Yeah, for me at least, the worry isn't that Russia would launch its nukes at us. It's that if things got to the point that Russia was pressing the button, they wouldn't be the only one, and I'd bet most of China's increasingly modernized nukes work.
I think the worry was that Ukraine (and other smaller former Soviet republics) would not protect their nukes as well. Perhaps to a lesser extent, there was a worry they'd sell them, but just thinking back to the post-Cold War discourse around the nukes in the former Soviet Union, it was security that was the big issue. I remember talk of these nukes basically being out in the open for anyone to take.
Whether this was realistic or not, I don't know. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the politics of Ukraine in the early-to-mid 90s.
There’s a strange existential *thereness* to his rhetoric… one minute he’s making up stuff that isn’t true, another he’s reading things he has no idea the meaning of, and another he’s just saying things he think might be neat.
I did not watch this, and have no intention of doing so, but after a decade or more of watching Trump be the late political version of Trump (which is different from the Apprentice version of Trump, and very different from the 80s/90s tabloid celebrity version of Trump), I have a pretty good idea of how it must have gone. And I totally get what you mean about the "existential thereness." Though he's a New Yorker through and through, it reminds me a great deal of my redneck southern friends and relatives back home, whose storytelling might be described as meandering by someone who isn't paying close enough attention to see the logic and the through-line. Sure, some of the digressions seem like little more than flights of ideas, but they contribute to the mood of the story in a way that shouldn't be underestimated. And besides, sometimes it's just important to remind people that Bubba really hates Kevin who lives down the street just past the old church that's not there anymore.
Ha... was just responding that I wasn't spending time in right wing world back then, so I may have just missed it. This might be the origin of it in the broader discourse, then. I remember liberals referring to MAGA as a cult during Trump's first term (maybe even the '16 campaign, I can't remember), and was thinking maybe that's where it started.
And I'm not gonna lie, I remember going to an Evangelical church in 2017, where Trump was much discussed in extremely religious terms, and thinking this was disturbingly cult-like behavior.
Interesting. Sadly I can't read it without a subscription. Whatever the articles says, the idea of Obama fans as "cultists" doesn't seem to have taken generally, though I admit I was not hanging around a lot of right wing circles back then, so maybe it took there.
I also found this from 2005, though it seems to be using cult to refer to a specific shadowy group, not all Dubya supporters.
I wonder when people started referring to hyper-partisans or staunch supporters of particular candidates as cultists. I don't remember it being a thing under Bush or Obama, though it's possible I missed it, or just forgot about it because it wasn't a super common thing. But at least since Trump's first term, I've heard people on both sides refer to people on the other as cultists. I get the idea of Trump as a Cult of Personality, but where does the rest of the cult talk come from?
Who's gonna convince him to reverse it? Trump is either a lame duck president or he won't need to be reelected to remain president, and doesn't seem to really care about the impact of what he's doing on voters. Is Congress going to tell him to reverse it? Musk? Someone else he actually listens to?
I assume at some point, Republicans in Congress, and maybe even at the state level, start sweating about reelection if Trump keeps breaking things, but to date, they've shown absolutely no interest in challenging Trump on anything, so a lot of damage can be done before that happens.
Are you German? I can't quite figure out why you're transliterating the name that way. It's probably innocent, but in today's political climate, when people spell certain names in certain ways to make them sound more foreign, I get anxious when I see someone doing something like this.
(By the way, sorry to turn this into a discussion about the healthcare system. I meant only to use it as an example of an actual idea someone who at least caucuses with the Dems has, and has campaigned on, to show that it is at least possible for someone to the left of Mitt Romney to have ideas and campaign on them.)
I agree it would be a mess for the labor market, but that's largely a problem for capital to sort out, not labor, and I believe people would be able to recognize, fairly quickly, the benefits to labor on top of the raise in pay (even if it's ultimately mostly taxed away), one of which you mention: the ability to leave your job, rather to drop out of the workforce (say, to become a stay at home parent, a full time caregiver for an adult relative, or because of your own health/mental health issues), or to find another job, is severely limited by having your healthcare tied to your employer. A universal healthcare system that is not tied to employment would result in one of the biggest increases in labor power in a century, and if I were a politician selling something like Medicare for All, I'd be saying this a hundred times per day.
