Marvin, just go and read some history books on the 1930s will you? We let the Nazis have their state. Then they took Austria. Then they took Czechoslovakia. Then they took Poland. Then they took Western Europe. Then they tried to take Russia.
Only a fucking idiot would suggest another try and expect them to behave this time.
One of the interesting thing about those who claim to oppose all forms of violence is the way state violence seems invisible to them unless it's open warfare.
As an aside, I don't think state violence was invisible to Martin Luther King.
(But then King didn't believe in cheap grace either.)
Fascists don't do that. Enforcing their will on others (with violence, if necessary) is at the core of fascism.
One of the problems with defining fascism is that there's no fascist creed they have to sign up to. If someone claims to be a Marxist, or if you claim someone is a Marxist, they have to pay at least lip service to, providing the means of the production to the workers, and so on. But D'Annunzio didn't write an official Fascist philosophy and while Mussolini fancied himself as a theorist it doesn't appear anyone else did. So any designation of a political movement or person outside the Italian political party is based on a subjective judgement about similarity.
However, we can rephrase your point: the movement in question is a populist movement based on racial ans sexual hierarchies espousing right-wing economics whose contradictions are resolved largely by finding common enemies. That means we can't expect it to not find enemies take hostile action.
Aside from expecting us to appease the far right again.
Things are too divided between city and rural.
There were more republican voters in California than in many of the red states put together. Those red states, their capitals are fairly blue. It's not going to work.
I don't know if you could arrange a massive exchange, put the entire town in a block of flats for a week, and just hope travel broadens the mind of enough (though the rioters were obv those who had private jets
While city kids would probably benefit from seeing a cow (but how you do that safely).
But, as I pointed out in my last paragraph, the land here already belongs to people. It's not like there are huge tracts of land that have nothing to do with anybody.
Let’s build them a nice big island somewhere out in the ocean then.
Ignore the practicalities for a minute, and answer one simple question - if it were possible for a two-state solution to happen, would it be desirable? Or is it more a case that you think their beliefs are so wrong and evil that they shouldn’t be allowed to exist regardless of whether they’re affecting anyone else or not, and all this carping about the practicalities is just a way of denying the basic premise behind what I’m saying without actually being so crass as to actually come out and say it?
Whoa, cowboy. If that second paragraph is directed at me, you might want to reread my posts. I don't want anyone killed. And you said my divorce parallel was exactly right.
Look, I'm pragmatic. If a situation isn't working and isn't likely to get better any time soon, I try to think of alt possibilities.
But, as I also pointed out in detail, sending white supremacists off to live by themselves, and having the rest of us live by ourselves won't work. And, since it won't, this is an interesting thought experiment, but can't fix anything.
What *I'd* like is for all the white supremacists (of any level, and violent or not) to have a sort of Damascus road experience--not necessarily religious, but an epiphany about people, and worth, and differences; about how you can dislike or even hate someone, and not act on it; about how to take baby steps in a better direction; and about realizing that you really don't want to wind up behind bars.
An epiphany that sticks, that's lived, that works.
To be honest, I see the kind of division that Marvin talks about as being not desirable but possibly a likely (inevitable?) destination to the journey that the USA is currently on. How much longer can Texas and California hold together without wanting to murder each other? (I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
The divisions in the US seem to be getting deeper and wider every day. It is now quite feasible that almost half the population overall (and a clear majority in some states) will refuse to accept the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. What happens if/when his administration tries to do something that the Trumpists regard as unacceptable (perhaps to do with COVID restrictions)?
We have seen this kind of fracturing play out time and time again over the course of history. It rarely ends well. Usually it ends in bloody civil war. Hoping that all those people who have swallowed the lies about the election, deep state corruption etc will come to their senses is hopelessly naive.
