So to clarify you think things like Musk or Trump's weird thing with Canada and Denmark are in no way controversial to centrist and leftists?
Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
It's not "spite" to just stand up for what you believe in.
Can't get a budget passed? Make that a Republican Party problem. The Republicans hold the presidency and both houses, why make it easy for them? The Republicans repeatedly blocked major Democrat bills in utter lockstep, again and again. Why should the Democrats support what they don't believe in when they get nothing in return? Sounds to me more like volunteering to be the doormat in an abusive relationship. This isn't spite, it's just having a backbone and compromise. That's something moderates can sign up to, as well.
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Maybe really standing up to Trump could do wonders for the Democrats. Look how Trump took over the Republicans: proof enough that blustering bullshit is a perfectly suitable replacement for competence and legality. Maybe the problem is all those milquetoast corporate gobshites and gerontocratic old ghouls who would have the party forever suffocated in anodyne mediocrity. Maybe the Dems could win over a lot of people by both sounding like they had some real passion and values, and then also acting on them.
Or to put it another way, maybe the Democratic party needs to radically re-evaluate what it stands for. We've just seen what happens when the Democrats attempted to exploit Trump's extremism to occupy the territory of moderate Republicans: they lost the election. There's got to be a lesson in there.
If opposing Trump is what you believe in, you have a problem. If your beliefs lead you to oppose a Trump policy, e.g. if you oppose him on tariffs because you think tariffs are bad policy regardless of his stance, that is reasonable. If the thing that you believe in is just opposition to Trump, you have a problem.
I'm not going to say whether they need to be more or less oppositional to Trump, only that it needs a basis beyond just opposing Trump. If they want to live up to their name and try to govern based on majority opinions, they'll have to accept when Trump's policies are popular. If they want to be a left wing idealist party, they might oppose him even more in places, but it would be based on something more tangible that "oppose Trump". It's not a matter of too moderate or too extreme, it's that their only definition is "beat the other team", and that's the politics people hate most.
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Look, back about 15 years ago, were you criticising the pointless and self-defeating spitefulness of the Republican Party's unprecedented obstructionism of Obama? What was it McConnell's said again - his main goal was to make sure Obama was a one-term president?
Don't bother answering that, because we all know that you weren't.
And did this really harm the party? In 2016, did the Republicans think to themselves "We're sick of oppositional politicians, what we want is a pleasant, constructive leader who is going to work well with people even despite disagreement"? Because I'm pretty sure they actually selected a raging, hate machine who overtly abused and aggressively attacked his opponents. Not only that, but they won the election! And liked him so much they stuck with him even after he lost the next election and got even more angry, aggressive, and unrelentingly hostile to opposition.
The point here being that "beat the other team" is actually what a huge number of people want. When you write things like the above despite it being belied by the conduct of your own party, it makes it look like that's what you think deep down. You just lack the demeanour of swivel-eyed fanaticism many more obvious ones do.
You must be very sheltered to not see how many people are crowing "boy are the libs mad now!".
I did not vote for Mitt Romney. I did not vote for Trump in 2016. I believe I even voted for the libertarian in the 2012 PA senate race. 15 years ago, fewer than half of my votes to send people to Washington were going to Republicans. The 2012 Republican Party did not deserve my support.
It ended with a ton of the party being ousted by young blood with a clearer vision for the future. I don't think that constitutes harm for the party, but it's certain not a measure of success for those who were left behind.
I don't think you can look at Trumps policies and suggest he's defined by opposition to Democrats. He does some things they say they want to, he does a lot more that they used to say they wanted to, and then he throws out some curveballs that he couldn't even possibly know their opinion on in advance.
I said that 20% of people are Democratic partisans, and 20% of people are Republican partisans. I'm aware of those people. They are not the only people who like the Republican Party at the moment, which is where the Democrats currently are.
It mostly ended in "RINOs" (i.e. co-operative conservatives) increasingly ousted by hyper-partisan conservatives, although this has also been a wider trend. Trump is in ways the apotheosis of this attitude: a man who acts like he shouldn't even have to listen to the legislature or judiciary, never mind the political opposition, who takes obvious and overt delight in denigrating his opponents. As said:
You can dismiss this as "20%", half your party, but that half of your party rules the airwaves, holds the executive, and call the shots. The other half of your party are the passengers on this vehicle, and evidently sufficiently content with the attitude of the crew that they're not getting off. And by your own admission, it's even brought you back into the fold!
It's evidently been a success for the Republican Party.
In the face of it, it is therefore absurd to argue the Democrats couldn't or shouldn't try something similar. Otherwise, it's just seems like you demanding that the Democrats act like a subsdiary of the Republican party.
There is a difference between denigrating your opponents and allowing that denigration to determine policy.
Trump did not decide to tighten the border to spite Democrats. Before Trump, there was a long history of Democrats enacting border protections and Republicans offering amnesty to migrants, which is not to say there was a party flip, just that there were varied takes within parties. The Democratic Party actively changed its immigration policies to attack Trump. That is different in kind to calling someone mean names.
You, as I've told you many times, also determine your position on current events relative to spiting Trump.
Nope. Congress is passing level headed federal funding. Trump's cabinet is seriously going about the business of running the government. And in no time flat, you're going to be reaching for rationalizations for why everything is actually super horrible, just like last time.
If you're a criminal, you'll be deported.If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up. The actions I'm taking are not only lawful, they're the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican President and every single Democratic President for the past half century. And to those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.
Who knew we were living in a fascist regime under Obama!?!?
Did Obama ignore a court order regarding deportations? Just asking for a friend.