Election 2020 - Here we go again

[Mongrel]

One of the Minecraft servers Starr goes to regularly screen movies on their Discord; of course, on or about Halloween, they did the obligatory Army of Darkness stream and I watched over her shoulder.

At one point early on she offered me the headphones, but I turned her down. It turns out I can watch Army of Darkness almost beginning to end without needing sound at all since the entire script is pretty much engraved in my brain, I guess?

[Thad]

Georgia recount complete; results unchanged.

This would seem to suggest that Georgia has finally gotten its shit together, which is good to hear.

[Esperath]

Biden to Name Longtime Aide Blinken as Secretary of State

[Thad]

Washington Post: 20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election

It's must-read, unless you're sick of reading about this shit. There's nothing in there that we didn't already know or suspect, but it's nice to get confirmation from primary sources, even if they're anonymous.

In June, during an Oval Office meeting with political advisers and outside consultants, Trump raised the prospect of suing state governments for how they administer elections and said he could not believe they were allowed to change the rules. All the states, he said, should follow the same rules. Advisers told him that he did not want the federal government in charge of elections.

Oof. I've long felt that the federal government should take a more active role in regulating how federal elections are conducted, but this has me questioning that stance. The President and Congress intentionally undermining access to the polls for partisan reasons isn't something that ever really occurred to me before the Trump Administration, but like many vulnerabilities in our system, that's one that I'm going to have to think about now. States (and municipalities) handling their own election processes is a deeply flawed system, but it can act as a hedge against federal meddling. (Course, the reverse is true too; stronger federal control could act as a hedge against state meddling.)

I think a more robust federal role in federal elections would have prevented what happened in 2000 -- but I think it could also have prevented what happened in 2020. Food for thought.

More troubling to Raffensperger were the many threats he and his wife, Tricia, have received over the past few weeks — and a break-in at another family member’s home. All of it has prompted him to accept a state security detail.

“If Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really complicit in it,” he said. “It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going to stand for righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you going to stand for the wild mob? You wanted to condemn the wild mob when it’s on the left side. What are you going to do when it’s on our side?”

I hate to victim-blame, but...you're complicit. You voted for Trump; you voted for this. You never thought the leopard would eat your face.

I respect Raffensperger's integrity in telling the truth instead of parroting the party line. But that's where we are now: the bar is so low that when a Republican says two plus two is four even though the president is demanding that he say it's five, that's notable and seems praiseworthy.

“If you were a Republican poll watcher, you were treated like a dog,” Trump complained, using one of his favorite put-downs, even though many people treat dogs well, like members of their own families.

“This election was lost by the Democrats,” he said, falsely.

*chef kiss*

[Mongrel]

I love all the "Accidentally Left-Wing" shit.

[Thad]

Texas suing Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to try to have their results overturned is, to my mind, not scary in itself; it's far too silly and, after all, it's Texas.

17 other states joining the suit? That's scary. Not because I think it has any significant chance of succeeding, but because this many elected officials undermining the integrity of an election is a serious warning sign for the health of our democracy, I think on a different level than the many, many other warning signs we've already seen.

We've discussed before that even when this is over, it won't really be over, that nearly half the country will consider the election illegitimate, and that violence seems all but inevitable. This is one more big step down that road.

[Friday]

There was no way to avoid it. Regardless of the outcome of this election, tension was always going to increase. And it will continue to increase until violence occurs. Unless you believe America can be "healed", it is simply inevitable at this point. It might not be for another 10 years, or even 20. Remember how much ramp up to the first Civil War there was, and for how many years before war actually broke out that people were predicting war. I'm sure some of their critics kept pointing out it'd been five years or whatever since they first predicted it.

Of course, we don't have a single hot button issue this time. Instead we have a plethora of them, including healthcare, police brutality, homosexuality, racism, etc.

I personally do not think this magical "healing" that everyone seems to think Biden can achieve somehow is even remotely possible. As has been pointed out 10 million times just today, the Trumpers live in another reality. Trump didn't "lose" republican votes between 2016 and 2020, he gained them. And no, I don't just mean in raw numbers.

In 2016, of the registered Republicans who voted, 90% of them voted for Trump. That number rose to 93% in 2020. Liberal media ran story after story after story about Trump supporters leaving him, but the data just simply does not support that. Sure, some people left, but overall more Republicans voted for him than before. Is the data skewed because tons and tons of Republicans who disliked Trump also registered as Independent/Democrat, leaving the remaining registered Republicans "more pure" in their support of Trump? It's possible, but another study I read said most Republicans who disliked Trump stayed with their party.

The Lincoln Project has been shown to have convinced hardly anyone, anywhere. Attack ads against the Republicans simply do not work because "fake news." These people are not "ready to be healed and convinced" they are dug deep in their trench. Put another way, they're no more likely to abandon Trump than we are to join him.

[Mongrel]

The long string of ineffectual failures who've occupied the presidency also rings all-too-familiar, such was also the lead-up to the Civil War.

The main question this time is what form violence will take.

The Confederacy was mostly geographically contiguous and that war took place was a conventional one, in an era without air combat, digital warfare, etc. AND when state militias were far more able to fight on relatively the same footing as the federal US Army than they are today (taking control of federal assets would require a lot more than just shelling a fort for a couple days). The Southern states had in fact prepared for war by rebuilding their state militia systems for this very purpose, something so far absent from the present day.

Today's red states are somewhat centred away from the coasts, but urban vs rural is a far stronger divide in many states, and even ignoring that, the territories of red and blue states relative to each other are far more fragmented than anything in 1860.

