I'm under the impression that US Border Patrol in particular has always been a Hive of Scum and Villainy (thank you Obi Wan).
I know that there are humanitarian groups working along the southern border to provide water and other humanitarian aid to undeclared migrants in distress, and that BP has been known to destroy their caches when they find them (for one example).
I think ICE has been less gleefully punitive in their policy as an institution than has BP, but that may also be a product of my selection process for reading, so...
Here's the other half of the revolutionary agenda that MAGA/P2025 is pursuing that will continue to obstruct any rebalancing that a flipped congress may attempt to legislate. It's going to take years for this bolus to pass.
When Mr. Trump’s policies are temporarily blocked by district court judges, appeals courts can issue “administrative stays,” temporary rulings that effectively reverse the lower court’s orders and let contested policies take effect. Administrative stays are supposed to be temporary but can remain in place for weeks or even months. In many cases, they are replaced by a more lasting stay, known as a “stay pending appeal,” that remains in place while the appellate court considers the case.
The Times analysis tracked both kinds of stays, as well as the final rulings that appellate courts made after considering arguments from both sides.
Mr. Trump’s nominees sided with him consistently across all three kinds of rulings, voting in his favor 97 percent of the time on administrative stays, 88 percent of the time on stays pending appeal, and 100 percent of the time on final rulings.
Even if the Dems retake the reins in both the White House and Congress, these judges will be in place to flip this behavior and obstruct implementation of any counter-agenda.
This is why the Project 2025 crowd have continued to support this administration. Judges get lifetime appointments, and they are counting on their conservative Christian judges to prevent any socially liberal changes from being implemented, and to fast-track any dismantling of the changes they cannot prevent once the GOP manages to regain control of either of the other branches for however long.
MAGA/P2025 believe an alt-history version of the US where the founding fathers were Christian nationalist, and We the People refers only to the "legacy Americans" who are Judeo-Christian western civilization chauvinists. No one else deserves representation.
hsh - Well, sure. The question is – how many people are so motivated? I know this crew plays almost exclusively to their base, but everyone else is seeing it, too. Everyone, the base and otherwise, is seeing the other videos.
But Vance et al act as though the first-person video from the shooter is a slam dunk of some sort. Do they really believe that? Or is it just a performance to bolster the belief that it is in the minds of the willing?
At this point, given what we have observed over the last year, we should probably conclude that this administration and its supporters in Congress have become a revolutionary government. The loyal will support the revolution, and as long as the local and federal authorities continue to treat the administration as legitimate, they will be used as tools of the revolution. Any local or state opposition will be treated as an attack on the sovereignty of the president, and they will continue to wield the sanction of state violence against those people until they are forced to stop.
They believe that if they have 3% of the nation under arms for their side, they can force their will. Veterans and active duty military comprise 6% of the population, and nearly a quarter of all law enforcement. Military and law enforcement voted 70/30 in favor of Orange Julius. About a third of the US is still on board with all that the administration is doing.
A third of the population that contains two thirds of the people under arms in the nation is a potent revolutionary force.
We can vote them out, sure, but I think that will force a constitutional crisis with a lot of unknowns, and that revolutionary force will remain.
If a viewer is motivated to believe Ross, then they will take the moment where the phone jerks upward as an indication that Ross was hit by the vehicle. Viewed in isolation, that video would allow someone to believe the narrative reported by Noem and Vance.
I just watched a documentary about women war correspondents in WWII. One of the current war correspondents said that when she arrives at a scene of conflict, one of the first things she does is look for someone she identifies as being her equivalent in that place and situation to give her a point-of-view she can connect with.
MAGA's version of that is to put themselves in the shoes of the ICE/BP enforcers and impute good faith to them and bad faith to the people who are obstacles to the enforcers. With that as a starting point, this video will justify Ross violence in their minds.
The converse, that ICE/BP are acting in bad faith, is too disturbing to contemplate.
You know it's bad when you have Bulgarian friends checking in with you and saying how much they are glad that they did not emigrate to the US - all while worrying about Putin in their own back yard.
JD Vance is supporting some dangerous and fucked up shit. He's saying that federal agents have "absolute immunity" in pursuit of their orders, and he's also claiming that we should have sympathy for the officer who executed Good because that officer had been injured in a previous action where he was drug along by a moving car.
