The 45th POTUS - Donald J. Trump

[Mickey]

2022: GOP loses more seats in the Senate, but wins more in the House (possibly for a majority)

*bzzt* wrong!

Specifically--look at the map. Maybe they lose Toomey's seat in PA, but they'll pickup Warnock's seat in GA once he's running against someone other than the least likable lady on the planet.

[wease]

With the current electoral system they can't afford to split

You think Trump is smart enough to worry about that?

[wease]

The Republican Party will split. Trump and his extreme right Neanderthals will form a new party due to the Republican Party turning their back on Trump. Unless Trump is unable to hold public office again.

*bzzt* wrong

Time will tell.

Do you really think Trump will just fade off into the night after the GOP disassociates itself from him? He's had a taste and now he wants it ALL.

[verb_to_trust]

Trump doesn't care what happens to the party after he's gone. He co opted their values purely as a means to gain power.

[wease]

Trump doesn't care what happens to the party after he's gone. He co opted their values purely as a means to gain power.

EXACTLY

[Mickey]

The Republican Party will split. Trump and his extreme right Neanderthals will form a new party due to the Republican Party turning their back on Trump. Unless Trump is unable to hold public office again.

*bzzt* wrong

Time will tell.

Do you really think Trump will just fade off into the night after the GOP disassociates itself from him? He's had a taste and now he wants it ALL.

I think time has already told, we live in a two-party system. What do you think is more likely, that Trump voters are going to go form an America-first party, or that the GOP will move to accommodate their most vocal base and pivot towards Trumpism--whether led by Trump or not--their hand-wringing this week aside.

[tragabigzanda]

The Republican Party will split. Trump and his extreme right Neanderthals will form a new party due to the Republican Party turning their back on Trump. Unless Trump is unable to hold public office again.

*bzzt* wrong

Time will tell.

Do you really think Trump will just fade off into the night after the GOP disassociates itself from him? He's had a taste and now he wants it ALL.

I think time has already told, we live in a two-party system. What do you think is more likely, that Trump voters are going to go form an America-first party, or that the GOP will move to accommodate their most vocal base and pivot towards Trumpism--whether led by Trump or not--their hand-wringing this week aside.

The GOP will make an effort to rebrand Trumpism into something more palatable and sanitary, but the House candidates have a large degree of independence from any RNC desires...

More interesting to me will be the extent to which new voters, or Obama > Trump voters, will find themselves attracted to some of Biden's more liberal policies, while they simultaneously do some soul searching and realize maybe they don't want to associate with overt racists and xenophobes.

And before you scoff at that last part, I'm optimistic that people are generally ok. I think the majority of the people who stormed the capitol last week are lost and angry, and have bought into a narrative that they're patriots by expressing their views with forceful violence. But I think that ultimately the majority of them will come to find the error of their thinking.

If Bob McNamara can admit mistakes for his role in Vietnam, surely Karen from Fort Meyers can have a change of heart...right? Right?!

[McParadigm]

The Republican Party will split. Trump and his extreme right Neanderthals will form a new party due to the Republican Party turning their back on Trump. Unless Trump is unable to hold public office again.

*bzzt* wrong

Time will tell.

Do you really think Trump will just fade off into the night after the GOP disassociates itself from him? He's had a taste and now he wants it ALL.

I think time has already told, we live in a two-party system. What do you think is more likely, that Trump voters are going to go form an America-first party, or that the GOP will move to accommodate their most vocal base and pivot towards Trumpism--whether led by Trump or not--their hand-wringing this week aside.

I think a traditionalist Republican Offshoot Party would be most competitive at first in the red suburban districts that turned blue, not in the places that Trumplicans are fortifying. But like you, I don’t think it will happen.

The thing is, continuing down the Trump designated path doesn’t just affect your party’s competitiveness in a location...it affects who your candidates are. As the party continues to use conspiracy and anger as prerequisites for acceptance, each Republican who retires or disobeys is replaced by a candidate who is less viable than the person they replaced. Next thing you know you’re running Kelly Loeffler and losing the senate seat.

