The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(09-19-2022, 10:47 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-18-2022, 07:50 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: (snip)

I can see a rough remnant of MAGA becoming professional bad neighbors.  Not most of MAGA.  The Big Lie and Trump’s criminality is becoming very obvious, if at a slow pace by people who limit themselves to MAGA loyal media.  But there will be a small fraction of those who hate because they have always hated, who make other people miserable because that is what they do.

That is what has to be crushed in the high.  It is said that the values of the high support the solutions to the preceding crisis.  This hate reflects the methods and attitudes of MAGA.  The culture of the high has to reflect that this hate is not acceptable moving forward.

I think you've made a lot of assumptions that may not pan out.  Number one on the list: that the MAGA crowd doesn't want change.  Yes they do, but it's more like the change that happened after the ACW.  They know that going back to what was is out of the question, but winning as a dominant minority is a perfectly fine alternative for them.  Look at the work that's gone into making it viable: the neo-SCOTUS, the voting control acts, the armed citizenry.  They're ready; we're not.  So do they win?  I hope not, but it's certainly possible.

If not for the guns and the militias training for revolution, I might be less concerned ... but I am ... very!

MAGA has gone from largely conservative to fascist. The most that it can do is to entrench itself in States in which white male rage can be the dominant force in politics, entrenching itself in statewide politics. To forestall revolts in such places as Omaha and New Orleans  it might tolerate local havens for liberals analogous to "Red (socialist)" Berlin or Hamburg in Wilhelmine Germany or "Red (socialist) Budapest" of the interwar Regency in Hungary. To win nationwide the MAGA cult must win one of Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin as in 2016, all of which could turn even more sharply away from the Trump agenda over time.  Corporate agriculture has largely squeezed out the yeoman farmers of the Plains states and transformed agribusiness into Junker-style economics with ultra-reactionary politics to fit. In the South, MAGA has revived the politics of ethnic division by pitting poor whites against poor blacks. Grossly hostile to any intellect, MAGA would be delighted with education that achieves little more than bare literacy and perhaps some low-level technical or mechanical skills for men or the 'domestic arts' for women. It supports fundamentalist Christianity  due to the blindness of that religious tradition to injustice and inequity essential to Junker-style politics and economics.  

Like other authoritarian and totalitarian causes (and do not delude yourself that MAGA is in any way small-d democratic), MAGA depends upon people not thinking about anything more than immediate needs and avoiding trouble with the rich-and-powerful. It makes its appeal to white male rage, which is not enough to hold onto a majority nationwide or even in the Electoral College. It overplayed its hand with abortion, and if Trump's "Three Stooges" on the US Supreme Court decides (as it could be with those three who have turned the USSC majority into practically a cell of the John Birch Society) that Americans need 'freedom' from unions or environmental regulations or that basic education is no right, then MAGA will get larger and even more strident opposition.