Any "Second Civil War", if you can even call it that - and if it does occur at all, because that's not actually guaranteed - may be asymmetrical, or not even referred to as a war. It may bear no resemblance to a conventional or even asymmetrical war proper, instead ending up more like terror campaigns or even gang wars. Or many of the undeclared labour or territorial wars which have taken place throughout US history with only bare mention, if at all in US history books. In fact it's rather frightening to realize how many large-scale, armed, organized conflicts have taken place entirely within the US since Independence.

Which side is forming the ruling party of the day, with "legal" control of the US Army and other conventional levers of power will of course define many aspects of any conflict.

There's a LOT of possibilities, and they keep changing, rather quickly. Which was true in 1858 as well, when a LOT of things started happening in a relatively short time.

[Thad]

There was no way to avoid it.

I don't like that phrasing because it elides the very direct responsibility of Trump and the rest of the Republican leadership.

There was a way to avoid it; Republican leaders simply weren't willing to do it.

I don't have a lot of very nice things to say about Bush or McCain, but I can't picture a scenario where they would have done what Trump is doing.

I suppose you can say it was inevitable in the sense that Republicans choosing to do what they're doing was inevitable. But it's still a choice, and I feel like describing the situation we're in as unavoidable lets them off the hook for that choice.

The Lincoln Project has been shown to have convinced hardly anyone, anywhere.

The only thing the Lincoln Project was trying to convince people of is that they're Reasonable Republicans and the incoming Democratic administration should work with them.

They never had any intention of changing anyone's mind about Trump. They're a bunch of opportunistic grifters who paved the way for him and then got buyer's remorse -- not because of his ignorance or his cruelty and certainly not because of his policies, but because he committed the cardinal sin of threatening Republicans' electoral chances.

[Friday]

I don't like that phrasing because it elides the very direct responsibility of Trump and the rest of the Republican leadership.

There was a way to avoid it; Republican leaders simply weren't willing to do it.

I don't have a lot of very nice things to say about Bush or McCain, but I can't picture a scenario where they would have done what Trump is doing.

I suppose you can say it was inevitable in the sense that Republicans choosing to do what they're doing was inevitable. But it's still a choice, and I feel like describing the situation we're in as unavoidable lets them off the hook for that choice.

That's fair, and I certainly was taking their actions into account like you said when I said "inevitable". But it's important to point out that this is entirely their fault because of the choices they made. The impact of what people believe because the President said so is enormous. Most people, believe it or not, still consider the President of the United States (as long as he's their party) to be a role model.

Anyway, you pointing out that this is absolutely the fault of the Republican leadership is absolutely correct. And you're also correct that it's important to not gloss that over. They are literally steering us off a cliff. The dems might are not be willing to turn the wheel back the other way when they get a chance to get their hands on it, but the GOP is the one pulling the wheel to the cliff.

[zaratustra]

I don't have a lot of very nice things to say about Bush or McCain, but I can't picture a scenario where they would have done what Trump is doing.

The worst sin of Trump was to make the Bush administration seem reasonable.

[KingRoyal]

It's not like Bush used dubious legal tactics to get the court to declare him the winner of an election

[Thad]

I don't have a lot of very nice things to say about Bush or McCain, but I can't picture a scenario where they would have done what Trump is doing.

The worst sin of Trump was to make the Bush administration seem reasonable.

Trump makes Bush seem smart and statesmanlike.

[Yoji]

Fuck, Bush seems honorable in comparison. I'm awfully scatterbrained these days, but I think I remember him emphasizing we were at war with terrorists, not Islam itself. And we make fun of how he could barely talk, but at least he didn't sound like an obviously fraudulent used car salesman.

And while I'm here, am I the only one freaked out over how many Republican representatives signed on to that Supreme Court appeal to overturn the results of the election? The one that the SCOTUS unanimously declined to hear? I heard there were ~120, which is like a third of House representatives?? Aaaaaaaaa???

[Mongrel]

The thing about Bush was that he was just straight up a dummy, used as a bit of a puppet by the GOP. If you think about Bush's tenure as actually being Dick Cheney's presidency, that's really what it was all about.

This by no means absolves him or rehabilitates the man, and "puppet" really is an oversimplification that denies he had any agency, but his administration is really when the GOP started to go all-out no-hold barred in terms of dismantling and undermining the actual basic institutions of government, even more so than under Reagan.

[Thad]

Hey, remember that time Bush nominated an unqualified crony to the Supreme Court and Senate Republicans wouldn't confirm her? Those were the days.

[Mongrel]

Well yeah. She wasn't their unqualified crony!

[Thad]

McConnell finally acknowledges Biden's win.



This suggests to me we're probably not going to see any shenanigans like the Senate refusing to certify the result. (Which wouldn't stop Biden from becoming president -- only one house of Congress has to certify the vote -- but would be one more big step in the entire Republican Party publicly undermining the result of the election.)

[Thad]

BoingBoing (inner quote is from the Texas Tribune):

Everyone seems to know that MAGA is going to melt down in January when it sinks in that Trump isn't going to be president anymore.

But what everyone doesn't know is that the meltdown will have a budget.

Prosecutors say Aguirre's election fraud claims were baseless and that he was paid $266,400 by the group Liberty Center for God and Country, whose CEO is prominent Texas right-wing activist Steven Hotze.

[Friday]

My prediction remains the same: Trump's most viable path to doing a coup is to do a coup.

But I also think any attempt will fail. I also think it's more likely that an attempt will not be made then one will be made.

But, you know. I also think that if there was going to be a coup from a President, it's a lot more likely from this one than any other.

Also, I think we should start talking about the very real possibility that he declares himself the true government in exile. Or rather, not if he will (because he will, regardless if he leaves the country, is jailed, or just starts his own news network) but how seriously people are going to take it, at all levels of society.