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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I agree with this, and to amplify it: I think Republicans would have done better to write off the Covid elections as "weird" than as "fake." The equivalent of a team losing a game when half their starters are injured, you don't argue that the other team didn't win, but should it really count as a sign of the quality of the two teams?

Meanwhile, I thought a good faith, conciliatory effort from Democrats would potentially look something like saying, "well, that was certainly a weird election, we did what we could to keep it safe even when it required some last-minute changes, but we promise to return to normal next time". Instead, I see histrionics about voter suppression any time someone wants to take us back to the dark days of 2016 when we didn't have ballot drop boxes in public parks and an insistence that 2020 was the "most secure election ever".

Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any Responsible Adult caucus for this one that wants to admit that it was actually weird that a quarter million people in Wisconsin decided they were "indefinitely confined". I really, sincerely don't think there was any mass fraud, just a general freakout over Covid, but I don't get why it's impossible for people to just admit that this was pretty weird and probably a bad idea to reify.

I agree. Calling a 50/50 Senate a "mandate" to make irrevocable changes is deeply bad faith. Complaining that "two senators" are holding up your agenda is deeply bad faith when you could have just won another 20 elections. Congress is deeply broken.

Meanwhile, I thought a good faith, conciliatory effort from Democrats would

You are running off of mistake theory.

Not really though, I'm just hypothesis checking. If the last minute Covid changes in elections had been good faith, I would have expected to see something like I described above. I didn't think the Covid changes were good faith, but if they were, I would have expected a different post-election tone than what we got.

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