As an aside in a recent email I mentioned that I thought Dobbs would "get better." What did I mean by that?
Let me make clear that my answer is speculation. And I'll admit up front that it's the kind of speculation liberals and progressives have engaged in for a long time without it coming true. But here it is anyway.
For a long time, Republicans have dreamed of a conservative Supreme Court that would give them everything they want. Now they have it. And they're going to blow it.
For years they've won the support of center-right voters who don't like Republican extremists and don't like Donald Trump but vote for them anyway. Partly this is because they prefer Republicans over Democrats on specific issues (spending, foreign affairs, crime, immigration, etc.) but partly it's because Republican extremists have been huffing and puffing for so long that nobody takes them seriously.
But in three specific areas the Supreme Court has now given them the green light to swing for the fences:
- Abortion (Dobbs)
- Black voting (Shelby County)
- Guns (Heller and New York State Rifle & Pistol)
There are smart Republicans out there who will counsel patience. Let this stuff settle for a while so that it doesn't get scary. Move slowly.
But there are too many conservative Republicans who have no intention of doing this. We're already seeing states try to pass draconian laws forbidding interstate travel to get an abortion or banning speech about reproductive rights.
Likewise, the last few years have already seen a bunch of red states passing obviously race-based gerrymandering bills as well as new election laws designed to give Republican legislatures the ability to turn elections their way based on little but paranoid suspicions.
Finally, we're also likely to see a lot more 2A lunatics carrying guns around everywhere, even in states that don't like this. Eventually one of them will touch off yet another massacre and police will make it clear that they knew there was a guy with an AR-15 hanging around outside the mall/school/courthouse but they were constrained from so much as approaching him. Hanging around a mall with an assault rifle is perfectly legal, after all.
I think this is going to happen because this is what always happens. I don't know how long it will take, but it will happen. And when it does, center-right voters will no longer dismiss conservative extremists as just blowing hot air. It will be obvious that the Republican Party is under the control of right-wing loons and they're scary as hell.
And then the backlash will come. Of course, this is the part that progressives are always predicting but never happens. The Republican Party keeps getting crazier and crazier and we say, "This time people won't put up with it." But they do. Ditto for Donald Trump and his increasingly lunatic pronouncements during the 2016 campaign. (Remember that?)
So why am I dumb enough to believe that this time, for sure, it really is going to happen? Because it's no longer just talk. Republicans now have the power to actually fulfill some of the most extreme fantasies of their MAGA wing. And that, finally, is going to scare people in purplish states into voting for Democrats.
Needless to say, all of this presumes that adults aren't able to rein in the GOP's MAGAnauts and Democrats are able to rein in their extreme progressive wing and present themselves as a temperate, reassuring alternative. That's not a sure thing. But I can hope.
Two thing that make me nervous about this:
First it could easily take a decade or more.
Second, Fox News.
If the purple voters have any contact with Fox News, that is some damn powerful propaganda that can keep a Republican-leaning independent voting R through a lot of terrible stuff.
To point the second, I recently just dipped my toe into some definitely conservative comment sections on definitely conservative sites just to "take the temperature." There is rage for the Democrats of course and a common signature to a comment was FJB, but there is a rage against some of the Republicans, even McConnell. Like murderous rage. Like ready to take to the street and hunt them down rage. Of course these are comment sections but I was surprised at how regularly they were targeted to their "own."
This is entirely characteristic of the violent revolutionaries in classical revolutionary situations where their biggest grievance is against the established conservative faction who they imagined has sold them out, are pretenders or aren't 'really' committed to ruin and destruction.
That's exactly the impression I was getting; they felt betrayed.
To a significant extent, they have been betrayed. The Republican Party hasn't convinced their base that the most important problem facing America today is that the wealthy pay too much in taxes. So Republicans have to win office by talking about other stuff, and then passing tax cuts after they are elected. In principle Republicans could both cut taxes and do the stuff that their base wants, but it's really hard to get stuff through Congress. During Trump's first two years (the period when Republicans had majorities in both houses of Congress), Republicans only managed to pass one major piece of legislation, and that of course had to be a tax cut.
Besides their guns, and their gawd, and their need for control, in every cold heart the need to feel cool gold against skin is overbearing. But that's the old version, this new variant is much more sadistic imo.
That actually worries me a lot.
