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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Highly engaged voters are invested and take the time to understand policy and nuance. Generally this is not the case. All the others are just trying to get through the day. So you cannot win them over with policy and nuances.
You need to show big, bold initiative and follow through.
The Democratic party could not even prosecute a guy who tried to murder Congress. So the thinking goes - Why the fuck would someone vote for them when they do fuck all?
Hell if someone tried to murder you and you just gave up and went about your way, no one would trust you to do anything of substance. That is the problem with the Democratic party today.
It was never the Democrats job to do that. It was congress's. Democrats did try. And they absolutely could have done better in many areas. I'm not defending them on that. But we need to also recognize that a large portion of Congress was flattered and extremely impressed that Trump was able to sic so many people on them. That they had no choice but to eagerly and gladly defend him while sucking up for him. Conservatives love an authoritarian. And without a few conservatives. Democrats were and never did accomplish much of anything.
No, it fucking wasn't Congress' job -- at least, not just Congress' job. It was the DOJ's job. And guess who appoints the motherfucking Attorney General?
Wow starting off contradicting yourself. It's an interesting argument Style. Not sure how it's going to work though.
All right so I'm not going to defend Merrick garland. I wish that he had done better too. Unfortunately he is kind of what you want. Someone who will try to stay out of the way and seem impartial at least. We're going to see first hand what having a blindly ideological and engaged Department of Justice will look like and why it's a bad thing very soon.
That said Merrick Garland did not appoint the judge that sabotaged the case. Merrick Garland and the Democrats did not appoint the Supreme Court Justices who sabotaged the case. And it's neither the executive branch or a political party's place to act as a balance or check to the whole f****** judicial branch of government. Even with that whole checks and balances crap is b*******. It was the congress's job. The Congress which Democrats never solidly controlled in any meaningful sense unfortunately. Especially due to Senators Manchin and the sinema.
There are plenty of actual things to blame Democrats for. That they didn't put on the sort of performative play that we would have liked to have seen is way at the bottom of the list.
What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter whose job it was. People vote for a leader. It was up to the leaders to make it happen. That happened to be the president. It's nothing more complex than that.
The "thinking" was instead to vote for the guy who tried to murder Congress?
The point of this article is that Trump was elected by those who did very little thinking at all.
No, it's that voters respond more to actions than words.
Democrats doomed themselves with the pro-democracy message in 2024. They shouldn't even have mentioned Trump's threat to democracy. It simply made them look unhinged to low-information voters. By the time the 2024 election came around, Biden's own actions made running on the democracy angle nonviable.
The fatal flaw in Democrats' messaging is that they ran on Trump as an enemy of democracy in 2016, 2020, and 2024. They ran on it, and yet, they did nothing about it.
Trump should have been hauled before a military tribunal and charged with treason on day one of Biden's presidency. Any SCOTUS justices that tried to carve out special provisions for him should have been hauled in front of the same tribunal and been charged as accomplices. Every single person remotely involved with the conspiracy, including seating members of Congress, should be rotting in Gitmo right now. They all should have been sent to jail or the gallows within 100 days of Biden taking office.
THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You do what you have to do, purge who you have to purge, and let history be your judge. Damn the consequences. Do some MAGA traitors want to start a riot in protest? Fine, send in the military to put them down. Do what you need to do and cut the rot out of the body politic.
You can't just SAY something is a threat to democracy. You need to get off your ass and actually DO something about it. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had pro-Confederate newspapers shut down, and that was just the start of it.
When democracy is threatened, sometimes you need to run roughshod over a lot of democratic norms, lest the enemies of democracy get away with it and try again. They only need to win once, you need to win every time. Which means that when someone does actually try to overthrow democracy, you need to come down like the hammer of God upon them. You need to respond with such overwhelming force that people are lining up at the door to strike a plea deal for a mere decade in prison. Realistically, when things get this bad, you need to be prepared to sentence thousands of people to decades in prison based on rapid trials in kangaroo courts if necessary. When thousands of people become so far gone that they think overthrowing a democracy is an acceptable option, the only real way to resolve that is to start handing out life and capital sentences like candy.
What did Biden actually do? He appointed an attorney general who sat on the Trump case for two years and only started an investigation when shamed into it by the House. And then Trump just ran out the clock. Garland prosecuted a bunch of the low-level people who physically stormed the capital, but he made sure all the actual high-level ring leaders escaped unpunished.
Biden didn't have a spine. He showed, through his actions, that he really didn't consider Trump a serious threat to democracy. And if the sitting president of the United States doesn't consider someone a threat, why would you expect disengaged voters to do so?
My only hope is that if Trump's promised Reign of Terror does occur, that he starts with all the leading figures of Biden's Justice Department. While whatever mistreatment they receive will be for things that weren't actually wrong, at least they will be indirectly punished for their actual crimes - failing to defend this nation's democracy. If Biden and Garland end up themselves sitting in prison on some Trumped-up charge, well I'll have zero sympathy for them. They will simply be serving their sentence for their cowardly failure to defend American democracy. If anyone is to feel the boot of a new autocracy, let them be the first. They are the ones that created it.
I see you went to the Bến Tre school of saving democracy.
No thanks to hauling Supreme Court justices before a military tribunal because you don't like the way they ruled. I wish we had expedited the cases against Trump, but I don't want a bunch of leftists suspending democratic principles just long enough to make sure their political opponents are weakened. We've seen that ploy before, and it doesn't end with freedom.
They just didn’t vote at all, which is kinda the same thing but there’s nuance to it even still.
I agree that the democrats needed a big bold message, but this is a strange metaphor. If someone tried to murder you and you just went about your way, people would... Vote for the murderer, I guess?
They didn't vote for Trump; they simply stayed home.
That is how the godfather works.