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Why not? What "serious consequences" do you have in mind, and what reason do our elites have to fear them (as opposed to, say, welcoming them as casus belli to crush the hated enemy tribe even harder).
Again, what consequences, other than his supporters giving up and quitting the political scene?
So what if people stop thinking our legal system is principled (assuming they haven't already)? The Chinese, for example, rejected the entire concept of "rule of law" and "equality before the law" (the core positions of the "Legalist" school) a bit over 2200 years ago, and soldiered on as a civilization just fine.
Greece? Ukraine?
Because the alternative is being subjected to severe punishment for no possible gain?
Except I think, based on my experience with my "republican base" family and friends, that is what most will do. After all, quite a few already think that 2020 was outright stolen, expect some manner of repeat in 2024, and have given up on voting in favor of one (or more) of three things:
Preparing for the imminent Second Coming/End of Days that is now guaranteed to happen in our lifetimes.
The "Benedict Option" (even if they don't use the term): preparing and strengthening their family and church in hopes their descendants a century or two from now will be better prepared to survive and rebuild in the inevitable Dark Age to come. (I think it was Dave "The Distributist" Greene who argued that the entire right needs to accept that we cannot and will not ever win politically any time this century, and the only possible politics for the right is either forming families or becoming a (Catholic) priest, then preparing said families and Church for the eventual collapse.)
Wait for "someone else" to "fix everything" for them.
This last — the immense "free-rider" problem — cannot be overstated. My Dad, for example, holds that, should this sort of situation come to pass, that "local church groups" will provide all the organization the American right-wing will need to "fight back" and win… while he's (AFAIK) never attended a church service in his life. (He's certainly never attended one in my lifetime. For that matter, he has no friends or social life at all outside our family.) Others confidently that our military will certainly step in and set things right… in between breathlessly repeating the latest thing they watched on Fox News about the Woke-ification of our armed forces.
This was one of the more common right-wing criticisms I used to see of all the Q-Anon nonsense — that, besides being an exercise in unbounded apophenia, it serves as a call to passivity, asserting that right-wing citizens need do nothing at all, because the "patriots" secretly at work behind-the-scenes will fix everything for them.
Others (like the people at Sarah Hoyt's blog comments) will go on at length about how doing anything but hunkering down is "playing into the Marxists' hands," and that we just need to wait until "Zhou Bai-Den's Marxist thugs" come busting down our individual front doors, at which point we need only shoot back in self-defense, and then we automatically win.
I think that, for all their passion, very few of them will get violent. Sure, some will, but those that do will do so entirely in the form of "lone-wolf" terrorism, blind lashing-out so poorly targeted and sloppily executed as to make Breivik's assault on Utøya look good in comparison. They will accomplish nothing but giving our government even more excuses to crack down on the right and limit political expression further still.
This reaches the point of civil war and potential serious domestic terrorism events. I don't believe you're thinking seriously about the consequences of this if you think that the elites could simply crush them - US domestic infrastructure is utterly impossible to secure in this kind of threat environment and the red tribe at the very least has the ability to reduce the US to a blasted wasteland with no functioning economy at all. Even assuming the elites are as perfidious, powerful, competent and undivided as you claim, their choices are going to be between giving the hated enemy tribe a say in society, or just not having a society at all.
That section was essentially an attack on AshLael's position - you don't believe that and neither do I, so there's no point discussing it given that I believe we actually agree here.
Your idea of a functioning democracy is Ukraine? You are not exactly making a good argument against the claim that functioning democracies don't do this, especially seeing as how Ukraine has actually suspended elections and isn't democratic in the slightest.
This is going to happen to them anyway if they do nothing, and in fact has been happening for a while. They have a choice between severe punishment, or severe punishment with a chance at victory. Sure, it sucks, but it beats the alternative.
I can't actually argue against your own impression of your friends and family, but I think that the base in general will absolutely get more serious and violent if what is being described comes to pass. Maybe we just see different portions of the republican base?
