Monday, April 25, 2022

The Permanent Long Slog

The other side of this is calls for Democrats to win the mid-terms (and 2024) NOW!  Electons are won on Election Day, which is to say: what happens between now and then matters, especially what happens much closer to then. The political junkies on Twitter may be all excited, but the average voter barely cares about their state’s primary, much less November.

I live in Texas and I’ve already voted three times (primary, special state election for Constitutional amendments, school board election), and still have a ballot to cast in the primary run-off. Don’t start bothering me with November, I’m already getting school board candidate robo-calls.

Can we get a break from the permanent campaign?
This argument is sound: Then collapses into "Evil must be eradicated and everyone must think like me!" There’s another Hitler out there, too; if we allow the conditions that led to the collapse of Weimar Germany to be recreated. Punishing Germany for WWI didn’t exactly teach them a lesson, did it? (Yes, I’m a broken record.) But would Germany today re-elect Hitler? Not anytime soon. And Hitler at least took a broken economy and created one of the great military powers of European history (yes, at what horrific cost?). But Trump was so incompetent he just drove the economy into a ditch. Who better is coming along? DeSantis? He’s going to raise taxes on 2 Florida counties just because he’s pissed off. He's forced Sen. Rick Scott to cancel his Disney+ account (Scott is a big Marvel fan?  Who knew?). O, the humanities! These things are a recommendation for national leadership? Who is the Hillary Clinton DeSantis will run against?

And who is Biden running against?  Because he doesn't really mind the Macron comparisons, especially if his opponent is Trump again:

The conditions that led to Trump weren’t exactly an indifference to democracy (an indifference Rick Wilson earned a good living from). It was, if anything, an excess of democracy. The party machinery that ran everything from smoke-filled rooms gave way (for many reasons) to primaries, which shifted the powers from the center of the parties to the fringes. No one worried about “primary voters” when conventions chose Presidential candidates. Now they rule the parties, more by perception than real authority. The parties themselves are so shrunken they are virtually meaningless, except for their lock on ballot access in all 50 states. That’s really the only reason they are important. (Trump is raising more money than the GOP. That’s one more reason he is perceived as the power in the party.) With the best of intentions we created the conditions that allowed for Trump and single-person rule and blunt demagoguery.  Indeed, the Republicans have benefitted from that since the days of Reagan (and further back the failure of Goldwater). It wasn’t complacency that led to that, or we’d still have the smoke filled rooms and conventions that actually elect candidates.

Being anxious (the opposite of complacent) isn’t really going to fix that; or anything else.

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