Now if we were talking firing squads, guillotines, or rioting mobs tearing down every stick and brick of the White House, I might be roused enough to cheer. Today, though, I see a criminal running the country, an entire political party dedicated to corruption over democratic representation, and an electorate that wants to negate every aspect of human progress in the USA and celebrate the barbarity of oppression, so excuse me if I don’t get excited about plodding procedural maneuvering by bureaucrats cautious about protecting their privileges. Especially when I expect Republican sycophants to block any change, while continuing to pack the judiciary with incompetents and ideologues.
I expect my grandchildren will remember this era not for the clown in the oval office, but for the way we ignored real crises in the environment and civil rights, fueled by a selfish majority and short-sighted politicians. They’re going to wonder what was wrong with us that we didn’t storm the halls of power and change our course right now.
Oh, well. We’ve got a dedicated thread for discussing the infuriating political situation. Join in there! I just don’t have the heart anymore.
Well, he’s impeached. Damn. That means Civil War right? The Red Caps are coming, the Red Caps are coming.
Just watch them backslide and claim that when they were screaming “Civil War if Trump impeached”, they meant “Civil War if Trump impeached AND removed”.
I was trolling on the Fox News comment threads last night with that “Civil War Now?” argument and by far the most common response was to threaten to murder me with a gun. Obviously I can’t defend myself because I live in a “libtard blue state” that banned guns. Actually no.
For me the most irritating thing about this whole mess has been the Red Caps threatening a “New Civil War”. There’s a word to describe the threat of violence in order to enact political change. It’s called “Terrorism”. I can only hope some of the more dangerous ones are being watched. Still expecting a mass shooting within the next week though. Fate could prove me wrong, but the extreme right is going to be exceptionally triggered by this.
So stay safe out there.
Here’s how I’d answer:
“Because we fooled ourselves into believing that the people we disagreed with were honest and could be convinced through reasoned debate. We believed that peaceful protest and civil disobedience would sway the populace, not realizing that a significant number of Americans are callous, willfully ignorant, sociopaths. We came to the conclusion that nothing ever justified violence and unrest and made pacifism into a near-religion even as the Right’s thugs clubbed and shot us. We thought that a government of checks and balances was all that was needed to stop corruption and serve justice to all. We kept telling ourselves that “everything was going to be all right” and “the arc of history bends toward progress” and we patted ourselves on the back for “not sinking to their level” when we refused to do what needed to be done. Now, do you have any loose change for the clean air machine?”
At this stage of the game, I’m just waiting for a quick, painless death before civilization finally collapses. Knowing my luck, I won’t get that mercy and I’ll get to helplessly watch the whole, bloody shit-show unfold in real time.
Another proof that entropy always wins. It had to fall apart sometime, but we have the awful luck of seeing it happen ourselves.
I’m not excited, but I would have been disgusted and demoralized if the House I helped elect last year had backed down on obviously impeachable behavior.
Statistically, violence doesn’t work for the left. There are few exceptions. And when it is effective, the win is tainted and isn’t sustained. The right has a monopoly on violence, and we fight an asymmetric battle there. If the left doles out violence, the left is blamed, and if the right doles out violence, the left is blamed. Though the latter is far less effective for the right than the former, especially if the left starts to properly organize.
Though, violence and unrest are not the same thing. Peaceful unrest is a thing. We also have to learn how to successfully win without violence for the future of civilization. Further, we have to assert our position. We can’t vote fo the center-right party just because they’re to the left of the far-gone party. They have to be worth voting for. If they’re not, it’s better to focus on organizing and primarying them out then to compromise and vote for them. Let the centrists fail until the Democrats realize they have to be an actual leftist party.
And I say all this as a person who very much feels a catharsis from the idea of violence. As far as I’m concerned, at this point, all elected Republicans deserve the guillotine. It’s far past a simple difference of opinion. At best they’re thieves and conspirators, but many of them are also racists and rapists. But violence won’t work. We don’t have the resources for it to work, we’re at a disadvantage there, and it’s just playing into their hand.
