Last night I was hanging out with a group of my Jewish friends in Philadelphia and it was a joyous occasion. Yet, when the subject turned to politics I became pretty glum and it was clear that I was feeling pretty down about the present mindset of a lot of my fellow Americans. One friend of mine attempted to cheer me up by putting things in context and after listening to him for a while I had to concede, “No, you’re right. Things are bad but this is not the Holocaust.”
The subtext of this was a little barbed, though, because the basic idea is that I am suffering from unrealistic expectations for my fellow man, and, really, humans are a lousy lot who are capable of far worse. So, I should be more cheerful than I am since at least people aren’t rounding people up in cattle cars to lead them to their execution.
My friend didn’t really succeed in improving my mood but I appreciated the attempt and agreed with his points. Then I woke up to this.
I’m still appalled that the GOP is going to win elections in these midterms. I’m appalled that the president’s approval numbers are as high as they are. I’m not going to change. I’m not going to lower my expectations. We have to start moving things in a better direction because we’re devolving and there aren’t going to be many more chances to turn things around.
So, yeah, I won’t consider it a good election night unless the people really show me something, and barely winning back the House while losing Senate seats isn’t going to cut it for me.
If that’s all the protest we can muster as a people, I am going to be pissed.
But, we’re not one people. Our founding fathers saw to that with their archaic dividing up federal power among the states, and establishing a Senate where every state gets two senators whether there are any people living there or not.
We’re 50 different states, and most of them are big and empty and filled with Trump low information voters. They listen all day to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and they know what they think and you’re not going to tell them any different.
In any system whereby there was a direct popular vote for President the Republican party would never win another election ever again. In a system where we have to worry about whether just a few thousand white nationalists in Western PA showing up will throw us all into a world war things aren’t so clear.
We have to change the system. This was done before when we added direct election of Senators and giving the vote to women. We can certainly eliminate the electoral college if we want to. It wouldn’t be that hard to pass the amendment. We just need 3/4 of the states to ratify it. That will be the hard part.
. . . think this is just nuts (i.e., over-optimistic):
You actually explain why that is with the rest of your comment.
It will be hard but not impossible. And its a worthy goal. We set ourselves back during the Obama years and let ourselves go at the state level. We can win these statehouses back, and then some, with effort.
I took issue with
It would be hard. Very hard. Constitutional amendments always are, by design. And, yeah, it’s certainly a worthy goal, as I already stipulated. But it will be hard to pass, and much harder to get ratified.
I don’t mean to laugh, but really. . . . Compared to the Civil War, the Great Depression and WWII, to the Civil Rights struggle in the 50’s and 60’s. . . this is easy.
We’ve done a lot harder things than this. It can be sold as a good government initiative. We are able to get fair aportionment when we are able to get get citizens initiatives on the ballot, people vote for them. We are passing such an initiative this week in Colorado!
The only way forward is through citizens initiatives in every state, even the Red ones. The people I described are dominant in a lot of places, but they’re not the entire population, well except in Utah and Mississippi maybe. Some places are admittedly a little dicey.
But, the Democrats just won a Senate seat in Alabama and that’s something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. Sure, his opponent was a tad over-fond of children, but you say that like it’s a BAD thing in Alabama? I’m not at all sure that it is.
State government is corrupt and worthless in these places mostly because people don’t pay attention. If you put liberal initiatives on the ballot they will pass in a lot of places we might not expect, based solely upon their state legislature, simply because they make sense and people can see common sense on the ballot some times.
Colorado is not really a very liberal state, despite the local power of Democrats. Yet you see us put recreational marijuana on the ballot and it wins handily. Not one political party in the state was for that, the governor opposed it. People just decided.
You’re seeing Democrats running in a lot of places where nobody ever thought that a Democrat could run and win, and some of them are going to win unexpectedly.