[Mickey]

I think people change their feelings towards things like national community and good governance when their material conditions change. The really interesting thing about Q--which is more or less the logical extension of Trumpism, its final form--is that it's structural thinking not dissimilar to most forms of leftism. Q people and by extension a lot of Trump people articulate a vision of the world controlled by unaccountable elites who have an entirely different relation to the world around them than everyday people and who are mostly responsible for the bad things that happen to you. So while there's a difference in both content and credibility between "the insurance executives and their ties to finance capital are responsible for my wife dying of a preventable illness" and "the pedophile cabal has the cure for cancer but they're hiding it from Americans," they articulate a similar vision of a world unevenly structured and in need of dire reform. Which is to say that Trumpism and QAnon are a rejection of the (neo)liberal state. Can those people be walked back into liberalism (as a grounding political philosophy, not the Democrats of course)? Maybe. Do they currently have incentive to do so, or will they receive such incentive under Biden? I would argue a big nope for both of those, though of course I can't see into the future of the Biden admin.

[tragabigzanda]

I think people change their feelings towards things like national community and good governance when their material conditions change. The really interesting thing about Q--which is more or less the logical extension of Trumpism, its final form--is that it's structural thinking not dissimilar to most forms of leftism. Q people and by extension a lot of Trump people articulate a vision of the world controlled by unaccountable elites who have an entirely different relation to the world around them than everyday people and who are mostly responsible for the bad things that happen to you. So while there's a difference in both content and credibility between "the insurance executives and their ties to finance capital are responsible for my wife dying of a preventable illness" and "the pedophile cabal has the cure for cancer but they're hiding it from Americans," they articulate a similar vision of a world unevenly structured and in need of dire reform. Which is to say that Trumpism and QAnon are a rejection of the (neo)liberal state. Can those people be walked back into liberalism (as a grounding political philosophy, not the Democrats of course)? Maybe. Do they currently have incentive to do so, or will they receive such incentive under Biden? I would argue a big nope for both of those, though of course I can't see into the future of the Biden admin.

Yeah that really is the crux of all this.

[McParadigm]

I’d like to hear more about what is meant by the part trag bolded. I’m not disagreeing, I’m just not sure I understand specifically what that might look like.

[tragabigzanda]

I’d like to hear more about what is meant by the part trag bolded. I’m not disagreeing, I’m just not sure I understand specifically what that might look like.

I think we can comfortably fit the majority of MAGA grievances under the "quality of life" umbrella. I don't think there's a silver bullet policy that will change their minds, but if Biden can succeed in some combination of:

-Creating more equitable college tuition structures
-More good-paying jobs that don't require four-year degrees
-More support for small business and entrepreneurs
-Better healthcare systems
-More affordable childcare options
-Tax relief for private school tuition
-Dial back the public wokeness mandate to the extent that people feel like they can tell a bad joke with being attacked...

Then there might be a day when some of these people wake up and think "Hmm, things actually are better now than under Trump."

[Mickey]

I’d like to hear more about what is meant by the part trag bolded. I’m not disagreeing, I’m just not sure I understand specifically what that might look like.

I think we can comfortably fit the majority of MAGA grievances under the "quality of life" umbrella. I don't think there's a silver bullet policy that will change their minds, but if Biden can succeed in some combination of:

-Creating more equitable college tuition structures
-More good-paying jobs that don't require four-year degrees
-More support for small business and entrepreneurs
-Better healthcare systems
-More affordable childcare options
-Tax relief for private school tuition
-Dial back the public wokeness mandate to the extent that people feel like they can tell a bad joke with being attacked...

Then there might be a day when some of these people wake up and think "Hmm, things actually are better now than under Trump."

