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I believe this is now fully baked in for all Republican candidates. Haley gets GoodGuy points at the moment because she's a loser that has zero chance of beating Trump. If she were nominated, she would immediately be a Nazi, dangerous to our sacred trans children and innocent asylum seekers. Normal, completely ordinary policies from a decade ago are now treated as signs of literal fascism. We're going to need a long period of de-escalation before a Republican winning the Presidency isn't treated like a reason for riots.
I mean yeah the rhetoric is always going to be that whoever is on the other side of the ballot is pure evil, that's just campaigning.
But what matters is how much the voters viscerally feel that rhetoric to be true, and how motivated they are by it. I absolutely do not believe that Democratic voters would be equally motivated to hate and turn out against any other candidate the way they are for Trump, there's a long shared trauma around the Trump name at this point that other candidates lack.
I sort of feel like maybe there's a blind spot here among the anti-democrat crowd, where they believe (or need to believe) that Trump is pretty normal and unremarkable and everything the other side tries to throw at him are lies and exaggerations. And that's a perfectly reasonable position to take, but I think it can blind people to teh fact that the other side does not feel this way, and actually believes and feels the things they are saying about how much of a unique and horrible threat he is.
If you believed that your opponents believed that Trump was perfectly normal and unobjectionable, then the only conclusion you could reach is that the other side is happy to lie outlandishly and histrionically about whoever is heading the GOP in order to get power, and the entire act in insincere from the highest halls of power to the lowest level voter. And it feels like some people are coming to that conclusion, implicitly or explicitly.
But as usual for cases like this, what's actually going on is that the other side doesn't believe what you believe, and is actually acting pretty normally in ways that you would recognize and probably do yourself, if you did believe what they believed.
Disagreements about matters of fact are a far more common and parsimonious explanation than one half of the country suddenly diverging from human nature to become elaborate liars larping every moment of their political engagement for a decade.
I remember that Mitt Romney was going to bring back slavery, tortured his dog, and never paid his taxes.
I remember when MAGA chuds tried to lynch a Black actor in Chicago and people who expressed doubts about it were outlandishly and histrionically accused of being pro-lynching. Then the accuser laughed it off because he never believed in the first place, it was just effective "rhetoric" for someone who treats every conversation as a struggle session, and every conversation partner as a victim to be insincerely manipulated.
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People are perfectly able to convince themselves of ideas by motivated reasoning when the idea is convenient for them to believe. "Lying" is probably the closest word we have to this. Or maybe "motivated reckless reasoning" or some such.
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Okay, so they aren't mostly liars. The ones in the media actually are, but the typical sort-of-engaged voter is not.
But, this means they are something more insidious than a liar. They are people who easily let themselves be convinced that [current republican candidate] is an existential threat to democracy, a dogwhistling cryptofascist, etc, etc. They may not be lying, but they so thoroughly selectively lack skepticism that they let bad news headlines convince them that Mike Pence electro-shocks gay children.
Yes, you and them disagree about matters of fact, and at least one of you is wrong.
I myself am not an optimist, I suspect that they are wrong, you are wrong, and I am wrong about most of our beliefs on all of these topics. We simply don't have the level of truth-preserving information channels it would take to expect to consistently do better than that as a society.
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Sure, but Republican voters are also probably not going to be equally motivated to turn out for any other candidate the way they are for Trump.
The thing is that bonus Trump voters in guaranteed red states aren’t worth anything, while less Biden voters in purple states are.
Boosting voter turnout in Wyoming or Arkansas is worthless for the GOP.
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Perhaps.
My impression is that Republicans are motivated by a sense of crisis around a pervasive culture war that seeps into every nook and cranny of life and lies behind every public and private institution. The election was stolen by a hundred different election officials and a thousand collaborators covering for them, teachers are transing your kids and teaching them to be Marxists, immigrants are pouring over the boarder and taking your government services, etc. A diffuse, broad crisis that requires decisive and far-reaching leadership to combat.
Whereas I think Democrats have very much focused their own sense of crisis around Trump specifically, claiming that he personally is a threat to democracy and decency and needs to be defeated at all costs.
My impression is that removing Trump from the equation dissipates the sense of crisis and urgency felt by the Democrats, but not that felt by the Republicans.
Republicans may not love the new nominee, but they'll be driven to vote for him out of the fear of the ongoing existential crisis anyway, in the same way that Democrats are historically unenthusiastic about Biden but are turning out anyway to vote against Trump.
I could of course be wrong, but that's my sense of the field.
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Of course, all Republicans are "fascists", but do you truly not see a difference in the tenor and hyperbole over Trump?
I do think a different candidate would be much harder for the Democrats to attack in this way. Trump makes it easy because he is an obviously narcissistic prick.
Not really, no, just the effects of increased polarization driven by other factors, mainly social media. I absolutely think the polarization would be no less with any other Republican.
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I think replacing Trump with DeSantis would immediately result in the rhetoric being that it's even scarier, that it's Trump-but-competent, that Project 2025 is still a danger to Our Democracy, and so on. Maybe they couldn't whip up the populace quite the same, I don't know, but the attempt would exist and I would still expect riots if any Republican wins in 2024.
Yeah, the attacks on DeSantis in 2020–2021 made me realize that whoever the Republicans nominated, they'd be attacked mercilessly by the media.
It's somewhat sad that people seem to have forgotten the pandemic so quickly. I view DeSantis as a hero for what he did in Florida.
It truly is amazing the collective amnesia
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Exactly correct - the rhetoric will be like that no matter who is on the ballot, that's what campaigning is like these days, but it won't actually energize Dems to get out the vote if it's not aimed at Trump, meaning it's an advantage to Reps.
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