If the second point is true, then that officer had no business being cleared for duty like this because he is clearly psychologically unsuited for his job.
And if the first point is allowed to stand and be put into practice...
I've heard war historians refer to WWI and WWII as "The Second Thirty Years War," and while the postwar period did mark the start of the effort to create international agreements governed by consensus and law, it also marked the beginnings of hyperglobalism, and soon after of networked societies. Some historians mark those last two developments as the beginning of the end for the Westphalian Peace that was instituted as a system in the first Thirty Years War.
(I did think a bit while writing my earlier post if I should describe Trump's worldview as 19th C. or 17th. C. for this very reason.)
The US has military bases on Greenland. Greenland wants to continue that practice, even if it were to become independent. They've specifically pointed to the Compacts of Free Association that the US has with the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Micronesia. That would likely take care of any strategic concerns.
What Greenland does not want, and what it seems Trump does really want, is a 19th C. imperial resource extraction scheme. Trump's comments point entirely to him thinking like a real estate developer, treating the Greenlanders not as a sovereign people with a right of self-determination, but as tenants on a desirable piece of property that has extensive mineral rights.
All the strategic concerns are true, but none of them ring true as motivations for Trump. He wants his name in the history books as having expanded US territory and acquiring valuable mineral rights that can be exploited to allow the US to dominate the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Anything beyond that is too much detail for the hamster wheel in his head.
WRT "narcoterrorism" - hoo boy, how fraught and tactical a word.
The FBI defines international terrorism as "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations." From that definition, all that is required is for the federal government to declare a group or a nation as "terrorist." They are a bit more helpful on the subject of domestic terrorism: "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature." Neither of these definitions, however, really do much to differentiate terrorism from other political crimes, especially hate crimes.
From my readings on the subject, I think that the crucial element of terrorism is that terrorism is a narrative crime. The media identity of the party doing the terrorizing must be announced to the public, or at the very least the reason for the violent spectacle must be made known to the public in some way, and that violence must have an ideological goal. I'd argue that the tool of the violence itself is not the weapon of the terrorist, but rather that the media is the weapon and that the media narrative is the intended injury.
From this viewpoint the Mexican cartels would qualify as narcoterrorists, but only in as much as they engage in kidnap, torture, and grisly executions as a means to subjugate the Mexican populace and intimidate, subvert, or control the legitimate government. Killing US citizens with the product that they sell is not an act of terror, it's just an illegal business enterprise. The drug cartels don't have any ideological goals they are trying to achieve through the deaths of their customers. They'd probably prefer to keep those customers alive in order to continue selling the drugs to them.
Maduro was a tyrant who violated the human rights of Venezuelans: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/americas/south-america/venezuela/report-venezuela/ He engaged in political intimidation and authorized arbitrary detentions and unfair trials for his political opponents. He wielded the Bolivaran National Guard against his political opponents in much the same way that the KKK engaged in terrorism against blacks after the Civil War.
But "narcoterrorism" against the US? That's propaganda. The illegal drug trade is just typical organized crime, and not the sort of thing that justifies military intervention in my non-lawyerly view of things.
bc - Really? The US has wanted Greenland for a long time. We occupied it during WWII invoking the Monroe Doctrine. And comparing Venezuela to Ukraine at this point is truly balloon juice.
Yes, really. The Danes were the ones that released the image of the forged letter, purportedly from Greenland but actually from the GRU, sent to Tom Cotton suggesting that Greenland was primed to join the US.
As for the Venezuela/Ukraine swap suggestion, that info comes from Fiona Hill's sworn testimony in 2019.
The best propaganda ops are always woven into historical contexts and appeal to the known biases of the targets.
The success of the mission in light of Russian air defense has to be taken into account.
According to former ambassador Ken Fairfax on BSKY, the Russians pulled their people ten days before the US op. Make of that what you will.
Such a strange state of paralysis we are in as a nation. The Democrats cannot keep up with the galloping norm-crushing or find any path of resistance that is not through the slow crawl of the courts. The media is hapless, and hopeless, and toothless, and hamstrung by oligarchic editorial capture. That leaves civil resistance, but it doesn't seem like we are really ready to hit the streets and risk an authoritarian backlash and the suspension of habeas corpus that we know the authoritarians are jonezing to try out.