The question that needs to be asked is "has the US gone so far down this road that healing is now impossible? (Hint: I suspect it has) And if so, how can some sort of resolution be found that avoids too much bloodshed?" (A de facto partition may not be the worst outcome in that respect)
Well, lots of Americans have mixed (at best!) feelings about California and/or Texas. Some of their attitudes (filtered!):
--California: Cesspool of licentious, notorious sinners who {stage whisper} do THAT! (Whichever "that" infuriates and/or attracts them most.) Those tech giants sit around on their asses, making a whole bunch of money for not doing much. Darn right, California's going to fall into the ocean some day--and a cheer will go up. They do make some good films and wine, though. Oh, and Disneyland.
--Texas: Well, it was fine to watch them on "Dallas" and "GCB". But I mean really! Attitudes and hair. Megabucks. They never got over the Alamo. And they keep wanting to secede from the Union. Well, let them! And let the door hit them on the way out. But we do want to keep certain places...
(Personal note: I'd like to keep Austin and Marfa.)
A lot of people probably want to get rid of *both* states. Of course, California pays a whole lot of federal taxes...
As I said to Marvin, there are too many obstacles (practical, legal, ethical, political) to make it work.
I'm not in the right frame of mind to get into whether healing is impossible. But trying to *force* it would be a massive mistake, and possibly make our first civil war look like a Sunday School picnic.
California, on the other hand, is just so over being dismissed by others as weird, freaky, drug-ridden and impractical. Get them going and they'll point to the size of their economy, to the strides they've made dealing with pollution, and so forth, and ask what people in (say) the Midwest have to sneer at.
We really need to stop being assholes to one another.
Yes, true of some Californians--though others are *proud* of those things!
I try to be mindful of speaking of various areas. For the Midwest, I know to avoid "fly-over states" and "the rust belt". Is there any other particular thing I should avoid?
(I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
You shouldn't do that. Trump got 6 million votes in CA (34% of the vote) and Biden got 5.3 million votes in TX (47% of the vote.) There's no way those people are going to be displaced without violence.
(I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
You shouldn't do that. Trump got 6 million votes in CA (34% of the vote) and Biden got 5.3 million votes in TX (47% of the vote.) There's no way those people are going to be displaced without violence.
As Randal Munroe noted, in 2020 there were more Trump voters in California than Texas, and more Biden voters in Texas than in New York.
California sometimes has these groups trying to divide the state. Parts of California are very pro-Trump evangelicals (mostly in rural areas) though even the Silicon Valley has Trump supporters (some of them extremely well-to-do that Trump was hitting up for major donations during the campaign [much to the annoyance of some of the locals due to traffic disruption when he visited]).
(I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
You shouldn't do that. Trump got 6 million votes in CA (34% of the vote) and Biden got 5.3 million votes in TX (47% of the vote.) There's no way those people are going to be displaced without violence.
That's why I said they were metaphors. I understand that you can find a lot of "Texas" all over the country and that the same applies to "California".
The point is that they represent vastly different ways of thinking and acting. Such differences have always been very hard to contain within one nation. Typically, if one side starts to get a structural dominance, the "minority" responds with fear-filled violence, leading to the majority using its dominance to squash all resistance.
Let's not be naive. The US is not unique. This kind of thing has happened before and we need to pay attention to the lessons of history - especially the failures: Yugoslavia & Austro-Hungarian Empire to name but two.
To be honest, I see the kind of division that Marvin talks about as being not desirable but possibly a likely (inevitable?) destination to the journey that the USA is currently on. How much longer can Texas and California hold together without wanting to murder each other? (I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
The divisions in the US seem to be getting deeper and wider every day. It is now quite feasible that almost half the population overall (and a clear majority in some states) will refuse to accept the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. What happens if/when his administration tries to do something that the Trumpists regard as unacceptable (perhaps to do with COVID restrictions)?
We have seen this kind of fracturing play out time and time again over the course of history. It rarely ends well. Usually it ends in bloody civil war. Hoping that all those people who have swallowed the lies about the election, deep state corruption etc will come to their senses is hopelessly naive.
Yes, my point exactly.