I should have been clearer: I actually think Trump is this. I mean if they'd ever seen one among the Democrats (actually they have, Bernie, and they like him).
Let me just add: I'm not even a Bernie supporter, though it may seem like that here. I just would prefer that the opposition party model themselves after a popular politician with ideas than, well, whatever they've been doing.
Hell, if we can go back to a very different Democrat who did this, it worked pretty well for Obama. His ideas were more centered around vibes than Bernie's, but at least they were ideas, and he was very good at selling people on them.
I think it's possible to convince people without presenting them with graphs and syllogisms. Trump is living proof of that. I watch on Facebook as people are regularly convinced by him and his minions (and whatever Musk is) that what he's doing is good for the country. The Democrats would have to have ideas in order to want to convince people of them.
Oh for sure. I think someone like Bernie could win this debate in the eyes of voters, given the proper forum (and I think he generally succeeds when he has the forum). I don't know that anyone else with national visibility in the Democratic Party could.
Unrelated, but an interesting thing in considering the centrist perspective is that Bernie himself is not only not particularly aligned with the "woke" wing of the Democratic Party, but in '16 at least, was pretty actively opposed by that wing. So while I get the centrist argument that "wokeness" is harmful, it really feels like they, or at least some of them, wield it as a general attack on the party's left wing even where it doesn't apply.
I think universal healthcare, once real proposals were before the American people, is something people would have to be convinced on, especially the middle class, who likely are pretty happy with their insurance, barring major illness. Unfortunately, I think the U.S. has had precisely two politicians who have been good at convincing people of things in the last 16 years, both of whom Democratic Party insiders hate (Trump and Bernie). To me, this says something both about our political system generally and about the Democratic Party in particular.
I prefer a party with principles than one whose entire political philosophy is avoiding making the other party's ads for them. I suspect the electorate would too, if they ever got to see one.
I think people would be fine with the tax required to, say, give us a truly universal healthcare system, because for most of us at least, it would cost us less, because so much of our compensation is in the form of health insurance, because our health insurance costs on top of that are so high, and/or because even with health insurance, we still have to pay out the ass for healthcare and medicine. I also think the American people are smart enough to understand that. I think the center right (the wing of the Democratic Party Tony Blair feels most sympathetic to) have a vested interest in making sure they never do understand that.
After every election loss, for as long as I can remember, the moderate Democratic strategy has been "Become Republican Lite," and then people start saying, "There's no real distinction between the two parties," and moderate Democrats get very upset.
I realize, of course, that the non-Republicans here are overwhelmingly within the moderate wing of the Democratic electorate, and spend pretty much all of their reading time reading others who are at least as far right as they are, but the most popular Democrat in the country remains the party's most visible left liberal, and his ideas remain incredibly popular not only among the Democratic Party base.
It makes perfect sense to talk to people where they are (the moderate Dems' gun shows and tailgate parties), and to talk to them about what is happening in their lives, but it's so weird to me that so many Democrats, and so many people here, feel like the job of a political party is to do what the electorate wants (which, at least last year, was vote for Republicans), instead of to convince voters that their ideas are better on the issues that voters care about. Why even have two parties? We can just fight out all of these disagreements in Republican primaries.
This looks bad, because it's in front of the cameras, but I suspect this is the way he's been talked to by the U.S., maybe without the Trump histrionics (e.g., the Hunter Biden references and "Don't tell me how we'll feel!"), since he came into power. And I don't think he's the only world leader who gets talked to like this by us.
This might be the only time I will ever link to a Larry Summers tweet positively, but this sounds about right:
I think there really was a battle for the soul of the GOP, and American conservatism generally, starting before the 60s, when Dixiecrats begin turning to the Republican Party, then continuing into the 60s with the fallout from the Civil Rights Act, the paleo-neocon battle, and their beginning to really cater to Evangelical/Christian conservative voters in the late 60s and 70s. I think you could probably say that's when they started on the path that leads to Trump (Christian conservatives are a big part of MAGA), or that it started with Reagan, or the Contract With America, but I think you really start to see the old political norms erode in such a way that a Trump becomes possible under Dubya, and in particular after 9/11. We just became a different country, politically, after that, as evidenced by the unadulterated awfulness of the Bush administration pretty much from that date on.