Because the Republicans I see that target their own like that are often the absolute most extreme, American Taliban style. Oof. The target Republicans for believing in objective reality and not Republican mythology.
Not always. Max Boot, for example, but he no longer calls himself a Republican
Wait until Liz Cheney announces her 2024 presidential run.
Maybe I'm naive, but right wing extremist violence doesn't worry me too much. In fact, I think it's the one variable that actually could hurt MAGA.
Think back to January 6: the hard right actually dodged a bullet that day. Imagine a significantly bigger body count: several hundred people killed, including, say, a dozen or more members of Congress or a sitting Vice President. The backlash would've been vastly more potent than the one we've seen.
The real danger was always the MAGA lawyers, judges elections officials and politicians. We remain a nation of laws, even when some Americans are attempting to subvert those laws. (Think back to Bush v. Gore). So crimes against our democracy will be gussied up in fancy-sounding pronouncements and legislation and case law. All (seemingly) very proper.
Thus the coup, when it comes, will be engineered by MAGA lawyers and operatives, and will be blessed by five guys and one woman in black robes.
But the violence dynamic is a different animal. Failure to police their own crazies is a weakness, not a strength, of America's hard right, because it's one phenomenon (another one is the thing Kevin is talking about) that might wake up voters (and some elites), or possibly give a Democratic administration legal cover to fight back more vigorously.
Everyone keeps forgetting that Trump wiped a dozen establishment Republicans off the stage in 2016. There's a lot of MAGA types that loathe the Republican Party and I'm not 100% sure they're going to show up for anyone not named Trump.
Might be true except when any Democrat publishes their platform.
A big part of the reason Trump prevailed so easily (in addition to the fact that the institutional party took no action against him) was the very fact that the non-MAGA vote in the primaries was divided umpteen ways between the various mainstreamers (Bush, Cruz, Rubio etc). Trump mostly didn't win outright delegate majorities early on. But he did quickly begin racking up plurality victories early on, Until he rapidly secured a sizable delegate lead.
And then it was over.
If Republicans want someone else in 2024, they'd best unite firmly and early around a single standard-bearer like DeSantis.
pluralities in winner-take-all states.
Yep.
Biden administration needs to make a big play to stopping gun exports to criminal gangs outside this country and stopping diversion of military/police aid to criminal groups. Then go after gun industry for not securely transporting their weapons to stores.
Republicans have routinely gotten away with policies that flood the streets with guns then blame the gun violence on Democrats. Until the mythology of the "good guy with a gun" is broken, we'll be stuck where we are.
Meanwhile, in Rio de Janeiro... Jair Bolsonaro is getting Viktor Orban's sloppy seconds during a romantic pre-re-election week with Tucker Carlson.
I can't wait to see it streamed on Glemm Greenwald's OnlyKlans men-only porn site.
Ah, Monty, where would we be without your pearls of wisdom? One of the very few reasons I keep participating here, given our troll problem.
Mitt Romney has a piece in The Atlantic...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/mitt-romney-republican-denial-biden-election/661468/
See, if liberals would deal with the fact that immigrants are over running the southern border, then we could work with Republicans on climate change....
Sweet Lords of Kolob, even the squares are off their nut.
Self-deportation is coming back in style.
This all assumes that we will still have popular elections in two years.
To rephrase that one saying:
Republicans can stay crazy longer than American democracy can stay functioning.
That’s my fear.
and they wonder why people are more stressed out now...
Indiana republicans are doing their part.
After rescuing the pregnant 10 yearly rape victim who was 3 days past the deadline to get an abortion in Ohio…. …Indiana is getting to work to legislate the same ban as Ohio.
Who knew the GQP's views on rape were shaped more by Alexander Pope than the Pope in Rome?
Uh, The Rape of the Lock? Seems a little reachy.
Republicans are the party of crime and corruption, all the time, every time.
There is no issue where they're not working to promote the crime, the corruption and as much injury to everyone as they can get away with.
There was another massacre today.
The Republican response,
https://www.rawstory.com/darren-bailey-illinois/
prayers and 'we need to move on'.
Fuck these shit stained monkeys. It's time to move on to wiping them out.
I appreciate Kevin's perspective; it's calming (very important) and I'm certain has at least some validity. I've seen some signs of right of center folks on my Facebook feed showing exactly what he describes. It's subtle, but it's there. Kind of like what Susan Collins would do if she had the spine.