I believe it is also worthwhile to attempt to develop some sort of political aikido. If it is possible to win without violence as the enemy resorts to it, it is worth-while to practice towards that end.
It took many generations of severe inequality and political abuse for the French to get angry enough to take matters into their own hands. The difference between the American revolution and the French (there were many, but this is the one I am thinking about today) is the American revolution was more of a political thing, led by oligarchs who were invested in maintaining order and preserving (their) government. The French revolution was a spasm of hatred, expressed with extremely personal violence; i.e.: sticking people’s heads on pikes and parading them around Paris. The current rulers of the US will eventually build that level of hatred, as it’s implicit in their politics, but it’s going to probably take longer than many of us expect.
Also, France had a pretty serious decade-long internal insurgency, first, before the revolution hit Paris. And a famine. We’re not in anything like as bad shape as the French were. Yet.
I know it is too early to celebrate.
It is worth noting it is a step forward.
It is important to take the steps within the Constitution, as it provides the means to protect itself from getting shredded, when the people implement those instructions.
Evil triumphs when the good do nothing, is the aphorism underway.
While it is nice to imagine violent overthrow of this corrupt administration, it is important to use the system, not destroy it. Chaos usually doesn’t resolve properly.
ksiondag@5 It’s not a question of non-violence, but “civility.” As long as liberals consider it more important to be perceived as the calm, reasonable ones and value pundits’ praise above enacting effective policy, we’ll be stuck in an asymmetric battle in which the GOP eats our lunch on a daily basis.
The impeachment is a baby step in the right direction, and it took openly corrupt behavior (twisting foreign policy to dig up dirt on a projected political opponent and laughing about it) to get the party establishment to do anything. I think the reaction immediately after the 2016 election was good, but we’ve regressed since then to the point where people think things are sort of normal and a lot of Democrats are just hoping they won’t have to put up a real fight and look “uncivil” in the process. (And we have knuckleheads like Biden and Buttigieg whose stated platform is to repeat Obama’s early mistake and “reach across the aisle”).
The GOP’s one stupid trick that Democrats always fall for is they say “You’re just angry and biased against us.” and Democrats so “No, no, we’re very reasonable and impartial. Just to prove it, we’ll give you this other concession.” I’d say, you bet we’re biased. You’ve shown a pattern of bad behavior in the past. And you bet we’re angry about it too. Otherwise, we will simply “negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.”
The real issue is the ludicrous expectation that the GOP will follow “rules” if we are just insistent enough about it. They are in it to reshape the judiciary and at this point (which they have) and almost certainly in it to suppress the non-white vote as long as they need to (and the more radical ones like Stephen Miller would like to push back the non-white demographic itself). There is nothing wrong with being angry about this. I do not believe in violence as a means, but I am sick of people pretending to be calm “adults” when they should be mad as hell.
@7
I think we’re long past the question of chaos and resolution. No matter what it takes to get the GOP out of power (and I am not optimistic) it is going to be a long, hard slog even to bring things back to where they were in 2016, let alone restore some “real” Democratic party imagined by those who happened to be alive and aware some time between the FDR and LBJ administration. That party does not exist and cannot exist with today’s alignment.
I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 with mild optimism that a holding pattern could be maintained while regrouping power. That all went to shit. At this point, hell, maybe Trump is just the asshole this benighted country deserves.
Impeachment? I’m not enthusiastic
The upside: no President Pence (in 2020, anyhow).
Why should that be? My answer is that the right has an entrenched and effective propaganda outlet. The left not only doesn’t have such a thing, but it has a slew of nominally-center-left leaning news media that is so afraid of becoming propaganda for the left that they occasionally over-correct to further propaganda for the right.
That’s the asymmetric battle. One that may be long, long lost given how much momentum Fox has. The question is if our systems and other tactics can win out against superior propaganda.
Perhaps the Rethug opposition to impeachment can be placed in perspective by considering that you have to go back to the Eisenhower administration to find a Republican who didn’t deserve to be impeached! The wrongdoing in the current dumpster fire of an administration has been reviewed well by Lynna et al. on the Political Madness thread.