Every last bit of this could be ground to a halt if the milquetoast Republicans who have "raised concerns" would break ranks and side with the Dems to restore accountability. I don't see that happening. The GOP has so thoroughly demonized (literally) the Dems that I can't see any of them choosing to work with the Enemies of Christendom.
I think MTG's response to Trump's comments at the Kirk Memorial are telling. It's not the nail in the MAGA coffin, but it may signal an inflection point for a lot of people as they start looking to shift their allegiance. I'm reminded of "The Awakening Conscience" by William Holman Hunt:
I expect that for a great many of the christian nationalist MAGA faithful we are going to see them start to think that The Ancient Orange One is King Saul, tormented by spirits, prone to fits, and abandoned by God, and see them turn instead to the Sofaphiliac as King David. Couchie has received Erica Kirk's anointment and has the trust of Sharkey's Hobbits. He Who Slumbers may not see out his term if the Project 2025 wing think they can Amendment 25 him and cut their losses.
If they do decide to go that way, good luck on keeping that lightning in the bottle. Vance is a pail of lukewarm dog vomit and naked ambition. I don't think he can hold any of it together for long.
What still terrifies me, though, is what comes after. I'm not convinced that the US Constitution can keep this place running with just another patch. This is a really risky and consequential moment and I don't think the cultists are done yet.
I mentioned that I thought Russian music was played best by Russian orchestras, and I think to a lesser extent, this is true with French orchestral music.
My go-to recordings for Ravel and Debussy for years were actually the Orchestre Symphonique du Montréal on Decca. Their long-time conductor (1978-2002) left acrimoniously after labor disputes and has since been the subject of multiple sexual assault allegations, but the orchestra's recordings are (mostly) excellent, both in performance and recording acoustics.
Our Christmas Eve plans were canceled by weather. We received about 2" of rain here, and our friends in Ventura County were hit with an inch more than that. The path through L.A. in-between was 4-5". We were not going to drive into that.
Points south are clearer, so today we head to San Diego to wander around the Zoo with all of the other heathens.
It’s not analysis, it’s an exercise in genre, which is why the LLM can plug in whatever ideology you choose and spread it over the dry toast of a general description.
Bsky thread with Lord of the Rings inspired cover band names. I was thinking to jump in, but then someone posted "A Flock of Smeagols" and there was no point in anything further being said.
I don't think that Buttigieg would be a liability. The one thing I do think is that pretty much any candidate is going to be chancy and could well lose because the media is going to lean into the sports model of reporting and focus on the drama rather than on the substance. If Buttigieg did end up losing because something he did, or something about him blew up into a negative, then I'm certain that half of the pundits would have already half-written post-election analyses arguing that his gayness was just too big a feature for swing voters to get past, and they'd blame the loss on "activists" running the Dems. And then it would be a generation before the donors would have the courage to support any LGBTQ+ candidate for national office again.
Same way I don't think Harris will ever be given another chance at the presidency. Doesn't matter that she came damn close carrying a lot of baggage that had been forced upon her by the circumstances.
Meanwhile, given where we are right now in our politics, it's hard to even fathom how The Dean Scream was enough to sink a candidacy. Really? That? What a strange moment in time.
wj - The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists — people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that “someone who can win a general election” should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
We have a real structural problem with the primaries in that the voters who need to be brought on board often don't pay any attention to the election until after the primaries are done, leaving the primary voters and the donors to pick. None of the Dem coalitions in the primary seem to have any sense of what those people are looking for. I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don't know themselves what they are going to go for, so it's a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason.
I think primaries are the place where ranked voting actually makes the most sense, in that ranked voting would not just take candidate support into account, but would also give a sense of crossover appeal. And if the primaries were done in two or three rounds it would also give the party a chance to see which candidates were gaining and which were losing support over time, and let the candidates adjust their approaches to some actual feedback.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread”
I'm under the impression that US Border Patrol in particular has always been a Hive of Scum and Villainy (thank you Obi Wan).
I know that there are humanitarian groups working along the southern border to provide water and other humanitarian aid to undeclared migrants in distress, and that BP has been known to destroy their caches when they find them (for one example).
I think ICE has been less gleefully punitive in their policy as an institution than has BP, but that may also be a product of my selection process for reading, so...
"
At first Fox was blaming all the disruptions on Antifa, but after this weekend the new Enemy of the People is "organized gangs of wine moms."
Everyone please update your codices accordingly. This has been your Two Minutes of Hate.
