State of the Discussion

I live in north central Texas, and I never see anything like that [Confederate flag flying off the back of a pickup].

Would that suggest that the whole point of flying those Confederate flags isn't about the Confederacy? Rather it's about "owning the libs". Thus there is no point to doing it in north central Texas -- there aren't enough liberals there to make it worth the effort.

This takes me back to 1977, the year of the queen's silver jubilee (the 25th year of her reign). There was much love shown for the monarchy, and a leftist reaction to it: I had a "Stuff the Jubilee" poster on my wall. The Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen, which would have been number 1 in the UK charts during the Jubilee week, had the charts not been blatantly fixed.

My impression is that there's now less strong feeling either way. Today's royal family is seen largely as a soap opera: naturally there's a black sheep in it.

The problem with monarchy according to Lewis Carroll:

"Off with their heads, said the Queen."

The problem with democracy according to Walt Kelly:

"Yep son, we have met the enemy and he is us."

As a point of contrast, Germany post WWII was able to move past Naziism – to not continually be engaged in arguments about it (I think – right Helmut?) – by owning it, recognizing it as toxic and a point of shame, and making explicit choices to reject it. Until AfD I guess.

a) no one in 1945 could come up with the idea that Germany had not totally lost (unlike 1918 when all fronts were still outside the Reich's borders and the population did not know that the Western allies would completely overrun them in the spring).
b) The Allies (in both West and East) allowed the broad majority of Nazis to get off lightly while at the same time making clear that this would change should they try to revive the Reich. And they kept that ultimate control long enough for everyone to get used to the new and improved democracy (which was accompanied by the 'economic miracle', giving it a huge boost).
c) it took decades (until the late 60ies) and a new generation to really come to terms with the true evil of Nazism. But (see above) the country was provided that time and was protected from anything like the Lost Cause poison.

Maybe, if Sherman had gotten his way and reconstruction had not ended by probably the dirtiest of all cow trades in US history (Andrew Johnson making a deal with the South to save his hide), there could have been something similar in the US.

Personally I think that the AfD is to a large degree a result of the fake enforced anti-fascism of the GDR. Botching the reconstruction of the East after the reunification (a good deal of disaster capitalism happened there plus - at least perceived - large scale carpetbaggery) gave it fertilizer. And now the weed grows all over the country, having surpassed a critical mass. No idea where it will end. Imo most adherents have not lived through the actual GDR (let alone the 3rd Reich) and got infected by a certain made-up nostalgia with no personal experience what an authoritarian regime actually looks and feels like.

by this point, no decent person would sign up to be anywhere near Trump. working for him means you run the risk of destroying your career by either having to lie for him or by getting a face full of MAGA hatred by refusing to lie for him.

that leaves utter idiots and cynical grifters who think they can ride the Fox/MAGA gravy train for the rest of their careers.

The comment in the podcast that most connected with me was Bouelle's statement about it not just being about the South as a geographic area, specifically. I live in blue part of blue MA, and the whole giant American and/or Confederate flag flying off the back of a pickup with Eric Church or similar blasting is all over the place here.

Head out into Worcester or Franklin county, even more so.

Cross the border into southern NH, even more so.

What thinking lately about the whole moment we're in, and have been in since probably Reagan, is that this country has never successfully come to terms with the negative or darker side of our history. There is a lot that is negative in our history - violent, genocidal, explicitly and thoroughly racist. And we've never really found a way to come to terms with it.

So we end up with these weird overcompensating mythologies about American exceptionalism - how special and wonderful and indispensable we are.

And the people who do try to call it out are accused of "hating America". And some of them seem caught up in our darker corners, like they themselves can't let go of it or move past it.

And a lot of the really toxic shit has never really gone away. One of the remarkable things to me about the last 40 years or so is the degree to which it's become OK again to be an unapologetic racist. Or at least a "scientifically based" racist, see also the Bell Curve crap.

Or an unapologetic misogynist, or at least a proponent of the idea that men are somehow supposed to be the bosses. See also Charlie Kirk. Andrew Tate, who is clearly one sick bastard, has over 10 million followers.

