I really feel stupid, saying this, or really, having to say it.
The Tragedy of Chuck Schumer AI art via Krea
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a manipulative or abusive relationship (on either side) but one of the characteristics (not the only one) is that the proponents begin to negotiate, increasingly unsuccessfully, with an enemy that is their imagination. That results in a distorted expectation. Unfortunately, however, that is how thinking works. Thinking about how a thing may work out, invokes (to a degree) an emotional response, and that colors our feelings and responses in turn.
That’s it.
“No, no, no, wait, that’s a lie!” is the only response.
Once the lie has been uttered, then the audience have made their decision and made their determination. If the lie was something they already believed, now you’re up against confirmation bias. Good job.
The democrats are playing a game of weak-ball, i.e.: they are taking every shot served at them, then yelling at the line-judge “That does not count, right?”
I am going to comment on my own posting, if I may.
What you are talking about here is the “first mover advantage” i.e.: whoever is in power sets the tone and everyone else must acquiesce or respond. There is no option entitled “propose a different agenda.”
Marcus Ranum@#1:
I am going to comment on my own posting, if I may.
Stop that.
The options that the Democrats have all play into republican hands. Shutting down the government is likely what the republicans really want. Passing the CR indicates weakness to the Democrat constituents (I don’t think the Democrats have anything like a base of dedicated voters). In a “damned if you do…” scenario, the Congressional Democrats made a choice. I disagree with it, but I think I understand it.
Marcus Ranum wrote @1,
Sometimes its the only way to ensure at least one intelligent comment shows up.
More seriously, there are several other responses to the “first mover advantage”, most of them involve not playing the game of the first mover. The democratic leadership lacks imagination, and that is crippling them. The lack of imagination prevents them from seeing the short-term, and long-term, affects of what Trump is doing. They see a few court decisions staying Trump’s actions and think, “Well, the system is working. Everything will turn out fine. In a few years this too will pass.” Thank you, Dr. Pangloss.
The democrats whine about not having media outlets to reach their base. Okay, create some. It could range from buying television station to getting local democratic party clubs to hand out fliers in front of supermarkets. I’d be more likely to give donations to the democratic party if I saw that they were using that money to change public opinion. Instead I regularly get demands for donations of the form of “Trump did something bad, give us money!”. Okay, Trump did something bad, what are the democrats going to do about it? Nothing? The same as last time? No donations for you then.
The democrats say they don’t have the time/ability to advance proposals to help the citizens while they are fighting the Republican party in Congress. Okay, then change the game. Use the republican party playbook of obstruction. Call for a floor vote for every piece of democratic proposed legislation even if it doesn’t get out of committee. Yes, the floor vote will not be granted, or passed, but it will become news. It would even be news on Fox if the democrats called a floor vote on a bill to raise the minimum wage and it was denied.
That is what is frustrating to me about this entire situation. Sure, congress needs the judicial branch to block Trump’s executive orders or the actions of his minions. But the democrats don’t have to stop there. They can be using their war chests to pay the legal fees for citizens who are targeted, and advertise it. They can bring bills of censure in all the legislatures in all the states. There are literally hundreds of actions the democratic party can take.
It’s been two months since the deluge of destruction, this is ample time to at least announce a plan of defiance. Instead, what do we get? The Senate democrats giving the republicans just enough votes to pass a dirty continuing resolution. I can see the calculation in that move. Schumer saying, “We don’t want to be seen as shutting down the government, but we want to show some backbone, so let’s give them just 10 votes so it reaches the 60-vote threshold to continue.” Idiots. The people who would blame the democratic party for letting the government shut down are going to blame the democratic party regardless. The rest of the nation would understand, and see a party willing to fight. Instead, by capitulating, the democratic party is seen as complicit by their allies, and weak by their enemies.
The democratic party can help shape public opinion rather than waiting until the republicans have enough rope to hang themselves. The democratic party doesn’t appear to care that the republicans are using that rope to seriously harm others, or care that so many USA citizens seem to believe the republican rhetoric.
This may not be as coherent as I usually try to make my comments. But I’ve edited it a few times to tone down my anger and disgust, and I’m tired of thinking about it now.
@4 flex
Sometimes its the only way to ensure at least one intelligent comment shows up.
I forgot who said it first, but years ago I adopted “People ask me why I’m always talking to myself. Well, it’s the only way I can have an intelligent conversation around here.”
@jimf:
Megatron used that line in the Transformers: Beast Wars cartoon. He got asked “Why do you keep talking to yourself?” “Because I’ve grown accustomed to intelligent conversation, yesssss…”
Krea seems to have almost figured out hands, but has a long way to go on toes and crotches (and marble).
