The Lincoln quote--“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it”--reminds me of a simplified description of navigation, guidance and control we used when I was in school--"where am I; where do I want to be; how do I get there?"
Control theory spends a lot of time defining our actual ability to execute "how do I get there?" We have to implicitly understand the levers and mechanisms we have to accomplish our goals, and as Bill points out, we have to do that right now.
But we also have to possess the will to use them. Maybe it's time for Jeffries and Schumer to announce - just like McConnell did at the beginning of the Obama administration - that our stated goal is to defeat the President's plans (maybe caveat that with "when they are counter to our values"... maybe not).
The hue and cry from the right will be deafening. "Where's the unity?" "How can you be so partisan?" "This is a time to come together!"
At which Democratic leadership should briefly recount McConnell's announcement, reflect on Biden's presidency and the level of cooperation he got from McCarthy and Johnson, discuss recent Supreme Court appointments, and invite the other side of the aisle to go fuck themselves.
Bill is completely right and Andrew is also completely right.
It’s time to pull ourselves together now and figure out our next steps. Many of us would benefit from picking up a civics book.
Also recognize that 15M 2020 voters STAYED HOME. Trump *lost* 2M votes since 2020. He won a majority of waaaay fewer people.
Start a political discussion group and bring that civics book, to help you figure out our next steps. Run for anything. Start volunteering for candidates for the midterms, now. They knew who they are and if they don’t survive their primary switch to the new one.
The deportations starting will send inflation through the roof. Sorry. Those people work and pay sales tax and many have taxes withheld. They pick produce and clean hotel rooms and lay tile and install roofing. We already have jobs going begging. No American citizen is willing to do any of those things.
If you know an undocumented migrant (or even a documented one, frankly) help them get certified copies of their citizen children’s birth certificates and keep a copy for them as well. Trump and Vance have every intention of deporting citizen children.
Get a gun and learn how to use it safely and store it responsibly. And practice. You can’t fight the military but you can certainly defend yourself against the MAGA asshole on your block who gets wasted and remembers he hated your Kamala* sign.
Pull yourselves together.
*Who did a basically flawless job. She didn’t tell Haley voters and stupid lazy Democrats to stay home.
The intellectual side of me says yes, we need to fight. But today, my emotional reaction is anger. Ignorance is not an excuse. Part of me says- give the house to them too and let the country feel it. But that’s today, pure anger. Hopefully tomorrow I am in a better place. But I know our fellow Americans are welcoming the pain they think will be inflicted only for the left. It may start there, but they will eventually feel it.
I wonder how the votes correlate with the sources of news people listen to. If people only listen to Fox and other's like it, they only hear lies. They were led to believe the economy sucks, inflation hadn't come down, immigrants were killing your family and taking your jobs (even though employers were having a hard time filling jobs), and Trump would fix it.
Oh good grief. Two days after the Bulwark praised Harris' "remarkable" and "nearly perfect" campaign, it is printing articles casting blame on her. IT IS NOT HER FAULT. If anything the problem lies with the asymmetry the Dems always face.
Or maybe we should just step back and stop trying to protect the American voters from the consequences of their own choices. We did that for the first Trump term and all we did was exhaust ourselves and make the voters think Trump wasn’t so bad after all.
I don’t think any of us anticipated the scope of Trump’s win. We have lost the Senate, and it is becoming increasingly likely that we will lose the House too. Who among us thought we would lose even the popular vote? We know we were right about Trump. But America does not agree with us. Some of Trump’s votes may be due to the price of eggs, yes, but most Trump supporters saw our side and said, no, I want that. We don’t have popular opinion on our side. He has a mandate, whether we like it or not. It’s time to come to terms with that, and for now, to adjust our ambitions accordingly. We should watch, criticize, and wait.
America knows we are right about Trump, but 51% want that. He indeed has a mandate to tear up the Constitution and usher in the autocracy he has been promising for nearly a decade. 51% of Americans have shown us who we are, and that as another Bulwark points out, Biden (and our) belief in what Toqueville called our innate goodness turns out to be a myth. How do we go about protecting the America we love or does coming to terms mean accepting the inevitable? As much as Trump criticized China, he seems determined to turn us into a sort of China where most of the population simply does the best they can under an autocratic regime.
Not long ago, MAGA ideologues were celebrating the repeal of Chevron deference to the regulatory decisions of administrative agencies. Now, MAGAs are poised to pack administrative agencies with ideological loyalists. Michael Popok pointed out that the repeal of Chevron opens the door wide for legal challenges to MAGA administrative actions -- which is kind of funny.
