This is part of my Hope Series, in the wake of the Likely Death of Democracy. I’ve been queuing these posts for 6:30 AM Eastern time and a frivolous link post for 9:30 AM as a chaser. I mention this because you may have missed previous entries. In the end there will be one per day for every day from 11/6-11/16. Check ’em out.
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Fuck accelerationists a lot, those people who, realizing crises precipitate change, have decided any amount of mutilated or dead innocents is a reasonable price to achieve their aims. That said, if acceleration is happening despite our best efforts, they are not wrong that it can precipitate change. This is a dark one, but it is a cause for hope.
Just how bad can the rethuglicans fuck this up? How bad can they make themselves look? Will they dismantle Social Security? Privatize Medicare A and B? Put ten-year-olds to work in Amazon distro warehouses? Will they exonerate hate criminals? Deputize proud boys to shoot up downtown Portland? Be caught filling mass graves at the southern border? Just considering the possibilities fills me with a murderous hatred, so I’ll just stop there. Fuck those guys an awful lot.
I think that’s the best hope for a reversal of this country’s course, of us staving off decades of fascist rule: that the fascists cannot help themselves, and go so hog-wild for evil that even badly suppressed, the anti- votes will wipe those motherfuckers off the ballot. And if voting is off the table? That blue states might secede. Who’s to say only bigots can rebel?
May we start living in less interesting times as soon as possible, but in the meantime, it’ll be grimly fucking interesting to see what happens, with fascism’s jackboot on the gas pedal. This has become their country to lose, and that’s a dark hope, but it is a hope.
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Two memes in the form of maps seen lately on fb.
One showing the USA divided into red and blue states with the blue marked America and the red marked with an insult.
Another showing a map of North America with the borders of Canada and the USA redrawn so that Canada includes all the blue states on both western and eastern coastlines.
FWIW Maybe not such bad ideas in my view. Though seems unlikely Canada would agree – or would it if some good Americans asked really politely maybe?
I’m not certain that’s a very hopeful message, it sounds like you are hoping the fascists will fuck things up so bad that the population will come to it’s senses. I think that’s more of a pipe-dream.
I can, however, offer a little more hope than that. Look at Trump’s cabinet appointments….
A Fox News commenter, Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense?
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for a Department of Government Efficiency?
My fear was that Trump’s campaign team was planning on putting fascists who are experts, and know how government works, into cabinet positions, but he’s once again filling his cabinet with sycophants and incompetents. That doesn’t mean terrible things won’t happen, but a lot of his appointments have no clue what job they are getting into.
Musk and Ramaswamy are going to run head-first into a brick wall. First, the House of Representatives controls the purse-strings. While a Department of Government Efficiency sounds like a grand idea, which representatives will be willing to close government offices in their district? Any takers? Bueller?
Second, the government employee union is a very powerful organization, and they will solidify against major cuts. I’m certain Musk and Ramaswamy will try to bust that union, but if they even try there will be few government employees voting republican in 2026. They may have big ideas, but ideas are cheap, implementation is difficult. This will be fun to watch, in a black humor sense.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the real fascists are trying to hide in sub-cabinet appointments, but they’ll be hampered because they won’t have to mange only one entitled twit, but a whole room-full of them.
Don’t get me wrong, this won’t be a Monty Python sketch, they will do some serious damage to the institutions, laws, and people of this country. But I’d much rather see an incompetent fascist than a competent one. And I’m now seeing that there may be some really funny blunders coming out of this cabinet. We should start a betting pool on who will be the first one to leave in the upcoming revolving door.
flex@2: Pretty much what I was thinking when I read about the horror clowns Dumpf is surrounding himself with. I hope these guys will be to incompetent to do maximum damage but maybe make their movement look so bad a few more potential voters are turned off.
Especially I’m hoping that very soon the bloated egos of Musk and Trump will clash and explode. Might not do much good but would at least be entertaining.
u kno, i was just joking last night he was going to appoint musk as “vice underchancellor of economic innovation” where he’d replace social security with scratch tickets that you can redeem for dogecoin,
but i guess he’s already on it. fucking hell.
I just attended a discussion with some Washington folks who generally know how these things work (including one former senator). I have some thoughts I might get into later, but the general sentiment was that we’re about to see more chaos than people are probably expecting.
