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A new fault line
Simple question: will the question of a “stolen election” by nefarious means – D malfeasance on the local level, top-down fraud efforts, Dominion manipulation, all of the above – divide the conservative side in the year to come? I get the feeling sometimes that if you’re not on board with the idea that Donald Trump actually won, full stop, you’re a cuck-shill Tapper-fluffer (cruise ship icon) RINO eager to buff your cocktail-party credentials.
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Oh, my comment wasn’t aimed at you, Marci. If it came across that way, I apologize. I was just pointing out the kind of argument I didn’t (still don’t) understand. I totally get not liking Trump and choosing to either leave the spot blank or vote for a third party and still calling yourself a conservative/Republican. I don’t agree with the decision, but I understand it. But I just can’t wrap my head around someone calling themself a conservative/Republican and choosing to vote for Biden – not after everything that’s happened the last four years and especially not after everything we’ve seen from the Democrats this year (uncontrolled looting and rioting, extended lockdowns, the abridgement of First Amendment rights, agendas put forth by The Squad and company, etc.) That kind of “reasoning” just blows my mind.
Mine too.
I sure hope not, James.
Can’t speak for others, James, but my foremost concern is the integrity of the vote. Trump coming out on top is something that would make me happy, but it is a squint-your-eyes distant second.
(Late to the party here, sorry.)
Yes, if the voters actually voted for Biden, then they deserve to get Biden, good and hard.
Hmm, that sounds a lot like youtube flagging. What better way to stop vote counting than for an online observer to push flag on the count?
What the NT right don’t seem to understand is that nobody is going to vote for you if you hold them in contempt. Trump got a lot of average people to vote for him because although he made his name synomous with wealth, he never looked down on them.
A guy I met in Puerto Rico can attest to that. This guy was retired from the NY construction industry and was working as a superintendent of the place we stayed. He met with Trump in his office about a project and said that he was very engaged and always probing to see if you knew your stuff. Once you’d proven that, you were in. Apparently, Trump came to work site every now and then. He’d speak with a lot of workers and they always cheered when he showed up.
Separately, I met an older woman who was/is a security guard at a mall in Indianapolis, but she used to work for Trump in the same role. Said it was the best job she ever had and that he treated his people right.
That’s me too, Weeping. I get not liking Trump (I don’t, though I did vote for him), and as you say, leaving the POTUS spot blank or voting for some hapless third party – but to vote for Biden??! I do not get that at all.
As for the 2020 election…..I’ve already experienced the fury of Trump supporters who expect my full endorsement of the idea that Trump is getting the election stolen from him. When I disagree, and say simply that though I am all in favor of investigating and prosecuting all fraud but don’t think that will change the outcome, I am accused of all kinds of things – not caring about voter fraud, burying my head in the sand, etc. The straw men are erected and bravely knocked down.
I think Biden won. Not by much, but I think he won. Has there been fraud? Yes, I’m sure there has been. I’d be amazed if there weren’t – I mean, if you think Trump is a fascist set to destroy democracy, another Hitler, blah blah blah, wouldn’t you be obliged to cheat a bit? Wouldn’t that be the moral action to take? I’m all for investigating and prosecuting voter fraud. But at the end of the day, I think Biden wins.
I think he has to prove it though, definitively. Not just claim it and then decry any doubters.
I’m always swayed by convincing arguments of “LOL” and criticizing the source.
We should probably do better than that. LOL!
Lots of Republicans won in the 2020 elections while Trump lost. So, if we accuse most Republicans of “holding them [regular people] in contempt,” this contempt does not seem to have been a barrier to victory on election night.
At least 1 Republican candidate for Congress won in Orange County, California even as Trump lost Orange County, California to Biden by about 9 points.
This is how Maine voted:
Maine vote count (as of Nov 13, 2020 7:25 PM)
Joe Biden – 420,357 Donald Trump – 341,949
Sara Gideon – 325,277 Susan Collins – 385,459
So, Susan Collins got more votes in Maine than Trump.
If you look carefully, you will realize that this isn’t Sarah Huckabee, it’s Sarah Hucklebee.
In other words, it appears to be a twitter account owned by someone trying to make themselves appear to be Sarah Huckabee. So, they slightly modified Sarah Huckabee’s name to Hucklebee.
It’s a fake.
Funny, when Obama started skipping his daily security briefs, did Senate Republicans think that was ok, too?
This is just more establishment crap. Get back to work loading the rubes with debt and becoming millionaires.
So you LOL at a post on Twitter, laughing at the source, yet in here you post “stuff” that you heard on a podcast, and then admit that they aren’t reliable.
Let me do some quick math here:
If I agree with a statement: Statement = True
If I disagree with a statement: Statement = False
Does that about sum it up? A nice easy binary decision?
I am simply saying that while I heard something on a podcast, I can not expect anyone to conclude that because it was on a podcast, it must be true.
We have to consider the possibility that the sources of information we have available to us are not 100 percent reliable.
If some cable TV host says something, it might be true or it might not be true or it might lack context and be misleading.
Well. That fixes everything.
I do not see how “conservatives” telling people that we are, what’s the word….some form of deplorable, because we think there was voter fraud is going to push us to vote for an anti-Trump in 2024. I don’t think that these NT’s (real ones or soft ones) realize that many Trump supporters will stay home. We were told to vote for McCain and Romney, but not Trump. This will not go well.
