Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

I had this realization this election cycle, when I was also feeling frustrated with the Democratic party and how terrible it seems to have gotten -- I thought back to my college years, and remembered who the campus democrats were, and how annoying and corny they seemed. Student government dorks, etc. And suddenly I thought "those people are the people moving into power positions in the democratic party now, them and their counterparts on other campuses -- why? Because they bothered to get involved. And I didn't." Like, you can complain all you want about the democratic party, but the democratic party is just made up of the people who involve themselves in it (although obviously money plays a huge role and that's a different issue). And I've never involved myself in it before. So I feel like I need to start involving myself, rather than just complaining about its direction.

Also, iatee OTMFM -- it's one thing to have a long-term moonshot vision, it's another to completely avoid thinking strategically in doing so.

The Democratic Party is still ruled by politics, even at the local level, no matter how corny the people involved seem. A friend of mine in college graduated and got involved in Democratic campaigning, and worked on the successful Hoboken mayor's campaign. She seemed corny as fuck on the outside, total student government dork, but if you knew her she was a complete sociopath. Not malicious or anything, but still a total sociopath.

On the national level, just look the Clinton/Sanders dynamic.

was there a coherent thought somewhere in that post that I missed?

Yeah, it's called having actual experience in what you're talking about.

I have more direct examples, but I don't want talk about that. It's not magical fairyland where you can just waltz into an established power structure with tons of money and ruthlessly ambitious people involved.

if we just run candidates who inspire people to show up and send out counter-programming flyers against the Official Approved Party Candidates, the party will be ours

no it won't - the DNC will just have Sarah Silverman call us ridiculous again for not towing the party line

we need a long-term strategic plan for dealing with the threat of sarah silverman being mean to us

Right, not saying you can just walk into your local dem office and determine the direction of the DNC tomorrow, but you can only start in that direction by being involved.

Also stuff like this does happen:

http://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/09/sanders-coalition-takes-over-brevard-democratic-leadership/95105028/

And suddenly I thought "those people are the people moving into power positions in the democratic party now, them and their counterparts on other campuses -- why? Because they bothered to get involved. And I didn't." Like, you can complain all you want about the democratic party, but the democratic party is just made up of the people who involve themselves in it (although obviously money plays a huge role and that's a different issue). And I've never involved myself in it before. So I feel like I need to start involving myself, rather than just complaining about its direction.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Thursday, December 22, 2016 8:47 AM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Suuuuuper OTMFM.

larry, I've noticed that your imagination has a tendency to run wild when you start making assumptions about the perspectives and motives of other people. Since no one itt suggested in any way that taking over a major political party was going to be a cakewalk, you probably can stop yelling at the strawmen that did.

the defeatist attitude is functionally identical to "normalizing" Trump and the GOP

Yes. The end result is precisely the same. I totally get the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the dread and despair but throwing your hands up with a 'whattayagonnado?' is kinda morally indefensible, imo.

I can't take part in partisan politics but I could work the phones for something like NPVIC, which btw is supported by a majority of Americans regardless of affiliation.

NPVIC doesn't disempower GOP voters any more than they already are. It does the opposite for single-party states because all of a sudden their issues start to matter where before they couldn't hold a candle to New Hampshire. It makes every vote count. Except the territories, but that's a separate piece of legislation I want to work on at some point.

But don't listen to me, go read the Hertzberg piece Alfred linked to.

Even if all you can muster up is the self-control to not add your voice to the defeatism crusade, that's a plus.

or we just do a better job campaigning in swing states. the electoral college is pretty annoying but overhauling it doesn't actually guarantee us anything in the future. even if the dems found themselves in a spot where they could make this happen via controlling 270 state electoral votes, that plan only works until exactly one of those states gets a republican government, which does actually happen once in a while. real change is only going to happen once there's broad consensus, not via some loophole. and there's no *worse* time to be looking for broad consensus on the subject, because republicans who probably didn't have a strong opinion on the electoral college a year ago now believe that it is a very good and necessary thing.

