SlowBoy
4mo ago
Trump ideas packaged in a more media and PMC-friendly face would be a political juggernaut, I think.
The whole point of the Trump era is that literally no one else would touch those ideas, because the media meaning-making machine made them anametha. You could not be anti-illegal immigration or anti-NATO or whatever without inherently drawing earth-shattering criticism. This is why no one else tried it. You have to pass through the wall of overwhelming media coverage, hostile donors funding every manner of opposition, prosecution, lawfare, and pushback. Literally no one else would do this.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
What happened was even more improbable than assassination, because the bullet missed Trump's head by fractions, famously caught on camera, and then created the conditions for an even more iconic picture, one of the greatest pictures in American history. This is basically extremely impossible, it defies prediction, it's one of the greatest meaning-making moments of American history.
In another sense everything I've written above is extremely exaggerated, because the assassination "doesn't mean anything" and "nothing ever happens". But in some primal monkey caveman grug brain unconscious level (, the only level that really matters) -- Donald Trump was literally just saved by God in front of the entire world. That is incredibly incredibly powerful. It doesn't "mean" anything, there is no mechanism by which having a chunk of his ear blown off translates into better personnel or policy. The direct consequence is that Trump is renominated and probably wins the election. But in a fundamental way the whole global consciousness is different.
Trump is a great historic figure like Caesar or Napoleon. I am not trying to crudely exaggerate. His whole self is now deeply bound up with the age in which we live, his personality strengths and flaws have deep consequences for the future. Trump isn't important because of any specific things he's done (which is really quite a lot of things). But he represents, for better and worse, the deep American spirit. Something was ratified this week. This was basically impossible to anticipate, despite any rational calculations about rhetoric and civil war and violence and likelihoods and odds. And I don't think people will stop talking about this any more than they stopped talking about Napoleon escaping from Elba or Caesar at Alesia.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Obama governed horribly -- Obamacare, IRS political targetting, enshrining disparate impact, fast and furious, Benghazi, ISIS, etc etc
SlowBoy
4mo ago
A few months ago I remember people here discussing a Mike Cernovich tweet predicting high odds of a Trump assassination. The overwhelming consensus here was that this was unreasonable and beneath even considering.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Electing a divided government does not guarantee an end of taxation and policies and stuff. Your idea sounds like a kind of vengeful wishful thinking: you want the French right to suffer, so you need an explanation. "The government you hate is more divided and powerless than ever, haha!" ?
SlowBoy
4mo ago
A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least.
punished with deadlock
Don't threaten me with a good time. Are you sure it's the "far" right throwing a tantrum?
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Identity politics didn't meaningfully exist in 2008. He also governed in extremely capricious ways that were more than "fairly center-left technocrat". If you watched any Fox News at all circa 2009, you would have heard over and over again Obama promising to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" in his campaign stump speeches.
Obama personally might not have given a damn about equity as such, but he filled his administration with people who did: Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice. Eric Holder practically enshrined disparate impact at DOJ, which is just equity by another name. Many of the key inciting incidents that made woke morals blow up -- George Zimmerman, Michael Brown -- were made worse by his administration and his personal actions.
We could go down the list all day.
but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it".
The Tea Party started as blowback over Obamacare. It really started as spontaneous protests and town hall meetings where constituents were livid over what Obama and Congress wanted to do with healthcare. Eventually, it got co-opted by Republican officials who made it another part of their vendetta against Obama. But it started with Obamacare, a piece of legislation which made American healthcare more expensive and more complicated, which people understood at the time, and pissed them off. No Obamacare, no Tea Party.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
SlowBoy
4mo ago
"Republicans might have been right all along, but instead of lingering in that uncomfortable truth, let's consider the ways in which Republicans are still wrong and I am still right."
SlowBoy
4mo ago
It wasn't really a real primary since Biden was the incumbent. After Carter was primaried in 1980 (and Ford primaried in 1976) the lesson strategists internalized was that primarying the incumbent leads to a loss in the general. Since then Democrats have shut out primary challengers (more successfully than Republicans have). RFK and Marianne Williamsone were the only two outsiders of any note willing to break this consensus.
However, I think Democratic voters also bear some blame here. 15 million of them turned out for Biden in the primary. They were excited to vote for him! I don't know if they felt like they were closing ranks around Biden, endorsing his performance, or trying to mobilize suplort against Trump. But they endorsed this! Look at Obama's re-nomination versus Biden's: in 2012, Obama got about half as many votes as he did in the contested 2008 primary. Whereas Biden's 2024 primary numbers are very close to his 2020 results. It's not just the party machinery that closed ranks around Biden: voters did too.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
The best account of Truman in the run-up to the 1944 convention, and the convention itself, is McCullough's biograohy of Truman. The relevant section here is about 30 pages and is extremely well-written. The gist of it is that Truman ended up in charge of a Senate committee to investigate wasteful spending by military contractors. (This was part maneuvering by Roosevelt, who wanted to avoid the House appointing its own committee which promised to be much more critical of the administration; Truman had politely floated the idea to Roosevelt previously.) The "Truman Commission" proved enormously popular so that, when negotiations began to replace FDR's VP on the 1944 ticket (Henry Wallace, whose radical left proclivities were spooking some), Truman was an acceptable dark horse compromise. It probably helped that Truman was connected to deep political bosses and the Missouri machine in a way that has never been satisfactorily elaborated.