The question that needs to be asked is "has the US gone so far down this road that healing is now impossible? (Hint: I suspect it has) And if so, how can some sort of resolution be found that avoids too much bloodshed?" (A de facto partition may not be the worst outcome in that respect)
The answers from most on this thread appear to be "yes, healing is now impossible" and "lock them all up". There doesn't seem to be any other bloodshed-avoiding solution that won't be seen as surrendering to the populist Right (though whether trying to lock up almost half the country would actually avoid bloodshed is an open question).
Bloodshed appears to be inevitable, because neither side seems to be interested in avoiding it (or at least, not interested enough to compromise one iota of their their deeply-held beliefs). Even stating a preference for compromise in order to avoid bloodshed is enough to get you labelled as one of The Enemy who is Way Out Of Line and Has No Place Here - and that's by the supposedly liberal side!
The avoidance of bloodshed is by the ballot box. It's ever so simple. Even the PIRA accept that. But not the Irish Republican Brotherhood, probably because democratic means weren't available. Scotland accepts that and will be independent soon enough, within this parliament. Armed insurrection in the US by undemocratic minorities will always be repressed, well since the last successful one (see below), as in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Corsica, Sardinia and has never created an unequivocal overwhelming groundswell of public support unlike the Irish Free State. Fascists will never be allowed to take over a state again. Let alone secede. Those fascists were clever enough to stay within the precious Union.
(I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
You shouldn't do that. Trump got 6 million votes in CA (34% of the vote) and Biden got 5.3 million votes in TX (47% of the vote.) There's no way those people are going to be displaced without violence.
That's why I said they were metaphors. I understand that you can find a lot of "Texas" all over the country and that the same applies to "California".
It’s a shitty metaphor if it encourages thinking that some kind of regional separation might be possible.
To be honest, I see the kind of division that Marvin talks about as being not desirable but possibly a likely (inevitable?) destination to the journey that the USA is currently on. How much longer can Texas and California hold together without wanting to murder each other? (I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
The divisions in the US seem to be getting deeper and wider every day. It is now quite feasible that almost half the population overall (and a clear majority in some states) will refuse to accept the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. What happens if/when his administration tries to do something that the Trumpists regard as unacceptable (perhaps to do with COVID restrictions)?
We have seen this kind of fracturing play out time and time again over the course of history. It rarely ends well. Usually it ends in bloody civil war. Hoping that all those people who have swallowed the lies about the election, deep state corruption etc will come to their senses is hopelessly naive.
The question that needs to be asked is "has the US gone so far down this road that healing is now impossible? (Hint: I suspect it has) And if so, how can some sort of resolution be found that avoids too much bloodshed?" (A de facto partition may not be the worst outcome in that respect)
Re history, the Thirty Years War, the 17th century European civil war could show where an ideological conflict like this might go.
There really isn't much any of us* can do except pray and try to work on the polarized within our own orbit. Which I am doing. It can be successful, though there's no guarantees and it takes a lot of time and patience. But throwing up our hands and declaring the whole thing hopeless is the fast road to hell.
* Unless somebody here is a high-up governmental person, or has miracle-working powers...
Only if everyone agrees to respect the outcome of the election and believes that it's fair and free.
Believe what you like in a free, open society with a demonstrably independent judiciary where Republican judges find for Democrat majorities. But don't lie it when you're in public office or be removed. If you undemocratically, unconstitutionally cause bloodshed, you will be confronted as the criminal, secessionist or terrorist that you are by the constituted authorities using all legal force necessary.
Only if everyone agrees to respect the outcome of the election and believes that it's fair and free.
And if they don't, well, we can just compromise with them, right? Say, we'll overturn these states' results because you without evidence think their election results are corrupt, and we'll keep these states' results. Because giving in to terrorists always keeps the peace.
The mere idea that there are 'Red states' and 'Blue states' is nonsense on a stick. All states are some shade of purple.