I agreed with those criticisms, though the bigger issue to me was that Q-Anon was obviously faked.
Who?
While it isn't particularly pleasant to talk about, Breivik's assault actually achieved all the aims he was going for. He confessed later on that his manifesto was actually a fake - the reason it was full of plagiarised writing was because he specifically wanted to give the impression that he was inspired by a particular group of writers in order to get the media to attack them. He succeeded, and at the same time wiped out the most promising left wing politicians of the next generation. Breivik unironically achieved the goals he had for the attacks, so you'd probably want to pick a different example.
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You've got to remember, post-2020-election the Republican machine did not declare "stolen election, government illegitimate". McConnell outright condemned Trump right after squelching his impeachment trial. You're right that a few lone wolves aren't much of an issue, but if the Republican machine as a whole flips into "rebellion" mode that's quite a different story, and having elections be stolen for real is the sort of thing that might push them over (remember, if the fix goes in that means all their hopes of accomplishing anything via the system - the whole reason they are politicians - just caught on fire). In particular, once one state declares secession or the equivalent, all the other red states are faced with the choice of "join the rebels" or "be made to fight the rebels and then be crushed politically in the ensuing witch-hunt". Texas is the obvious spark, but not the only possibility.
Complicating matters is the fact that the PRC is probably looking to have a Taiwan invasion ready and waiting next year, precisely in order to take advantage of possible chaos in the USA.
Most of my hope is on "the SCOTUS nixes attempts to remove Trump from the ballot". Outside of that scenario... well, I'm sure glad I don't live in the 'States.
Of course not; that would not be keeping in their role as the Outer Party; the Washington Generals to the Democrats' Globetrotters. It would threaten their cushy jobs and ongoing access to the proverbial gravy train.
As the Spartan ephors said to Philip II, "if." I don't think they will, because enough of the long time party establishment are, to use wrestling terminology, jobbers. They're paid to make a show of opposition, to maintain "kayfabe," and then lose. And they likely know it. It doesn't matter how blatant any future "steal" is, they know their continued access wealthy donors, personal influence, and those famous "DC cocktail parties" depends on insisting that the elections were still free and fair.
No, that's far from the whole reason. Again, there's the many benefits of the job itself — the pay, the perks, the status, the influence. I think it was one of Chris Rufo's essays that pointed out how the Democratic party has shown a willingness to accept short-term electoral losses in pushing through long-term legal and social changes, highlighting the particular example of LBJ. In contrast, the GOP, most especially the party establishment, trend very much in the opposite direction — they consistently prioritize protecting their phony-baloney jobs (to borrow from the great Mel Brooks) over "making a difference." There are benefits to being in the Outer Party. There are reasons that generally-competent basketball players play for the Washington Generals.
(Then there's the ones like Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich (can you tell I'm Alaskan?), for whom politics is literally the family business. The latter was being "groomed" for his eventual Senate seat all the way back when he was in high school. They were raised to be politicians. There are reasons I say that an openly aristocratic system is just being more honest about the ruling class.)
Plus, even if the GOP establishment does want to accomplish things in office, those aren't necessarily the same things that their voters — especially the Trump base — want. As someone once put it on a lengthy youtube video I once watched (analyzing county-level maps and breakdowns of biennial Congressional elections from the end of WWII to the end of the 20th century), the Republican Party began as the party of New England bankers… and that's what it always will be. They only "picked up" white working voters because the post-Nixon Democrats "dropped" them, as Matt Stoller describes at length in his 2016 Atlantic piece "How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul." The job of GOP elites is to falsely pander to the voter base when campaigning, then deliver for the elite donor class in office — and I remember sometime last year or so a quote floating around the web from an interview with a Republican campaign strategist where he pretty much said that.
Assuming they aren't able to delay it from reaching them until after the election.
We seem to have very-different models of these people. I guess if there's an obvious steal and the GOP just rolls over and plays dead, I'll have to give this more credence than I currently do.
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