Look, call them whatever you want:
It is absolutely central to the social conservative voter’s self-image that they be fighting to defend something Big and Worthy and Righteous, and tax cuts and the inherent beauty of the corporate form aren’t going to cut it.
They need issues like LIFE or MARRIAGE or FAMILY, or they sit it out. They haven’t miraculously turned into glib, ironic, pot-smoking libertarian-types, despite the Koch propaganda and Grover Norquist’s fantasies. That’s silly. They’re the same voters they always were.
They’re rural, they’re religious, and they’re dead-earnest.
I think we may be overthinking this. They’re just assholes, and I know we want to understand them so we can appeal to them to vote for us, but there’s not that much to understand. The economy and the deficit have become code for what LIFE and MARRIAGE and FAMILY were code for before, which is somebody out there getting something he or she doesn’t deserve. That’s all this is, a neverending fight to not have to think about somebody else being screwed. Also the president is black, and not completely bonkers, so there’s that.
I seriously do not have any patience for it anymore. Back in 2004 I thought let’s appeal to them this way, that way, another way, but after six years of just watching people get angrier and crazier ABOUT NOTHING I think our best bet is to appeal to our own damn base and get them out to vote because there’s more of us, and the hell with these crazy morons. I know it’s gonna upset the Villagers, saying they don’t deserve to be listened to and heard … look, maybe they do, but somebody other than Democrats can do it, because we have a limited amount of time on this planet and we don’t need to spend it this way.
A.
They don’t matter.
The uberrich are out to suck this country dry, and they finally have all their pawns in place — they own a political party, media empires, the Supreme Court and most of the other political party. Nothing’s been done about easily hacked and untraceably corrupted voting machines. They have tens of millions of desperate working and middle class citizens convinced that racist fascism is the only solution to their problems. They have made relativism the only mode of public discourse: there are no hard facts anymore, only competing narratives. People are not citizens anymore, only consumers, urged to construct whatever reality is most comforting to them (and most helpful to the ambitions of the plutocracy).
Third-world status is in our forseeable future. Our infrastructure will continue to crumble. Our once-proud roads will be pounded back into gravel. Our bridges will collapse. The rest of the world will ride 300 mph trains while we sit in endless traffic jams, paying $5 for a gallon of gas and tell ourselves we’re the greatest country on earth as we slip further & further down every measure of health and livability.
No, I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist. We can all see this happening. There is no left-wing revolution coming. There’s no need for a right-wing revolution as they’re sitting pretty. So what’s the answer?
Sometimes there is no answer.
The idea that these people are all rural backwoods yokels is utter uninformed bullshit.
If many of the teabaggers were inclined to put their arguments into a rational form, present the facts as they are (rather than parroting what they heard Glenn Blech disgorge the day before from that carnival funhouse mirror that is his understanding of history), Democrats would listen to them. Hell, if they were capable of doing that, they wouldn’t be teabaggers…
What’s happening now is a kind of institutional insanity, and I don’t know how many of you have tried be logical with a person in the midst of a paranoid schizophrenic episode, but, I’m tellin’ ya, it don’t fuckin’ work.
The mistake that the Dems have consistently made thus far is believing that they can talk to wackos and loonies (and I’m not exactly talking about the ones in the public here). We’ve got a President that thinks Ronnie Fuckin’ Reagan was right, says so in public, and thinks that buys him points with the Repugs, and that they’ll cooperate because he’s beingreasonable. He still hasn’t figured out that–precisely because they are wackos and loonies–they are determined to, figuratively or literally, march down Pennsylvania Ave. with his liver on a pike.
Why compromise with people who are wrong? Dems need to be ramming their agenda down Republican throats with the same vigor they had it done to them for the past decade.
That’s where Obama is just SO WRONG. The American people don’t want compromise – they want the commonsense policies he was talking about on the campaign trail. Who gives a shit whether Republicans support any of this? Progress needs to happen over and above and despite them, just like it always has, or our country will continue to go to hell in a handbasket.
Virgo, agreed, because there are plenty of them in Chicago and the suburbs, if Illinois’ new teabagger-friendly senator is any indication.
A.
They’re not just assholes. They’re what’s left when most of the people who want to pursue their dreams or live an enlightened lifestyle or just get away from a constricting environment move to the coasts.