No, it's not nonsense. All states have voters of both parties, but some states have governments heavily dominated by one party or the other. Trump did get 5.5 million votes in California. But a Republican has not held a state-wide executive office since 2010. We last went for the Republican presidential candidate in 1988. We've had only Democratic U.S. Senators since the same year. Democrats have held both houses of the state legislature since 1996. And except for one session in the mid-90s when we sent the same number of Democrats and Republicans to the House, our House delegation has been majority Democrat since 1959. So sure, there are Republicans in California, but as of last summer, registered voters were 46% Democrat, with Republicans and no party preference both at 24%. Republicans have a hard time finding qualified candidates just to run for state-wide office, in part because the people running the big cities are mostly Democrats, and also because donors don't want to waste their money supporting losing candidates. California is a blue state.
Texas is pretty red. Republicans have held all state-wide executive offices since 1994, both houses of the state legislature have been majority Republican since 2002, and their House delegation has been majority Republican since 2004. They last went Democrat for President when Jimmy Carter was on the ballot. The difference is that the Democratic party in Texas is not practically moribund the way the Republican party in California is. But somewhere like Utah -- that's a red state; they have no Democrats in state-wide office and no Democrats in Congress. There are more than twice as many unaffiliated voters in Utah as Democrats.
38 state governments are currently trifectas, that is, one party holds the governorship and has a majority in both houses of the state legislature. Only 12 states have divided government. Some trifectas have been in place for a while: Utah's dates back to 1985. 20 trifectas are 10 or more years old.
And these things make a difference. You can legally smoke weed in California, and if Roe v Wade is overturned, you'll still be able to get an abortion here. In a red state, not so much.
But -- being polarized along party lines is one thing, and being on the brink of civil war is quite another. To have a civil war, or even a successful coup, you need some subset of the military to be on board. The Joint Chiefs are clearly not on board, and the military rank and file are 43% non-white, so perhaps as a group not all that willing to support a white nationalist insurrection. We're far more likely to have increased domestic terrorism than an outright civil war.
How we will develop a sustainable multiracial/multiethnic democracy remains to be seen. The demographics of the US are changing rapidly, so this is a problem that needs to be solved sooner rather than later, not so much because of the imminent threat of war but because if we don't we'll just have a mess at best -- at worst, we'll have epic ethnic strife and perhaps eventually war.
Sure, the number of D-voters outnumbers the R-voters, so that the legislature up and down the ballot tends to be all Blue, and the state legislation reflects that.
But we're talking about cleansing at least three states of all people of colour (including, most distressingly, Native Americans) and everyone who dislikes having a fascist as a neighbour (which I'd hope was most people, but hey). The purpleness of all states needs to be front and centre against this kind of nonsense.
On the assumption that one in five voters of the voters for the larger party might switch votes to the other party under the right circumstances: the percentage of voters you need to get a stick reliably elected if it's the right colour is 62.5%. That means more than a third of the population support the second party.
But we're talking about cleansing at least three states of all people of colour (including, most distressingly, Native Americans) and everyone who dislikes having a fascist as a neighbour (which I'd hope was most people, but hey). The purpleness of all states needs to be front and centre against this kind of nonsense.
Yes, it's ridiculous on its face, and it's not going to happen. Neither is Wyoming going to secede from the Union, despite the Republican party state chair proposing it. Neither are we going to have a civil war.
Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor today that the insurrectionists were provoked by Trump and other powerful leaders. I loathe McConnell down to my toenails, but this is a good thing -- it starts to separate the Republican party from Trump.
Senatortoise McConnell seems to have gotten his spine out of storage just in time for the inauguration.
Just in time to not need it any more. Paint me totally unimpressed.
Oh, I'm sure he'll find a use. I recall he spent a lot of effort trying to insure that Obama was a one term president. (McConnell's exact words, not mine.) Let's home Biden remembers that. After all, he was there.
To be honest, I see the kind of division that Marvin talks about as being not desirable but possibly a likely (inevitable?) destination to the journey that the USA is currently on. How much longer can Texas and California hold together without wanting to murder each other? (I am using "Texas" & "California" as metaphors for the two extremes of views within the US)
The divisions in the US seem to be getting deeper and wider every day. It is now quite feasible that almost half the population overall (and a clear majority in some states) will refuse to accept the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. What happens if/when his administration tries to do something that the Trumpists regard as unacceptable (perhaps to do with COVID restrictions)?