"
Charles WT - have you read the BJ AI series that Carlo Graziani authored?
https://balloon-juice.com/category/science-and-technology/artificial-intelligence-carlo/
[Should be read, and not just left to an LLM to synopsize ;) ]
"
Here's the other half of the revolutionary agenda that MAGA/P2025 is pursuing that will continue to obstruct any rebalancing that a flipped congress may attempt to legislate. It's going to take years for this bolus to pass.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trumps-appeals-court-judges.html?unlocked_article_code=1.DlA.MMri.p_Ld7V7iZp4E&smid=url-share
Even if the Dems retake the reins in both the White House and Congress, these judges will be in place to flip this behavior and obstruct implementation of any counter-agenda.
This is why the Project 2025 crowd have continued to support this administration. Judges get lifetime appointments, and they are counting on their conservative Christian judges to prevent any socially liberal changes from being implemented, and to fast-track any dismantling of the changes they cannot prevent once the GOP manages to regain control of either of the other branches for however long.
MAGA/P2025 believe an alt-history version of the US where the founding fathers were Christian nationalist, and We the People refers only to the "legacy Americans" who are Judeo-Christian western civilization chauvinists. No one else deserves representation.
"
hsh - Well, sure. The question is – how many people are so motivated? I know this crew plays almost exclusively to their base, but everyone else is seeing it, too. Everyone, the base and otherwise, is seeing the other videos.
But Vance et al act as though the first-person video from the shooter is a slam dunk of some sort. Do they really believe that? Or is it just a performance to bolster the belief that it is in the minds of the willing?
At this point, given what we have observed over the last year, we should probably conclude that this administration and its supporters in Congress have become a revolutionary government. The loyal will support the revolution, and as long as the local and federal authorities continue to treat the administration as legitimate, they will be used as tools of the revolution. Any local or state opposition will be treated as an attack on the sovereignty of the president, and they will continue to wield the sanction of state violence against those people until they are forced to stop.
They believe that if they have 3% of the nation under arms for their side, they can force their will. Veterans and active duty military comprise 6% of the population, and nearly a quarter of all law enforcement. Military and law enforcement voted 70/30 in favor of Orange Julius. About a third of the US is still on board with all that the administration is doing.
A third of the population that contains two thirds of the people under arms in the nation is a potent revolutionary force.
We can vote them out, sure, but I think that will force a constitutional crisis with a lot of unknowns, and that revolutionary force will remain.
On “2026, as f**ked up as 2025”
We are on the same page, novakant. One more way that the media continues to normalize the caprice of Clementine Caligula.
On “An open thread”
If a viewer is motivated to believe Ross, then they will take the moment where the phone jerks upward as an indication that Ross was hit by the vehicle. Viewed in isolation, that video would allow someone to believe the narrative reported by Noem and Vance.
I just watched a documentary about women war correspondents in WWII. One of the current war correspondents said that when she arrives at a scene of conflict, one of the first things she does is look for someone she identifies as being her equivalent in that place and situation to give her a point-of-view she can connect with.
MAGA's version of that is to put themselves in the shoes of the ICE/BP enforcers and impute good faith to them and bad faith to the people who are obstacles to the enforcers. With that as a starting point, this video will justify Ross violence in their minds.
The converse, that ICE/BP are acting in bad faith, is too disturbing to contemplate.
"
You know it's bad when you have Bulgarian friends checking in with you and saying how much they are glad that they did not emigrate to the US - all while worrying about Putin in their own back yard.
"
Plato is out at Texas A&M because of the Symposium, not the Republic. It's Aristophanes' speech about the Myth of the Androgyne.
Too gay for Texas.
On “2026, as f**ked up as 2025”
JD Vance is supporting some dangerous and fucked up shit. He's saying that federal agents have "absolute immunity" in pursuit of their orders, and he's also claiming that we should have sympathy for the officer who executed Good because that officer had been injured in a previous action where he was drug along by a moving car.
If the second point is true, then that officer had no business being cleared for duty like this because he is clearly psychologically unsuited for his job.
And if the first point is allowed to stand and be put into practice...
"
I've heard war historians refer to WWI and WWII as "The Second Thirty Years War," and while the postwar period did mark the start of the effort to create international agreements governed by consensus and law, it also marked the beginnings of hyperglobalism, and soon after of networked societies. Some historians mark those last two developments as the beginning of the end for the Westphalian Peace that was instituted as a system in the first Thirty Years War.