About 70% of winning is just showing up! And Dems are showing up in a lot of places this year. All but around 24 Congressional races are being contested and that’s a record high number – about equal to the Republicans in 2010 so we’ll see. But the Democrats are poised to make some really good gains, simply by fielding good candidates in a lot of areas and running sensible campaigns.
We’ll be in a lot better position to start working on some things after November. Progressives will be in a lot better position all over this country. It won’t take a wave to do that any more.
We start a national movement to put a Constitutional Amendment on the Ballot in every state where that is possible, make the Democratic party accept that as a platform position in 2020.
You are proposing a dangerous political experiment – democracy. For every proposal a liberal constituency advances, there will be a dastardly one proposed by some of the 63,000,000 Trump voters. My experience on facebook for the past two years has been …. illuminating.
Now may not be the optimum time for “one man, one vote”; who knows what we might end up with?
. . . this “reply”, although starting out “I don’t mean to laugh, but really . . . ” certainly got you off on the wrong foot.
Your entire comment amounts to expanding on a program/agenda I already stipulated to supporting, while in fact conceding (while not admitting as much) the one objection I raised: that it would not, in fact, be “not that hard”.
Just read the details of your own description. That is something that is well worth attempting, but accomplishing it will be, as I said, very hard. Calling it “easy” relative to a few supremely difficult things that were accomplished (or at least survived, e.g., The War Against Treason in Defense of Slavery) doesn’t negate that it will be, objectively, not “easy”, but the opposite of easy: hard.
That you couched this lecture in condescending ‘splaining from which I learned not a single thing I did not already know quite well didn’t help your case . . . . or my mood.
Yeah, because every red state will vote against it.
Any other bright ideas?
Every red state was going to vote against a lot of things, like marijuana or gay rights. Yet somehow these issues are making ground in a lot of places all over the country. And the funny thing is that no political party is really behind them. PEOPLE are behind them.
Where in the hell did all this cynicism come from that nothing can be done? Why not? Much harder things have already happened in this country, like the Gilded Age when there wasn’t even an income tax. It was unconstitutional for the federal government to tax people directly on their wages or the sale of their assets.
And we changed that by Amending the Constitution. We gave women the vote when women were not allowed to vote so how could they get it? Men weren’t less misogynistic in those days either you know! They openly argued that a woman’s place is in the home, at a time when most women did work at home, and not in the voting booth, and yet somehow they passed a voting rights amendment.
A lot of women demanded that and got it.
We did have a civil rights movement and an anti-war movement that stopped a destructive but profitable war that both political parties wanted to wage unremittingly and indefinitely.
We’re simply not going to accept winning elections by 3 and then 5 million votes and having their candidates just put into the white house in this fashion every year. All the things I listed actually were power grabs by the federal government over the states. At the end of each crisis the federal government got more power and the states less and the result was more progressive.
We’re going to have to do this and we will accomplish it.
. . . this popped into my head unbidden (though obviously not unrelated).
Besides repudiation in the form of a wave election, we really need something like that everywhere right now. If I knew how to go about making it happen (or even just get it started and rolling), I would.
Came in from a day of canvassing to this news from Pittsburgh. A lot of thoughts are running through my head right now. The first thing that came to mind is, if I was immersed in the right wing hate machine, how easily it would make sense that this guy was just another American patriot defending his culture against those who support and encourage the ravenous brown skinned hordes to swamp their country and steal their cultural birthrights as God’s chosen people, white Americans. After all, I have had a number of confrontations with people around the cultural argument. And while they would never dream of openly professing that killing people is a proper method to achieve their end, they would seem to have a hard time avoiding that conclusion as a logical extension of their train of thought. After all, how far down the chain is this from snatching children from their parents, putting the children in cages, and permanently separating them from each other? Or publicy musing about the possible necessity of shooting migrants fleeing death and oppression in their own countries? Is it three cogs away, or four, down that chain? And does it really matter? Because the fact of the matter is, they are all on the same chain. If you keep moving around it, you will eventually arrive there. It is a closed loop, with all things having relevance and interconnection to each other, regardless of their position around the chain. This is simply another offshoot, another extension, of the “Making America Great Again” argument.
Because at the root of all this, there is nothing more than the singular seed of hate. In whatever form one chooses to practice it, they all share a common progenitor. The commonality among them is simply understood, whether one wishes to recognize it, or not.
Our Commander in Chief proudly proclaimed just this week that he was a nationalist. And today, someone who publicly stated that he felt that the President was not sufficiently nationalist decided, “HIAS (Jews) likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw the optics. I’m going in”. And he did. With the requisite phallic symbol of right wing power, an AR-15. It doesn’t take a genius to see the synergetic relationship here. But we as a country will, to our great peril, ignore it once again; as we always do. We will find all sorts of tangential rationales to avoid confronting the reality of the destructive path down which we are careening. After all, we are Americans! We are exceptional! We will endure forever!
The folly of our self righteous bleatings will make our downfall all the more suprising to us. The cancer eats away, every day, killing one cell at a time. And we still continue to ignore the symptoms of our sickness, even as they grow more pronounced and evident every day. Nothing lives forever, least of all our man made forms of governance.
Also spent the day canvassing. There’s a clipboard with issues that we ask people to point to and show the biggest one for them — been using it for years. “Medicare”, “Jobs”, “Immigration”….
There’s none for ‘domestic terrorism’.
Someone probably didn’t think we’d ever need one.
They simply need to be beaten back a little so they are more humble and stop resisting so much. We did this with integration. We just went ahead with it and after a while they sorta got used to the fact that, yes NEGROES!! are now allowed to eat in restaurants and bars and sleep in the same hotel, even the same room the night before you slept in it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
They got used to that although they still don’t like it. They are just freaking out now because they’re waking up to the fact that America is becoming a minority majority country. Well, that’s certainly not going to stop because they build a stupid wall against Mexico, and we’re not going to accept Apartheid in this country, so they’re just going to have to get used to it.
Get used to the idea that they are living in a multi-cultural country. We were very close to beating them down in 2016, with Hillary Clinton too, which was about as much of a handicap as we could possibly have ever had.
If we can do it in future, we can break all this fascism and cause it to dwindle away.
Most of you probably don’t know the history of France, but this exact thing happened in France in the early 1950’s when de Gaulle led a fascist movement very similar to our white nationalists today. It fizzled out after a while. This one will too.
All we need to do is drive them out of power for a bit. Then we use power to change the rules to be more democratic, small d. Redistricting is key and we’re winning a lot more governorships so there’s that.
De Gaulle, or Poujade?
Trump is Poujadist to the ends of his stubby fingers, mais il n’est pas Gaulliste
>So, yeah, I won’t consider it a good election night unless the people really show me something, and barely winning back the House while losing Senate seats isn’t going to cut it for me.
>If that’s all the protest we can muster as a people, I am going to be pissed.
That’s EXACTLY what’s been going through my mind for the last week.
It has been said that HIAS is assisting the caravan, hence the nexus with illegal immigration.
That is a high death toll but might be expected with an AR15 since the bullet is high velocity and tumbles through the body. Emma where are you?
I too am appalled that the conservatives will win elections, more than they should. Some say both sides are going nuts but I have a problem with that. It is the president who instructs his base about body slamming and lock her up. His hate is visceral. What did you expect? Keep it up and this will surely get worse.
We need to be real about this: that they will win elections is a measure of the depravity of a significant portion of the population. We need to dispense with the fantasy Clinton spilled during the election, that “America is great, because America is good.” No, its not “good.” Its people are not exceptional, and when you combine apathy with the steady stream of propaganda citizens have been bombarded with, steeped in the cauldron of racism its been stewing in since before its creation, what we have today is probably a logical conclusion.
The good news is that they are not a majority; the bad is they are scattered about such that the electoral college gives them more weight then a one man, one vote democracy ought to. Is it impossible to win 3/4 of statehouses? No. May not happen in some of our lifetimes, but its a worthy long term goal for the democrats to get control of it to get rid of the damned electoral college.
https://twitter.com/normornstein/status/1016789064379334656?s=21
Good point. Here’s a real link.
Thank you.
Very chilling to contemplate.
An even more better link.
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/12/in-about-20-years-half-the-population-wil
l-live-in-eight-states
It’s going to get worse, Martin. Even if the Republicans lose the Senate and the House, and then Trump is soundly defeated in 2020: think back to 2009-2010 and the backlash that happened once Democrats started even attempting to wield power, and imagine it being orders of magnitude higher. This is a wave of explicit fascism that does not accept Democrats as “legitimate” political actors. I don’t know how it ends or how it will be defeated — although I do believe it will be defeated — but it will be a struggle.
You made a point in past posts that past generations had to “step up” to establish some sort of order and that the ones who came after had it relatively easy. Adam Serwer likens the current era we are living in as a “Second Redemption”, harkening back to Southern State Terror campaigns defined roughly from 1870’s-1910’s. I don’t think people are mentally prepared for it yet.
Nor have they, for 150 years, mutatīs mutandīs
From “Not a Tea Party, But a Confederate Party”, by Doug Muder:
They’re fewer in number than they have been in the past, they just control the mechanizations of one of the two political parties — cold comfort.
More cold comfort: it ain’t just the US, and the struggle has been pushed international with demons and monsters arising from their slumber:
Jair Bolsonaro: Far-right candidate wins Brazil poll
Will liberals and the left rise to the occasion this time? Remains to be seen. Center left parties are being battered, but new parties and coalitions are rising:
Germany’s Green Party Emerges as the Center-Left Opposition
Two blocks from my house.
So sorry for you and your community. So sorry for all of us.
“Good guys with guns” are no match for an evil person with an AR 15.
While these are dark days, I do wonder if things today are any worse (or maybe actually better) than they were in, say, the ’60’s, what with the Vietnam War and political assassinations of major US (Democratic) leaders. I wasn’t alive then and so have no context.
. . . (though only just awakening politically: I turned 18 during ’72, the last year of the draft; “drew” high lottery number, though, and numbers being drafted were declining by then, so was not personally at risk).
My answer’s ‘yes’, worse today. I’m inclined to say ‘far worse’. Then, a number of norms and re-balancing mechanisms had not yet been demolished by the increasingly fascist Banana Republicans.
Then, it wasn’t controversial that “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts”, a principle that the Banana Republicans have now totally rejected, with their sneering dismissal of “The Reality-Based Community” and the accompanying, preposterous claim that they create their own reality.
Then, it was still unthinkable that a Senate majority would simply refuse for over a year to act at all on a popularly elected President’s SCOTUS nominee. The evil necessary for that had to wait decades for embodiment in the form of Majority “Leader” Mitch McConnell.
Then, there was not yet a massive, rightwing media propaganda ecosystem ensuring that the Reality-Denying Community stayed that way.
Then, there was no political party engaged in all-out, full frontal assault on the most basic underpinnings of democracy (with the transparent motivation that functional democracy consigns them to permanent minority status; from which they nevertheless fully intend to hold onto power if possible by any means necessary): voter-suppression across a broad range of forms; gerrymandering (including racial gerrymandering with “surgical precision”); etc.
Then, no party had yet brainstormed, and then fully weaponized the “brilliantly” evil propaganda jiu jitsu of All Projection, All the Time.
Then, no political party had yet fully embraced Hitler’s Big Lie tactic.
Then, concern over ecological degradation and support for meaningful actions to address it were majority positions, to the point that it was Nixon who (with little choice) signed all the major landmark environmental legislation that Banana Republicans are currently attempting to repeal or roll back on every front. (Yes, relative to the root causes and scale of the problem, those have largely amounted to tinkering around the margins, especially under constant Banana Republican sabotage. Still, practically Utopia compared to today.)