurks beneath the more polite moderate bigotry and racism they mostly adhered to in the past, but as much as I love the idea that somehow our politics moves left after this, the plethora of cries for Kamala to move to the "center" (or praising her for doing so) has me very skeptical and disheartened that any of the events of recent history or the imminent death knell of Trumpism is going to do anything better than slow our rightward march.
Democrats treat anyone at the Bernie level and beyond like they are some kind of albatross. I don't see that changing.
As with so many of my opinions about the presumed Harris presidency I want to be wrong, but all I see is Dems getting more conservative and R trying (probably successfully) to claim some "Well thank goodness we finally got rid of those jokers" high ground after Trump is gone.
MAGA assholes overtook that party. It's no longer recognized as "Republican". Those assholes should be discharged with absolute hatred.
Fiscal conservatives haven't existed since before Reagan, so that's long dead.
Best scenario probably results in the dissolution of the Republican party, and its key players in jail, dead, or otherwise removed from the political landscape.
But the roots of the problems there- the xenophobia, the tribalism, the (deeply ironic considering some of their slogans) supremacy of feelings over facts - that stuff isn't likely to go away. So even if the Republican party collapsed, there's still plenty of people ready to believe outsiders are bad, climate change isn't real, etc etc.
I don't really know how to fix that. Probably spend 100 years investing in education for all, removing lead and other toxins from the environment, and smashing apart anything that consolidates too much power (eg: Facebook, Sinclair media)
Probably spend 100 years investing in education for all, removing lead and other toxins from the environment, and smashing apart anything that consolidates too much power (eg: Facebook, Sinclair media)
Well, neither party is going to do those things, so we're pretty much fucked. (And that's not a both sides argument, it's just reality.)
At least there's been some anti trust movement lately! The Democratic party is much better about that than the Republican
The Democratic party is much better about that than the Republican
They are better in every way honestly, but increasingly I'm concluding still not good enough.
Your scenario and mine would go hand in hand, we're just focusing on different things.
My point was that the Republican party would benefit from a significant change in direction back towards something more normal. And the country as a whole would be better off as well, because there aren't many upsides to teetering on the edge of a fascist dictatorship, and anything that moves us away from the precipice is a good thing.
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Meatspin.com
Oh fuck the link LMFAO rotflmao nooooo I clicked on it to see if it actually worked. I meatspinned myself hahahahhahahah
They will be better off, but not just if Trump loses, they have to de-MAGA the whole party, then they'll be in good shape.
they have to de-MAGA the whole party, then they’ll be in good shape.
Hopefully not because conservatism itself is a morally and intellectually bankrupt position. So I'd be much happier if they burn themselves to the ground, and/or conservatism becomes unpalatable to the vast majority.
I think it's a generational thing. As boomers die off their horrible values are passed on less and less. The few people in younger generations who got absorbed in racist, fascist and misogynist populism may die clinging to those values, but it will be harder to spread to the next generation in a post Trump loss climate. (Hopefully post Putin loss climate by then too!)
There is room for a true conservative party and a true liberal party, right now we have neither.
What does conservative mean that's not "there must be in groups for the law to protect but not bind, and outgroups for the law to bind but not protect "?
Conservative ideas like "we should just let people pour mercury into the river " and "it's cool to have kids work in factories " and "you entered into the contract willingly so you can't sue Disney for killing your wife" and "how about women can't vote " and "we don't need a fire department we'll just oh shit the whole town burned down? To shreds, you say?" are all bad ideas, and that's about the tier of thought I expect from conservatives.
You are confusing conservatism with fascism, and I don't blame you or anyone else for not being able to tell the difference at this point.
It's important to first understand that conservatism is a descriptor for a concept rather than a grouping of people. Yes, I know you can categorize certain people as "conservatives," but doing that has the pitfall we are seeing now, where they start describing themselves as such and then proceed to degrade ideologically over time until their beliefs and actions do not even resemble the original meaning, all the while clinging to this tribalistic, meaningless word that they choose to identify as.
Conservatism is supposed to be about conserving values that, ideally, you or your parents fought to establish in the first place. Things like "regulation that prevents mercury from being legally dumped in rivers," and "you have to be of at least a set minimum age for employers to be allowed to hire you" are laws that prior generations bled for to bring to reality. These are, by definition, conservative values because someone else established them before your time. We want to conserve them, because the benefits they bring us are still very relevant to us today. They are worth holding onto.