Democratic politicians in 1944 knew what they were doing, and that FDR might not make it. But nobody really considered the gravity of what that meant, or it probably would not have gone to Truman. McCullough's section ends with the great anecdote of reoorters talking to Truman's mother on the news of his nomination, as she predicts that it's all a lot of hogwash and FDR will easily serve out his term.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
All three of those cases involved covering up the details from an unknowing public. (Although in Reagan's case there wasn't too much to cover up.) FDR was widely-recognized as being too old to run in 1944, but a great deal of self-willed delusion about how old he really was kept people from thinking about it too hard. (There was also a fairly open process for choosing a new VP that gave a lot of people confidence, Truman had a small national profile but was popular in 1944 for investigating army contractor waste.)
That self-willed delusion about Biden's age just crumbled and could possibly never be restored.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Reagan's senility has been greatly exaggerated with time. It all comes down to a few moments where aides caught him sundowning in private. McConnell, Pelosi and Biden have all had much more serious moments caught on camera, multiple times.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic.
It would be undemocratic to replace Biden with another candidate. I think it's fine to admit that, I think almost everybody would prefer the "undemocratic" candidate to the "democratic" candidate in middle-stage senility. And, probably, if you were to run the primary today all over again, the voters would pick someone else. The problem is that the apparatchiks might not pick that same someone else.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Closing the border was a smart move.
But he didn't really close it. Thousands are still getting through. Maybe it makes a nice sound bite, but I don't think it actually convinces anybody.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
My theory is this would be a positive for Whitmer: Blue Voters don't care if the experts may have accidentally been a tiny bit overzealous in saving the world from Covid, and if Red Voters hate it, she must be onto something!
SlowBoy
4mo ago
A Hail Mary is probably the best chance Democrats have. Sticking with Biden (or Harris) is almost certainly a losing proposition. A generic Democrat also probably won't fair well (there are a million hurdles to overcome that almost certainly lean toward Democrats being disenthused and abandoning ship). But the right generic Democrat could make the party fall in love. It's extremely unlikely, and very few of the Democrats talked about at the national level really have this potential. But it's hard to imagine the Hail Mary play bad scenario looking worse than the current outlook. To he who risks all goes the glory.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Any hot-swap is going to leave some part of the Democratic party unsatisfied: they're a year behind in the game of buy-in and consensus. "Your guy? What about my guy?" It takes more than a generic Democratic to drive turn-out and excitement, it takes someone who can actually convince voters that they are the right person at the right moment. Otherwise, people will quickly capsize and donors, voters, officials, and orgs will quickly abandon the national efforts and focus on whatever local efforts they can salvage.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans aren't just standing by rolling the dice to see if they'll decide to implode too. They're attacking, they're on the offensive. "Look at these people, they've been lying about Biden for four years, what else have they been lying about?" The new guy will have some controversies (they always do), and they'll be fresh and untested and hard to counter. (The party is circulating its talking points on the media, but in the fast-moving chaos the main story became something else, and nobody internalizes the response.)
Kamala might have a lot of problems, and might be historically unpopular -- but at least she doesn't come with these problems, and that may look attractive right now.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
And the president talking to his executive officers is explicitly a power granted by the constitution.
At this point, the President would have invoked executive privilege, and Congress would have launched an impeachment inquiry, or campaigned on doing so.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
This is why presidents issue the bulk of their pardons on their last day in office.
Moreover, if the president does something heinous on the last day of his administration, what's stopping the next president from ordering the DOJ to prosecute and investigate? What's stopping Congress from issuing a subpoena and hauling the last guy in? What's stopping a federal prosecutor from opening a case and bringing charges? This is all baked in. All this ruling means is that, in the ensuing legal battle, your last-day president gets to argue that what he did was an official act.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
I am punching him in the face but not anyone else, ergo, maybe he just has a punchable face?
Wanting to kill the president is disgusting. It's morally reprehensible. There's not some "both sides" hypocrisy consistency "true free speech" liberal norm where I'm forced to concede that, hey, live and let live man. "I want to kill the president." "That's disgusting." "I'm only joking." "Oh, ok, sounds like free speech."
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