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If it 'died' it is in large part because it wasn't fit for the new environment and DEFINITELY wasn't fit to battle its major competitor.
I'd view this as more of an adaptation than anything else.
History is more contingent than that. And it's not clear that MAGA is particularly well equipped to perform better. The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too. Outside of Trump himself, MAGA has mostly lost Republicans elections over the last eight years and I'd bet it'd lose this one, too, if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.
Trump is probably a net drain now that he's broken the consensus. But Dobbs is a huge confounder here. The GOP was projected to gain in midterms even with Trump and the result of standard conservative maneuvering for the last few decades seems to have interfered.
Trump is notably less gung-ho on the pro-life issue than many in the party.
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Well my personal take is that "MAGA" as such dies with Trump. Doesn't mean he takes the entire right-wing edifice with him.
I'm far more interested in what comes after Trump, given how disruptive he was to prior alliances.
I suspect JD Vance is a hint of what we'll be seeing later on.
Realize how much of that was almost inevitable given the ideological demands the Dem base now makes. Think about why Kamala didn't pick Shapiro despite desperately NEEDING to win PA. Think about why the Dems can't do effective outreach to male voters or even acknowledge that male voters have their own independent set of concerns.
Can the Dems even run a standard, electable candidate without ticking off a large part of that base and triggering infighting anymore? Do they have candidates that can clear the primaries (a significant portion of the Dem electorate backed Bernie Sanders twice) and then be dominant in the general these days?
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Yes. And what were the outcomes of those victories? Why are election victories valuable?
Because otherwise you get the New Deal and the Warren Court.
I hate this argument. That the right should accept losing slowly as a "win," because it's not as bad as losing quickly.
I don't remember if it was here, or at the old subreddit, but I remember reading yet another gun control argument, yet another "cake slicing" characterized as a "compromise." When someone asked what exactly the pro-gun side got out of such a compromise, one gun control proponent got quite honest: you get to keep some of your guns for now. You get them taken away slowly, a bit at a time, rather than all at once right now. You get to lose slowly, instead of quickly, and you should be happy with that. It's a very vae victus attitude, an "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further," attitude.
I'm also reminded of a Nick Freitas video where he complained about a constituent who called him "useless," then spent an hour explaining how state legislatures work, how little power elected politicians have, how the system is rigged against right-wingers so that it's often "lose-lose" — in short, how he's useless. Or, more specifically, that he personally is not useless, but that any right-wing politician in his position playing by "the rules of the game" will be just as impotent.
As I see it, "well, at least you get to lose slowly" isn't an argument for playing the rigged game, it's an argument for flipping the table. Because, as @FCfromSSC notes, even when we "win" electorally, we still end up in the same place.
Sun-tzu says not to fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong, fight where you are strong and the enemy is weak. Your argument is one that says electoral politics is a battleground where the right is weak. So why should we fight on that one, instead of one that's more favorable to us. Because there's one battlefield where we have, if not an advantage, then the least disadvantage — the literal battlefield. We have a lot more guns, more veterans, a lot of favorable geography, control of the food supply, and less dependence on some highly-vulnerable infrastructure.
As I see it, your statement here isn't an argument for why we should seek electoral victories for the Republican party, it's an argument for why we should grab our guns and start shooting.
Please stop saying this.
Why? He's right, given the premises. The people offering the lose-lose alternatives should take notice, unless (as I suspect) they already have and are perfectly willing to fight the real war.
Because he's written this before, unironically, and just a few days ago.. If his behavior catches up to his rhetoric, this would not be a good thing. Not every comment is meant to be taken as a thought experiment.
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Because it's boring and cheap.
The only thing to talk about at that 0point is internet tough guy shit that always sounds like twelve year old boys playing with Legos. "We have all the money so we're gonna win" "Oh yeah?! Well what're you gonna do when we cut off the water supply?"
I have no interest in reading a bunch of internet guys brag about their experience with Gorilla warfare.
Anyone who thinks that the median poster on the motte is going to do anything other than duck and cover during real civil strife is kidding themselves. (this is true of most online spaces)
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Calling for it is definitely boring and cheap. An actual collapse of civil order would be a lot of things, but "boring" and "cheap" are not among them. If you think that our current order would obviously have survived Trump catching the Butler bullet with his brainstem, you are much more of an optimist than I. I believe that a lot of Americans were genuinely disappointed that the bullets only killed and wounded his supporters and not Trump himself. Would you disagree?
The taboo on organized political violence has been steadily degrading for at least the last decade. We've had multiple presidential and federal assassination attempts within the last few years, numerous politically-motivated shootings, and at least one politically-motivated spree-killing of children. This would be catastrophic if the capacity for organized violence were a constant in the equation, and only the willingness were increasing. And in fact, the commenter above fervently believes this, as do most people, and so is actively working to maximize the willingness variable. And on the flipside, most people discounting the possibility of a serious collapse are likewise assuming capacity as a constant and reasoning from there.
He and all others who share this perspective are deceived. Not only is capacity a variable, it is a variable freighted by a massive overhang of untapped potential energy. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for the best ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. The further the culture war escalates, the more motivated the search. If nothing changes, that search is very likely to, within the next few years, return results that are unsurvivable for our present society.
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The next time you see blue tribe normies freaking out that Trumpists literally want to murder them all, remember that it's not just the top-down Democrat propaganda that made them think that. You contributed.
I'm not a Trumpist, nor did I even say I wanted to murder them all. Even if I had said it was time for open war (I did not; I said that given his premises, open war made perfect sense), open war does not imply genocide.
Stop trying to stifle discussion.
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Nice, fedposting, consensus building and stupid rolled in one.
Not entirely sure is it trolling or genuinely advocating for civil war. And unsure which one would be sadder.
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And my point is that we got the equivalent of the New Deal and the Warren Court even when we won.
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It’s not happening, and if it is, it’s a good thing?
more an argument over definitions, in my view. Red Tribe's prospects look better to me under MAGA than they have at any point since W's first term. The MAGA movement is pretty clearly a national contender; and this despite what one might euphemistically refer to as "procedural headwinds". It's true that we're aligning into a direct fight with the entire formal establishment, but that sort of fight is exactly how this nation was founded, and I like our odds. Certainly the present situation seems preferable to one where we endlessly sacrifice value to support that establishment and receive nothing in return.
In very different times, under very different conditions (geographic, economic, technological, military…).
On the basis of what? I, of course, question such optimism…
…but still agree with this part totally.
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