commenter-thread

Abundance, baby!

He's running!

Pretty interesting that he's publicly calling-out Whitmer on Twitter.

Thanks for the link... and yes, the Neo-Liberal shills are shilling and to my point, I think they are pursuing intra-Dem fights with the new and likely effective anti-Trump packaging.

Which is to say that the Party realignment (and role reversals) continues apace:

"Not long ago, the political logic of rejecting free trade made a certain degree of sense for Democrats. But events have a way of changing political logic. A trade-skeptical message that worked perfectly well five or 10 years ago is going to sound awfully out of touch after Trump is done turning tariffs into a synonym for catastrophic ineptitude."

The context for his ending the argument thus is spelled out earlier: we (Dems) can't have a 'subtle' or 'nuanced' trade policy or talk about competence in deploying such a policy -- we must abandon all things to oppose Trump and any future policy that might be tainted by Trump. And by the way, my favored policy is the way we should abandon those things.

Electorally, he might even be right -- as we discuss above, Trump often poisons things he touches... it's one of the reasons not to support Trump. So taking opposing positions definitionally isn't a bad electoral strategy.

But, I honestly do think that abandoning 'good' or 'subtle' or 'nuanced' positions just because Trump bigfooted some of them isn't in anyone's long-term interests.

And finally, on a purely electoral note... adopting the opposite of some of your formerly held positions often works at cross purposes with a) your ability to talk to them, b) being perceived as sincere, c) how the new things work with the old things that are still important, and d) how realignment can cross pressure individual reps whose constituencies still adhere to the 'old' party alignment.

Anyhow, this is what I was saying in that there's a lot of pressure to simply become market fundamentalists and abandon positions that were 'reasonable' 5-yrs ago because of optics.

Unfortunately the Trump effect is bad in so many different ways, it's hard to settle on a single one to hate. But one thing I'd personally avoid is simply taking the opposite stance; sometimes it really is better to acknowledge the point and give the opponent a noose of how he's doing it is worse than how you'd do it.

Not doing that is kinda how the R's got Trump in the first place.

Heh, #Notalldemocrats ... now I'm mildly interested in what Chris Deluzio is all about.

From the one paragraph I'm allowed to read:

"The video featured Representative Chris Deluzio, from western Pennsylvania, who calmly intoned, “A wrong-for-decades consensus on ‘free trade’ has been a race to the bottom” and “Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.”"

Yes, the Republican party is broken.

Strangely, there are just no incentives for your old OG Republican to do anything other than watch where this goes.

If *they* kill it, then they kill what would have been the biggest, most beautiful success ever. Career ending.

If Trump crashes and burns, whelp they just go back to their safe seats and hope to ride out the failure... some won't make it, but some will. Still better than the sure thing of ending their careers.

The parties are frozen until something breaks.

Yes, that's a real concern. In fact, it concerns me that the Liberal response has been a sort of libertarian embrace of market fundamentalism.

Credit to AOC and Bernie who are at least pulling out bad ideas from the previous century... but Dem critiques of Tariffs in the service of anti-Trumpism? Eeep.

Agreed, but piling on the 'failed execution' aspect of any Trump project is that the path forward was never just tariffs.

There's a ton of work to do internally with how we invest on infrastructure ... ironically the IRA highlights what many of those reforms need to hit. And then there's separating the objectives by region and geo-strategy. And then there's building new(ish) trading blocs FIRST so that we can detach or provide incentives to new trade policies in other harder to crack areas. And then there's a general requirement for determining what success looks like, and how sub-successes are prioritized... etc. etc. etc.

IMO the thing that you use to detach weak-Trumpers (or anti-Democrats) is 'do you really trust Trump to have done his homework and do you trust him to make things better after he makes things worse for the other team?'

It won't overcome negative partisanship entirely... but if you're in politics for the iterations you have to take the things he's directionally right on -- and prove that you're better than he is to change the ship of state.

In the end, Trump likes tariffs, and he has authority to use tariffs... so his policy is, tariffs. He never ever does the work that's needed to be a successful statesman.

The deliberative body always (tm) delegates the actual negotiations to the Executive because the deliberative body can't really negotiate coherently.

Now, the deliberative body should delegate tasks ad hoc and post hoc the delegated authority should be circumscribed until the next delegated task... but, yes, the point is directionally true.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10038

 

 

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