GOP Will Shit Itself

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Mongrel
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Fri Apr 30, 2021 5:30 pm

nosimpleway wrote:how long before Mongrel gives someone a PT tip?


Well to start with, they'd need to at least be the age of consent.
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mharr
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby mharr » Sat May 01, 2021 10:52 am

There's a horrible tea joke forming here

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Grath » Mon May 10, 2021 5:08 pm


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Mongrel
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Mon May 10, 2021 6:20 pm

"Why are Republicans dumping Liz Cheney, who just won reelection, as an act of symbolic fealty to Donald Trump, who just lost?"
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Wed May 12, 2021 10:53 am

And she's out. House Republicans oust Cheney from leadership for calling out Trump’s false election claims

There's going to be a lot of discussion and debate about what exactly this means. It feels like a significant moment. I see it as one more step on a road the GOP's been on a long time. Of course, those two things aren't mutually exclusive.

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mharr
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby mharr » Wed May 12, 2021 11:39 am

I will be so joyously happy for you all if they manage to fracture into two or three competing parties. Our left wing has that exact problem and it's been a half-century free ride for their opposition.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Wed May 12, 2021 12:30 pm

We started the original incarnation of this thread in 2008. I've been predicting a fracturing of the party for longer than that, and so far they've managed to prove remarkably resilient. I still don't know if Trump's divided the party or unified it.

Then again, "I've been predicting it for a long time and so far it hasn't happened" isn't an argument that a thing won't happen. It sure seems like we get a little closer each time.

There are a lot of metaphors for political change over long periods of time -- a swinging pendulum, the arc of the moral universe, and so on. Today I've been thinking about it in terms of tides. A wave comes in, then it recedes. Maybe the next wave gets farther up the beach, or maybe it doesn't, but eventually, over time, over cycle after cycle of ebb and flow, the tide moves farther and farther up.

The Republican coalition was divided on McCain; he won the primary without a majority of the vote. But once he got the nomination, the wave receded; the coalition backed him in the general.

Four years later, much the same thing happened with Romney; unlike McCain, he got a majority of the primary vote, but there was still a fairly large anti-establishment wing of the party that wasn't happy at all with him and would have backed anybody else. But once he clinched the nomination, the wave receded again; he got the support of the Republican coalition.

Then, in 2016, things went the other way -- where in the past two primaries, the establishment had unified behind one candidate while the opposition was fractured, in 2016 the anti-establishment wing unified behind Trump while the establishment couldn't figure out who its guy was (and finally settled on Ted Cruz, who's hardly establishment Republicans', or anyone else's, first choice). Trump won the primary with an even lower share of the vote than McCain, and the establishment spent the next few months trying to triangulate a position that wouldn't piss off Trumpists but also wouldn't alienate people who were kinda uncomfortable with that whole "grab 'em by the pussy" thing. They were ready to throw him under the bus as soon as he lost.

The tide receded. Trump won the election, and the party unified behind him, because really, he wanted the same things they did, he just said the quiet part loud.

And let's not forget for one goddamn moment that Liz Cheney supported everything he did until the moment her own life was threatened. She's her father's daughter and a really and truly odious human being. She supports the bigotry, the warmongering, the voter disenfranchisement.

On the one hand, Trump went too far even for her. On the other, there aren't that damn many Republicans in Congress who are on her side. The big corporate donors are already preparing their talking points to justify why they're going to start contributing to Republicans again. I think the tide may be receding again.

The Republicans' short-term plan is, don't say or do anything that will piss off Trump or his supporters. Their long-term plan is, thoroughly disenfranchise voters who don't support them. I think we need to take those threats seriously. Fissures in the Republican Party aren't going to matter if they do an effective job of rigging the game in their favor.

This is one of the reasons the Democrats really need to pass filibuster reform and pass the new Voting Rights Act. So far, at least two of them (including my own senator, Kyrsten Sinema) are playing will-they-won't-they games to get attention.

I don't know what happens next, on the Republican side or the Democratic. Maybe a few Republicans switch to Independent, and maybe they don't. Maybe everything stays more or less the same. For awhile, anyway; until the next thing.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby pacobird » Wed May 12, 2021 4:33 pm

Moneyed interests and cultural conservativism are the most successful political alliance of all time and it's not particularly close; I don't see why anything that doesn't directly assault either of them would upset the arrangement.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Wed May 12, 2021 5:15 pm

pacobird wrote:Moneyed interests and cultural conservativism are the most successful political alliance of all time and it's not particularly close; I don't see why anything that doesn't directly assault either of them would upset the arrangement.

The main flaw with that alliance is the same that it's always been: It eventually self-destructs all of whatever society it's based in. If we as humans do not actively balance things, then the basic laws of nature or physics will.

That's the thing about erosion. Each wave may take away a little more, but to most folks it seems like little changes day-to-day - until the day the seawall collapses.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Wed May 12, 2021 6:33 pm

pacobird wrote:Moneyed interests and cultural conservativism are the most successful political alliance of all time and it's not particularly close; I don't see why anything that doesn't directly assault either of them would upset the arrangement.