We have seen this kind of fracturing play out time and time again over the course of history. It rarely ends well. Usually it ends in bloody civil war. Hoping that all those people who have swallowed the lies about the election, deep state corruption etc will come to their senses is hopelessly naive.
The question that needs to be asked is "has the US gone so far down this road that healing is now impossible? (Hint: I suspect it has) And if so, how can some sort of resolution be found that avoids too much bloodshed?" (A de facto partition may not be the worst outcome in that respect)
Re history, the Thirty Years War, the 17th century European civil war could show where an ideological conflict like this might go.
Riiiiight. Catholic vs. Protestant on one axis and from France to Hungary and Sweden to Spain on others, with bits of Germany in the middle.
It's not a question of spine - it's a question of power. Trump cost McConnell his position as Senate Majority Leader when he screwed up the Republican bids in the George Senate run-offs, and McConnell has gotten all he's going to out of Trump in the way of judges and tax cuts. He's decided it's time to move on.
Also, as the chief Republican in the Senate, whether in the minority or the majority, he gets high-level intelligence briefings. So who knows what he knows about the insurrection -- could be very ugly. His reference to "other powerful people" inciting the violence is what I find most interesting.
I hope that now, at last, we can stop calling him president. He never was, having usurped the office illegally with the help of his Russian pals. He was merely the current occupant of the White House. I dare not speculate on what he might soon be the occupant of.
Comments
Only a fucking idiot would suggest another try and expect them to behave this time.
(But then King didn't believe in cheap grace either.)
One of the problems with defining fascism is that there's no fascist creed they have to sign up to. If someone claims to be a Marxist, or if you claim someone is a Marxist, they have to pay at least lip service to, providing the means of the production to the workers, and so on. But D'Annunzio didn't write an official Fascist philosophy and while Mussolini fancied himself as a theorist it doesn't appear anyone else did. So any designation of a political movement or person outside the Italian political party is based on a subjective judgement about similarity.
However, we can rephrase your point: the movement in question is a populist movement based on racial ans sexual hierarchies espousing right-wing economics whose contradictions are resolved largely by finding common enemies. That means we can't expect it to not find enemies take hostile action.
Things are too divided between city and rural.
There were more republican voters in California than in many of the red states put together. Those red states, their capitals are fairly blue. It's not going to work.
I don't know if you could arrange a massive exchange, put the entire town in a block of flats for a week, and just hope travel broadens the mind of enough (though the rioters were obv those who had private jets
While city kids would probably benefit from seeing a cow (but how you do that safely).
Whoa, cowboy. If that second paragraph is directed at me, you might want to reread my posts. I don't want anyone killed. And you said my divorce parallel was exactly right.
Look, I'm pragmatic. If a situation isn't working and isn't likely to get better any time soon, I try to think of alt possibilities.
But, as I also pointed out in detail, sending white supremacists off to live by themselves, and having the rest of us live by ourselves won't work. And, since it won't, this is an interesting thought experiment, but can't fix anything.
What *I'd* like is for all the white supremacists (of any level, and violent or not) to have a sort of Damascus road experience--not necessarily religious, but an epiphany about people, and worth, and differences; about how you can dislike or even hate someone, and not act on it; about how to take baby steps in a better direction; and about realizing that you really don't want to wind up behind bars.
An epiphany that sticks, that's lived, that works.
LOL. I just said what I'd like to see, with no illusions that it's apt to happen. But...
{Tugs on God's shirt sleeve.}
The divisions in the US seem to be getting deeper and wider every day. It is now quite feasible that almost half the population overall (and a clear majority in some states) will refuse to accept the legitimacy of Biden's presidency. What happens if/when his administration tries to do something that the Trumpists regard as unacceptable (perhaps to do with COVID restrictions)?
We have seen this kind of fracturing play out time and time again over the course of history. It rarely ends well. Usually it ends in bloody civil war. Hoping that all those people who have swallowed the lies about the election, deep state corruption etc will come to their senses is hopelessly naive.
