Well for now, related to my posts, I'd just reiterate that paranoia, fear and outrage are most useful for his ultimate goal of destroying cosmopolitan society. It's another reason the left simply can't import the Breitbart model wholesale -- I think we're looking for something different.

Republican MAGAts defending trump are just liars, cheats, frauds, and charlatans. There's no defense for defending a bully and a fool.

Hey now, some charlatans are very good people that would never support someone as ridiculous as Trump. Let's not go putting all charlatans in the same deplorable basket.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendl...whard-bad-wig/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_...nal_Foundation

Ezra Klien had a podcast last week about getting people to run for office. Some progressive group has apparently had 3k people sign up saying they'll run for something.

I think there's ton of room for deeper analysis of the dvaut type that's not being done, people resort to the same stale explanatory frameworks. Our politics is way too defined by retired olds and those who preach to and grift from them.

Consider this, for the last 20 years something like 55%+ of law and med school grads have been woman. Many are coming into their prime and have power and are reshaping institutions. Many older men are becoming redundant. The world that is coming to be is still coming to be even if an overly careful, bland corporate lawyer lost the electoral college to a toxic Cheeto with Alzheimer's.

I really think Trump is the last surprise strike from the near dead movie villain before he is finally vanquished. The question is how much of the GOP goes down with him. In 3 years, after impeachment, the talking point will be, "President who?" "Never heard of em."

Like it's weird how much/if widespread internet has reduced crime, and I wouldn't be surprised if widespread amazon, telework, cheap housing makes some rural areas become more cosmopolitan. Just spitballin, but the times they are a changing.

It's not written in stone. We have agency to help write the story. Maybe Trump and Bannon turn the US into a western Russian style oligarchy. As I said, I'm not necessarily forecasting sunshine here. There's a lot of very, very bad outcomes that are possible.

I'm only warning that winning through outrage and grievance is possible but the downside risk are loops of epistemic closure that you see the right has fallen to over the last 40 years. The result is that it is very difficult to achieve lasting, durable outcomes that stand the rest of time without the use of escalating force and emotion and anxiety; you can only titillate people for so long, and it's not a movement set about to find new adherents but just keep the existing ones in engaged. Almost by definition -- the goal isn't to build popular consensus but instead to generate anger. And the escalation of force and fear and execution of power and silencing opposition has costs and is hard to pull off. So it's not exactly some easy trick either. Part of the idea here seems to be that Trump et al have found the secret 3 sigma weapon to winning politics but ultimately there's going to be a political reality that hits when you govern in an environment where only like 30% of the population agrees with you. The Trump Admin and the right-wing movement has done wonders to obstruct but genuinely rebuilding the country in their image is going to prove much harder.

So: I think if the left consciously tries to import the FNC/Brietbart/chain email industry to manufacture outrage and grievance it has a high likelihood of success but will likely prove only effectual at defeating Trump. Defeating Trump is critical and important but there probably needs to be an eye toward more, eventually. For now, maybe it's enough.

We shall prevail through the overwhelming power of...the opponent's incompetence.


Also, https://twitter.com/greg_scanlon/sta...75965733445634

This is a great series of posts. It's important for people to realize that the deal Republicans cut with Trumpistopheles is not working out for them, at least based on the first two weeks of the presidency, and not just because there's no lasting political momentum. Yes, they won a crushing electoral victory, but they haven't yet been able to convert them into any kind of coherent policy initiatives. The immigration EO is a spectacular blow-up. (Also ask yourself why Trump is working on immigration reform through fiat rather than legislation with his political allies.) Tax reform is an area the GOP cares about deeply and where they have a huge stockpile of genuinely well-thought-out policies on the shelf; but it's already completely clear that Trump has no ability to lead a discussion to assemble reform. Most surprisingly, the White House is leaking to an absolutely unbelievable degree. Some of the leaks are basically just direct hit pieces on Trump being sourced from his own people, only two weeks in! It's not a coincidence that Trump can't run an administration; it comes directly from his origin story as an anti-establishment nutcase. The establishment may have held their noses to vote for him, but they won't loyally staff his White House.