That, at least, is when a lot of people on the left, including progressive Dems (hell, even some centrist ones eventually), and a lot of libertarians, began warning that we were headed down a dangerous path of increased executive power and an increasingly divided polity (especially after the invasion of Iraq began to go south, but probably inevitable even without that given the 50+1 strategy). Throw in financial instability, continued outsourcing, increased inequality, etc., and you have a recipe for, well, now.
Obama was super popular among a certain type of liberal, but his approval ratings never rose far above 50% his entire second term, and were at times in the 30s. In fact, I think his approval ratings were in the mid-to-low 40s the entire lead up to the 2016 election. I'm sure a bunch of people wish they could have voted for him in 2016, and hell, maybe he'd have beaten Trump, but he was not popular, and I don't remember many people saying they wish they could vote for him a 3rd time the way they did with Clinton in 2000.
I continue to believe Obama's talent as a politician and his popularity among progressives convinced a lot of what is effectively the Dem base (white, educated, middle to upper middle class people) that everything was fine and dandy with the Democratic Party, even though he basically didn't accomplish anything for the last 7 years of his presidency, and the Democratic Party as a whole was a rotten-to-the-core gerontocracy that no longer seemed to have any principles, messages, or really any ideas whatsoever, much less the hope that got Obama elected. This made both the rise of Bernie Sanders, someone who does have principles and a message (and remains one of, if not the most popular politician in the country as a result, even if centrists hate him for the same reason), and Donald Trump, a complete nihilist, possible.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/3/2025”
Yeah, for me at least, the worry isn't that Russia would launch its nukes at us. It's that if things got to the point that Russia was pressing the button, they wouldn't be the only one, and I'd bet most of China's increasingly modernized nukes work.
"
I think the worry was that Ukraine (and other smaller former Soviet republics) would not protect their nukes as well. Perhaps to a lesser extent, there was a worry they'd sell them, but just thinking back to the post-Cold War discourse around the nukes in the former Soviet Union, it was security that was the big issue. I remember talk of these nukes basically being out in the open for anyone to take.
Whether this was realistic or not, I don't know. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the politics of Ukraine in the early-to-mid 90s.
On “Group Activity: President Donald Trump Address to Congress”
There’s a strange existential *thereness* to his rhetoric… one minute he’s making up stuff that isn’t true, another he’s reading things he has no idea the meaning of, and another he’s just saying things he think might be neat.
I did not watch this, and have no intention of doing so, but after a decade or more of watching Trump be the late political version of Trump (which is different from the Apprentice version of Trump, and very different from the 80s/90s tabloid celebrity version of Trump), I have a pretty good idea of how it must have gone. And I totally get what you mean about the "existential thereness." Though he's a New Yorker through and through, it reminds me a great deal of my redneck southern friends and relatives back home, whose storytelling might be described as meandering by someone who isn't paying close enough attention to see the logic and the through-line. Sure, some of the digressions seem like little more than flights of ideas, but they contribute to the mood of the story in a way that shouldn't be underestimated. And besides, sometimes it's just important to remind people that Bubba really hates Kevin who lives down the street just past the old church that's not there anymore.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/3/2025”
Ha... was just responding that I wasn't spending time in right wing world back then, so I may have just missed it. This might be the origin of it in the broader discourse, then. I remember liberals referring to MAGA as a cult during Trump's first term (maybe even the '16 campaign, I can't remember), and was thinking maybe that's where it started.
And I'm not gonna lie, I remember going to an Evangelical church in 2017, where Trump was much discussed in extremely religious terms, and thinking this was disturbingly cult-like behavior.
"
Interesting. Sadly I can't read it without a subscription. Whatever the articles says, the idea of Obama fans as "cultists" doesn't seem to have taken generally, though I admit I was not hanging around a lot of right wing circles back then, so maybe it took there.
I also found this from 2005, though it seems to be using cult to refer to a specific shadowy group, not all Dubya supporters.
"
I wonder when people started referring to hyper-partisans or staunch supporters of particular candidates as cultists. I don't remember it being a thing under Bush or Obama, though it's possible I missed it, or just forgot about it because it wasn't a super common thing. But at least since Trump's first term, I've heard people on both sides refer to people on the other as cultists. I get the idea of Trump as a Cult of Personality, but where does the rest of the cult talk come from?