Dubya crashed the economy into a ditch, fabricated evidence to get us into a disastrous war, retaliated against critics of his evidence fabrication (l’Affaire Plame) and so on. As to George H. W. Bush, we should have gotten him as a two-fer with Reagan for the Iran-Contra scandal. And that is if we didn’t get him on obstruction of justice charges for his efforts to bury the Agnew investigation. Saint Ronnie presided over the most corrupt administration on record until the present–138 administration officials under investigation or indictment and dozens of convictions. Nixon, everyone knows about.
So, while the corruption of the current administration is unique, as it the stonewalling by the party, they’ve been practicing for a long time.
@9
I voted for her because it was a question of bad vs. worse. I don’t regret it but it would sure be nice if the choice boiled down to who was the least bad.
But odds are that’s going to happen again in 2020 and I’ll need to choke my bile back long enough to repeat my own actions.
dma8751482@13
I am leaning towards voting for Bernie Sanders in the CA primary. It is not because I have any optimism at all in the Sanders agenda (more whether he could accomplish it within US politics than whether it would work, which I suppose it could; it’s just European social democracy).
I believe Sanders may be the only electable candidate. Biden is going to piss off the most motivated voters (likewise Buttigieg if he gains traction). Those like me who just want Trump out of office will vote for whoever is running against him, so there’s no point in catering to people like me and I know it. The only other candidate who could motivate “progressives” is Warren and she’s already being presented as not a real progressive on the left. If it was about finding a candidate I like, it would be Warren. (It definitely won’t be Biden though!)
It’s super great that the only issue they decided to get trump on is like, digging up political dirt on an opposing candidate’s family, and not like, the literal child concentration camps. Or like, literally calling for group violence and murder.
@15
Americans apparently don’t care that much about the the persecution of immigrant children. Disgusting, but seemingly borne out by public reaction. Plus, the issue isn’t whether the behavior is evil but whether it is grounds for impeachment. There’s a purpose to keeping the focus narrow. If the question was simply whether Trump is personally corrupt, that has an easy answer (he just paid out a $2 million settlement with admission of wrongdoing connected to misusing his non-profit). If it is whether he’s culpable for the death of innocents, pretty much every American president meets that bar. It would be interesting to see how far you’d have to go back to find a counterexample.
In this instance, Trump (and Mulvaney through open admission) handed congress an unambiguous example of “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Should they have just sat on it?
PaulBC @ #14:
Looking through the different candidate’s policy agendas and picking one that seems “achievable” is nonsense in the first place. So what if Bernie’s policies won’t be implemented by criminal scum in the Senate? Are you going to elect someone the criminal scum find agreeable then?
I mean, people constantly make this argument and it’s always insane. Literally not one single policy of any democratic presidential candidate is going to make it through the senate. None. The point of these policies aren’t to implement them: they’re to tell you who the candidate is and let you state what kind of party you want.
The choice isn’t between proposed laws, it’s between the people who would propose those laws. The reason to pick Bernie (or any candidate) is because you agree with their overall take on how society and government should operate. Trying to judge between people based on some arcane list of policy ideas is just neoliberal insanity.
Also PaulBC, @ 15:
It’s up to congress to decide what “high crimes and misdemeanors” means. They could have impeached him, and removed him, for crimes against fashion for that fucking combover on his first day in office if they so wished.
The crimes they choose to impeach for aren’t “ambiguous” or “unambiguous.” They just show everyone what those pressing the charges consider important. In this case, it’s attacking their good buddy Joe Biden over the obviously corrupt dealings with his son.
If they wanted to come out of this looking good, they should at least have had the decency to empanel a special prosecutor for Biden as well. As it is, if Biden ends up being the nominee, holy shit.
@17
I was convinced in 2016 that the GOP Senate would not find Hillary Clinton agreeable in the slightest and was looking forward EAGERLY to four years of gridlock as demographics shifted and maybe we could do better. But if Sanders had been on the ballot, obviously I would have voted for him too. If a choice had been a big rubber stopper to shove in the door of the Oval Office, that might have been even more appealing to me.