The question that needs to be asked is "has the US gone so far down this road that healing is now impossible? (Hint: I suspect it has) And if so, how can some sort of resolution be found that avoids too much bloodshed?" (A de facto partition may not be the worst outcome in that respect)
Well, lots of Americans have mixed (at best!) feelings about California and/or Texas. Some of their attitudes (filtered!):
--California: Cesspool of licentious, notorious sinners who {stage whisper} do THAT! (Whichever "that" infuriates and/or attracts them most.) Those tech giants sit around on their asses, making a whole bunch of money for not doing much. Darn right, California's going to fall into the ocean some day--and a cheer will go up. They do make some good films and wine, though. Oh, and Disneyland.
--Texas: Well, it was fine to watch them on "Dallas" and "GCB". But I mean really! Attitudes and hair. Megabucks. They never got over the Alamo. And they keep wanting to secede from the Union. Well, let them! And let the door hit them on the way out. But we do want to keep certain places...
(Personal note: I'd like to keep Austin and Marfa.)
A lot of people probably want to get rid of *both* states. Of course, California pays a whole lot of federal taxes...
As I said to Marvin, there are too many obstacles (practical, legal, ethical, political) to make it work.
I'm not in the right frame of mind to get into whether healing is impossible. But trying to *force* it would be a massive mistake, and possibly make our first civil war look like a Sunday School picnic.
:votive:
We really need to stop being assholes to one another.
Yes, true of some Californians--though others are *proud* of those things!
I try to be mindful of speaking of various areas. For the Midwest, I know to avoid "fly-over states" and "the rust belt". Is there any other particular thing I should avoid?
Thx.
As Randal Munroe noted, in 2020 there were more Trump voters in California than Texas, and more Biden voters in Texas than in New York.
That's why I said they were metaphors. I understand that you can find a lot of "Texas" all over the country and that the same applies to "California".
The point is that they represent vastly different ways of thinking and acting. Such differences have always been very hard to contain within one nation. Typically, if one side starts to get a structural dominance, the "minority" responds with fear-filled violence, leading to the majority using its dominance to squash all resistance.
Let's not be naive. The US is not unique. This kind of thing has happened before and we need to pay attention to the lessons of history - especially the failures: Yugoslavia & Austro-Hungarian Empire to name but two.
Yes, my point exactly.
The answers from most on this thread appear to be "yes, healing is now impossible" and "lock them all up". There doesn't seem to be any other bloodshed-avoiding solution that won't be seen as surrendering to the populist Right (though whether trying to lock up almost half the country would actually avoid bloodshed is an open question).
Bloodshed appears to be inevitable, because neither side seems to be interested in avoiding it (or at least, not interested enough to compromise one iota of their their deeply-held beliefs). Even stating a preference for compromise in order to avoid bloodshed is enough to get you labelled as one of The Enemy who is Way Out Of Line and Has No Place Here - and that's by the supposedly liberal side!
Only if everyone agrees to respect the outcome of the election and believes that it's fair and free.
My brother was employed to take photos of the war graves in Yugoslavia.
Re history, the Thirty Years War, the 17th century European civil war could show where an ideological conflict like this might go.
There really isn't much any of us* can do except pray and try to work on the polarized within our own orbit. Which I am doing. It can be successful, though there's no guarantees and it takes a lot of time and patience. But throwing up our hands and declaring the whole thing hopeless is the fast road to hell.
* Unless somebody here is a high-up governmental person, or has miracle-working powers...
Believe what you like in a free, open society with a demonstrably independent judiciary where Republican judges find for Democrat majorities. But don't lie it when you're in public office or be removed. If you undemocratically, unconstitutionally cause bloodshed, you will be confronted as the criminal, secessionist or terrorist that you are by the constituted authorities using all legal force necessary.
I remember it well. Not the best example to have used, I’ll admit.
And if they don't, well, we can just compromise with them, right? Say, we'll overturn these states' results because you without evidence think their election results are corrupt, and we'll keep these states' results. Because giving in to terrorists always keeps the peace.