The “what did Harris campaign do to lose the election” is driving me nuts. It seems to assume that the election was in the bag for her. It wasn’t. The polls always showed a tight race.
I’m not sure that inflation was the sole thing on peoples’ minds. Many tuned the authoritarianism out as just the way Trump talks. Many weren’t sure a woman could do the job. Especially a black affirmative action one. These last two were part of ingrained almost unconscious conclusions that colored perceptions of the candidates.
The polls showed a tight race. But the result was a landslide win. It was obvious that Harris wouldn’t win before 10:00. Trump vastly improved his numbers since 2020 across the board, even in districts and states that he lost, whereas Harris sadly underperformed. The polls sure didn’t show that.
Undoubtedly there were different reasons for different people. I have no doubt that for many it was distrust of a woman. For many it was race. For many, it was the transgender panic. For some, it was the naive belief that T*** has a magical formula for bringing prices down. For some, it was misinformation about the facts of border-crossing during the past 8 years, and misinformation about crime. And for some it was the belief that we are "at war" in Ukraine and spending a large part of our budget on it.
The resistance should start with challenging the legitimacy of Trump's presidency. It's not a free and fair election when one candidate and one party gets to accept the outcome only if they win and undermine the legitimacy of the election if they lose. It's not a free and fair election under the Constitution when one party nominates a candidate who is not even constitutionally eligible to hold office after having incited an insurrection in violation of his oath of office, as certified by Congress in the impeachment process, which disqualifies him from being President again under Sec 3 of the 14th Amendment. It's not a free and fair election when one candidate is intentionally causing death threats to be made against opponents to silence them. The list goes on and on. We should start the opposition by denying his legitimacy, not by submitting to his criminality. To pretend that this is a legitimately peaceful transfer of power is to condition the people to accept the tyranny that is to come.
A system that adheres to its own Constitution would have barred T*** from seeking office again. A party that cares about the rule of law would not have nominated him.
Never Trumpers need to become Democrats; not just vote but join. I know it's unsavory but it's necessary. You can't really have an impact outside the tent. Dem's need proactive media at every turn. Low info voters who do regularly vote chose Trump because they felt good before COVID. They blame Dems for the post COVID hardships, not realizing tht paycheck to paycheck is better than no paycheck with no government support. They are delusional in thinking those resources will go to them vs immigrants (most of whom get next to nothing). It's going to be a wide awakening.
I have a hard time with your assessment, Andrew. Trump's authoritarianism was just as visible as the price of eggs. The attempt to stay in office on J6, which he literally admitted to moments before November 5th, threatened our democracy and the rule of law. Our democracy is precious, you can live without eggs!
I still can't fathom how a majority of voters could decide that an effort to stay in office unlawfully is no big deal. Or defying a subpoena for sensitive documents that were willfully, illegally retained.
Then there's the frequent praise of dictators who "rule with an iron fist" and the apparent inability to understand why an American president should not admire that kind of governance. Anyone who thinks he doesn't really want to exercise the same power just as ruthlessly is an idiot.
I think we should be humble and look at more evidence before drawing too many conclusions about what happened here, but I think Andrew's hypothesis is a good starting point. It might help to demystify this possibility a little to ask a couple of questions about the average voter and think seriously about what the answers are likely to be. For example:
- What is the percentage of voters who know that Trump defied a subpeona?
- What is the percentage of voters who know what a subpeona is and why it is important to the law?
I don't know about you, but it wouldn't surprise me if the answer to those questions is relatively low. I have thought a lot over the past 24 hours that one thing we might learn from this is that most voters simply have no idea what an authoritarian in waiting looks like in the year 2024.
The people who regularly dispense their "wisdom" to consumers of conservative media do know those things, and they would consider the defiance of a subpoena disqualifying if any candidate of the other party had done it. But they chose to whitewash it and claim that the real crimes were committed by DOJ against Trump. Those people chose moral cynicism for the sake of political power.
Virtually everyone knows that Trump incited a violent attack on the Capitol in an effort to stay in power. Many people who at first called it unconscionable eventually turned around and said "never mind," thus signaling to average voters that they shouldn't see it as disqualifying at all.
Thank you, Bill.
Only way back is let Trump grind America into the ground
The Lincoln quote--“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it”--reminds me of a simplified description of navigation, guidance and control we used when I was in school--"where am I; where do I want to be; how do I get there?"
Control theory spends a lot of time defining our actual ability to execute "how do I get there?" We have to implicitly understand the levers and mechanisms we have to accomplish our goals, and as Bill points out, we have to do that right now.