In one sense, that’s actually a good thing. Trump and Republicans will be trying to do too much all at once, and there are enough road blocks that each thing they try to do will take time. Too many House seats will be close races in 2026, and too many Senators need to look good 6 years down the road, so they have to look like they’re doing something to fix the economy and won’t have the time or political teamwork to fuck up everything all at once. One commenter wondered, if RFK even gets confirmed by the Senate, how many Scaramuccis would he last? I hope that commenter is right.
There’s your hope. They will still do some damage, but it won’t be done with German efficiency.
We still need to be very concerned about who gets to control the Department of Justice, and how much more fucked our justice system gets.
We on the left also need to get our shit together on messaging about the Democratic Party. I’m going insane from the amount of “Why haven’t the Democrats just done X, Y, and Z? I guess they don’t actually care to fix things!” that I’ve seen around the Internet. I guess people forgot their Schoolhouse Rock and are letting the Republicans turn them into useful idiots (in the idiomatic sense) for their cause. I am not happy about that.
inviviMark@5: “…it won’t be done with German efficiency.”
That made me laugh, as our government coalition here in Germany just fell apart after three years of chaos and not getting much done, because one of the three parties involved constantly blocking the other’s plans. German efficiency indeed.
Of course the nice thing about our system is that elections can be held before the full four years are over in case something like that happens.
On the other hand there seem to be doubts whether we get the necessary paper for the ballots prepared for next February…
Like everyone else I’ve been thinking a bit over the last week about why Trump won.
One possibility I came up with the idea that Trump won because people are motivated by narratives.
For all it was hateful, mean, and petty, Trump provided a strong narrative which resonated with a lot of people. The narrative was that the people of the country are worse off than they were before. And there are a lot of people who feel that way. Ignoring the fact that it has been Republican policies which have generally resulted in people being worse off, Trump pointed to anyone and everyone he could to blame for people being worse off. People have a hard time finding jobs because the immigrants are taking them all. China is taking all our manufacturing. DEI and woke is making companies hire people who are less skilled. The message was that Americans are getting shafted, and Trump understands and will fix that because he’s being shafted too.
Now, the Harris campaign didn’t seem to get a narrative out there. The message I took from the Harris ads were: Trump is bad, this policy will help you, this other policy will help you, and we are friends with republicans who hate Trump. Then the Harris campaign walked into the republican trap of, “Harris doesn’t have any policy proposals.” So the Harris campaign responded to that with putting out more policy proposals; ‘this policy will help you’, ‘this policy will hurt billionaires’. The messages were accurate, but they didn’t resonate.
Now I think the media either fell into the same trap, or recognized what the Trump campaign was doing and jumped on the bandwagon. The media reporting at the end of the campaign largely seemed to be, “Here are the Harris policies.”, not “Here is the Harris narrative.” Biden’s narrative; “Finish the job.” was a far more powerful three-word-narrative then anything I heard from the Harris campaign.
Should we be convincing an electorate through slogans and stories? I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem ethical to manipulate people that way. But dedication and enthusiasm are far easier to generate with good narratives and popular slogans then well-reasoned arguments.
I would also say that what I experienced from the Democratic campaign, the 20+ text messages a day asking for money and 50+ e-mails a day also asking for money, was exhausting. I can see voters staying home just to protest the amount of damn daily requests for $1 here or $5 there (or $45 (yeah, cute, I get it, go away), or $150 (but it would be matched!), or whatever the weird value of the day was). I didn’t get many phone calls, but I made it pretty clear to the people who did call me that I never give money to anyone over the phone. But Jesus-Haploid-Christ on a pogo-stick! I am not going to give money to a state-level candidate in Arizona when I live in Michigan! I ended up giving NO money to ANY candidate! Not even when Musk started texting me to say that if I gave $5 he’d put my name into a drawing where I might win a hat! I started getting those texts AFTER the others started to slack off because they knew I had already voted absentee. Money does not win elections. The Democrats had and spent far more money then the Republicans in 2024. The few dollars I withheld did not make a difference. Enthusiasm wins elections, which is what we saw last week. Enough with the begging emails and texts already!!
The mainstream leftish party here, the NDP, does that a lot too. And has never won a federal election, not once. Came in second a single time.
Their latest schtick is trying to sell me a $75 T-shirt. $75! For a T-shirt! A middle class person would balk at paying that much for one. What makes them think their working-class and student base can afford to spend that kind of money on a T-shirt, when it represents a week’s worth of food, or a month’s heating bills, or a month of medication they require to survive, that they’d struggle to afford without that $75?