“Weak-ball” sums up the situation on the D-side pretty well, except that the R-side plays Calvinball, and has the line-judges’ families in ICE detention.
Gandalf the White also said something similar:
Leave Marcus alone Ranum.
seachange@#9:
Leave Marcus alone Ranum.
If this was a season one Star Trek episode, the computer would start smoking and shaking.
flex@#4:
Sometimes its the only way to ensure at least one intelligent comment shows up.
I’m actually very pleased with the level of discourse around here, for what that’s worth.
I wish I had more time and energy to get into the rough-and-tumble but I really don’t and besides, the topics I am interested in these days don’t really require verbal knife-fighting.
Pierce R. Butler@#7:
Krea seems to have almost figured out hands, but has a long way to go on toes and crotches (and marble).
I’m going to do a review about Krea in the mumble mumble mum umble.
jimf@#5:
“People ask me why I’m always talking to myself. Well, it’s the only way I can have an intelligent conversation around here.”
I used a variant of that, which was, “it’s the only way I can win a debate, or get the last word.”
flex@#4:
The democrats whine about not having media outlets to reach their base. Okay, create some. It could range from buying television station to getting local democratic party clubs to hand out fliers in front of supermarkets. I’d be more likely to give donations to the democratic party if I saw that they were using that money to change public opinion. Instead I regularly get demands for donations of the form of “Trump did something bad, give us money!”.
Yeah. It looks to me as if the democrats got lazy and realized that they just have to be a little better than the other guy, and then throw around the usual sky is falling stuff about the right wing blah blah blahing someone’s rights. My suspicion is that they were just fund-raising and trying to get re-elected, and consequently had absolutely no plan for what to do if it turned out that the asteroid actually was not going to miss. Imagine my fury when they basically said that “you minorities and women didn’t vote hard enough.” Excuuuuse me what?
One of the things that absolutely drives me batshit is that both parties have been completely aware that the right wing has been working hard to pack the supreme court and federal judgeships. “Oh, dearie me!” after it is thoroughly too late, when it’s been a topic of discussion for almost 20 years (that I can recall) There’s no time like ‘too fucking late’ to get all excited about enemy activity. And, so the republicans are going to Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow and getting massive amounts of millions – the democrats’ response has been to fill my email with beg-o-grams basically implying that they want more money so they can try what didn’t work a little bit harder or at least with better funding. Now both parties’ beg-o-grams automatically go into my spam folder. I thought that some of the democratic candidates (e.g. Vindman) might be interesting but imagine my non-excitement when all I see is burnishing of military ribbons and “at least I am better than Trump.” No, damn it, I want some freakin’ socialists, anti-racist, anti-imperialists, who are willing to say that they will not approve a DoD budget that includes religious training, etc. Just lay it the fuck out there, people.
The democrats’ love for fake centrism is what brought upon them Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin and John Fetterman – people who are at least better than Trump, but who are willing to stand up and undercut the entire political agenda in a way that gives the democrats a great excuse to fold all their tall ambitions and settle for being just a little better than Trump. Chuck Schumer, I am looking at you.
I actually believe – or believed, anyhow – enough in Americans to think that if they were spoken to as adults and the flaws in their opposition were manifest, they’d get a mandate. Remember Roosevelt? The corporate class and republicans still reel in horror at that name. How did he get his mandate? Well, there was WW1 and then the great depression, and Roosevelt was handed a mandate to fix some of the absurd inequality that was going on. Around the same time was the Haymarket bombing, the Battle of Blair Mountain, The Battle of Homestead, and an “diamond age” that was being enjoyed by folks like the railway and steel and oil tycoons while the Bonus Army had their camps burned by Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. Anyhow, the left managed to connect that massive unfairness with a notion of social reform and elected a candidate that, by god, fucking did it. Kirsten Sinema would have flickered like a moth in an oxy-acetylene torch if she had tried to derail FDR. Even Smedley Butler didn’t want a piece of that freight train.
But we’ve got Chuck Schumer and he’s not as bad as Trump.
I’m gonna comment on my comment by repeating myself. :)
I’ve said many times that “nobody can be serious about the budget unless they are willing to talk about defense spending.” Which, I think, is true as far as it goes. There’s another axis, which is “nobody can be serious about peace or lack of corruption in our political process as long as they’re taking junkets to Israel, or flying to vacation spots on Harlan Crow’s or Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.” But the absolutely uncritical support for Israel which has long been a characteristic of US politics is something that any serious leftist needs to speak about.