(I did think a bit while writing my earlier post if I should describe Trump's worldview as 19th C. or 17th. C. for this very reason.)
"
The US has military bases on Greenland. Greenland wants to continue that practice, even if it were to become independent. They've specifically pointed to the Compacts of Free Association that the US has with the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Micronesia. That would likely take care of any strategic concerns.
What Greenland does not want, and what it seems Trump does really want, is a 19th C. imperial resource extraction scheme. Trump's comments point entirely to him thinking like a real estate developer, treating the Greenlanders not as a sovereign people with a right of self-determination, but as tenants on a desirable piece of property that has extensive mineral rights.
All the strategic concerns are true, but none of them ring true as motivations for Trump. He wants his name in the history books as having expanded US territory and acquiring valuable mineral rights that can be exploited to allow the US to dominate the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Anything beyond that is too much detail for the hamster wheel in his head.
"
The memes are on the Maduro-asks-to-be-self-deported schtick:
"
WRT "narcoterrorism" - hoo boy, how fraught and tactical a word.
The FBI defines international terrorism as "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations." From that definition, all that is required is for the federal government to declare a group or a nation as "terrorist." They are a bit more helpful on the subject of domestic terrorism: "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature." Neither of these definitions, however, really do much to differentiate terrorism from other political crimes, especially hate crimes.
From my readings on the subject, I think that the crucial element of terrorism is that terrorism is a narrative crime. The media identity of the party doing the terrorizing must be announced to the public, or at the very least the reason for the violent spectacle must be made known to the public in some way, and that violence must have an ideological goal. I'd argue that the tool of the violence itself is not the weapon of the terrorist, but rather that the media is the weapon and that the media narrative is the intended injury.
From this viewpoint the Mexican cartels would qualify as narcoterrorists, but only in as much as they engage in kidnap, torture, and grisly executions as a means to subjugate the Mexican populace and intimidate, subvert, or control the legitimate government. Killing US citizens with the product that they sell is not an act of terror, it's just an illegal business enterprise. The drug cartels don't have any ideological goals they are trying to achieve through the deaths of their customers. They'd probably prefer to keep those customers alive in order to continue selling the drugs to them.
Maduro was a tyrant who violated the human rights of Venezuelans: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/americas/south-america/venezuela/report-venezuela/ He engaged in political intimidation and authorized arbitrary detentions and unfair trials for his political opponents. He wielded the Bolivaran National Guard against his political opponents in much the same way that the KKK engaged in terrorism against blacks after the Civil War.
But "narcoterrorism" against the US? That's propaganda. The illegal drug trade is just typical organized crime, and not the sort of thing that justifies military intervention in my non-lawyerly view of things.
"
bc - Really? The US has wanted Greenland for a long time. We occupied it during WWII invoking the Monroe Doctrine. And comparing Venezuela to Ukraine at this point is truly balloon juice.
Yes, really. The Danes were the ones that released the image of the forged letter, purportedly from Greenland but actually from the GRU, sent to Tom Cotton suggesting that Greenland was primed to join the US.
As for the Venezuela/Ukraine swap suggestion, that info comes from Fiona Hill's sworn testimony in 2019.
The best propaganda ops are always woven into historical contexts and appeal to the known biases of the targets.
The success of the mission in light of Russian air defense has to be taken into account.
According to former ambassador Ken Fairfax on BSKY, the Russians pulled their people ten days before the US op. Make of that what you will.
"
Over at BJ, Adam Silverman is reminding everyone that both the Greenland nonsense and the Venezuela idea were planted by the GRU.
https://balloon-juice.com/2026/01/04/war-for-ukraine-day-1410-and-now-we-know-where-the-venezuela-idea-came-from/
None of these idiots should ever have been given security clearance. They are entirely too easily manipulated.
"
Such a strange state of paralysis we are in as a nation. The Democrats cannot keep up with the galloping norm-crushing or find any path of resistance that is not through the slow crawl of the courts. The media is hapless, and hopeless, and toothless, and hamstrung by oligarchic editorial capture. That leaves civil resistance, but it doesn't seem like we are really ready to hit the streets and risk an authoritarian backlash and the suspension of habeas corpus that we know the authoritarians are jonezing to try out.