No, it's not nonsense. All states have voters of both parties, but some states have governments heavily dominated by one party or the other. Trump did get 5.5 million votes in California. But a Republican has not held a state-wide executive office since 2010. We last went for the Republican presidential candidate in 1988. We've had only Democratic U.S. Senators since the same year. Democrats have held both houses of the state legislature since 1996. And except for one session in the mid-90s when we sent the same number of Democrats and Republicans to the House, our House delegation has been majority Democrat since 1959. So sure, there are Republicans in California, but as of last summer, registered voters were 46% Democrat, with Republicans and no party preference both at 24%. Republicans have a hard time finding qualified candidates just to run for state-wide office, in part because the people running the big cities are mostly Democrats, and also because donors don't want to waste their money supporting losing candidates. California is a blue state.
Texas is pretty red. Republicans have held all state-wide executive offices since 1994, both houses of the state legislature have been majority Republican since 2002, and their House delegation has been majority Republican since 2004. They last went Democrat for President when Jimmy Carter was on the ballot. The difference is that the Democratic party in Texas is not practically moribund the way the Republican party in California is. But somewhere like Utah -- that's a red state; they have no Democrats in state-wide office and no Democrats in Congress. There are more than twice as many unaffiliated voters in Utah as Democrats.
38 state governments are currently trifectas, that is, one party holds the governorship and has a majority in both houses of the state legislature. Only 12 states have divided government. Some trifectas have been in place for a while: Utah's dates back to 1985. 20 trifectas are 10 or more years old.
And these things make a difference. You can legally smoke weed in California, and if Roe v Wade is overturned, you'll still be able to get an abortion here. In a red state, not so much.
But -- being polarized along party lines is one thing, and being on the brink of civil war is quite another. To have a civil war, or even a successful coup, you need some subset of the military to be on board. The Joint Chiefs are clearly not on board, and the military rank and file are 43% non-white, so perhaps as a group not all that willing to support a white nationalist insurrection. We're far more likely to have increased domestic terrorism than an outright civil war.
How we will develop a sustainable multiracial/multiethnic democracy remains to be seen. The demographics of the US are changing rapidly, so this is a problem that needs to be solved sooner rather than later, not so much because of the imminent threat of war but because if we don't we'll just have a mess at best -- at worst, we'll have epic ethnic strife and perhaps eventually war.
But we're talking about cleansing at least three states of all people of colour (including, most distressingly, Native Americans) and everyone who dislikes having a fascist as a neighbour (which I'd hope was most people, but hey). The purpleness of all states needs to be front and centre against this kind of nonsense.
Yes, it's ridiculous on its face, and it's not going to happen. Neither is Wyoming going to secede from the Union, despite the Republican party state chair proposing it. Neither are we going to have a civil war.
Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor today that the insurrectionists were provoked by Trump and other powerful leaders. I loathe McConnell down to my toenails, but this is a good thing -- it starts to separate the Republican party from Trump.
"I moved on him, like a bitch. I just started impeaching. And when you're speaker of the house they let you do it."
(okay it wasn't something she said)
Senatortoise McConnell seems to have gotten his spine out of storage just in time for the inauguration.
Just in time to not need it any more. Paint me totally unimpressed.
Oh, I'm sure he'll find a use. I recall he spent a lot of effort trying to insure that Obama was a one term president. (McConnell's exact words, not mine.) Let's home Biden remembers that. After all, he was there.
Riiiiight. Catholic vs. Protestant on one axis and from France to Hungary and Sweden to Spain on others, with bits of Germany in the middle.
Also, as the chief Republican in the Senate, whether in the minority or the majority, he gets high-level intelligence briefings. So who knows what he knows about the insurrection -- could be very ugly. His reference to "other powerful people" inciting the violence is what I find most interesting.
Is it too late for a surprise - like a war?
https://theguardian.com/us-news/live/2021/jan/20/joe-biden-inauguration-donald-trump-impeachment-kamala-harris-washington-covid-coronavirus-live-updates?page=with:block-60085ea98f08fbcf3cf0e039
Thanks be to God.
president scumbag is sulking somewhere, I guess...