But we also have to possess the will to use them. Maybe it's time for Jeffries and Schumer to announce - just like McConnell did at the beginning of the Obama administration - that our stated goal is to defeat the President's plans (maybe caveat that with "when they are counter to our values"... maybe not).
The hue and cry from the right will be deafening. "Where's the unity?" "How can you be so partisan?" "This is a time to come together!"
At which Democratic leadership should briefly recount McConnell's announcement, reflect on Biden's presidency and the level of cooperation he got from McCarthy and Johnson, discuss recent Supreme Court appointments, and invite the other side of the aisle to go fuck themselves.
Bill is completely right and Andrew is also completely right.
It’s time to pull ourselves together now and figure out our next steps. Many of us would benefit from picking up a civics book.
Also recognize that 15M 2020 voters STAYED HOME. Trump *lost* 2M votes since 2020. He won a majority of waaaay fewer people.
Start a political discussion group and bring that civics book, to help you figure out our next steps. Run for anything. Start volunteering for candidates for the midterms, now. They knew who they are and if they don’t survive their primary switch to the new one.
The deportations starting will send inflation through the roof. Sorry. Those people work and pay sales tax and many have taxes withheld. They pick produce and clean hotel rooms and lay tile and install roofing. We already have jobs going begging. No American citizen is willing to do any of those things.
If you know an undocumented migrant (or even a documented one, frankly) help them get certified copies of their citizen children’s birth certificates and keep a copy for them as well. Trump and Vance have every intention of deporting citizen children.
Get a gun and learn how to use it safely and store it responsibly. And practice. You can’t fight the military but you can certainly defend yourself against the MAGA asshole on your block who gets wasted and remembers he hated your Kamala* sign.
Pull yourselves together.
*Who did a basically flawless job. She didn’t tell Haley voters and stupid lazy Democrats to stay home.
The intellectual side of me says yes, we need to fight. But today, my emotional reaction is anger. Ignorance is not an excuse. Part of me says- give the house to them too and let the country feel it. But that’s today, pure anger. Hopefully tomorrow I am in a better place. But I know our fellow Americans are welcoming the pain they think will be inflicted only for the left. It may start there, but they will eventually feel it.
I wonder how the votes correlate with the sources of news people listen to. If people only listen to Fox and other's like it, they only hear lies. They were led to believe the economy sucks, inflation hadn't come down, immigrants were killing your family and taking your jobs (even though employers were having a hard time filling jobs), and Trump would fix it.
Oh good grief. Two days after the Bulwark praised Harris' "remarkable" and "nearly perfect" campaign, it is printing articles casting blame on her. IT IS NOT HER FAULT. If anything the problem lies with the asymmetry the Dems always face.
Trump's fat, lazy, and stupid.
And he wants us to fear him.
So don't.
If you do, you're giving him what he wants.
So don't.
Bill, I ready to act now but what are you proposing we do?
Or maybe we should just step back and stop trying to protect the American voters from the consequences of their own choices. We did that for the first Trump term and all we did was exhaust ourselves and make the voters think Trump wasn’t so bad after all.
I don’t think any of us anticipated the scope of Trump’s win. We have lost the Senate, and it is becoming increasingly likely that we will lose the House too. Who among us thought we would lose even the popular vote? We know we were right about Trump. But America does not agree with us. Some of Trump’s votes may be due to the price of eggs, yes, but most Trump supporters saw our side and said, no, I want that. We don’t have popular opinion on our side. He has a mandate, whether we like it or not. It’s time to come to terms with that, and for now, to adjust our ambitions accordingly. We should watch, criticize, and wait.
America knows we are right about Trump, but 51% want that. He indeed has a mandate to tear up the Constitution and usher in the autocracy he has been promising for nearly a decade. 51% of Americans have shown us who we are, and that as another Bulwark points out, Biden (and our) belief in what Toqueville called our innate goodness turns out to be a myth. How do we go about protecting the America we love or does coming to terms mean accepting the inevitable? As much as Trump criticized China, he seems determined to turn us into a sort of China where most of the population simply does the best they can under an autocratic regime.
I don’t like it either, but he’s got both branches of Congress and the Supreme Court. And public opinion (for now.)
Not long ago, MAGA ideologues were celebrating the repeal of Chevron deference to the regulatory decisions of administrative agencies. Now, MAGAs are poised to pack administrative agencies with ideological loyalists. Michael Popok pointed out that the repeal of Chevron opens the door wide for legal challenges to MAGA administrative actions -- which is kind of funny.
We should play the game of legal delay, delay, delay better than Trump does.