That said, it seems very, very clear that what goes by 'conservatism' in this country has, over the past 60 years, moved inexorably, step by irreversible step, to a place of reactionary revanchist extremism from which it cannot escape. Some center right Republicans have and will abandon this nihilistic ego trip, but this will only make the nihilists more extreme and confident in their righteousness. Jennifer Rubin has been preaching for years that the Republican Party as it stands must be destroyed. What must be destroyed are the sentiments and behaviors that lie at the core of our very own authoritarian movement.
Europe did not fight a single "Civil War" and then, hey presto!, see its "...bruised arms hung up for monuments." The worst of the human never quits, not ever, and when you have a society as structurally narcissistic as ours (try reading the Declaration of Independence through this lens) you open the door wide to 'freedom' becoming a cancer. And cancer does not just go away. You have to kill it. And the longer you let it go, the worse it gets and the more it takes to kill it, or more realistically, beat it into some kind of functional submission. The French executed hundred of Vichy officials after WWII. The U.S. permanently stripped Japanese officials and industrialists of all power and status. How is it going to work here? Elections? Prosecution? Social and professional ostracization? The media finally becoming endemically unaccepting and reflexively critical of right wing extremists (and at this point they're almost all extremists, by act or submission)?
Churchill supposedly said something like "Americans always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else." More to the point, we just haven't beaten the worst of what makes Americans American into marginalized and largely powerless status. Unless we do this, this country will drag the world into global decline and collapse. It's not "war" in the mortal sense; it's "war" in the human sense, the Greek sense, but it's war by any measure.
...at the voting booth.
Republicans as a party seem to want to rule, not serve, and basically have given up on governance (ala Steve Benen). They have to be voted out at all levels until a new party emerges, one that respects our constitution.
As for this mass shooting....
1. Blame Biden
2. Antifa.
3. False Flag.
4 Nothing to see here.
etc.
There is a person of interest/suspect--but so far no motives and no reports of social media posts (yet?).
fyi: suspect caught--still no word on motive.
He's a low-end Trump loving gun nut with tattoos on his face.
That's his entire motive.
Republicans as a party are interested in two things: protection of private property rights and preservation of the status quo of privilege. They do not see promoting the general welfare as a legitimate government role and are determined to prevent Democrats from doing that.
"It will be obvious that the Republican Party is under the control of right-wing loons and they're scary as hell."
If there are any center-right voters who haven't realized this after 7 or so years of Trumpian politics (and the preceding decade of Tea Partiers), I have to say they are idiots who can't tell the difference between their head and their behind, or they are so selfish that until one of these laws hits them directly, they couldn't care less about all the craziness making people miserable all around.
There are easily tens of millions of Americans walking around barely sentient, with only rudimentary logic or reason ruling their brain functions. (To be fair, most nations probably contain a fair share of people who essentially don’t think about anything very deeply. But America definitely has more than its fair share, probably because we’re mostly comfortable/coddled in everyday life.)
Given this, it would not surprise me if tens of millions of Americans have no idea what either party stands for, what either party is currently in control of or even how our governments or electoral systems function.
Bingo. … I’m going with “selfish “. It explains so much about what Republicans, including “moderates”, do, such as the response to Covid, mask mandates, etc.
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of mankind's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith
+1
"Republicans now have the power to actually fulfill some of the most extreme fantasies of their MAGA wing. And that, finally, is going to scare people in purplish states into voting for Democrats."
Muahahahaha! You hear that, Republicans? With you in power, we've got you right where we want you! Every step you take dragging this country to the right will (probably) be met with some scared purple people dragging this country a half step back to the left!
Nazi at Walgreen's refuses to fill birth control prescriptions,
https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/vpubao/woman_trying_to_get_her_birth_control_at/
Can Walgreen's fire her? I'll bet they can't because religious psychotics are special.
Walgreens can certainly fire the pharmacist, especially in the right-to-work states that the religious nazis tend to live in. But they choose not to, because they’re cowards and don’t want the howling monkeys harassing them on Twitter or in court.
The standard was that a pharmacist with religious objection to filling a script would defer to another pharmacist. But, at least since the early 2010s, disagreeable harmacists have felt the right to refuse service AND abscond with the physician's script.
It's sickening. & thoroughly against standards, such as the Hippocratic Oath & HIPPO Law.