― iatee

whoof. this is dangerously short-sighed, imo.

the democratic party has spent the last 25 years pissing on tip o'neill's grave, which is exceptionally rude given that i don't think he's even been dead that long, and alienating major sections of their base, not on a policy level but on the strategic and tactical levels.

if the pattern of the last 50 years hold, can the democrats take the white house again? yeah, it's probable that if not in four years, then in eight the democrats can win even if the best they can come up with is somebody like tim kaine. but this is ignoring the bigger picture.

the republicans are the "break shit" party. the democrats try to be the "fix shit" party. it is much, much easier to break shit than it is to fix shit, and correspondingly political momentum in my lifetime has strongly favored the republicans.

president obama spent the last eight years trying to build a broad consensus, and we see what it accomplished. you can't build a policy consensus, a compromise, between "break shit" and "fix shit".

i would argue that building a broad and stable policy consensus among the electorate is much harder than you make it out to be, is in fact probably impossible, because a significant portion of the american electorate simply does not give a fuck about anything policy-related.

furthermore, the notion that we can just retake the white house in four or eight years and start building a consensus again is highly questionable, given that the republican long-term strategy for their party is to ensure, by any means necessary, unquestioned and unbroken rule for their party. they are rigging the game in their favor, and they don't really give a shit how obvious they make the rigging. look at north carolina.

now, if building bridges still sells, sure, keep trying to sell it, but the republican party right now is a pretty overtly fascist institution, the american equivalent of the greek "golden dawn", and my conclusion is that implementing any long-term positive change at all requires fascism to be crushed.

The Democratic Party is still ruled by politics, even at the local level, no matter how corny the people involved seem.

― larry appleton

political party infested with politicians shocker

Yeah, no shit, you're saying the same exact thing I am. That was my point in response to man alive.

Rush I think you're totally misunderstanding iatee's argument.

The point is that doing slightly better campaigning in swing states is MUCH easier than trying to get the nation united around getting rid of the electoral college. I mean I feel like you are purposefully ignoring what it would take, legislatively, to either get rid of the electoral college entirely or get enough states to pass NPVIC (the latter of which would be not only difficult to achieve but easily undone).

the "broad consensus" he's referring to = broad consensus on the electoral college

i will agree that one of our biggest failures is the inability to get liberals to the polls or in anyway involved on a large scale between POTUS elections (duh).

my very conservative aunt used to make this really shitty - and frankly racist - comment about the dirty libruls' superior ability to push their agenda because they were a bunch of lazy bums living off the government who had all the time in the world to organize, demonstrate, strike, etc (*this was the 80s so i really don't even know what the actual fuck she was talking about), and how all the hardworking jesus-loving republicans had to actually go to work and keep the ship afloat.

kinda wondering is we're seeing the actual real-life inverse of her paranoid fever dream: a bunch of retired olds and angry un- and underemployed red staters, many who are heavily or completely subsidized by the govt, with nothing much to do but go to tea parties, politicized "bible studies", noe-confederate shindigs, threaten their congress-idiots and badger everyone in their real life and online communities into making America White Again.

NPVIC doesn't disempower GOP voters any more than they already are. It does the opposite for single-party states because all of a sudden their issues start to matter where before they couldn't hold a candle to New Hampshire. It makes every vote count. Except the territories, but that's a separate piece of legislation I want to work on at some point.

if you are a wyoming republican voter your marginal vote might not have any effect on the election, but your state still gets disproportionate say in the end result. the votes might be baked in but they're still helping to determine the winner, so it's deceiving to say they don't count - they count more. wyoming makes up 0.18% of the american population and gets ~.5% of the electoral votes.

and in a popular vote world, wyoming voter issues obviously don't get any attention because they're 0.18% of the population.

(and yes i appreciate that in a sense i'm trading my aunt's racism for some degree of classism/ cultural bigotry. but it doesn't change what i see "on the ground")

XP thanks for the pro tip I'll take Wyoming off the top of my list - do you think the Dakotas might feel the same way?

The EC, in many cases, detracts both from a constituency's ability to effect meaningful change and their impetus to even try. The US might not care about WY's particular issues in a popular vote world but the current framework doesn't give them any reason to make the rest of the country care or to, y'know, just gtfo of WY.

To an extent, maintaining the EC is not that dissimilar to promising to revitalize dead or dying industries.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-secretary-of-state-reject-john-bolton-moustache-transition-president-elect-cabinet-a7489576.html

did we talk abuot this yet

XP thanks for the pro tip I'll take Wyoming off the top of my list - do you think the Dakotas might feel the same way?

really the only red state republicans voters that have a lot to gain from a popular vote are in texas. regardless, my other point is probably more important than calculating peoples' voting power - which people might be able to overlook because it's kinda murky and confusing. even those texas republicans who might have marginally less influence in the election than they would otherwise are going to be pretty happy w/ the electoral college as long as they believe its existence is politically advantageous for republicans. which they definitely do at the moment.