The second thing to understand is that conservatism, and its converse liberalism, are both relative terms. "Conservatives" do not actually have an objective hard set of views or dogma, otherwise they'd still be clawing at the dirt in caves while praying to the sun, and "liberals" do not have some sort of objective hard set of opposing views either, otherwise they'd be conservative by definition.
A healthy society utilizes both of these concepts in delicate balance--even down to the individual person holding viewpoints rooted in both preserving some values, while simultaneously working to change or enhance others. Again, conservatism and liberalism shouldn't be seen as belonging to opposing groups of people, but as concepts that we all use every day without even thinking about it.
Conservatism is a neutral stance. It represents stagnation, which isn't always bad if used to protect the right things. Liberalism is the progressive stance. It moves us forward and helps us understand what is good and what is better.
However, conservatism can also (and often does) start moving backwards instead. That is called regression, and is exactly what you were referring to with that list of regressive ideas. Most of those were defeated long ago by progressives of the time, many of whom paid dearly to make sure that their kids wouldn't have to suffer the same way they did. Spitting on their graves by rolling back their hard-fought victories is not "conservative" at this point, only regressive, and it should start being correctly identified and called out as such before it's too late to stop it from regressing further into the worst case scenario.
I appreciate the lengthy and well written response. But I don't really agree.
When the current state of things is bad, pushing to conserve it is also bad.
Sometimes things can seem good from the perspective of the hypothetical conservative, but actually be pretty bad from a more zoomed out one. For example, someone might want to "conserve" their suburban lifestyle. They might not realize the racism that went into establishing it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Law is a pretty good book.) Worse, they might support the racism. "Our parents fought to keep people of life ancestry together. That's just how the world is. Those people should live somewhere else.". There are countless other examples. "My dad employed children in his factory and my golly I want to do the same." Something being a tradition doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Conservatives do not have a lock on keeping good laws. Progressives do not want to change things for the sake of change. No progressive is going to look at a law that says you have to be 18 to work dangerous machinery and be like, "This is a good law, but we can't leave it as-is because then we'd be a conservative." Progressives would also support a law against dumping mercury in the river, because the underlying values ("don't poison people for profit", i guess?) are progressive values.
I think the underlying value system of conservatism is hierarchy. The world must have hierarchy. You see this with like monarchy and nobility, you see this with the rich being treated differently than the poor, and you see this with racism. Other ideas like "Oh, we should preserve our traditions" are mostly paint jobs on top of "There must be outgroups to bind and ingroups to protect".
I think that's a highly, highly idealized idea of what conservatism means, and as someone in my fifties I don't think that has been seen in US politics since my parents were children (Edit: and in thinking about this comment after leaving it, I'm not even sure who I'm imagining from that time who fits the bill - Eisenhower maybe? Gotta love this from him.) - and we all know the social ills we've had to stamp out since then. Those sort of "principled" conservatives may have been "better" people than the trumpists, but were still not compatible with any modern non-regressive attitudes regarding LGBTQ+ rights, modern views of women's rights or the degree of agency that modern women have, nor modern understanding of racism and bigotry within individuals and systemically throughout our institutions.
In the same way that communism has enough widely known examples of how badly it can go that most people in the US run from it politically* (I acknowledge people disagree with that assessment, and that it's oversimplified, but I'm not here for that argument - it's how most people feel, deserved or not) there is or should be no one with a modern understanding of conservatism who doesn't likewise run from it. How can a conservative party exist in the US which doesn't get overrun by maga-types? What other party would they join? Even the Democrats are too conservative for many (including me), but the magas aren't going to run there for sure.
*I frankly think that a hundred years from now the US will be held up as an example of the perils of rampant, corrupt, unchecked capitalism in a way that is viewed equally abhorrently as folks from my generation and earlier viewed the USSR and other "communist" nation examples. The air quotes are a nod to those who argue that none of those commonly touted examples of the ills of communism were truly communist nations, though again I'm not here for that argument.
I saw a clip of an ex-republican voter saying the republican party is like a mattress with bedbugs. You can't save it by spraying with insecticide, you have to take it out and burn it and buy a new mattress. I thought that was a pretty good analogy, but the bedbugs/magas will still be out there and there's a huge number of them.