What we’re suffering from is the inordinate power conferred to relatively unpopulated/under populated regions of the country.
Couldn’t agree more on getting. out. the. base.
Republiclown “gains” were the result of voter apathy as much as anything, and while for the life of me I can’t understand why people wouldn’t vote — the worst thing you have to do is wait in line, and the lines are usually shorter for the midterms — I also can’t understand why this administration, over and over again, gave in before even having a fight.
A few weeks ago Atrios put it succinctly (paraphrasing): announce your plan, if it passes, good, if it doesn’t, blame the other side for obstructing. It’s not difficult.
The obvious first step for Democrats is to agree about what we believe in. We can never seem to do that. But, if we did, we could just stay true to our beliefs, push for what we believe in, and only compromise at the last second, within certain limits.
I agree with CVS that the Republic form of government we have is a major burden, since it confers super powers onto the largely unpopulated states, letting the cretins there dictate what the rest of us can do. But, a far bigger systemic problem is that Congressmen serve much more for personal enrichment than for service to their country. That problem is a hard one to solve, too.
Trying to keep this country together now is like trying to keep the Roman Empire intact in the fourth century AD: it can’t be done because the institutional apparatus that held it together (them: Imperial domination; us: constitutional democracy) is no longer functional. The inevitable result for the United States is collapse and fragmentation into 4-6 independent states: 1) New England, the industrial northeast and the Great Lakes states; 2) the confederate south; 3) West Coast; 4) Texas; 5) Midwest/Rocky Mtn/southwest states. Some northern state may apply for Canadian status. Maybe NM and ARZ would align with Texas. The impending economic collapse makes this the most likely scenario; it will be much like the Soviet collapse in 1991-92.
cut it to the bone. they are the people who hate welfare. they have bootstraps and asking for help is sinful. salt of the earth can be bitter.
they are not the good people of ‘meet john doe’ anymore. and easily bamboozled by their world view. and save fetuses! not whales.
I believe the vast size of the US and relative mobility of our population has insulated us, so far, from what caused other countries to fall into despair and totalitarianism, but I agree with Sandman that we may have finally reached a breaking point. It only took 20% unemployment to get Hitler elected, and we’re not far from that when you count everyone who has stopped looking for work and the underemployed. Add in the disparity of wealth and dysfunction of the federal and state governments, and something is bound to give sooner or later.
We could divide Phoenix (which is basically purple) like old Berlin, into and Eastern “Texas” side and as western “California” side.
Remember what happened the last time there was a fracture in the union. Given today’s armaments and forms of warfare I can’t see a replay of the 1860’s, but it is hard to see a major fracture being done peacefully.
If the US were to splinter, the new “states” would have to have draconian immigration policies to avoid depopulating some of the new “states” and over populating to the point of bankrupting some of the others.
When do we accept the horrible risks of a new Constitutional Convention? Ultimately that is where the solution lies.
At lest you figured it out so your not insane. It’s broke and it will take a complete collapse so just my be people start to work together for the betterment of the peoples of this nation. If successful we could spread the idea to others that are willing to look into how we recovered from the insanity. Just wishful thinking, I’m not usually this hopeful.
I have met some of those rural, religious, and dead-earnest people, and they scare the living shit out of me. On the other hand, I’m an urban atheist cynic, so we don’t wind up having much to talk about. They’re also usually about 100 IQ points less smart than I am, which doesn’t help either.
Remember, kids, places with more cows than people tend to lose their population with potential pretty young, so the inhabitants of such places tend to bewhat’s left over…
cut it to the bone. they are the people who hate welfare. they have bootstraps and asking for help is sinful. salt of the earth can be bitter.
Except for farm subsidies. And military bases. Social security. Medicare. VA hospitals. The federal highway system, rural electrification and irrigation projects. And the military, a jobs program for their kids who couldn’t get into college. And the fact that they live in welfare states receiving massive financial transfers from ‘sinful’ heathen places like CA and NJ.
More accurately, they love their welfare, which “isn’t welfare” because they “earned” it; they just hate welfare for people they don’t like. And they don’t like anyone who isn’t just like them.
but the salt of the earth don’t count legacy help from govt.
So good it’s gotta be repeated: