Josh Hawley Moves to Become Trump’s Heir Presumptive

When I say “media personality” I don’t mean pundit.

Right now the “media personality” marked as Trump’s heir apparent isn’t Tucker Carlson it’s Eric Trump.

Disenfranchisement (think green party), gerrymandering, dark money…

I know what you are saying, but there was significant fraud.

Difficulties getting on the ballot, legal hurdles that are required, citizen’s united… The US electoral system is systematically fraudulent.

Voter fraud is a very slightly different kettle of fish, though we have the amusing situation of a Trump supporter believing in fraud because they had done so, and been convicted of doing so.
Given the nature of the system if there wasn’t voter fraud, then that’s just about the only part of the system that runs fairly. I have no particular reason to think that voter fraud is a problem. But there are more problems with the US, and more and more other countries electoral system.

As Stalin did not say, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the vote decide everything.” Computerized voting is the forefront of possibilities potentially rendering all other forms of fraud obsolete.

Given the nature of the US electoral system it is not surprising that people have no faith in it – even as they manage to support the worst aspects of it. It is amusing that the only aspect of the US electoral system that appears to be fair is the part that is attacked.

Least we get too complacent, historically voter fraud has been a thing too. Chicago, and mayor Daley is a thing, especially in the election of Kennedy. Belief in voter fraud is not entirely made from whole cloth.

Trump meant that, eventually, certain untrue things will be disallowed from political discourse. They are wrong but easy to be believed by some. This is not going to solve problems however will take certain courses of the table.

It also means that low-level corruption must be eliminated to a strong degree.

Let’s see, most here thought the neoD’s election officials cheated Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020…but none of those people thinks it’s plausible that those same election officials would cheat in the general election? Strange that.

This from a neoD party, who’s “leadership” is in their very late 70’s and 80’s, often incorrectly referred to here as baby-boomers but, in reality, are the 1935-50 generation who came to power almost 50 years ago and have ruthlessly held their power and uprooted FDRism from what is now neoD party, that cadre are, if this blog is to be believed, incapable of deception?

And then folks here are worried that “the “next” Trump will be more dangerous”. I am almost laughing at the thought process. After the massive damage done by Clinton/Bush/Obama; instead of worrying about the damage that will be caused with absolute certainty by returning to Clinton/Bush/Obama policies good neoD’s will assert their virtue by fretting over somebody who is NOT in a position powerful enough to have any effect on a very popular measure.

Palin 2024.

Drops mike …

All of this depends on Pence. He must make a choice. He can either put the final knife in Trump’s back, force a Contingent Election and leave his hands clean while Mitch and Romney put the knife in Trump’s back, count the alternate slate of electors to give himself and Trump another term, or throw the gavel to Chuck Grassley and flee the Senate and skip town.

We are entering a period of very rapid generational change at the top of politics among the Democrats. The Democrats are the weaker Party in many ways now, their electoral base shrinking geographically and ethnically, compounding its poor grip on institutional bases.

And speaking of addressing issues that are actually germane to peoples lives, to current politics as they are, I’d like to commend SomeofParts for trying to start a discussion about how Democrats just helped Mitch McConnell undercut Bernie Sanders:

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/senate-democrats-motion-to-concede

” the sheer scale of Wednesday’s Democratic surrender was truly a sight to behold. And it probably ended the chance for more immediate aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy.

The day began with Sen. Bernie Sanders following through on his promise to deny unanimous consent for the Senate to advance a $740 billion defense authorization bill, until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allows an up-or-down vote on legislation that would send $2,000 survival checks to individuals making less than $75,000.

Sanders’ move forced McConnell to ask the Senate to pass a formal motion to proceed on the defense bill, which would let Republicans move forward on the Pentagon priority without a vote on the $2,000 checks. The motion created the moment in which Democrats could have stood their ground and cornered the GOP leader.

Instead, 41 Democrats obediently voted with McConnell, allowing him to move the defense bill forward without a vote on the checks. That included “yes” votes from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and vice-president elect Kamala Harris, the lead sponsor on a bill to give Americans monthly $2,000 checks during the pandemic. One day before her vote to help McConnell, Harris had called on the Republican leader to hold a vote on her legislation.

Only six members of the Senate Democratic Caucus mustered the courage to vote against McConnell’s maneuver Democratic senators in fact provided the majority of the votes for the measure that lets the defense bill proceed without a vote on the $2,000 checks.

It was a motion demanding Democrats concede — and they instantly obliged. Had most Senate Democrats voted against that motion, they might have had a chance to deny McConnell and stall the process.

5 Republicans also voted against the measure, including Missouri’s Josh Hawley [Ian’s “more dangerous Trump”], who has pushed the survival checks with Sanders.

Republican president Donald Trump has called for Congress to pass the $2,000 checks, but Georgia’s Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue — who only this week started pretending they support the direct aid — were nowhere to be found. They skipped the vote”

And they could “skip the vote” because, in part of the strong support shown here for the neoD’s “Trump=Hitler => Biden, TINA” campaign of 2020

@GlassHammer,

Do you think that Alex Jones might give office-seeker politics a try?

Google “Sarah Palin 2024.”

It’s already beginning. The merch is out and a bunch of conservative talking heads are already looking at her.
She’s the only one with the natural charismatic chops and the crazy to feed trumps base.

“You know what you never see in Alaska … a momma bear wearing a mask” to stadium filled thunderous applause.

Sorry, we’ve yet to even begin to plumb the depths of American idiocracy.

Another way to put this is that propaganda, grand stories, and tribalism are effective.

Correct.

I would only modify “grand stories” into “narratives.” Or even “sales pitches,” but that’s little more than a quibble.

We’ve been living in a cesspool of propaganda for generations, and it doesn’t get any less so as time goes by. Propaganda is the currency of control, and yes, it works. Like a charm. Until it doesn’t. We’re on the cusp of one of those times. But there’s nothing truthful to take the place of the failing propaganda.

Tribes are by their nature small and insular. A small and insular tribe can seize and hold power over heterogeneous nations — and have done so many times through history, no less so in the United States.

And how does Josh fit into this picture? Heir to Trump? Nah. A member of the Tribe Trump? Nah. This is a tribe that could not hold power and runs the risk of being wiped out by the many more powerful, richer and devious tribes that constitute our ruling class. Is Josh part of any of those? Nah.

Right now, it looks like there are no real heirs to the personalities who have captivated politics in the USA. We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift that is transforming the concept of politics. Trump, I think, is the last gasp of the Ancien Régime. What comes after?

We haven’t seen it yet.

I think it could be argued Palin was the precursor, the cusp, that led to Trump.

When you look at the history of it, to my memory every pResident since Nixon has been a puppet, the distraction from the goings-on in the background. Palin was the rude and crude that was just rude and crude enough to make even more rude and crude, Trump, acceptable.

Fascism sneaks in the back door It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn’t get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

And this is what has been happening to America – in particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party – for a very long time. Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of this, the culmination of a very long-growing trend that really began in the 1990s.”

Things’d be different were Palin prosecuted for putting crosshairs on a congresswoman.

Hawley is pedigreed. Father a banker. Expensive Catholic high school. On to Stanford, then Yale Law School where he edited the law review and was president of the Federalist chapter there. Some clerking including for John Roberts at SCOTUS. Married another of Roberts’ clerks. A little law work and law school teaching back in Missouri, jump to state attorney general, then Senator. And he’s 41.

I don’t have much use for pedigreed idiots, but you can see his current posturing as a branding exercise, setting himself up to be a player and ready to move up as far and as fast as he can go.

Ten Bears wrote: “Four years out of law school Associate Professors of Law are Associate Professors of Law because they haven’t found gainful employment in the practice of the Law. The dude has no real world experience, is as Ivory Tower as other prominent people in the news today.”

Eh. Hawley clerked for John Roberts at the Supreme Court, so he knows exactly how the sausage gets made in Washington. He could just be lucky, but his career has the looks of a smart guy working to a plan. Probably more so than Obama, also a law professor — and for a lot longer — till his political career got going.

Thomas P. Golladay wrote: “All of this depends on Pence. He must make a choice.”

Pence will make whatever choice Charles Koch thinks he should make.

V. Lenin wrote: “There are weeks when nothing happens; there are weeks when decades happen.”

This above all. Although this is New Year’s Day and it’s customary to make predictions, not only don’t we know what unprecedented factors might appear in the next four years, but also people here are assuming that Hawley’s future chances are predicated on factors which were relevant in the past but are irrelevant now.

The central relevant factor now is that the vast mass of Americans will be increasingly faced with the truth: they live in a shithole kleptocracy under a ruling class of grifters that not only doesn’t care about how they live and, indeed, whether they live or die, but that’s also largely incompetent to do anything much about it — this part hasn’t really sunk in yet — if it were to care.

Under those circumstances,, the mass of Americans will be increasingly desperate, and anyone in DC with any appearance at all of changing things for them will attract followers. Under those circumstances, ‘Trumpism’ doesn’t need Trump. Ann Coulter was enthusing on right-wing media about the recent election results precisely because of that: the Republicans advanced while, she said, getting rid of “the eight-year-old” (her words) in the White House.

V. Lenin wrote: “Power was lying in the streets. We picked it up.”

It might be Hawley. It might not be. But eventually someone _will_ be along.

Happy New year.

“Hell the neoliberals are an extension of the Whigs.”

Is what I meant to say.

Ronald Reagan was the first post-FDR empty suit President. Spiro Agnew, the first empty suit VP. Since then the suits have just gotten emptier.

Josh Hawley is just another crook on the make, exempt from the effects of the positions he takes.

I dunno if this Josh Hawley is in a position for this or that. I think really it’s pretty early for this kind of speculation; gonna be a lot of news cycles between now and the next primaries.
But if he pulls it off, that could be bad news for the centrist Democrats. He doesn’t strike me as obviously evil enough to strike fear into the hearts of Sandersish progressives and force them to hold their noses. Like who’s really gonna care whether the next Clinton/Obama/Biden/Harris wins an election or if it’s Josh Hawley? For a leftie, might as well vote Green or whatever, or stay home.

Brennan,

Well, that was a cute sea lion act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Only big D sounding Democrat I ever see commenting on a regular basis around here is Mandos — and he’s a brit I believe.

If Hawley runs on a populist message he has a good shot at beating either Biden or Harris in 2024. He’s off to a good start by siding with Sanders for $2000 checks for Americans. I have also seen him on The Hill Rising show touching on all the right talking points about making the Republican Party the party of working class Americans by dealing with the power and corruption in Big Tech and Wall Street. I am skeptical whether he is truly genuine about what he says but he’s a good talker. He could carry the populist vote and the religious right vote. From the ACB hearing, I could tell he is a religious conservative and pro-life. His Wiki states that he was raised Methodist, but he and his family now attend an Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and he identifies as an Evangelical.

Funny how the cons are always surprised at the conned’s awakened anger.

It wasn’t your average Joe tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

This is all premature. Pretentiously premature.

“over a decade” – Bull Shit

Josh Hawley will be working on his secong Inaugural Address while AOC is trying to decide if she should vote for Nancy as speaker for the 12th time. There is no one on the left who isruthless enough to win anything. I am going to go with the fascists who offer me bread in the middle of a depression. You guys can stay here an hope that AOC is a “media personality”

I’m a Canadian living in the continental EU.

As for whether I’m a “big D sounding Democrat”, in literal terms obviously not, in ideological terms my policy preferences closely track Ian’s. What I seem to differ with most commenters here is on two issues:

1. how to get from A to B, as it were.

2. identity and cultural issues as “first-class” political objects, as opposed to things that are straightforwardly reducible to economic class issues.

Many commenters here implicitly tie (1) to the policy preferences themselves. i.e., it is almost as if, if you don’t agree with a particular way to achieve power, you must also disagree with what to do with that power. I’ve noticed that trying to sever this connection provokes in some people an extremely negative reaction.

Bush in occupying Iraq drew from a Christian evangelical strata to staff the reconstruction.

They were comically incompetent true believers and there were a lot of them.

Christian dominionists among American elites are a shadowy presence. If they assert themselves, it may well feel revolutionary to secular majorities on the urban coasts.

If “bread” doesn’t motivate and I don’t think it does that much, it is because people have lost all hope of EVER getting bread. Let that sink in.

js:

Shoot, read your post right after I hit submit.

But yes, that is exactly what’s going on, and Mandos just gave me the hook I’ve so long been looking for to write a post on learned helplessness.

Thanks Mandos.

edmondo PERMALINK
January 2, 2021
Josh Hawley will be working on his secong Inaugural Address while AOC is trying to decide if she should vote for Nancy as speaker for the 12th time. There is no one on the left who isruthless enough to win anything. I am going to go with the fascists who offer me bread in the middle of a depression. You guys can stay here an hope that AOC is a “media personality”

You’re so right, edmondo. It’s true that the left has no spine. They think that they can change the Democratic Party from within by being good soldiers. The reality is that the rot is too great and progressives should be taking any chance given to them to throw out corrupt members like Pelosi. Instead, we will have to wait until Pelosi leaves on her own accord or dies.

Progressives should have also handled Biden early on in the primaries in the same way Gabbard owned Harris early on in the debates. If we had seen more of that from Bernie and the Squad, Biden could have been destroyed before Super Tuesday. Instead, we kept hearing from Bernie about how his “good friend” Biden would make an excellent president.

Hawley is being more outspoken than the Squad on populist issues because he is ambitious and strongly believes that he will be the best choice as president in four years. I can’t hate him for having his eyes on the prize and saying what he needs to in order to get what he wants. Four years from now, AOC will still be arguing on Twitter and having brunch with Mama Bear Pelosi while Hawley says and does what it takes to win the presidency.

About Hawley offering “bread:” He will no doubt follow the playbook from the many other right-wing authoritarians of the last several decades, which is to offer some left-wing fiscal programs while swinging as hard right as possible on cultural issues, and then after getting elected, take away the left-wing fiscal programs later when no one is paying attention.

This need for heroes and saviours, tho. If it’s not Obama, (and boy, it wasn’t) then it’s Bernie; if it’s not Bernie (and it’s not), then it’s Trump; if it’s not Trump (and it isn’t), then it’s Josh. No, it’s really AOC! (if only she could decouple from Nancy).

No. It’s none of them.

What will emerge post-Trump/post-Biden/post-Gerontocracy isn’t known, but our politics has essentially collapsed. There hasn’t been any there there for a good long time, but it’s too obvious to ignore now. The Dem consultant class is at wits end, the electeds are essentially useless except for their donor class, and even then…, so the jockeying for post-Apocalypse position is meaningless. On the R side, there’s little but money, cruelty and hypocrisy. Is that enough for you all? Really? I guess for some, yes, but I can’t fathom it.

Because a pol says something we want to hear, we should give that pol our support regardless of anything else? Horsefeathers. If so, it means that our elections are no more meaningful than Roman elections under the Empire. Oh. Silly me, that’s true, isn’t it? And those meaningless elections carried on long after the Gibbons’ supposed “Fall”.

The Revolution isn’t coming (it’s already been here and gone; we lost). The ruling class has made very clear that for the most part, “we” are simply in the way. They very successfully pit us against one another, over and over again, fighting over scraps or nothing at all, while pandemics rage, climate catastrophe becomes irreversible, and homelessness and starvation become accepted norms (again.)

Salvation? Not from above.

Josh Hawley is just another snake oil salesman. Unlike Trump, he can speak in complete sentences. While Trump wouldn’t know a church if he was in one, he and the congregation would have no problem exploiting each other. It’s one of the few times where Trump isn’t the biggest hypocrite in the room. Hawley doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state as long as it is his church calling the shots.

Hawley also doesn’t have any use for American elections either. He wants to contest the election on Jan. 6. He won’t succeed but the message he is sending is that elections aren’t legitimate and don’t count if his side loses. The take home is that Hawley may be a Senator but he is no defender of the Constitution. He will deep-six it whenever it gets in his way.

And it will get in his way, because as much as some will hmm and haa about it, American national elections, especially the Senate and Presidency, are already rigged. It’s just that the rigging favors the Republican party. Think about it, the Republicans have won the popular vote for President only once (in 2004) for President in the last 8 national elections. And they only won in 2004 after having stolen the election via the electoral college in 2000 with Bush v. Gore. At the Presidential level in the popular vote, that’s small d- democracy that we are all supposedly for, the Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 28 years, and that once was based on a previous cheat. They are a minority party and have been for a generation. Hawley in this environment is unremarkable. The Republicans aren’t competitive in Presidential elections unless they cheat and/or keep in place the anti-democratic electoral college.

As for the Senate, it’s not that it’s unrepresentative. It’s that it is wildly unrepresentative. You could have a working majority in the Senate (26 states, 52 Senators) from states containing just over 17.5% of the population of the 50 states.

Republicans may be evil but they aren’t stupid. Mitch McConnell knows his group of thieves aren’t going to be able to hold on to power even with all the rigging they have used up to now. That’s why Mitch is doing everything he can to stack the least democratic, least accountable branch of government left: the judiciary.

I don’t know how deluded Hawley is but there is no come back for this for Republicans. There is no return to a majority. It’s just a minority trying to hold on to power for as long as it can.

None of this is to say the Democrats are good. It’s just to point out that the numbers are on their side, and have been.

if you don’t agree with a particular way to achieve power, you must also disagree with what to do with that power Mandos

I once had a conservative evangelical tell me about how the Bolsheviks who were using torture and terror, were tolerated by elite Russian liberals of the day because the liberals ‘understood’ their cause. Her point was that leftism is always evil because it’s always a result of needing to force ones own disgruntled will onto others, and this always leads to evil.

Of course I saw it differently. I see that anybody who uses torture and terror to achieve their ends when they’re powerless, are going to double down on the torture and terror after they’ve achieved total power, regardless of their “politics”. A benevolent dictator will behave quite differently from a malignant narcissist.

IOW, we must start with the degree of sociopathy which the PTB demonstrates. Even after my careful explanation, the conservative evangelical continues to believe that it was “leftist forces” which stole the 2020 election because their reasoning is wrapped around the “needing to force ones own disgruntled will onto others” bit.

I really didn’t think that I was being too subtle for her. Past behavior is an accurate predictor of future results, and these behaviors are going to multiply as power increases and checks against said power decreases. I even quoted them Matthew 7:16, to no avail. IMHO, for any leftist revolution to succeed this very basic idea must be understood at the common cultural level, including those pesky evangelicals.

I was surprised to read you here about your identification with the left. I simply don’t understand much of what you write. For example:

One thing I noticed (and remarked extensively on) during the ACA debate way back when now, was that it was obvious how the elite used the “flabby” nature of most people’s political consciousness to create the messages that allowed them to “have the opportunity” to set things up the way they want. The economic left, on the other hand, viewed this with a self-disarming contempt, demanding “show me the money” without having any power, material or cognitive, to make anyone show anything.

If you want to call it “flabby”, so be it. It works.

I don’t know what you mean by “elites”. I regard them as the top couple of percent of wealthy people with heavy interests in the medical industry, the financial sector, and the media among other assets. They largely control Congress. Yes, they created messages. The economic left as you note lack material and cognitive power. In that contest, those with control of the media and of Congress will virtually always win the propaganda battle. That’s why we’re set up as a propaganda state. You seem to argue that we should join the elites and that somehow that will bring us more of what we want. That somehow just escapes me.

Over and over again, you’ve seemed to argue that success (“it works”) is the goal. I think good policy is the goal. As Debs said, “I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want, and get it.”

American badly needs a benevolent leader like this. From wiki about:
“Genghis Khan introduced many innovative ways of organizing his army … forbade the selling of women, theft, fighting among the Mongols, and the hunting of animals during the breeding season.[23]

He appointed his adopted brother Shigi-Khuthugh as supreme judge (jarughachi), ordering him to keep records of the empire. In addition to laws regarding family, food, and the army, Genghis also decreed religious freedom and supported domestic and international trade. He exempted the poor and the clergy from taxation.[24] He also encouraged literacy, adopting the Uyghur script, which would form the Uyghur-Mongolian script of the empire…”

Mandos trolling my wishful thinking and resentment at my irrelevance and powerlessness is not so terrible. If he gives me something to think about, I feel compensated.

I think “bread” matters in politics, but its importance in popular electoral politics depends delicately on the extent to which people have an understanding of how policy relates to “bread”. Mostly Americans are completely ignorant of policy or agnostic concerning policy’s consequences. People have bizarre notions — the Federal deficit is a threat to their grandchildren’s prosperity or the stock market’s index is an indicator of the economy’s health. You could see who makes them ignorant everytime a teevee journalist asked Sanders how much more M4all would cost.

The worldview of Christian evangelicals on the economy is on display in movies on my Amazon Prime: sunny, optimistic fairy tales of the meaning of life as found by lucky, pretty people thru hardship overcome and encounters with wise ol’ codgers.

I do not expect the precariat to rebel, though it is fun to see Pelosi and McConnell have their houses vandalized. Nor do I really expect “collapse” to happen in a way that would rescue my political desiderata from oblivion. But, (further) collapse is coming — it is built into the way the economy has been run for 30+ years.

The Hawley Gambit just might work.

At this point, the consultant class of both parties (but particularly the Dems) is terrified and bewildered, never having encountered or imagined anything like this and prayerful that process and procedure will save the day.

Uh, maybe not.

Hawley is the media It-Boy for the moment, and clearly he is smart as a whip, as they say, and he seems to actually have a plan. From appearances, it is not to keep Trump in office. It’s to so bollox the works that the apparatus grinds to a halt and the presidency, for all intents and purposes is vacated. No one is inaugurated on the 20th. Clever, no?

For its part, Congress has already irrelevated itself in the eyes of much of the public, particularly by failing to address the survival needs of the Lower Orders. This is a bipartisan failure. And it’s devastating.

The courts don’t want to get involved for obvious reasons.

When taking to the streets is the only other option, we have to understand that street protest can work, though most of the time it’s ignored. It works when protest shuts down the ability of the governing class to govern, or when credible threats of bloodshed and violence come to the forefront.

Nice, polite protest will fail every time.

I have little doubt that we will see violence and bloodshed in connection with the protests scheduled for Jan 6 and onward, and in some places, we are likely to see government basically shut down due to protest. Police will refuse to fight the protesters. There’s likely to be a standoff/paralysis in DC with electeds retreating to their bunkers for the duration.

If he’s as smart and clever as the media seems to think he is, Hawley will take full advantage of the chaos and get on the tube constantly. He might try to play a kind of Guaido role without claiming to be president himself. The Dominionists will coalesce behind him or someone else to serve as Interim Leader.

And there we are. There will be no further Trump regime; there will be no Biden regime. There will be an Interim, during which the factions of the Overclass will set aside their differences sufficiently to agree on an authoritarian way forward that assures their prosperous future and tamps down the restive masses.

Most Americans will express their gratitude.

Che, good grief, 83+ million people dropped a protest vote on Biden. If Biden is not inaugurated on January 20, the reaction will not be gratitude. We keep getting told to be gentle and tolerant of the other 73 million idiots. That ends, if this BS doesn’t stop. The talk about sedition and a coup was a willful, conscious attempt to stop this in its tracks, to call it what it is. Y’all think that only the right or hardcore left have balls. Hawley will not be president, not this time around.

There were a few acts of right-wing violence. That car-murder at the Charlottesville rally. That young man who came up to Minnesota from Wisconsin ( as I remember) to pleasure-murder a couple of people.

I also wonder how much of the “antifa” violence was really conducted by secret police in antifa disguise . . . . and/or by Trump supporters in antifa disguise. And of course some of the violence was started by police using tear gas and etc. to turn non-violent marches into violent outbreaks. On purpose, in order to be able to accuse marchers of violence.

That said, 73 million Trump voters do vastly outgun 83 million Biden voters. If 83 million Biden voters really think they can get successfully violent on 73 million Trump voters who outgun the Biden voter community by hundreds of times, then the Bidenists will experience a “Darwin moment”.

So perhaps the Bidenists should think of some other way to express and apply their displeasure, should Hawley be able create a “Kerensky transition” to something or other.

The fact that people here seem to believe that a modern American civil war would be some romantic blue vs. grey nonsense and not Syria is certainly something.

Of course Trump and the Republicans would want violence. They would want the kind of violence which makes good TV and good campaign ads. This would give them lots of TV crime footage to run tough on.

FDRism would have to find or create a new party to express itself through. Right now, every little dissident group would want to have or be its own party. The best thing is for all of them to give it a try, and let Darwin pick the winners. Perhaps some New Deal Revivalists could call themselves Real Democrats and start a party called the Real Democrat Party. Let the Democratic Party sue them in court. It would generate more publicity.

They could make the FDR-face the emblem of their party. Let the Democrats sue over that, too. Their mission could be to “bring back the New Deal”. They would have to spend years on patient education first. Thousands of little Teach Ins all over the country on what the New Deal even was and what-all was done during those times. And then all about how the Upper Classes spent decades working to abolish the New Deal step by step. And then suggestions about how to restore the New Deal step by step, and also adapt the concept to current times and conditions.

Ian Welsh has written that people wanting improvement have to have a convincing theory and story about that . . . out there and ready to go for when large numbers of people start searching for one. The New Deal itself is a very convincing theory ( proved and tested) and a good story to re-publicise.

And lets don’t forget about CREEP’s actions on behalf of Nixon in 1972. The disciples of Segretti and Stone are still out there, and they too would want telegenic violence for Trump to run tough-on-crime with.

It all fits right in with the TrumpCo antifa narrative.

Blue mayors cracked down on OWS because OWS targetted the Biggest Money OverClass Overlords specifically. And Obama led the crackdown by co-ordinating all the on-the-spot crackdown with the mayors. As part of earning the big tubmans he planned to earn after leaving office.