It's also important to remember that politics is not a zero-sum game. Even if it allows you to punish "the other side" on partisan issues, electing a president who can't conduct a routine call with a close ally or who wants to turn NATO into the Delian League has huge costs for both sides. Hardcore History just did a very timely podcast on nuclear confrontations, and one of the points he made is that, from the perspective of a visitor from Mars, every U.S. president should be elected solely on the basis of their ability to prevent a world-ending nuclear war, and that all other political issues are insignificant compared to that. In thirty years, no one will care what the tax rate was under the Trump administration, but they will care a whole hell of a lot if there is a limited nuclear exchange with China, and they won't exist if there is an all-out war with Russia.

It recently struck me why some people believe the clearly indefensible statement that Pence would be worse than Trump, and it's relevant to this discussion. It's because Pence likely would be worse on some issues (LGBT rights, church/state, abortion), and people thereby infer that Pence would be a worse president for people who are particularly affected by those things. That's a classic cognitive error. A gay man can be seriously harmed by LGBT discrimination in a way that a straight person can't, but the harm from a war with China is much greater to both of them. Likewise, the fact that a Breitbart/Trump strategy might advance the ball on GOP-coded issues (if they can get their **** together) doesn't mean it's better for GOP voters, because it comes at a cost on formerly nonpartisan issues, like whether it's good or bad for the government to kill protesters and journalists.

Page one of google search for "nyt plight middle class"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...dle-class.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/o...dle-class.html

https://www.nytexaminer.com/2012/07/...class-decline/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/o...e-america.html

http://www.dailyyonder.com/outyonder...rica-catch-up/

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate...-rural-america

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/t...rly-1900s.html

There was more ink spilled on thinkpieces about how to help and understand disaffected white middle americans than basically anything else that's ever been written about.

It was too much still couched in the terms of identity politics which needs to be abandoned entirely by everyone.

Stop talking about people as whites and blacks and latinos. The Hilary campaign was awful for this and the coverage was awful for this.

She literally imagined that saying she is the candidate for women or the candidate for latino people would mean those groups would turn out en masse to support her. Great plan, how did that go?

Enough with it. Stop flagging up the fact that the people were white and instead focus on what they were angry about.

One of the most wrong headed articles I've ever seen in my life was this one: https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...rump-white-men

Prime example of someone too far gone in a particular way of thinking to be able to see why this way of thinking is pernicious and led to this in the first place.

But reading this thread maybe my faith in individual free thinking, independence of mind, and so on has been much too optimistic.

People want to think collectively. They want to be tribal.

That's the day true liberalism as I know it dies. But it seems my way of thinking (be your own person) is a real minority view all of a sudden.

Can we please instate an extreme vetting policy for posters who originate from certain subforums (POG, SMP, maybe others)?

IIRC, he even had his shirt sleeves rolled up. *crowd gasps*

Seems like this has a lot of potential to turn into an extremely ugly mess.

The 9th circuit will reject it for sure. As Laura Ingaraham said on foxnews this morning the law states they should overturn it but they won't. If I'm the DOJ I definitely don't take this to the SC until Gorsuch is seated because you'll likely get a 4-4 vote. I would say there is a tiny chance you could get Breyer to side with the DOJ but it's too risky and if this goes 4-4 and is upheld they'll need to go back to the table once Sessions is in and it'll take 6 months to come up with something that is legal. That's what should have been done initially

It's early, though. I think it's likely they get their feet under themselves and start achieving more besides chaos and start doing more that appeases Congressional Republicans. And yet still, the Congressional GOP agenda isn't wildly popular either and is pretty far apart from even what a significant amount of even Trump voters wanted. To me it feels a little like rearranging the deck chairs on a slow-sinking Titanic. The point is that *none* of this stuff is especially popular, either scattershot anti-immigration policies OR corporate tax reform OR rolling back a bunch of the core ACA components or strident anti-abortion policies or anti-LGBT laws.