I think this ends up - as Cottem points out - being "shunted off" onto the South because that region has the most overt history of, specifically, chattel slavery. The Confederacy was an explicit attempt to establish a state based on the doctrine of white supremacy and the legitimacy of black slavery. It's an obvious vector for the worst in our history. And, that is an obvious source for resentment on the part of the folks who live there.

But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.

As a point of contrast, Germany post WWII was able to move past Naziism - to not continually be engaged in arguments about it (I think - right Helmut?) - by owning it, recognizing it as toxic and a point of shame, and making explicit choices to reject it. Until AfD I guess.

And I think the way Trump fits into this is that his own personal pathology mirrors that of the nation perfectly.

Since this is a music thread:
Is someone here able to transcribe the lyrics of this song for me?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJgDp5zF4s0
I only get disconnected fragments and the auto captions produce mostly rubbish.

Remember: It is perfidy to quote GOPsters verbatim and a felony to provide audio or video proof when the quotes get challenged. That includes public speeches made to an audience of millions.

Pro Bono's quote reminds me that the inner circle of George Bush was dubbed the 'Mayberry Machiavellis' (and Gemini tells me it was not by a democrat, but by a former White House staffer under Bush)

Io spero, e lo sperar cresce ‘l tormento:
io piango, e il pianger ciba il lasso core:
io rido, e el rider mio non passa drento:
io ardo, e l’arsion non par di fore.

wj - (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)

Right about now those farmers are also starting to realize that there is no way to plan for what to plant next year, because there is no telling what The Ancient Orange One is going to decide to add to the tariff pile as his next tantrum negotiating tactic.

You can't plan a year out when the yahoo in charge keeps blowing stuff up to keep his enemies - the farmers' customers - off-balance.

They could plow it all under and try to grow carbon, but TAOO has blown up climate subsidies as well.

Screwed.

I notice that Trump is now demanding that the Chinese resume buying soybeans from the US. One suspects that he discovered that Midwestern farmers are seriously upset to have a major market snatched out from under them. (Especially those who didn't see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)

He seems oblivious to the fact that the Chinese have found alternative suppliers. Which is to say, they don't need to buy from us. As opposed to, say, refined rare earths, for which we (and, for that matter the rest of the world) have no alternative sources of supply.

We could develop them, of course -- "rare earths" aren't particularly rare; just challenging to separate from each other. It would just take 5-10 years, even assuming zero regulatory constraints (i.e. no environmental impact reports, no planning permissions, etc.). Can't expect Trump to grasp that, of course.

I could easily see the Chinese playing hardball on this. If only to show the wannabe his place. Hey, it keeps working for Putin, so why not?

My main criticism of the (D)’s over the last, say, 40 years is that they’ve neglected the areas that aren’t what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.

The two big political geography stories of the last 35 years are the huge swing from blue to red in the Midwest, and the corresponding swing from red to blue in the West. The 8-state Mountain West now has one more blue US Senator than the 13-state Midwest. The entire 13-state West has nine more than the Midwest. 35 years ago -- 1990 -- Republicans in California were competitive: legislative seats at the state and national level were close to equally divided, and that year Feinstein lost the election for governor.

Personal charisma is great, recognizing that nobody watches TV anymore so stop spending all your money there is great, understanding how to leverage social media is great.

Recruit the charismatic people, do all those things.

However.

My main criticism of the (D)'s over the last, say, 40 years is that they've neglected the areas that aren't what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.

When I say that, people often reply "how can you say that, their policies are much better for those folks". And in general I think that's true. But I'm not talking about *policy*. I'm talking about physical presence and local identity.

There are 50 states, 435 Congressional districts, and something north of 3,000 counties or county equivalents in the US. I don't know how many cities and towns, but a lot of those, too.

There should be a (D) candidate for every public office, in every one of those political units, in every cycle. There is not. My scientific wild-ass guess is that they're lucky if they field candidates in half of them.

There should be some kind of (D) field office in each of those political units, and the DNC and similar (D)-aligned organizations should be supporting all of them with money and people. They should *not* be telling them how to run their local organization, because the people who live in an area almost certainly know the area better than anybody in the DNC. But they should be supported with money, assistance in recruiting local candidates and volunteers, and with boots on the ground (as they say) during election cycles.