And of course the police violence against marchers to turn them on purpose with malice aforethought into rioters should also be remembered. Demonstrators and marchers themselves should remember it. As well as have their own security and suppression people throughout the demonstration and march to savagely beat down the first people they see picking up a brick or a rock in order to head off such secret police provocations.

Perhaps every single antifa who shows up at an event should be shot. That way, if some of them are secret police or secret Republicans, they won’t get away with it. ” Kill them all. Jedgar Hoover will know his own.”

This:

“violence always works against the incumbent, if it didn’t, blue mayors would have cracked down on it like they did the with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests during Obama.”

Should have been:

“violence always works against the incumbent, if it didn’t, blue mayors would[n’t] have cracked down on it like they did the with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests during [the] Obama [regime].

To the rest of your reply DC? Hey, when you guarantee that you’ll vote neoD no matter how unappealing the neoD’s shit-sandwich…well..you are not in a position to articulate an alternative as you have already said TINA!

There is only one non-violent* path to reform that I see and that is to vote strategically, something neither party [or anybody who posts here] wants you to consider.

*And unlike Ian, I do not think violence within the American Body Politic will yield a result superior to the inexorable decline I have been forced to witness over the course of my lifetime. Indeed, Ian indicate that he longs for the complete dissolution of the USA, perhaps he is right, on the other hand I think that the folks hoping for a better life in 395 AD were a little disappointed to find out that it took 1,500 years to make good on the promises bandied about during Rome’s undoing.

@ S Brennan,

Strategic/tactical voting makes good sense. That is why I invaded the Republican primary in 2012 to vote for Romney . . . . so that if Romney got nominated, I would feel free to vote against Obama, which I did.

In 2016 I was out of state so I couldn’t vote for Sanders in the primary. If the primary had been all neoLibDs, I would have voted for Trump in the R primary. In the election I voted for Trump in order to try and defeat the Evil Clinton. This time around I voted for Simple Joe Malarkey and Kamalabama Harris because the TrumpAdmin was doing too much damage to the Bureaus and Agencies for them to absorb any more. We need an EPA which proTECTS the environment, more or less. 4 more years of “deconstruct the Administrative State” would leave us without one. And we need to restore a reality-based awareness of the fact that mass carbon skyflooding leads to certain predicted problems, just as they were predicted.

So sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t give the neoDs my guarantee.

Next primary I plan to invade the R primaries to try getting an R nominated that I could live with as President. That will set me free again to vote some third party, just like I did in 2012.

DC, what you describe here:

“That is why I invaded the Republican primary in 2012 to vote for Romney . . . . so that if Romney got nominated, I would feel free to vote against Obama, which I did.”

is tactical voting, albeit far more sophisticated thinking than 99% of the “blue no matter who” crowd.

To the rest of your comment; with the very real possibility of 12 years of neoD dominance, [2 Biden / 10 Kamala]. I think you should have looked to what would happen to the neoD’s if they had been out of power for 4 more years, 2024 would have been a possible reform year; now, the first opportunity will probably be, 2036 assuming a one term R president at the end of the 12 year reign. The DNC’s power needs constant FEDERAL renewal, the neoD’s neolibralism/neocolonialism has precluded them from many state offices they NEED the Presidency much more than the R’s do. And in all likelihood the neoD’s of the DNC will now have the oval office for 12 years and that may be enough for them to do to the federal government what they did to the party of FDR.

Biden supported Obama’s effort to “grand bargain” away Social Security and they almost made it happen, I look for him to attempt to one up Obama and make a deal with McConnell to do away with it. And that will be all she wrote, once Wall Street controls all retirement funds…you can kiss any hope of restraining big business goodbye..including any environmental concern.

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Eric, Ian’s not the pussy you imply in your comment, he’s a big boy, he can [and does] speak for himself. If Ian’s got a problem, he’s got my email & he’s got my phone number and having known him and commented here for about twelve years I am pretty sure he can use his position without you brown-nosing his ass, now take your haughty verbal bullshit and stuff it where the sun don’t shine.

Few things would make the elites happier than mass withholding of votes. You notice that they throw up obstacles to voting at every opportunity? They want to get rid of the pesky underlings.

“lefties”& “liberals” are the easiest group to bamboozle.

Yeah right. Conservative evangelicals calling for totalitarianism to eliminate “radical liberal socialism” at the behest of kleptocratic overlorss, are more enlightened.