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Can the GOP front a bland republican? It seems to me the Democrats are fairly successful at channeling their radical wing's energy into bland-seeming manager politicians. By contrast, the MAGA wing will veto non-MAGA candidates, who in turn spook the normies; this is to my eyes what happened in 2022 with the red wave that never materialized.
The core difference is that, for all of BLM and antifa's blustering about the revolution, the American red tribe is a whole lot angrier about the state of politics. Psmith is only somewhat exaggerating here when he says 100% of the revolutionary energy in our own society is on the right today. Blue tribe meanwhile knows it's playing defense.
Just this week in the UK, the MAGA equivalent in Britain blew up 14 years of Conservative rule to vote for the radical populist Reform, allowing Labour to waltz into power with a laughable third of the vote. This is what I expect in the US if 2028 Republicans try to field a Nikki Haley or Mitt Romney-like.
Counterpoint- Youngkin.
Which only happened because the VA GOP did an end around and instead of holding a primary, held a convention that basically installed Youngkin. Even then, in the next midterm elections, despite Biden's unpopularity and Youngkin's at the time relative popularity, the Dem's held the Virginia legislature, largely because of abortion.
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True, Liz Cheney might as well be under Jorgensen for all the pain she is receiving.
I contend though that the Blue Tribes are playing defense on two fronts: the far right and the far left both, and the public fears the far left more than the far right. The far left is acting as a vanguard element to coopt the machine of the normie like how the far right did it with the centre right normies but this only happened because people prefer the far right to the far left. If the option is the normie right vs the far left, the normie right wins. Issue is whether the far left can wear the skinsuit of the normie left long enough to get into power.
Liz Cheney has a Dick Cheney problem. I don’t think she’s a good example.
At this point everyone knows Dick Cheney was planting false stories to the establishment media to sell the war to the American people. The same thing we know see on the left of funneling misinformation thru the Times.
And I am honestly not even against the Iraq War. I think it ended up ok. Probably could have been better executed if we worked with the Baathist and just cut the head of the snake. Saddam was pretending to have WMD and Cheney used the fact Saddam couldn’t deny having the WMD to sell the war.
Iraq was a mess then. Ideally we could have worked out some kind of deal for him to step down and then provide resources for a new stable regime.
After 9/11 having a guy pretending to be a little crazy with weapons wasn’t something we wanted. Setting up something like the Saudis relationship would have been great.
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