The abortion decision could be a shock to some Independents (the largest group - almost all actual Republicans are now extreme), but the gun decision does not really change things, People who wanted to do mass murder could get some weapons for it in another state if theirs had regulations.
"And that, finally, is going to scare people in purplish states into voting for Democrats"
I'm sorry, that's just not how fascism works. The whole point of it is that the *voters* don't get to make a choice, and that's exactly how it will go down here. Already Republicans probably have enough power between the Supreme Court and the various gerrymandered state legislatures to pretty much throttle the 2024 election, if not this upcoming one as long as they are willing to break democratic norms (narrator: they are)
And really, how many of these Republicans voters that think the party has gotten too extreme are left? Watching the current GOP "moderates" like Collins and Romney cower and become insignificant in the face of the fascist takeover of their party doesn't give me a lot of confidence that there are many.
The tell will be when they openly go after the so-called 'liberal' MSM with actual legislation. The end of cold-war politics dealt the Republic a body-blow that it may not survive.
Desantis is already abridging 1st Amendment rights vis a vis Disney and “don’t say gay.”
Today. Right now.
I hope Kevin is right, I really respect his opinion, but… Republicans will take the House in 2022. This will hamstring Biden. Making the Dem more likely to lose in 2024. And at that point… I’m nervous.
There's little prospect losing the House (as shitty as that's going to be) hurts Biden's chances in 2024, for the simple reason that Republicans can always be counted on to engage in hubris and overreach when they gain power.
Craziness is more common than good sense. Republicans for the last 40 years or so have been counting on this. People ignored that boring Jimmy Carter who said put a sweater on and turn down the thermostat to save energy. They like Ronnie Reagan who said let's burn the furniture and keep the party going. Fox News continually amps up the emotional rage. Why would people ever turn away from this once they are sucked into it? When people are angry and emotional they don't stop to think things through.
Sorry. People will vote on gas prices. If they don't need an abortion right then and it wasn't their kid killed by an AR-15, they will just be angry about the cost of a gallon of gas.
It sucks, but that is how it will go.
I am not saying you're wrong ... but if you're right how do you account for all the progress made up until, oh, 1980 or thereabouts on lthe liberty, equality, fraternity fronts?
There is an important case study involving sharks attacks and the East Coast, around the beginning of the 20th Century, iirc.
They absolutely will “throw the bums out” based on gas prices alone (or shark attacks). Even if the incumbent party has, quite literally, zero control over the events people are grumpy about.
That’s a huge problem given the general insanity of Republicans these days.
(This has been the problem taking over from incompetent bastards like W Bush and Trump: a lot of blame falls on the people who take over and try to fix things. This is insane. This is how the average voter works.)
Sorry. People will vote on gas prices.
You may be right. The handwriting on the wall with respect to reproductive rights (and other kinds of rights, too) has been visible for years now: vote GOP and you increase the probability of losing those things. And yet Republicans have continued to win many elections, and have increased their dominance in wide swaths of the country.
So pretty clearly: A) lots of voters don't care, at least provided gun rights don't go away B) lots of voters barely read a newspaper C) lots of voters want these liberties restricted.
But the price at the pump hits them in the face. Hard. On a weekly basis.
I think there's a strong possibility the extremism of the court could help Democrats this fall, sure. I also think there's a strong possibility Democrats are going to get crushed. I believe it's really hard to predict either way, although history, at least, says "crushed" is the more likely outcome.
People in the 25+ states that will essentially ban abortion have to live with the reality of that policy, since it is no longer just a GOP talking point but a reality. I hope that there is enough anger on the progressive side to boost this November's turnout sufficiently to survive the midterms (meaning that old Turkey Neck doesn't become the Senate majority leader again). The reality of abortion bans with take longer to sink in, hopefully by 2024.
Meanwhile, I am perfectly fine having progressives scare the shit out of people with respect to a potential national abortion ban, LTGBQ rights, and access to contraceptives (the theocrats wet dreams).
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I doubt they really care about abortion, even the saner one's think it's something that's bad. Maybe they think it should be but it's not enough to vote D. 2A is a goddamn right! Hell, most of them really believe there was voter fraud and that waste, fraud and abuse will fix the budget.
The Covid stuff was absolutely bat shit crazy. Dumbest shit ever. And they'd argue that Fauci got everything wrong. It was nightmare dumb stuff and the guy came within 40K votes of winning.