Most importantly it's unjust. A few thousand people get to be the Real Americans who tell millions of other people that they don't count. It must be destroyed.

Please continue to waste your time trying to win a moral argument with pragmatism.

Isn't the pre-emptive "that will never work" faux savviness exactly what we all hate about the current Democratic Party? To the extent we can agree on anything besides that we're all doomed

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-secretary-of-state-reject-john-bolton-moustache-transition-president-elect-cabinet-a7489576.html

did we talk abuot this yet

tbh it's refreshing to at least know there's some kind of logic behind his picks outside of "what's going to benefit me personally"

I'm not disagreeing that the electoral college is shitty and undemocratic. it's also morally unjust that DC doesn't get any national representation despite having more people than wyoming. honestly that might be more unjust than 'we use this system of weighted voting to pick the president for archaic reasons'. but the reason why it currently doesn't have representation is the exact same reason we can't change the electoral college in the short-term - you can't separate the moral issues from the fact that the end result of these changes would be a transfer of political power in our direction and republicans know this.

good news everyone

https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-obama-rescinding-muslim-and-arab-special-registration-system

the reason why it currently doesn't have representation is the exact same reason we can't change the electoral college in the short-term - you can't separate the moral issues from the fact that the end result of these changes would be a transfer of political power in our direction and republicans know this

Yes and the same dynamic underpins every discussion of voting rights / voting access / voter id.

You can make the argument in the abstract, as an issue of basic civil rights, but everyone knows that the people who we want to be enabled to vote are presumed to be Democratic-leaning.

one of the reasons why you could hope for change *one day* is that unlike dc statehood / voter id stuff / giving felons voting rights, the electoral college is not *so* directly correlated to 'well, now democrats just get more voters. forever.' honestly probably is overall due to turnout stuff, but there are potential maps where the electoral college benefits dems, and it's not inconceivable that it costs the republicans an election one day. again, people forget that it actually came super close to happening in 2004.

it could be an issue becomes a moral and practical issue and maybe small/swing state voters actually end up willing to give up their advantage just so we have a voting system that they actually understand. but that's going to happen when it feels like a politically neutral institution, not right after it cost the democrats an election.

and also it's just a weird thing to spend any political energy on because in the long-term, 'winning the presidency' is one of the few things dems are actually kinda good at and well set up to do in the future.

@dick_nixon
It is always a tragedy if the president dies in office. If the next one should die I fear it would be much worse than that.

I feel I can say this given the crap being peddled by Trump's doctor.

At present someone is nominally in charge. If Trump should die, no one is obviously in charge. No one likes or is loyal to Pence.

in the long-term, 'winning the presidency' is one of the few things dems are actually kinda good at and well set up to do in the future.

True. Even in this sorrowful time, Democrats came a lot closer to winning the presidency vs. winning a majority of governorships, state legislatures, the U.S. House, etc.

dem pres won 4 out of the last 10 elections last so they do about as good as a coin toss

Donald J. Trump – Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes
8:50 am - 22 Dec 2016

wtf is this supposed to mean

@realDonaldTrump: The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

http://pix.iemoji.com/images/emoji/apple/ios-9/256/thinking-face.png

Xp

He's going for a Reagan-esque koan and wrote a moron-esque scribble

channeling the spirit of general buck turgidson

absolutely. The Tea Party proved it's not as hard as people think to change the direction of a party with a relatively small group of committed activists. I don't think you'll see quite the same degree of focus on the left, but I think you'll see larger numbers of people getting involved.

The Tea Party was astroturfed fully formed from the heads of the Koch Brothers!

This was Putin yesterday:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C0S7_gNUoAEOiNR.jpg

I must furiously masturbate in public until the scourge of public masturbation has at last been curbed.

It's an obvious Commie trick, Mr. President. We are wasting valuable time! Look at the big board, they're getting ready to clobber us!

Newt backtracks on "draining the swamp," on video!

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/811986402099527680

lap it up, lapdog