"
Who's gonna convince him to reverse it? Trump is either a lame duck president or he won't need to be reelected to remain president, and doesn't seem to really care about the impact of what he's doing on voters. Is Congress going to tell him to reverse it? Musk? Someone else he actually listens to?
I assume at some point, Republicans in Congress, and maybe even at the state level, start sweating about reelection if Trump keeps breaking things, but to date, they've shown absolutely no interest in challenging Trump on anything, so a lot of damage can be done before that happens.
On “Group Activity The Full, Unedited Trump, Zelenskyy, and Vance Video”
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Are you German? I can't quite figure out why you're transliterating the name that way. It's probably innocent, but in today's political climate, when people spell certain names in certain ways to make them sound more foreign, I get anxious when I see someone doing something like this.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/3/2025”
(By the way, sorry to turn this into a discussion about the healthcare system. I meant only to use it as an example of an actual idea someone who at least caucuses with the Dems has, and has campaigned on, to show that it is at least possible for someone to the left of Mitt Romney to have ideas and campaign on them.)
"
I agree it would be a mess for the labor market, but that's largely a problem for capital to sort out, not labor, and I believe people would be able to recognize, fairly quickly, the benefits to labor on top of the raise in pay (even if it's ultimately mostly taxed away), one of which you mention: the ability to leave your job, rather to drop out of the workforce (say, to become a stay at home parent, a full time caregiver for an adult relative, or because of your own health/mental health issues), or to find another job, is severely limited by having your healthcare tied to your employer. A universal healthcare system that is not tied to employment would result in one of the biggest increases in labor power in a century, and if I were a politician selling something like Medicare for All, I'd be saying this a hundred times per day.
"
I should have been clearer: I actually think Trump is this. I mean if they'd ever seen one among the Democrats (actually they have, Bernie, and they like him).
Let me just add: I'm not even a Bernie supporter, though it may seem like that here. I just would prefer that the opposition party model themselves after a popular politician with ideas than, well, whatever they've been doing.
Hell, if we can go back to a very different Democrat who did this, it worked pretty well for Obama. His ideas were more centered around vibes than Bernie's, but at least they were ideas, and he was very good at selling people on them.
"
I think it's possible to convince people without presenting them with graphs and syllogisms. Trump is living proof of that. I watch on Facebook as people are regularly convinced by him and his minions (and whatever Musk is) that what he's doing is good for the country. The Democrats would have to have ideas in order to want to convince people of them.
"
Oh for sure. I think someone like Bernie could win this debate in the eyes of voters, given the proper forum (and I think he generally succeeds when he has the forum). I don't know that anyone else with national visibility in the Democratic Party could.
Unrelated, but an interesting thing in considering the centrist perspective is that Bernie himself is not only not particularly aligned with the "woke" wing of the Democratic Party, but in '16 at least, was pretty actively opposed by that wing. So while I get the centrist argument that "wokeness" is harmful, it really feels like they, or at least some of them, wield it as a general attack on the party's left wing even where it doesn't apply.
"
I think universal healthcare, once real proposals were before the American people, is something people would have to be convinced on, especially the middle class, who likely are pretty happy with their insurance, barring major illness. Unfortunately, I think the U.S. has had precisely two politicians who have been good at convincing people of things in the last 16 years, both of whom Democratic Party insiders hate (Trump and Bernie). To me, this says something both about our political system generally and about the Democratic Party in particular.
"
I prefer a party with principles than one whose entire political philosophy is avoiding making the other party's ads for them. I suspect the electorate would too, if they ever got to see one.
"
If your paycheck is smaller after getting rid of your employer-provided coverage, it's probably because your employer pocketed the savings.
"
I think people would be fine with the tax required to, say, give us a truly universal healthcare system, because for most of us at least, it would cost us less, because so much of our compensation is in the form of health insurance, because our health insurance costs on top of that are so high, and/or because even with health insurance, we still have to pay out the ass for healthcare and medicine. I also think the American people are smart enough to understand that. I think the center right (the wing of the Democratic Party Tony Blair feels most sympathetic to) have a vested interest in making sure they never do understand that.