We all saw what happened to the last bunch of democrats that tried to speak out about Israel they were demonized as anti-semitic and silenced by Nancy Pelosi’s “do you want to get re-elected or not?” machine. Pelosi, in addition to just being too damn old, is the lynchpin of the “we’re not as bad as Trump” strategy. She needs to go. She’s not serious about anything except getting her power-bloc re-elected, and they’re basically the “old fuddy duddy coalition” and I think Chuck Schumer is an old fuddy duddy, OK?
Also, Hakeem Jeffries is doubtless not a bad human being, but a great orator he is not. The democrats need someone at least as articulate as Barack Obama, who is obviously not as bad as Trump and doesn’t need to say it.
Steve Morrison #8
Gollum also talked to himself.
or was that Precioussssss?
They don’t view Republicans as the enemy. They view Republicans as their class brothers, with whom they have a few disagreements over exactly how much noblesse oblige their class owes the peons, to be settled with a friendly game, and they’re repeatedly a bit miffed and baffled when their gentleman opponents keep cheating and bribing the refs, but they certainly won’t lower themselves to that level.
(This applies to “corporate Dems”. The AOCs of the party seem less prone to that sort of thinking, though I worry it might infect them too if they spend long enough hobnobbing with the rotten ones and being offered all kinds of luxury vacations and other moral-corroding gifts by both them and the lobbyists.)
The system needs a reboot. Dems and Repubs need to go the way of the Whigs and the Federalists, if America is to move forward rather than accelerate its circling of the drain.
Hear, hear!
Oh, not necessarily. He could instead be a duplicate created by a transporter accident, or the counterpart from the mirror universe. In which case we need some way of differentiating the evil Ranum from the good Ranum.
At times like this, I always find myself going back to a post from Jon Schwarz, way back in the dim and distant past of 2007 – Democrats And The Iron Law Of Institutions:
I think that’s an incredibly powerful and useful summation of the dynamics in play, and it really helps us to focus on the reasons why politicians do the things they do, and how we might be able to persuade them do the things we would like them to do.
The first thing to realise is that it means that the #1 job for the Dem leadership is not beating the GOP, it’s keeping or enhancing their positions within the party machine. They’re only interested in the former to the extent that it provides a means towards the latter.
Schwartz makes a number of observations in that post:
[There’s more, and I really can’t recommend reading the whole post highly enough.]
Of course, the problem here (as he says) is that the Dem leadership, and particularly the DNC, is “an unelected … oligarchy”, and it’s extremely difficult for anybody outside that oligarchy to influence it. One thing that actually managed to shock me (something I had long thought impossible, at least where machine politics is concerned) was when I found out that the membership of the DNC is secret – even from other members. (However, that link contains a leaked list…)
If you want to fix politics in America, I’d suggest that figuring out how to reform the DNC would be a good place to start. Cory Doctorow has some thoughts on that here: Occupy the Democratic National Committee.
[All emphasis in quotes is original]
@16, chigau (違う), who wrote,
And what interesting conversations he had!
@17, Bekenstein Bound wrote,
So many possible snarky replies….
I think I’ll go with, “Good… Bad… I’ll agree with the one with the katana.”
The problem the machine Democrats have is that, at heart, they don’t really have a vison or plan for meaningful change. They like where they are, they like how things work. They are comfortable with how things are going. The majority of your country is not. The people are not. Donald Trump can lie blatantly, can promise the moon and stars, can have a lifelong history of failing to deliver on his promises and he can still beat the democratic machine, because at least he’s promising something. He is also offering the standard fascist litany: I’ll hurt your enemies, boost the deserving masses like yourself, purge the enemy within, dominate the enemy without….
But I don’t think you can understand his broad appeal to his base without understanding the core: he promises change. And people fucking want change. The last democrat to offer change was Obama, and he delivered business-as-usual and massive banking bailouts while maintaining the endless foreign wars that the US economy has become addicted to. And he’s delivering some kind of change, even if it’s entirely negative in its results.
Unless the Democratic party can overthrow its internal aristocracy, I don’t see how it’ll ever win another election. What are they even offering? “We’ll fight Trump and then your life can go back to what it was like two years ago? You must have been happy with things then, because every person who is allowed to talk to me loved the status quo, so I assume the population at large does too…”
Maybe after 8-12 years of failed trumpismo and economic ruin, if there are still elections, they might win just because people are exhausted with the other side….
@17, Bekenstein Bound
Which one has the goatee?