I was primarily interested in electing whoever was more likely to undermine the reactionary takeover of the US government, and that was obviously not Trump (and God forbid someone like Kasich had been elected, we’d be stuck with no way out for decades and the same damn Federalist Society SCOTUS, just with the NYT cheering on his smiley moderateness).
I am angry at anyone who sat out the election or voted for Jill Stein because they didn’t get their own way and the DNC handpicked the nominee (as parties always try to do and the Sanders campaign never had a PLAN to prevent). If they voted for Jill Stein because they thought she had a shot of winning, more power to them I suppose. Anyone who did not vote for Hillary Clinton but expected her to win and was disappointed that she did not just expected me to do their “dirty work” for them. So screw that.
And maybe Trump really is the president we deserve collectively as a nation founded on slavery and genocide. The longer it goes on, the longer I come around to that view.
@18
Oh good grief! Yes, Hunter Biden is kind of a fuck-up who got a cushy job, but Joe Biden did absolutely nothing illegal as VP. The evidence backs that up. I know that Democrats are kind of into self-policing (look at Al Franken) but in this case they were wise to show a partisan front like parties that actually win know how to do.
You can rest easy about that, PZ. They’ll wonder that about everything from at least 1980 onward, this part isn’t unique. Or are you forgetting that we knew about global warming since the 70s and let both parties kick the can down the road over and over and over again, knew about voter suppression and hackable voting machines since the early 2000s and let both parties kick the can down the road, how the military budget went up and up and up with the support of both parties, how both parties went into an authoritarian spiral after 9/11 (and the party which claimed to be against it not only refused to clean house but kept trying to nominate the worst offenders for President)… it’s not Trump you’ll have to explain away, it’s the nation’s political history throughout your entire adult life. By the time you’ve finished with GWB and Obama, they’ll be so convinced that you and everybody else in the country was insane that you won’t need to explain Trump at all.
Oh, and to anybody who is espousing that “blue no matter who” garbage: you do realize that that’s asymmetric, right? You’re committing yourself to voting for any Democrat no matter how far to the right they may be, but the right-leaning Democrats for whom you are willing to sacrifice your ethics have already signaled that they won’t reciprocate. If Sanders gets the nomination by a clean majority vote, Obama has said he will try to overturn that, and he’s getting nods from people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
@21
Hahahahahaha. Is that the issue I’m supposed to be worried about?
I sacrificed my ethics the day I decided that I would embrace my birth advantage as a US citizen (purchased in genocide, slavery, and imperialism) to pursue a lucrative career and turn the other way while we raped the environment and bombed the rest of the world. If I was concerned about ethics, I would be engaged in very different behavior. As it is, I vote for the least bad option that will actually happen. Having Bernie Sanders on the general election ballot in 2016 almost could have happened, but that was kind of for him and his supporters to work out, and they didn’t. I came to a judicious decision on the least bad option, as I have done during my voting life since 1984. But “sacrifice my ethics”? Gimme a break. I’m soaking in blood. You’re soaking in blood, most likely. Most of us reading this are using more than our share of resources and convincing ourselves that’s OK. All I want to do is STOP MANIACS FROM MAKING THINGS MUCH WORSE. That is my simple goal. I have no idea what you purists are on about.
@20
You mean an obvious sinecure?
I mean, yeah, various sources have stated that Hunter Biden did nothing wrong, and that’s probably true: getting a sinecure through influence and your dad’s position isn’t considered wrong in modern American society, but it is obviously corruption. Competent politicians (i.e. not Trump) tend to be capable of doing these things without leaving an obvious criminal trail.
The underlying point is that the Democrats are impeaching Trump over something that looks and smells like one group of corrupt politicians going after another corrupt politician for corruptly interfering with their own corruption. Trump’s corruption is heavy handed, idiotic, and obvious, so yes, he should be impeached, but it leaves the Democrats with a terrible messaging problem.