Way back when, Howard Dean developed a 50 state strategy to basically do the above. It worked well. Obama continued it at least for his first run, but since then it's kind of been abandoned.

There *is* interest in all of those places. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been holding town halls in very red places and thousands of people show up. So at least a basic level of interest is there.

My sense, or belief, is that the (D)'s as an institution have focused on the stuff they sort of know how to do - basically the easy stuff. Solicit big money from rich people in large cities, focus-group their messages to try to polish them up into something that will resonate with "regular people", lean heavily on the most reliable demographics that they are (more or less) sure to win.

It's a very top-down, center-of-power-centric approach.

They need to stop spending billions of dollars on consultants and start spending billions of dollars to establish and support *local (D) organizations* in every freaking political unit in the country. And let those organizations take the lead in identifying and understanding the issues that are significant to the people *in those places* and in explaining to those people how they benifit more from (D) policies than from (R) ones. Which, in general, they do. And also let those local folks take the lead in understanding how (D) policies do NOT benefit folks there, so they can evolve policy to address those needs.

Folks in all the places I'm talking about don't really care all that much what Chuck Schumer says. They might not even care all that much what Trump says other than to find it somewhere between annoying and entertaining.

But they will have a much harder time tuning out what their neighbor says.

The 50 state strategy, but really make it a 50 state, 435 district, 3,000 plus county, every town and city strategy. Support (D) candidates for mayor, town clerk, school board, county sheriff, tax assessor, dog catcher. State senate and house.

And, of course, federal House and Senate. But work from the bottom up.

Do that for 3 or 4 or 5 election cycles. They'll lose a lot, and spend a lot of money on doing so. And they'll win some. And over time, they'll win more.

Patience, persistence, and quit relying on the easy wins.

<i>Why not a model focused on re-imagined Revolutionary War heritage and New England?</i>

Not necessarily New England, but this was more of a thing when I was a kid in the NJ suburbs of Philadelphia. My grandmother's house was decorated with plates depicting scenes from the Rev War and other such memorabilia. She had pistols and powder flasks, some of which were obvious replicas and others that may have been genuine. Her house was not at all rare in that regard.

People would display the old "Betsy Ross" flag year round, but it was everywhere around the 4th of July.

I know a few people who currently participate in Rev War reenactments, but they're NJ Loyalists (i.e. Red Coats). They tend MAGA-ish. It's kind of odd considering that they aren't on the side of the rebels. That would give them a sort of commonality with the rebels of the Confederacy. Maybe it's the authoritarianism they like (not "No Kings" but "Yes Kings").

I visited Gettysburg a few summers ago. Seeing the American flag there seemed to signal something completely different from what it does when I see it flapping around from the back of pickup truck where I live - pride in the Union that defeated the Confederacy rather than obnoxious faux-patriotic MAGAism.

/stream of consciousness

This may be the oddest picture I've ever taken: it's the Spourne Parclose, containing the tomb of John Ponder, in St Peter and St Paul's Church, Lavenham.

How do you get coverage, online or otherwise, for the other side of that story? 

Good question. My feeling is that much of the media is being played by the savviest manipulators of the news cycle. Trump gets way too much air time for what amounts to disinformation, so do Netanyahu and the IDF, Farage and previously Johnson.

I don't know why they run the trucks-in-the-mountains ads in the rest of the country. In the 11-state contiguous western states, the vast majority of the population lives in urban/suburban areas but can drive to the mountains in less than an hour.

I've long said that the proper picture to represent the modern West should look like this. In this case San Francisco, and the snow is rarer in Las Vegas and Phoenix, but it still happens occasionally even there. Now that the Census Bureau has admitted it's the 21st century and we can do density based on actual built area rather than county area, the western region is very narrowly denser than the Northeast, and both are much denser than the Midwest and South.

There is a mystique about the West that's every bit as bullshit ad the mystique about the South and similar in some ways. There's the erasing of historical crimes against humanity, the faux claims to independence, and the strange definition of masculinity which includes 'strength" but not brains. The Southern version has more faux morality. Both have BS about being victimized by outside elites. The West version has A LOT of pity party about not being represented when in fact they are over-represented in government.

I guess my question is: Why is that kind of bullshit the model? Why not a model focused on re-imagined Revolutionary War heritage and New England?