"
I have shamelessly joined the pile-ons of both The Democrats and the Third Way Dems:
https://x.com/MixingChris/status/1895850328098271336?t=ryugv2tu5jc3uGVNrrgwEw&s=19
https://x.com/MixingChris/status/1896578900681224356?t=YO_fZYJwSBNd7t2nM2EiLA&s=19
I'm not gonna vote for them anyway, but I'd at least like to see the opposition party act as a competent opposition.
"
After every election loss, for as long as I can remember, the moderate Democratic strategy has been "Become Republican Lite," and then people start saying, "There's no real distinction between the two parties," and moderate Democrats get very upset.
I realize, of course, that the non-Republicans here are overwhelmingly within the moderate wing of the Democratic electorate, and spend pretty much all of their reading time reading others who are at least as far right as they are, but the most popular Democrat in the country remains the party's most visible left liberal, and his ideas remain incredibly popular not only among the Democratic Party base.
It makes perfect sense to talk to people where they are (the moderate Dems' gun shows and tailgate parties), and to talk to them about what is happening in their lives, but it's so weird to me that so many Democrats, and so many people here, feel like the job of a political party is to do what the electorate wants (which, at least last year, was vote for Republicans), instead of to convince voters that their ideas are better on the issues that voters care about. Why even have two parties? We can just fight out all of these disagreements in Republican primaries.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
This looks bad, because it's in front of the cameras, but I suspect this is the way he's been talked to by the U.S., maybe without the Trump histrionics (e.g., the Hunter Biden references and "Don't tell me how we'll feel!"), since he came into power. And I don't think he's the only world leader who gets talked to like this by us.
This might be the only time I will ever link to a Larry Summers tweet positively, but this sounds about right:
https://x.com/LHSummers/status/1646967949297700872?lang=en
On “In Times Without Norms, All Laws Fall Silent”
I think there really was a battle for the soul of the GOP, and American conservatism generally, starting before the 60s, when Dixiecrats begin turning to the Republican Party, then continuing into the 60s with the fallout from the Civil Rights Act, the paleo-neocon battle, and their beginning to really cater to Evangelical/Christian conservative voters in the late 60s and 70s. I think you could probably say that's when they started on the path that leads to Trump (Christian conservatives are a big part of MAGA), or that it started with Reagan, or the Contract With America, but I think you really start to see the old political norms erode in such a way that a Trump becomes possible under Dubya, and in particular after 9/11. We just became a different country, politically, after that, as evidenced by the unadulterated awfulness of the Bush administration pretty much from that date on.
That, at least, is when a lot of people on the left, including progressive Dems (hell, even some centrist ones eventually), and a lot of libertarians, began warning that we were headed down a dangerous path of increased executive power and an increasingly divided polity (especially after the invasion of Iraq began to go south, but probably inevitable even without that given the 50+1 strategy). Throw in financial instability, continued outsourcing, increased inequality, etc., and you have a recipe for, well, now.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
I do hope that one of the lessons Democrats have learned from the last 5 or 6 weeks is that it's actually possible to do things.
"
Ah, so it's the building, not the call for a global intifada, that you're objecting to?
"
Would it then also cover this then?
"
Obama was super popular among a certain type of liberal, but his approval ratings never rose far above 50% his entire second term, and were at times in the 30s. In fact, I think his approval ratings were in the mid-to-low 40s the entire lead up to the 2016 election. I'm sure a bunch of people wish they could have voted for him in 2016, and hell, maybe he'd have beaten Trump, but he was not popular, and I don't remember many people saying they wish they could vote for him a 3rd time the way they did with Clinton in 2000.
I continue to believe Obama's talent as a politician and his popularity among progressives convinced a lot of what is effectively the Dem base (white, educated, middle to upper middle class people) that everything was fine and dandy with the Democratic Party, even though he basically didn't accomplish anything for the last 7 years of his presidency, and the Democratic Party as a whole was a rotten-to-the-core gerontocracy that no longer seemed to have any principles, messages, or really any ideas whatsoever, much less the hope that got Obama elected. This made both the rise of Bernie Sanders, someone who does have principles and a message (and remains one of, if not the most popular politician in the country as a result, even if centrists hate him for the same reason), and Donald Trump, a complete nihilist, possible.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.