But inflation is gonna kill us all.
Maybe you get some moderates, maybe you get women back, or keep them I guess, maybe, but if we aren't already at a point where "sane people" aren't thinking WTF am I doing voting for the crazies, it's not gonna change because D stands for the Devil.
When these halfwit Nazi shitbags start trying to confuse people by piously pretending
the problem with mass shootings is about improving access to mental health treatment, while not once doing anything whatsoever about it, remember,
it's like they're saying the best way to cure cancer is with a healthy lifestyle and plenty of exercise.
And then they're going to do the chicken dance and pray for rain, because that's the only conversation you're going to have with them.
Finally, we're also likely to see a lot more 2A lunatics carrying guns around everywhere, even in states that don't like this. Eventually one of them will touch off yet another massacre and police will make it clear that they knew there was a guy with an AR-15 hanging around outside the mall/school/courthouse but they were constrained from so much as approaching him. Hanging around a mall with an assault rifle is perfectly legal, after all.
I think this is going to happen because this is what always happens. I don't know how long it will take, but it will happen. And when it does, center-right voters will no longer dismiss conservative extremists as just blowing hot air. It will be obvious that the Republican Party is under the control of right-wing loons and they're scary as hell.
Maybe, today?
It’s funny that some freak wasted people watching a July 4 parade. White people terrorized by their own. 2nd amendment rules. I think it was Kyle Rittenhouse, but I guess they found some other freak. Oh well.
I think that’s all ok with them. Cost of doing business. So says your local gun shop.
I'm sure Social Democrats in Germany in the 1930s comforted each other with arguments that the Nazis had gone too far, what with their persecution of the Jews and their concentration camps and their preparations for another disastrous war. It was only a matter of time before a backlash developed and moderate centrists were returned to power.
And they were right! Come 1990, Germany once again had a moderate Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union/Free Democratic Party government!
Of course, there was a bit of unpleasantness in the intervening period ...
👍👍👍👍👍
This.
I don't think the US is condemned to be oppressed by an autocratic system forever. I haven't made a study of the phenomenon of average duration of the absence of democracy. Spain spent about four decades under authoritarianism. Some of the South American dictatorships managed to limit it to 20 years or so. I figure by the late 2050s, the US should be ready to make the transition.
Well, you can hope than some voters, who somehow weren’t put off by TFG’s admiration for dictators, his encouraging violence against protesters and even the press at his rallies, his history of cheating and conning people and failing at multiple businesses, his bigotry, misogyny, and - oh, I could go on to book-length, but that’s been done by others.
The data says negative campaigning works, and this year presents Democrats with two huge opportunities for ratfvcking: the dual splits in the Republican Party over Trumpism and privacy rights. The best chance Democrats have to beat the off-year curse is to fan the sparks of the Republican civil war. Help them beat themselves. The splits are between those who openly back Trump and the Big Lie, and those who don’t want to talk about it. Same with abortion and privacy rights - it’s the ‘pro-lifers’ vs. those who don’t want the issue raised at all. Go after the weasels; keep pressing them for answers, don’t let them change the subject. If they keep avoiding, call them out for cowardice, if they slip and state a position, their own will eat them.
Needless to say, all of this presumes that adults aren't able to rein in the GOP's MAGAnauts and Democrats are able to rein in their extreme progressive wing and present themselves as a temperate, reassuring alternative. That's not a sure thing. But I can hope.
Also assumes voters still have the power to vote out Republicans. There are a lot of people in Hong Kong who don’t like the communist party’s policies lately, but they totally lack any power to vote for an alternative, so nobody thinks Hong Kong is going to reverse direction anytime soon. Same could happen here. We could end up with lots of elections in which systemically the only possible winner will be the Republican Party.
Please stop posting in a both-sides frame. Not as full posts and not as snide asides either.
Who is the leftiest lefty in Congress? I'd say Bernie in the Senate and AOC and her friends in the house. Are any of these people anything like Taylor Green, Ron Johnson or Jim Jordan? The question answers itself.
Look, I am also annoyed at woke speech like "person who can be pregnant" instead of "woman". But compared to how annoying Jordan is, how stupid Johnson and how evil MTG this does not matter in the least.
I doubt very much we lose a lot of votes because of Bernie or AOC or even their followers. Or if we do then mostly due to misrepresentation of these people on FOX News (you are absolutely correct on FOX of course).
