Fear Itself

Trump supporters claim Democrats are ‘trying to get Biden in’ with ballots ‘from China’https://t.co/pvzchBrYiG

— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 8, 2020

These are the people we're supposed to be afraid of.  But either these people are looking for monsters under the bed (totaly disconnected from reality, IOW), or they are thinking of the overseas ballots NC is waiting on, by law.  Overseas ballots from American citizens like military personnel.  People entitled to vote, IOW, even if they don't live here at the moment.  So there could be "votes from China," but that doesn't mean those votes are coming from Chinese citizens.

There's an irrational fringe that believes it does.  They are driven by a person, a human being upon which they can hang this fantasy.  Lyndon LaRouche (ask your grandpa,  I  don't have time to teach you everything!) kept his lunatic fringe group alive by constantly popping up to run for President, and when the election was over, he started running again for the next four years.  That's how he kept his supporters together.  When he quit running (finally), he quit having even media attention.  And without media attention, he didn't exist at all.

Donald Trump may well be active on Twitter (or Parler), come February, but he'll never be a public presence again.  For one thing, he faces criminal prosecution from the federal government and from at least New York state.  The former he can try to pardon himself out of (and will the Supremes place the President above the law because of a "textualist" construction of Art. II?).  The latter he can only face down, and it may well keep him occupied for the next four years.  Yes, Michael Cohen says Trump wants to run a media empire.  But since he ran a casino into the ground, an airline, a football team, a steak company, a "university." and a scam charity, and his real estate operation is in deep indebtedness, what are the odds that will amount to anything?  Besides, with the debt load he carries, and Deutsche Bank reportedly ready to turn against him, where will he get the money?  Steve Bannon's Chinese backer?

Without a political campaign or political party or elected office, what political power does Trump really have?  A bunch of cranks who won't vote for anybody because Trump is not on the ticket?  That usually adds up to bupkis.

I don't see it adding up to anything more than that.

While we're on the subject:  I don't have an answer for why 70 million people voted for Donald Trump.  Probably there are several: 1) he's the incumbent, that always counts for a lot (despite the ability to change leaders frequently, people really don't like to.  That's why Senators are there for life, or even representatives.  The Dingells made a dynasty of it.  Name recognition is powerful in politics, and what name is more recognizable than the one that's been in office?)  2) the partisan divide.

“We don’t need to invite him for dinner,” Siravo posted in August, in response to a “Conservative Hangout” Facebook page that listed Trump’s accomplishments in office. “We just need him to fix our country & all the democratic mess.” She added that she had been “raised a Democrat.”

That's the owner of the Four Seasons landscaping company where Giuliani had his infamous press conference over the weekend.  I have a memory of a Walt Kelly anecdote from the '40's, I think, or the '50's, where he and a friend are rejoicing in an electoral victory for the Democrats, when they meet a disgruntled Republican voter who bitterly declares to them "You bastards are bastards!"  Why?  Because they were Democrats, of course.  My late father-in-law ran for a county judgeship, a fact his children never knew because he died while they were young.  His oldest son found the newspaper clipping of this race in his mother's effects, and was disappointed to find out his father was a Democrat.  But in Texas until the 1980's, everybody was a Democrat, or you didn't hold public office.  It's where the term "yellow-dog Democrat" came from:  you'd vote for a yellow-dog if it was on the Democratic ticket.  Now that's partisanship, and it's as American as violence and cherry pie.  But for reasons lost on me, Chuck Todd and any other fountain of wisdom on TeeVee thinks partisanship is something new that crept into the purity of our politics from foreign shores or subversive thinking, and once upon a time we were politely Democrats or demurely Republicans, and everything ran on greased wheels.  Which is always a shock to those of us who know anything about American political history.

I know AOC is supposed to have punctured the balloon of Democratic victories that Democrats were expecting (they were in a bubble as hermetically sealed as any rabid Trump supporter, as it turned out) by her comments AFTER the races were over, and if Democrats had just been allowed to sound more like Republicans (a la Bill Clinton, although Hillary couldn't carry that off for some reason), then everything would have come up roses for the House and Senate and state legislatures in, oh, say, Texas.  Yeah, I dunno.  Running as GOP lite doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me, any more than running as AOC in West Texas or East Texas would be.  OTOH, for the first time in my life (at least since Carter), I saw large signs for Biden in East Texas, which is as relentlessly GOP now as it was Democratic in my youth.  And I remember AOC keeping her opinions to herself throughout the 2020 campaign.  So while I take some of the criticism of her to heart, I also say again:  blaming someone else for your failures is a pretty weak excuse and a poor way of dodging responsibility.  I got boiler-plate e-mails from every Texan running for federal office around me, and they all thanked their supporters and said they did all they could.  None of them blamed a congressperson from NYC for what happened.

We don't need to be afraid of Trump.  And we don't need to be afraid of not being Republicans.  In some parts of the country, their message sells.  OTOH, Colorado was once more reliably red, and Georgia is starting to look distinctly purple, along with Arizona and Nevada.  Maybe we (Democrats) should start thinking about where we won, instead of bitching about where we didn't.  And start noticing just how partisan the country is turning, again; and how we can make that work for us.