There comes a point where associating with certain factions becomes bad for business. We're at a point where companies like Raytheon and Wells Fargo gave more money to Democrats than Republicans in the last election. That's...not what usually happens.

The best thing Republicans could do at this point, as far as appealing to risk-averse corporate donors, is shut the fuck up and pretend the last four years, and January 6 in particular, didn't happen. They've opted for pretty much the opposite of that.

I keep pointing to Arizona as an example, and how, in an increasingly competitive state, Kelli Ward's leadership has made corporate donors a lot more gun-shy about supporting the AZGOP than they were as recently as 2018. Sending insurrectionists and a group whose actual name is "Cyber Ninjas" in to search for traces of bamboo in the ballots may be a good way to drum up small-dollar donations from the base, but I don't think it's the best strategy for bringing Raytheon back to the table.

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IGNORE ME
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed May 12, 2021 7:13 pm

I mean for one thing "Cyber Ninjas" is an incredibly Santa Monican name for a security company.

...

They're from Florida?

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Büge » Wed May 12, 2021 7:27 pm

Mongrel wrote:That's the thing about erosion. Each wave may take away a little more, but to most folks it seems like little changes day-to-day - until the day the seawall collapses.


In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big goddamn poster. Like I said, in prison a man will do most anything to keep his mind occupied. Turns out Andy's favorite hobby was totin' his wall out into the exercise yard, a handful at a time.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby pacobird » Wed May 12, 2021 9:08 pm

What are some historical, global examples of religious conservatives breaking with capital?
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Wed May 12, 2021 9:52 pm

The ones I can think of all involve a wave of extremist zealotry, like the Iconoclasts or Daesh.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Thu May 13, 2021 12:04 pm

pacobird wrote:What are some historical, global examples of religious conservatives breaking with capital?

A complete split between religious conservatives and corporate America does seem unlikely, and if it did happen my guess is any such split would most likely be temporary.

But donors yanking the leash to remind politicians who's in charge? That's not out of the question.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Thu May 13, 2021 12:50 pm

Circling back to something I meant to say earlier:

mharr wrote:I will be so joyously happy for you all if they manage to fracture into two or three competing parties. Our left wing has that exact problem and it's been a half-century free ride for their opposition.


That's not really how it's worked, historically, in the US. It's a lot harder for third-parties and multi-party coalitions to gain a toehold under our electoral system than it is under a parliamentary system.

There's an observation called Duverger's law that a two-party system is the equilibrium point of our electoral process. We've had parties collapse in the past, but it's always resulted in a return to that equilibrium point. The Federalist Party collapsed and was replaced by the Whig Party; the Whig Party collapsed and was replaced by the Republican Party. Historical precedent indicates that if the Republican Party splintered, it would mean a few years of electoral defeats followed by the rise of some other party.

But this isn't 1860, either. We've got a situation now where, to a lot of people, and to white evangelical Christians in particular, their party affiliation is an integral part of their identity. There are a whole lot of Republicans who I don't think will ever be anything other than Republicans.

And I'm serious about all that voter disenfranchisement stuff, too. Even a greatly diminished Republican Party can still win elections if it rigs the game in its favor. And while Republicans currently have a minority in the federal Congress, they control most state legislatures -- which is why you can see stuff like Arizona and Georgia each electing two Democrats to the federal Senate, and then their respective state legislatures scrambling to prevent anything like that from happening again. (FTR I think Mark Kelly's pretty safe in 2022. But you never know. And there are plenty of other offices on the ballot next year that I'm a lot less confident about; we've elected one Democratic governor in the last thirty years, and she repaid us by fucking off to Washington and leaving us with a Republican replacement.)

In a nutshell, the GOP's shown a pretty remarkable resilience and ability to remain united even when it's looked like it wouldn't. There are some serious fractures now, but for all that, I think there's still a pretty good chance Republicans retake Congress in 2022 and then paper over all the intraparty infighting and go back to the business of not governing.

If Democrats manage to keep both houses in 2022, then that probably deepens the disagreements within the GOP. Though Trump's still the presumptive frontrunner for the 2024 nomination and if he runs the party's going to back him.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby nosimpleway » Thu May 13, 2021 2:02 pm

Thad wrote:There are a whole lot of Republicans who I don't think will ever be anything other than Republicans.

Reframing abortion as a crime instead of a medical health issue is a brilliant stroke of political genius and I don't think Pat Robertson gets enough credit for basically inventing the issue out of whole cloth. I might be voting for the guy who collaborated with a foreign power and is openly corrupt and contemptuous of anyone who isn't a fawning sycophant and has been bankrupted more times than anyone can count and so on and so on and so on (and so on) but at least I'm not voting for some kind of baby murderer.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Friday » Thu May 13, 2021 10:16 pm

I just point out to them that like clockwork, every time a Republican President holds office, child mortality rates go up.

Why is that? Weird. It must be because you motherfuckers gut social services that help mothers and kids over and over again.

Free lunches in schools? That's a waste of money. Fuck you. Starve.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Wed May 19, 2021 5:22 am

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jun 13, 2021 3:49 pm

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