Part of the problem is that the massive right-wing propaganda machine employs hundreds of people who do little but trawl through every corner of the internet looking for something a leftist has written or done that can be sensationalised as the latest political outrage. The machine promptly amplifies it into a national "scandal", Trump Republicans pick it up and run with it, and it gets covered by the mainstream media. Casual readers get the impression some obscure activist or state official represents the entire Democratic Party.
Liberals and Democrats, on the other hand, are terrible at hanging right-wing misdeeds around the neck of the Trump Republican Party. Whether it's the Kushner boy's brazen bribery or Greg Abbott's dismissal of mass shootings as God's plan, offensive right-wing words and actions tend to get media attention for about 10 minutes and never be spoken of again. Just compare the continuing nonsensical media coverage of "the Hunter Biden laptop story" with the silence about the former guy's blatant fraud and corruption.
The result is a vague public impression that Democrats have a general tendency to be more guilty of questionable behaviour than Republicans, when in fact the balance is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.
A minor point: while no Republicans have accused Abbott of maligning God with his statement, it made me wonder what their reaction would have been if a Democrat had made that disturbing comment.
Please stop posting in a both-sides frame. Not as full posts and not as snide asides either.
Who is the leftiest lefty in Congress? I'd say Bernie in the Senate and AOC and her friends in the house. Are any of these people anything like Taylor Green, Ron Johnson or Jim Jordan? The question answers itself.
Look, I am also annoyed at woke speech like "person who can be pregnant" instead of "woman". But compared to how annoying Jordan is, how stupid Johnson and how evil MTG this does not matter in the least.
I doubt very much we lose a lot of votes because of Bernie or AOC or even their followers. Or if we do then mostly due to misrepresentation of these people on FOX News (you are absolutely correct on FOX of course).
This argument had some traction right around 2000 when Al Gore was making the same point. But trying to appease the GOP (that was what Clinton/Gore politics amounted to) has failed to reign in the extremists on the right; if anything it has strengthened them.
There will be a potent backlash. I agree with Kevin's thesis 100% provided we manage to avoid elections-nullification descent into autocracy.
THIS is the elephant in the room Kevin seems to be blithely ignoring.
Am I saying it's a sure thing? Absolutely not. I couldn't put a number on it. But I keep reading about how MAGA is strategically changing elections law at the state level, and putting in loyal foot soldiers at every level of elections machinery. I also remember thinking, back in January of 2021: there's no way Democrats will be allowed to secure a fairly won Electoral College victory if Republicans control both chambers of Congress four years hence. And we're going to soon get a Supreme Court decision highly likely to turbocharge MAGA's ability to steal elections: Does anybody seriously think the six right wingers will be able to resist full embrace of the "independent state legislature" scam? Not a fucking chance. The Chief Justice himself by all accounts is a proponent.
Maybe (who knows?) the threat to our democracy is exaggerated for all I know.
But I doubt it.
This. I think only a massive turnout of Democratic votes in November can save us. I'm not holding my breath.
Well, a massive popular vote victory by Democrats would certainly complicate the efforts of the GOP to steal the election. Close elections are their friend.
The problem is that stuff like state-level gerrymandering, the entrenchment in the Judicial Branch, and possibly even switching to state legislatures openly picking Electoral college results greatly blunts the ability of a backlash to really bring Democrats back into power. Wisconsin is so gerrymandered, for example, that Democrats would have to win by 20 points to retake the state legislature - and while gerrymandering federal elections has its limits, they can do everything in their power to keep redrawing it out as long as they can.
And even if they do win, the Supreme Court and lower courts can sabotage any progressive victories unless they finally lose patience and do an aggressive attack on the Court's legitimacy.
I see a lot of despair and dread here and among my liberal friends. I think Langston Hughes best captured America and despite his unforgiving eye, his poem gives me hope:
"Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)"
Read the whole poem by a black man fighting against a deeply racist society. Humans everywhere all the time (well maybe not Bhutan) have been shit to one another forever but flawed people dreamed and fought for something better. We have something better now and we have to keep fighting for it.
Until the Democrats rein in the extremely scary progressives who advocate for, *gasp*, universal health care, the Republicans will continue to receive votes.
There are NO "extreme progressive" Democrats. That's just silly bothsiderism.
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