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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34363 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Or "not my president"--there was even a 2016 campaign to recruit faithless electors.

Fair point to mention. But I'd argue that fake electors are much worse

But I'd argue that fake electors are much worse

You and a lot of other people! But that's one of the main reasons why norm violations are bad: they provide excuses for others to escalate. By declining to clearly and unequivocally condemn the faithless elector scheme, Democrats created a reason for Republicans to begin thinking seriously about ways to preserve victory in the face of electoral defeat.

Treating every conflict as the most important conflict ever and buying into the narrative that "whatever bad thing my side does is justified, because the other side is even worse" locks us all into a race to the bottom. Regardless of Tuesday's outcome, I have no confidence at all that the result will be a cooling of the culture war divide.

Do you in your heart of hearts believe that the way 2016 was done convinced Trump and his allies that it's fine to escalate to fake electors?

I'm not persuaded that Trump or his allies believed that what they were doing was assembling fake electors. Just as I suspect the people trying to recruit faithless electors (or the Representatives declining to certify) did not, for even an instant, regard themselves as attempting to "steal" the election.

This is not the sort of thing that people generally think of in a point-by-point tit-for-tat. Rather, the dirtier the other side plays, the more justified one feels about playing dirty. The particulars are less important than the trend, because it is the trend and not the particulars that point toward what is likely to come next.

I'm not persuaded that Trump or his allies believed that what they were doing was assembling fake electors.

I'm interested, if you have you written about Eastman and Chesebro I would like to read it

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