Tie up all his crap in court.
Drag stuff out as long as possible.
There are plenty of smart lawyers who, I think, would be more than willing to make Trump's appointed legal teams look like idiots.
The “what did Harris campaign do to lose the election” is driving me nuts. It seems to assume that the election was in the bag for her. It wasn’t. The polls always showed a tight race.
I’m not sure that inflation was the sole thing on peoples’ minds. Many tuned the authoritarianism out as just the way Trump talks. Many weren’t sure a woman could do the job. Especially a black affirmative action one. These last two were part of ingrained almost unconscious conclusions that colored perceptions of the candidates.
The polls showed a tight race. But the result was a landslide win. It was obvious that Harris wouldn’t win before 10:00. Trump vastly improved his numbers since 2020 across the board, even in districts and states that he lost, whereas Harris sadly underperformed. The polls sure didn’t show that.
affirmative action? seriously?
Undoubtedly there were different reasons for different people. I have no doubt that for many it was distrust of a woman. For many it was race. For many, it was the transgender panic. For some, it was the naive belief that T*** has a magical formula for bringing prices down. For some, it was misinformation about the facts of border-crossing during the past 8 years, and misinformation about crime. And for some it was the belief that we are "at war" in Ukraine and spending a large part of our budget on it.
The resistance should start with challenging the legitimacy of Trump's presidency. It's not a free and fair election when one candidate and one party gets to accept the outcome only if they win and undermine the legitimacy of the election if they lose. It's not a free and fair election under the Constitution when one party nominates a candidate who is not even constitutionally eligible to hold office after having incited an insurrection in violation of his oath of office, as certified by Congress in the impeachment process, which disqualifies him from being President again under Sec 3 of the 14th Amendment. It's not a free and fair election when one candidate is intentionally causing death threats to be made against opponents to silence them. The list goes on and on. We should start the opposition by denying his legitimacy, not by submitting to his criminality. To pretend that this is a legitimately peaceful transfer of power is to condition the people to accept the tyranny that is to come.
A system that adheres to its own Constitution would have barred T*** from seeking office again. A party that cares about the rule of law would not have nominated him.
Never Trumpers need to become Democrats; not just vote but join. I know it's unsavory but it's necessary. You can't really have an impact outside the tent. Dem's need proactive media at every turn. Low info voters who do regularly vote chose Trump because they felt good before COVID. They blame Dems for the post COVID hardships, not realizing tht paycheck to paycheck is better than no paycheck with no government support. They are delusional in thinking those resources will go to them vs immigrants (most of whom get next to nothing). It's going to be a wide awakening.
I have a hard time with your assessment, Andrew. Trump's authoritarianism was just as visible as the price of eggs. The attempt to stay in office on J6, which he literally admitted to moments before November 5th, threatened our democracy and the rule of law. Our democracy is precious, you can live without eggs!
I don’t know if the voters wanted authoritarianism. But you know what they didn’t want? Our side, us, what we were selling.
Especially because they were usually lying about the price of eggs.
Or they all get the very best free-range eggs that Whole Foods has to offer.
I still can't fathom how a majority of voters could decide that an effort to stay in office unlawfully is no big deal. Or defying a subpoena for sensitive documents that were willfully, illegally retained.
Then there's the frequent praise of dictators who "rule with an iron fist" and the apparent inability to understand why an American president should not admire that kind of governance. Anyone who thinks he doesn't really want to exercise the same power just as ruthlessly is an idiot.
I think we should be humble and look at more evidence before drawing too many conclusions about what happened here, but I think Andrew's hypothesis is a good starting point. It might help to demystify this possibility a little to ask a couple of questions about the average voter and think seriously about what the answers are likely to be. For example:
- What is the percentage of voters who know that Trump defied a subpeona?
- What is the percentage of voters who know what a subpeona is and why it is important to the law?
I don't know about you, but it wouldn't surprise me if the answer to those questions is relatively low. I have thought a lot over the past 24 hours that one thing we might learn from this is that most voters simply have no idea what an authoritarian in waiting looks like in the year 2024.
The people who regularly dispense their "wisdom" to consumers of conservative media do know those things, and they would consider the defiance of a subpoena disqualifying if any candidate of the other party had done it. But they chose to whitewash it and claim that the real crimes were committed by DOJ against Trump. Those people chose moral cynicism for the sake of political power.
Virtually everyone knows that Trump incited a violent attack on the Capitol in an effort to stay in power. Many people who at first called it unconscionable eventually turned around and said "never mind," thus signaling to average voters that they shouldn't see it as disqualifying at all.