laxam
2mo ago
Against Clinton, that's not as much an anchor as it should be. She was the anti-charisma and had the reputation of a flaming pile of shit among the general public.
I think pretty much any Republican who could speak coherently and with even a modicum of force could have beaten her in 2016, but Republicans like Jeb or Rubio would have sparked off a base revolt, anyway, while in office. Only someone who could credibly pursue immigration restriction would have been able to please the base and those two are the exact opposite.
laxam
2mo ago
I was digging through Google for old articles about Harris from when she was elected AG and a huge number of them were direct comparisons to Obama when he was the Hot New Thing. She's been pretty directly groomed for this and she still can't do much more than read from a teleprompter.
laxam
2mo ago
I don't know if you remember the era well or not, but I do. The Republican Party of that time wasn't 'neocon' (a term in ridiculously bad odour, something no one wanted to be associated with), this was the TEA Party party. And they delivered, at least partially as a way of being seen as fighting Obama. We got several government shutdowns or near shutdowns, budget fights for the ages, and Sequestration, which included deep cuts into ostensible sacred cows like the defense budget (something I can't imagine the 'neocon' boogiemen ever doing).
Looking back, it's a shame we didn't do more. The Federal fiscal situation is out of control and is on schedule to get worse, not better, as time goes on. I was outright disgusted when the Biden administration bragged about keeping cuts to 1% in 2023 budget negotiations. We'll have a crisis on our hands within the decade because we failed to do enough in the 90s (no balanced budget amendment), we failed to do enough in the 2010s (no path to balance and the tax cuts under Trump), and we're failing to do anything right now.
laxam
2mo ago
Bush's lead had disappeared by the time Trump started taking off. It was essentially an open race and, to be honest, would probably have ended up being either between Rubio and Cruz or a three way between them and Kasich, depending on if Kasich and Rubio could consolidate. However, Rubio's pro-immigration image would have turned off the people who went for Trump in real life, so I could see it easily going to Cruz.
He's a weak vessel, but we didn't know that in 2016. He could probably handle Clinton fairly easily, especially if he focused on immigration like Trump did.
laxam
2mo ago
There was no momentum in 2010.
The Republicans won the largest seat number in the House they had won since 1946 and the largest individual seat gain for either party since 1948. And, of course, the momentum didn't stop there: They won more seats total in the House in 2014 than they'd had in any year since 1928. The GOP went from controlling 10 state legislatures in 2010 to controlling 25 after the 2016 elections, they took enough individual chambers to drive the Democrats down to unified control of just 5 total state legislatures, and went from occupying 23 to occupying 34 gubernatorial seats. Obama apparently presided over the Democrats losing more than 1000 downballot offices in his two terms.
The Republican Party was at an apex of its power going into 2016 that it hadn't seen in a century. Trump barely squeezed out an EC victory from that and ran behind the rest of the party everywhere, then presided over a Democratic landslide in 2018.
This:
The Republicans didn't do anything wrong
is nonsense. They totally failed to live up to the expectations of a big portion of their base and so they got saddled with Donald Trump, who drives turnout for the Democrats at least as well as he does for Republicans, and dramatically better in midterm years. Had they done something to appease enough of the base that Trump's impact on the 2016 primary was as big as his impact on the 2012 primary and the Party went into the 2016 election with anyone more acceptable to the broader public, we'd be in a wildly different place.
laxam
2mo ago
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan.
2016 wasn't a flash in the pan, it was a brick wall that all the momentum the right had been building since 2010 smashed to pieces against.
laxam
2mo ago
The difference is that Obama is actually good at this. Harris is a prop and she has been her entire career.
laxam
2mo ago
I just have to know what you think about Hong Kong cultural output in the latter half of the 20th century.
laxam
3mo ago
The practical outcome of the US government being afraid of its armed citizenry wasn't a bulwark against tyranny, it was the enabling of Jim Crow
Armed resistance in the South was crushed. Except in Louisiana, Jim Crow was imposed at the ballot box, with a decent helping of more normal threats of violence.
Armed black men were a bulwark of African American freedom.
laxam
3mo ago
Women and their community memberships used to be the beating heart of Anglosphere conservatism.
laxam
3mo ago
If it took us three generations to get here, it'd be unreasonable to expect us to take less than three generations to go back. Baby steps.
laxam
3mo ago
Is not wearing a tie lazy?
Yes.
Should we be concerned about male modesty?
Yes.