Every last bit of this could be ground to a halt if the milquetoast Republicans who have "raised concerns" would break ranks and side with the Dems to restore accountability. I don't see that happening. The GOP has so thoroughly demonized (literally) the Dems that I can't see any of them choosing to work with the Enemies of Christendom.
So very fucked up.
On “Moving towards Epiphany”
I think MTG's response to Trump's comments at the Kirk Memorial are telling. It's not the nail in the MAGA coffin, but it may signal an inflection point for a lot of people as they start looking to shift their allegiance. I'm reminded of "The Awakening Conscience" by William Holman Hunt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awakening_Conscience#/media/File:Hunt-AwakeningConscience1853.jpg
I expect that for a great many of the christian nationalist MAGA faithful we are going to see them start to think that The Ancient Orange One is King Saul, tormented by spirits, prone to fits, and abandoned by God, and see them turn instead to the Sofaphiliac as King David. Couchie has received Erica Kirk's anointment and has the trust of Sharkey's Hobbits. He Who Slumbers may not see out his term if the Project 2025 wing think they can Amendment 25 him and cut their losses.
If they do decide to go that way, good luck on keeping that lightning in the bottle. Vance is a pail of lukewarm dog vomit and naked ambition. I don't think he can hold any of it together for long.
What still terrifies me, though, is what comes after. I'm not convinced that the US Constitution can keep this place running with just another patch. This is a really risky and consequential moment and I don't think the cultists are done yet.
On “Weekend music thread #10 Maurice Ravel”
I mentioned that I thought Russian music was played best by Russian orchestras, and I think to a lesser extent, this is true with French orchestral music.
My go-to recordings for Ravel and Debussy for years were actually the Orchestre Symphonique du Montréal on Decca. Their long-time conductor (1978-2002) left acrimoniously after labor disputes and has since been the subject of multiple sexual assault allegations, but the orchestra's recordings are (mostly) excellent, both in performance and recording acoustics.
On “An inscrutable Merry Christmas”
Our Christmas Eve plans were canceled by weather. We received about 2" of rain here, and our friends in Ventura County were hit with an inch more than that. The path through L.A. in-between was 4-5". We were not going to drive into that.
Points south are clearer, so today we head to San Diego to wander around the Zoo with all of the other heathens.
🎄 🎄 🎄
On “Welcome to my world”
It’s not analysis, it’s an exercise in genre, which is why the LLM can plug in whatever ideology you choose and spread it over the dry toast of a general description.
On “Weekend Music Thread music thread #09 In Russia, Christmas music sings you!”
Bsky thread with Lord of the Rings inspired cover band names. I was thinking to jump in, but then someone posted "A Flock of Smeagols" and there was no point in anything further being said.
"
Happy Winter Solstice, everybody.
On “The Wiles Interview”
I like Buttigieg. I like Booker a lot as well.
I don't think that Buttigieg would be a liability. The one thing I do think is that pretty much any candidate is going to be chancy and could well lose because the media is going to lean into the sports model of reporting and focus on the drama rather than on the substance. If Buttigieg did end up losing because something he did, or something about him blew up into a negative, then I'm certain that half of the pundits would have already half-written post-election analyses arguing that his gayness was just too big a feature for swing voters to get past, and they'd blame the loss on "activists" running the Dems. And then it would be a generation before the donors would have the courage to support any LGBTQ+ candidate for national office again.
Same way I don't think Harris will ever be given another chance at the presidency. Doesn't matter that she came damn close carrying a lot of baggage that had been forced upon her by the circumstances.
Meanwhile, given where we are right now in our politics, it's hard to even fathom how The Dean Scream was enough to sink a candidacy. Really? That? What a strange moment in time.
"
wj - The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists — people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that “someone who can win a general election” should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
We have a real structural problem with the primaries in that the voters who need to be brought on board often don't pay any attention to the election until after the primaries are done, leaving the primary voters and the donors to pick. None of the Dem coalitions in the primary seem to have any sense of what those people are looking for. I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don't know themselves what they are going to go for, so it's a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason.
I think primaries are the place where ranked voting actually makes the most sense, in that ranked voting would not just take candidate support into account, but would also give a sense of crossover appeal. And if the primaries were done in two or three rounds it would also give the party a chance to see which candidates were gaining and which were losing support over time, and let the candidates adjust their approaches to some actual feedback.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.