How are voters supposed to get behind one corrupt party because the other party was more comically bad at being corrupt? What’s the message here?
Wait, wait, I got this one. The secret message is that deep in my heart I am really a Republican and might as well vote for the authentic kind, not a “milquetoast” substitute. It’s true. The leftists in my life have convinced me that voting for Trump maybe be the only logically consistent choice for me.
Or as I analogized once, and I think it really does sum up every conversation I have had in the past four years about politics with my sister-in-law, a Sanders supporter. (I play the crack addict/neoliberal if that part is not clear.):
“Yikes, the house is on fire!”
“We really need to discuss your crack addiction.”
“That’s all you ever want to talk about. Can we do something about the fire?”
“The house wouldn’t be burning if you weren’t a crack addict. You started it lighting your crack pipe.”
“Umm… we still need to put it out.”
“Oh yeah, that’ll just lull you into a sense of complacency and you’ll go right back to smoking crack.”
“Probably. But look, can you at least lend me your phone to call the fire department?”
“My phone! How convenient. And then you’ll just tell your friends that I approve of your crack addiction.”
“Look, I was a crack addict last year. I’ll be one next year if I live that long. Can we put out the fire?”
“I refuse to be complicit in your crack addiction.”
“I don’t want that. I just want to put out the frickin fire!”
@25:
Have you considered that maybe your sister is saying something different from how you’ve summarized her opinions there?
Here I am, showing solidarity with sisters and brothers everywhere.
Elladan@26 Sure, but has she considered that after four years, that’s my takeaway?
I look at the choice as between being a crack addict, or being a crack addict with a burnt down house. Others may see the choice differently, and that’s their prerogative, but this forms the basis of my voting behavior.
@PaulBC
I would find your analogy more accurate if the crack addict, when the sister relents and hands over the phone, does nothing about the fire and calls their dealer to go get more crack. That’s pretty much how the democratic party has been behaving.
canadiansteve@28 I admit you have a point.
… but the thing to consider is that even if I’m a crack addict, I would still probably prefer it if the house didn’t burn down. So it’s like, OK, I’ll definitely call in the fire, just let me contact my dealer first. It’ll only take a second. Or, you know, you could just call in yourself and we can discuss my crack addiction later. The analogy can go a lot of ways, but my point is that persistent debilitating problems + an immediate threat of destruction is still worse than persistent debilitating problems without the immediate threat.
The theory (and you’ll find some form of it across the political spectrum) is similar to moral hazard. If we just fix the immediate problem we’ll become complacent and never address the root cause (hence “radicalism”). So it’s better to have that threat instead of rewarding my bad behavior. Sorry, my life is too short and I am pretty sure the root causes won’t be fixed. I would like to help sometimes and not just be a cynical asshole. However, I reserve the right not to join a doomed cause. (Sometimes I’m wrong; it’s good we had the Civil War to end slavery and didn’t listen to incrementalists, but there is a severe cost.)
The idea that 2016 was a great year for fundamental change in a good direction made no sense. We were teetering on the edge of where we are now with Trumpism. With some work, we could have held it back. We failed. It only gets harder from here on.
But yes, if you were worried about my “neoliberal” sense of complacency, that was a good call. I can’t think of anything that has shaken my sense that any good is possible more than the Trump/McConnell combination. I still like Obama and don’t resent him for saying things I found appealing, but it isn’t happening. The big job is just going to be how to hold onto the vote and prevent the GOP from establishing a white minority theocracy within the hollow shell of our so-called constitution. That’s what they want, and they are just a hell of a lot better at this game than Democrats.
@PaulBC
I would agree with you on pretty much everything there, and add the caveat that I come at this from a non-American perspective, so I find many parts of the American identity perplexing.
The problem with Obama is specifically that he is both likeable and very intellingent, so he was able to do nothing about the disaster going on there and not receive as much criticism as he deserved.
