Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
What I think is needful: Punitive anti-GOP voting come November. Aside from those GOP'ers who have consistently opposed Trump (3? fewer?) we should pick the Dem and fire for effect.
Redpilled. Based.

If you meant, 'do I believe that they have lost the moral high ground to preach about the vital nature of one aspect of the Constitution by championing a fumbling would-be pseudo-autocrat who is at best operating extra-constitutionally and quite possibly in direct contravention of other portions of that document' I would say "yes" -- while noting that they will never recognize much less acknowledge the logical and ethical fallacy in which they are engaged.
The closest I've seen any of them come is Ammon Bundy distancing himself from organized anti-government groups because of backlash against him for suggesting that maybe immigrants aren't evil vermin.

...

Those who expect Trump to be memory holed or quasi-rehabilitated, like Bush II, or mythified like Reagan, are probably wrong.

There will be a new Lost Cause legend. Because it satisfies both the impulses to flatter oneself and one's commitments and to account for how a perfect ideology could be rejected on a national scale, which were the motivations toward the first Lost Cause (besides reinsinuating Southern power in an active way). The first Confederacy lost the fight but won the peace, enabling its adherents to advance the first Lost Cause. We must not allow it to happen again. The framework for permanent struggle is already here in QAnon.

(I do expect the name of Donald Trump to have more clout in the mouths of national Republicans than the man himself.)

Quote Originally Posted by rory_20_uk View Post
This is the perennial pragmatism vs purity. Biden's pick is a solid one for trying to get minorities and as many "law and order" types from the middle as humanly possible. They are the ones which are required to win elections.

I imagine that there are some Democrats who wanted Bernie to team up with AOC and the rest of The Squad who can then all snipe at Trump from Twitter for the next four years as he does further damage. But Bernie and AOC is the wonderfully "pureist" choice of proper Left wing politics which is quite some way from the "average" voter and would probably galvanise a nasty mix of money, racists and xenophobes to ensure that the Useful Idiots stay in power.

As a reminder, Harris was for the elimination of private health insurance before she was against it, and post-California her record has been one of the most liberal for national Democrats (including working with AOC on climate policy and Sanders on economic relief). There is not a useful dichotomy between pragmatism and purity when what's really going on is fundamentally a difference in policy preferences and political priors, one that shifts over time. Few speak of the ideological purity of the hard-right Republican politicians (functionally the whole party), who are far more ideologically rigid than almost any national Democrat, including Sanders. (For example, in the categorical rejection of more government spending on pandemic relief.) But I've never even heard of a putatively non-partisan discourse of a tension between Republican "purity" and pragmatism, perhaps because it is widely assumed that only liberals have the agency or desire to seek to accomplish things, and therefore only liberals can be held to account for their aspirations and performance.

Most candidates run to the center in the general election. Biden is moving left.

Admittedly, it may be an advantage that Biden has over Trump that polling has evinced a perception among the electorate of Biden being more moderate. Whereas in 2016 similar polling reported that Clinton was seen as more extreme than Trump. This comes despite Biden's platform being well to the left of where Clinton's started or ended. The electorate is malinformed, underinformed, and full of idiots. Politics should be understood in terms of mechanically manipulating these tendencies to maximal advantage, rather than allowing them to manifest as disadvantage. The chief example of a Sandersite "purist" illusion/handicap is the heartfelt belief that top-down persuasion is an available and useful component of organization (contrasted with mobilization) in electoral politics.

I'm not super-enthused in the context of the Democratic VP pick being the presumptive nominee in 2024 or 2028, but Harris has time to grow. As usual, Eric Levitz does very good syllogistic analysis (though this one is a rehash).

(It occurs to me that in a scenario of long-term single-party governance, the presidential field would become narrower than it ever has. Not that we're yet at the point of anticipating a Democratic lock on national politics, and a Republican single-party state would have the oligarchic politics of Putin's Russia, I'm just saying that given the current norms around the VP position a baton relay is what would naturally emerge in any long period of single-party rule).