I agree with most of this (public wokeness, as you call it, is less a cause than a symptom). In broad strokes, I would say that the crux for me is--what makes political subjects feel like they are part of national community? The best example of the liberal state being able to do this is the post-war bargain between capital and labor in the US, where labor ceded militancy for middle-class ascendency under the specter of the Cold War. It was a period of more or less shared prosperity and (yes, sometimes troubling) national conformity and satisfaction with the liberal state. This arrangement was basically undone in the late 60s for a lot of reasons but not least among them because it was predicated on the global hegemony of US manufacturing in the immediate post-war climate, which was later undercut by upticks in German and Japanese manufacturing, eroding profits and endangering this bargain. The response by capital was the so-called neoliberal turn which, I would argue, is the root for a lot of the anger that animates the populist left AND right today (increased privitization, transnationalization of capital but not of labor, etc.). And so the primary way to manage that anger such that it maintains something like the liberal state would be to try to re-strike the bargain which had sustained things in the past. The problem is that US capital no longer holds the same competitive advantage over the rest of the world (it's also not really US anymore, different argument though), and even if they did, they have no compelling reason (the threat of state communism) to strike such a deal, so it would take massive public investment and subsidies to balance the score. This is the Bernie Sanders plan, more or less--you can disagree with its feasibility but I think it correctly diagnoses the core problem with the US as a liberal state. The Biden administration is not willing, it seems, to undertake the kind of universal programs that would sufficiently balance the score and is more content to do the kinds of wonkish, targeted half-measures--small business grants but only for certain types of citizens, etc. Again, this might "work" better on a purely economic level, but it doesn't really address the problem of national belonging which undergirds national *political economy*.

This is where, I think, Burt's argument from the other thread is correct--Trumpism includes a lot of small business tyrants (the petit bourgeois are historically the most selfish and reactionary class), but also a lot of working class people who have suffered the effects of increasing precarity over the past 20 years, whose lives were made marginally better by Obamacare maybe but in some ways not at all, etc., and so who are basically being offered nothing but contempt from the Democrats--"job retraining" in the wake of NAFTA really reads as "get fucked." They're responding to this by thinking structurally, not in a particularly nuanced, sophisticated, or evidence-based way (though there's really something to be said about Q as a participatory experience) but with generalized feelings of anti-elitism and anti-liberalism. You can manage this and bring them back into the fold by reforming the liberal state to be more inclusive in a material, not symbolic way, or you can take the Trump pill and go the other direction, close down the liberal state, start policing the boundaries of citizenship, etc. So it's my contention that as long as the Democrats stand in opposition to the left path, which under Biden they will (he's already walked back from that "abolish student debt" thing, which would be a VERY easy material shift), Trumpism will remain appealing.

[McParadigm]

I appreciate the responses. To be honest I think they’re a bit “cart before the horse,” myself. I can’t think of any policy that would help folks, including the ones listed above, whose popularity would survive the conservative media bubble if it were the Democrat Party pursuing it.

Fox News tried toning down the fantasy a bit in the wake of the election, and went from being the dominant force in cable news to trailing behind CNN, MSNBC, and sometimes Newsmax (OANN doesn’t report to Nielsen).

Developing helpful policies like the ones above should absolutely be done, but at this point it’s a bit like thinking that if you drive up to the treatment center the heroin addict will see the light and walk themselves in.

[Mickey]

I don't disagree--why are so many working-class people *vehemently* opposed to Medicare for All when it would objectively make their lives better EVEN IF it was poorly implemented? Or, for that matter, why is my mother-in-law, as a small-business owner who struggles to keep up with Obamacare healthcare mandates, vehemently opposed to an M4A system funded by taxes on Wall Street transactions that don't concern her? It's a question of ideology, for sure--those pesky imagined relationships to the relations of production. But I do think if the *real* relations of production changed, people's ideological relations would as well. Not in a 1-to-1 way, not automatically, maybe not even in a way we can predict, but it's a surer shot than saying shit like "C'mon man, this isn't what America does" and expecting everyone to just get in line.

[McParadigm]

[Hatfield]

I appreciate the responses. To be honest I think they’re a bit “cart before the horse,” myself. I can’t think of any policy that would help folks, including the ones listed above, whose popularity would survive the conservative media bubble if it were the Democrat Party pursuing it.

Fox News tried toning down the fantasy a bit in the wake of the election, and went from being the dominant force in cable news to trailing behind CNN, MSNBC, and sometimes Newsmax (OANN doesn’t report to Nielsen).

Developing helpful policies like the ones above should absolutely be done, but at this point it’s a bit like thinking that if you drive up to the treatment center the heroin addict will see the light and walk themselves in.

What an absolute conundrum. No one can think of way to combat the constant barrage of bullshit these people choose to tune into.

[McParadigm]

[doug rr]

[McParadigm]

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