That was indeed a really good piece (also enjoyed Tucker's interview!)...and I agree that if you get folks talking about their actual lives and cares, face to face, we find we like each other...youthathletics wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 3:30 pmI heard Adam Kinzinger speaking in detail about 6JAN last week and yesterday. We are coming out of the fog, we just have a handful of people that need a kick in the ass.MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 3:21 pmI, too, like to think positively...but I thought that the aftermath of Jan 6 was going to a major shift to the positive, leading to a rejection by the GOP, my party, of the worst impulses embraced and led by Trump, and a return to some sort of rational competition for voter support based on ideas and proposed solutions, not complete lies, fear and resentment.youthathletics wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 3:04 pmIt'll get better, we are country that always advances. We don't need all this negative-nelly crap. Sure we can talk about, but no need to talk it in to existence.MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 2:50 pm Yes, we do face an "existential threat"...to our democracy.
Is that a greater threat than all other threats? Nuclear war? Climate crisis?
I dunno, I'm willing to walk and chew gum, but it's way, way more serious than many would prefer...because they really don't care about the principles of democracy, all they care about is power and privilege for themselves. 40% of Republicans say they are willing to commit violence against their government, if they're not in power...power by whatever means necessary...85% say that Biden was not elected in a fair and accurate election. They believe the Big Lie.
And the way our social media and overall media landscape has balkanized, there really is the possibility that our divisions increase, not heal.
But sure, there's indeed hyper-partisan over reach from the left as well, a major contributing to factor to those divisions...However, I just don't see the same threat to democracy coming from that direction at this point.
Painfully, those worst impulses appear to have only grown stronger in the formal GOP and in the hardening of their base voters. It's really weird IMO, but I don't think we can pretend it away.
Now, I'd been predicting the autocratic impulses to worsen during the Trump Presidency, so I wasn't actually surprised, though horrified, by how it seemed to culminate in a crescendo down the final stretch...but I'd really hav thought that the spell would be broken...but it hasn't been.
So, was that just the beginning of something much worse?
You'll have to remember why and how we got Trump....the left has not learned that lesson and continues to double down, they continually stoke the embers. I'd also encourage you to watch the 2nd setting of 60 minutes last night....good stuff is taking place.
But that's the issue, there's very little of that happening and the hardening of views is getting weirder and weirder.
I just don't think that ignoring it will work.
We can't pretend that the GOP has made this choice, doubled and tripled down on this choice.
I think Biden actually had the right instinct that what the country needed was a common foe, the pandemic, and that addressing the pocket book challenges of the working class, middle Americans, was the right path to eventually finding common ground...but this whole effort to delegitimize him and his Presidency, to delegitimize our voting process and democracy itself, the Big Lie, has very deep, serious implications.
And yeah, I think the Russians and others have been pushing us to devolve as hard as they could.
....the basis for stop the steal is election fraud in key swing states where the election rules were changed due to the covid emerg -- those are the states to which the Congress members objected. Return to pre-covid emerg rules & make the ECA more specific -- you remove the bases for the stolen election claim.