Trump is not going away. He will run again, build his own media empire, and be a force in politics long after the Nevers are gone.
I will be interesting to see if Trump runs in 2024.
I can imagine a Tom Cotton or Nikki Haley saying to Donald Trump in a primary debate, “If you want to nominate someone who will hold a lot of MAGA rallies and then ultimately lose to Joe Biden, Donald Trump is your candidate. If you want to nominate someone who will campaign hard, fight for conservative principles and beat Joe Biden, I am your candidate.” It could be a compelling message.
I’m going to hope that both Cotton and Haley have more class than that.
If Trump calls Nikki Haley ugly and Tom Cotton low energy, Haley and Cotton might return fire with fire.
That’s basically what Trump was doing to the GOPe types. But the GOPe thinks its rude and obnoxious condescension is “civility” and doesn’t realize that what Trump did back at them was the same as they were dishing out for years.
“GOPe”
I understand the idea here, and I’m sympathetic to it, but also wary.
I wonder if we should begin to deconstruct the old-style GOP and the Trump-style GOP (for want of a better term), and try to focus on specific details of behavior, rather than on our various ideas of what the two groups represent. That might allow us to choose the best of both, and begin to synthesize a more effective Republican Party.
One of my great frustrations of the Trump era has been the tendency to see either Trump or the older GOP as monolithically good or bad. I think we need to learn some valuable lessons from Trump, because he did some things better than the older GOP did and it’s important that we capture that. On the other hand, the older GOP did some things better, and we should respect that as well.
For a lot of people, it seems a hard conversation to have. I’m broadly pro-Trump, quite happy with his Presidency, often frustrated by his behavior. I’m also a plain old Republican, and I’ll stand by the party and hope to preserve the best of it post-Trump (whether post-Trump means 2020 or 2024 or some point further down the road).
I think both the Never-Trumpers and the anti-GOP people should sit down and be quiet for awhile, and let cooler heads prevail.
(By the way, none of this refers to you. I’m just responding to the GOPe reference, and to the gist of James’ original post.)
Nothing is monolithic. Except an actual monolith. Maybe.
The frustration arising after 2012 and earlier is not quite with the “old” GOP as much as it is with the establishment GOP. Since the successes of the 90’s it’s been timid, incompetent, duplicitous, ineffective, and nonresponsive to large segments of its constituency or any other. Not only had we not gotten more of the loaf we crave, increasingly we had been losing more of whatever loaf we had left. Added to the culture war losses are the fact that the federal government is more intrusive and more in debt than ever. We replaced a rather clear moral claim in opposing the USSR with a rather murky and even nonconservative position on post Cold War foreign policy. We’ve allowed local population centers to be marched through by progressives. Whatever economic successes could very well be the result of government inflation bubbles. As much as the stock market and GDP have increased, there is a feeling outside of urban centers (and even within them) that people and communities are still being hollowed out even if their 401k (if they have one) does ok.
On the Trump side – this is almost entirely reactionary to crazy over the top accusations and assertions made about Trump. One can’t linger long in anti-anti-Trump without just acknowledging the craziness of some and the positive accomplishments of Trump. I’m a strong Trump supporter but even I don’t think he is monolithically good. So what? Who ever was?
It may be true that the best of the GOP is tonal; the best of Trump is policy.
And the inverse, in each case.
As I think we discovered a couple of weeks ago, tone matters. Perhaps that’s one of the more important things we can merge into the new GOP from the old.
Yes tone matters.
Russia Collusion Hoax. Resist. Politicization of the IC. BAMN. BLM. Fine People Hoax. Brett Kavanaugh the gang rapist. Innocent until proven guilty is only a legal concept. Fake News dialed up to 11. Defund the police. Riots. Looting. Antifa. Cancel Culture. Social Media censorship. Critical Race Theory. Covid lockdowns and authoritarianism. Yes tone matters.
Propaganda and radical rejection of the social compact matters way, way more than tone. That’s what I learned. What I’m interested to learn in the next few years: does dialing up the propaganda and shredding the norms that much have fatal consequences? Too many people are just “so tired” of the drama. I suspect it won’t be fatal. Which will be a real problem because successful strategies get repeated.
I get really irritated when people want to morally equivocate about the tone over the last several years. As if President Trump’s personality shortcomings are even comparable to the insanity we’ve all seen. As if all of these bad things, if done with the right tone, are somehow acceptable while irritating tweets and irritating personality are just too much.
Democrats don’t give a crap about tone as evidenced by their foul-mouthed standard-bearers. Yet supposedly the President was so awful in tone that “republicans” chose to vote for the people who smear us all as racist-nazi-fascists while using the effenheimer every other word.
Yeah, the “tone” argument doesn’t hold water with me. If you hated the President’s tone, yet voted for Democrats, you’re a hypocrite, plain and simple.
How about we escalate the rhetoric until and only until we win. Then we can walk back the tone on our own terms and not because foul-mouthed Democrats demand it of us. They have set the new rules for public discourse. We’re fools if we keep playing by old rules that are no longer in effect.
Name one time that tone won an election.
The only reason this is true is the GOP, excepting the Contract with America which was 25 years ago already, has been woefully lacking in the will to enact anything.