I think the critical point isn't that the focus and priorities are wrong, although you're probably correct on that score that they are. The larger point: the whole coalition's unifying principle is anger and grievance. Mostly white identity and tribalist. I think it's the logical conclusion of the kind of politics Autocratic is advocating for; not that the fostering and cultivating outrage and resentment necessarily leads to soft white power movements but that they are ultimately not built to achieve big-tent politics that enjoy broad consensus where you can pass laws and produce a political culture that stands the test of time. That is: A politics built almost singularly on a 40 year kulturkampf is limited in scope and agency. When they're not focused on ginning up anger and frustration and outrage, they have nothing left to do and the people empowering them don't want to hear about it, and critically, they don't care. No one in power, either in Congress or in the White House, seems especially adapt at building a consensus or popular will for any of this. I think Paul Ryan for instance might love that, but has no way to enact it with the GOP voters. The restless base just wants to humiliate liberals and titillate themselves with fictions about Mexican bad hombres and Muslims bombing them. This isn't a set of governing principles. It's not a governing ideology. And I think the current crop of GOP leaders up to and including Trump are incapable of converting it into that. They've gone too far down the well of the kind of politics Autocratic was talking about: paranoia, conspiracy, anger, grievance, victimization. They're more than addicted; they rely on it. They can't justify their presence without it.

I think the chaos of the Trump Administration is surely partly because he's brazenly incompetent, sure, and certainly because he's an outsider generally unconcerned and not curious about the particulars of governing.

But part of it is a much larger problem across the right-wing that these people aren't politicians and aren't practicing politics as conventionally defined. They're just flattering angry sensibilities and resentments. There is no next, no grand outcomes they want, no shared driving principle beyond some limited grifts.

That's why I caution against it: the process that got us to this point started with a group of elites noticing the effectiveness of this sort of politics as a way to break what they saw as encroaching welfare state overreach and then the inheritors of the movement eventually mistaking the means for the end once they beat back the welfare state. Liberals shouldn't look at that whole process and examine the whole history of it, and then try to emulate it. You might admire it in certain applications but I'm not sure you can give these people credit for really making anyone on their side happier, solving any concrete or meaningful problems for their voters, or enacting genuine, durable, long-lasting changes. They give their angry supporters some thrills with twitter insults and surely some movement scammer types, media clowns, and rich people up to and including Trump are probably actively grifting and scamming. But that's it. No one else is getting much here. In the end, liberals should question what Outrage Machine politics have wrought for the right-wing: they have power and they are certainly capable of causing misery and enriching a small few. I assume liberals aspire to more.

I don't think Trump has ever had to contend with admission of failure in his whole life. Would he even be able to go quietly quietly after impeachment and conviction?

You don't need to look too far to find a positive model for Dems to evoke.

Canada has been accepting refugees by the thousands, including Syrians, we have had no terrorist attacks, unless you count Muslims being murdered by a Trumpkin. We have universal healthcare, nationwide gay marriage, very low levels of racism, very low gun death, low crime levels, high international approval ratings, largely civil political discourse, 70% voter turnout, national climate change policy, national abortion rights with no debate, soon to be leagalized pot, incarceration rates 6 times lower than the US and we produce all the worlds best comedians.

#makeamericacanada

Bolded is complete lunacy.

The notion of evil is silly religious nonsense and does not being in any serious political discussion. It let's people off the hook because it presumes some innate trait rather than freewill. Trump and his people choose to make awful decisions.

This is an excellent post and it makes me think that I have misinterpreted some of DVaut's earlier posts.

I'm gonna go back the other way here and reference our recent disagreement: Democrats and the left frankly needs to be doing way more right now to inculcate and produce a feeling of anger and resentment at what's being done. For instance: that botched attack in Yemen is the perfect example of something that tickets all the boxes. Foster a sense of nationalism -- our boys lives matter. We all agree with that! Trump's incompetence puts them in harm's way. Trump is betraying out national identity by spilling our blood in a careless way. Use the rhetoric of grievance and resentment and nationalism.

This should have been a lay-up that imo Democrats are still failing to capitalize on.

But it can't be just that. It can be that for now. Do not get addicted to it. Do not let it replace our long-term ideals and what we're trying to do to achieve them and work on building long-term political consensus for it. The right-wing has effectively gained power with it, sure, but consider to what end. They haven't rebuilt the Reagan coalition. They haven't won a lasting victory. And critically I think the mindset that gets addicted to grievance politics and resentment is incapable of getting there.

Bolded part is what worries me.

You keep losing G7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, though.

Seriously, great post. Canada's doing it right.

We placate ourselves with the realization that most of the players on US teams were born in Canada.

Not a new position, apparently.