Is this supposed to be that hard?
laxam
3mo ago
This is after about a century of reforestation. Parts of the East coast used to be just as intensively cultivated/settled as any part of Europe. Massachusetts now has significantly more forest than it did in the 1920's, for example.
laxam
3mo ago
Slaveowners were a tiny portion of the British population. They were powerful disproportionately to their numbers, but they would never have been able to resist abolition by force like the American South could.
If the Revolution has failed/never happened, the British slave owning population would have been much larger and more widespread -- remember, most Northern states abolished in response to the ideology of the Revolution.
laxam
3mo ago
the will of a democratically elected government
Kind of funny coming from a government elected by 33% of the populace.
laxam
3mo ago
Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans. Borderers (in Appalachia) were not the normative background of slave-owners who were pedigreed Anglo-Saxons.
Yeah, this isn't close to true. It was kind of true in the 18th century but, when Westward expansion hit the Appalachians and the Revolution happened, New Wealth became extremely common in the Old South West. Andrew Jackson was not from the 'highest class of European Americans'. Plenty of slaveowners in Alabama or Mississippi or Arkansas or whatever has borderer background.
Not to mention that not all plantations were vast affairs with hundreds of slaves. Plenty of slaveowners had just a few slaves and these people would be almost entirely of lower class background back East.
laxam
3mo ago
I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres,
The way it worked was geographical: in the lowland Tidewater and Piedmont of the Eastern Seaboard, large scale plantation owners were the descendents of early settlers groups -- Barbadians in South Carolina, the famous Second Sons Cavaliers in Virginia --, while the large scale plantation owners in the more recently settled Trans Appalachian West was a mix. There were a lot of people who were descendents of settlers from the old frontier in the uplands of the Appalachians, which would include the Scotch-Irish and Scots Borderers everyone is talking about, but also just a mixture of the lower classes from up and down the coast who left the old, more settled areas to seek their fortune out West.
This group is where the planters in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi come from. While Tidewater/Piedmont planters did up sticks and move West, they had to deal with a lot of cracker neighbors who would be beneath their notice back East.
They also were the group that pushed into the Trans-Mississippi West below the Mason Dixon line (and Missouri), including Louisiana and Texas. Sam Houston's family originated from the Shenandoah valley, for example. The exceptions there are the old French planters of Louisiana and the Spanish Royal land grantees in Texas.
So, the answer is 'Old Wealth on the coast, New Money everywhere else, mostly'.
laxam
3mo ago
There was general deflation at the time. The program was nonsensical, as was usual for a lot of New Deal programs.
laxam
3mo ago
I think what you are saying is mostly true; however, people like Charlemagne and Cortez exist in a Christianity that was reimagined by Germanic warrior aristocrats after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, something you also saw earlier with Constantine, an Illyrian warrior aristocrat.
Charlemagne's ancestors specifically (and famously) converted to Catholic, Chalcedonian Christianity, not one of the sects morphed to the convenience of the Germanic conquerors. They built an enduring connection to the Roman Church and built a church (and empire) at home under the influence and with the assistance of that Church. The Franks were very much orthodox Christians by the time of Charlemagne, unlike their Arian cousins in North Africa and Spain (at least early on, in the latter case).
While a form of Christianity (hard to call it fully formed, though, tbh) did spring up in Charlemagne's time catering to German warrior aristocrats (and their peasant foot soldiers -- Saxon society was complicated, as was Saxon warfighting), it did so in the Saxon lands, aimed at converted the Saxons, not the Franks, who had been Catholic Christians for centuries and centuries by this point.
laxam
3mo ago
Concerns about one state lording it over the others, such as Holland did during the era of the Dutch Republic, were very prominent in designing the Electoral College (and other parts of the Constitution) and concerns about party tickets were very not prominent.
Pretty much everything to do with choosing the President is one of those things the Framers got extremely wrong and their mechanism broken pretty much right away.
Bush's lead was already shrinking before Trump came down the escalator. He had an early lead because he started with more name recognition, but he was not a strong candidate along any dimension except that vague sense of competency that came from having done a good job in Florida, which he failed parlay into actual success on the campaign trail.
Immigration was already an issue prior to 2016. The whole reason the autopsy had happened after 2012 was because the Republicans were already tentatively on the restrictionists side of the brewing crisis and had been for a while -- pretty much the entirety of the highly restrictive current legal environment was passed by Republicans in the 90s and 2000s. Unfortunately the only Republican President to serve after those laws came into effect was an immigration booster and Obama was never going to enforce the letter or the spirit of the law, so they never worked.
Cruz came from the right wing of the party on this debate. He may not have made it the center of his campaign -- but he may well have -- without Trump, but he already had the reputation and had already made it a important plank of his platform.
More options
Context Copy link