There’s no doubt that a Clinton presidency would have been much less harmful than a Trump presidency in the short term. But the ultimately unanswerable question is what would have been the long term impact. If I can stretch the analogy a bit – right now there are a lot of people moving around in the burning house saying the house isn’t on fire and everything is just great (and many of these people are collecting the valuables out of the house thinking they will be able to get themselves out of the house with all the valuables they can carry before it collapses). Then there’s a whole bunch other people saying the house is on fire but it’s all the fault of those dark-skinned people that lived in the basement and if they could just put those people back in their place then the fire would go out. Then there’s another group of people thinking that since the whole place is burning they might as well set some more fires. There’s still more people saying that if the house burns that’s because god wants it to burn so we shouldn’t interfere with god’s will…. (It’s a pretty big house to fit all these people!)
in amongst all this chaos the people who are pointing out that it really would be in everybody’s best interest to put the fire out are simply getting drowned out by all this. So is it any wonder that some of these people think that if the fire intensifies a bit that maybe the rest of the people in the house will consider doing something about the fire, and though obviously a worse fire is worse, maybe getting everyone’s attention is worth the extra harm?
@#22, PaulBC:
Hey, you know what the single worst mistake any American President has made in the last 50 years? Despite Trump, it’s still the invasion of Iraq.
So why is it that in 2008, we chose a candidate who tried to keep us in Iraq? (Yes, Obama did — he failed, and we left on Bush’s original timetable.) Why is it that in 2016, we chose a candidate who voted for the war in Iraq, despite having access to the notification from the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the “evidence” that we had to go to war was all either false or unverifiable, and who notionally represented a state where polls showed 60% of the population was against the war? Why is it that in 2019, the candidate being pushed by the party is somebody who not only voted for that war, but as recently as 2016 was actively bragging about it and saying that it was a great decision?
If you don’t like that, how about the repeal of Glass-Steagall? That repeal led in a very direct and traceable way to the meltdown of 2008 — many of the frauds which caused the meltdown were things which had been directly prohibited. The law was originally put in place because before it was passed, those frauds were already happening. Why is it that in 2016 we nominated somebody who was dumb enough to have backed a policy change which would obviously enable fraud? Why is the party backing a candidate in 2019 who did the same?
Why were the candidates of 2008 and 2016 both people who said that under Reagan they would have been Republicans? You know, Reagan — the guy who set records for number of appointees indicted, backed terrorists in multiple parts of the world, and was pretty certainly actually senile while in office? That Reagan?
Why is the party backing somebody who says they love Republicans and has been caught telling Republicans to make sure to vote in 2020 because he doesn’t want the Democratic Party to get “too powerful”?
It’s because the party knows that they will never lose your vote. And because of that they have pushed, and will continue to push candidates who are unlikeable and worthless. We got Trump because Obama did nothing to stop the Republicans — there was no plan to prevent disenfranchisement or hackable voting machines — and because the party just had to run Hillary Clinton, who was considered untrustworthy in polls by more than half the country at every single point in her campaign. If we get Biden as nominee, or Buttigieg, or even Bloomberg, chances are really good we’ll lose again — Baby Boomers love Trump, statistically, so the only way to win is to get out the youth vote, and trust me, nobody under 45 is going to show up for somebody who thinks “no malarkey” is a great slogan, like Biden, or that they can completely reverse course on Medicare for All without anybody noticing because they got a donation from the pharma companies, like Buttigieg — and the less said about Bloomberg, the better.
You are actively sabotaging your own position by being willing to swallow whatever the DNC is pushing. In 2024, the Republicans will be running Neo-Trump, whoever that is. If people like you don’t wise up and start setting some boundaries, the DNC will probably be insisting on David Duke, and laughing at each other behind closed doors because you’re so gullible that they can finally do what they’ve wanted to do since 1992 when Bill Clinton got them their positions on the committee.
I consider this.
Considering, today, a crime is not a crime for one in power, I wonder…
If one disclosed, for sufficient funds, precisely how to construct the x-ray laser within a modern thermonuclear warhead, is one emperor?
No, it’s not for sale. It’s an insurance policy.