Why The Left Taking Over The Republican Party Is Even Harder Than Taking Over The Democratic Party

I should amend my statement above to note that while results over 70% for Republicans do happen here, they are comparatively rare, and I can’t remember now which Town voted that way in which election, though I do have a memory of it.

My research in recent years indicates that GOP candidates often win 60-something percent of the vote herein SE Mass. in the more conservative towns. Just a footnote to the above, I don’t want to give the impression that over 70% is typical.

Sorry, but the actions of the Dems after losing Iin 2016 leads directly to Republican claims about invalid elections. Clinton may have shown up to the inauguration, but behind the scenes she was spearheading a conspiracy to render the result invalid (if I recall correctly, the very specific explanation was that staffers circled around to Russia as the culprit in abhotel room surrounded by Shake Shack containers). This set the precedent for being to throw a sissy fit when you lose and just claim it was a fake result. This is now the new political borm; it’ll likely happen with every election.

I can’t even in all honesty say that the Democrats walked but the Republicans ran with the idea, because the GOP largely confines itself to just grumbling ‘fake election; not my President’ (gee, sounds familiar), while trying to prove it through slow court cases. Meanwhile the Dems attempted a grand media and spy coup (I’m not anyone other than Lambert Strether at NC ever explored the implications of if they had been successful and effectively turned the ‘intelligence community’ into an entity with veto power over civil elections. Literally an element of fascism at that point).

(And no, January 6 was not a couple attempt. It was a riot of idiots who were surprised when they even got into the building, which we know from the full video evidence they were allowed to do at at least one entrance, and then milled around for a few hours in confusion). At absolute most within that mob were a few people with firmer and more nefarious plans to kidnap senators, but that does not remotely a coup make)

One wonders if ” real Democrats” or “New Deal Reactionaries” or however they like to think of themselves, could conquer and occupy and convert particular state or sub-state regional or local DemParty structures. They would have to keep themselves known only to eachother until they had completed their conquest of the targeted DemParty fort or base or foxhole or position they have targeted for conquest and conversion. Once they had secured their conquest, they could openly reveal themselves as a self-named and self-aware group or tendency and invite like-minded others to join them and consolidate their conquest.

If this could be done at the level of one entire state, then the conquerors of that state’s DemParty could rename it the Real Democrat Party or the Real (Your State Here) Democrat Party. If it could legislate and force ” New Deal Reactionary” or other desired legislation/rules/etc. into being and enforcement in that particular state, perhaps other bunchloads of similar people could achieve similar DemParty conquests in other states.

Enough such state takeovers and they could call themselves the Union of Real State Democrat Parties or some such thing.

They would need from the very start a powerful and effective intelligence/counter-intelligence bureau or division to spot and eject or “exterminate” every single Democrat or Clintonite or Obamacrat or Clintobamacrat or ClintoBidenite or whatever from infiltrating and destroying their new party efforts from within. It would only take one single malignant metastatic clintonoma cell or one infectious Yersiniobama pestis political bacterium to destroy any such new party. So such a new party effort would need to be vigilant and dispassionate about spotting and “exterminating” every single such Clintamination effort.

And still have enough energy left over to pursue the original goal-oriented purpose which would lead such people to make a “new party” or “DemParty conquest effort” to begin with.

(Hopefully such people would not devote all their leisure time to such an effort anyway. Hopefully their primary time investment would be towards building survivalism, and elective politics only after that.)

As stated, hardcore anti-communism, private property, facebook, prejudice… every factor mentioned in the post against the left being able to influence Republicans, is then supercharged by tribalism.

IMHO, breaking through that tribalism is the biggest bugger. It might be possible to do one-on-one. You might even part as friendly disagreers surprised by how many common concerns you both share. But once they’re back amongst their own then all bets are off. They’ll revert right back to groupthink, awaiting the next big stupid idea.

Maybe it’s only the few of us who aren’t traumatized by being shunned by our tribe. We can’t all be self-reliant, personally-responsible, free-thinking, hard-working, American-family-values misanthropes like me. Fortunately, it’s only a minority of the general population who’re doomed to be zombie robots, at that level.

I think there might be another factor at play here, that a lot of Dems really are loons. Instead of targeting mindlessly destructive corporate and plutocratic concentrations of power, it seems they’ll do everything but, including making sure to get suckered into every single low-priority culture war they can. They gotta pick their battles.

Soredemos is right. Since cult conservatives are unethical morons prone to mob thinking, do not give them any ideas! Shhh!! And don’t think that calling their ridiculous riots “coups” will shame them into… shame. We must know that shamelessness is their superpower.

When it comes to powerful and effective intelligence/counter-intelligence bureaus or divisions to spot and eject or “exterminate” every single Democrat or Clintonite or Obamacrat or Clintobamacrat or ClintoBidenite or whatever from infiltrating and destroying New Deal Reactionary party efforts from within, one must always consider the money. We’re all being conditioned that the money is the only thing that matters. Not even status matters, if you’ve got the money. Think of Biden being too senile, but the obviously senile Trump not being senile because he’s got money. New cars, Disneyland, magic drugs… are far more important than doing the right thing for God and country these days. We must consider the money.

I think anyone who has ever done any kind of union organizing or community organizing is familiar with the “one-on-one” problem, which is a compound of political ignorance/disinterest and the ways in which personality shapes attitudes. “Tribalism” aligns people’s political attitudes, almost like an electric current aligns the molecules of an iron bar and Red and Blue become opposing magnets, repelling each other.

Political attitudes — as important as attitudes are to personality — are neither the beginning nor end of politics and political deliberation. Resonating with pre-existing attitudes — attitudes being predictably distributed across demographic groupings — may be a leverage point for propaganda and hardening or softening attitudes can be a goal of propaganda. Still, I think imagining that instilling “right-attitude” should be a primary political goal can start a dangerous game or an impossible game or just a (very doable) long game depending on which particular attitude we are talking about.

After the Second World War, the “authoritarian personality” was medicalized for a time, as if the political problem posed by Germany came down to a curable social psychology of bad attitudes. I think it is still the case, contempt for the “deplorables” is used to justify extreme hostility to populist political campaigns on the basis that the “deplorables” have bad attitudes.

The liberal-left has had so much success in the mass-cultural politics of deploring “bad attitudes” that reactionaries and conservatives find some of their most effective arguments in exaggerating or exacerbating that success by subtly pushing it to greater, more absurd extremes, hoping I suppose that some these culture wars end in a self-immolation of what passes for progressive politics. Biological men in women’s sports because of a linguistic confusion of gender with sex creates an issue where there shouldn’t be an issue, imho.

And, then there is the popular tactic of projecting racism and sexism onto a dimly understood past. This is indulged in by political conservatives pushing predatory economic policy and hoping to de-legitimize progressive economic policy as well as the professional “woke” pushing a successor ideology of ineradicable “original sin”.

I am not ready to sign up for a politics of “right-attitude”, on either side of the Red/Blue divide. I think I sometimes have some insight into how the dynamics work to ignite passions, but mostly I think the gambits I see out there tend to be dishonestly manipulative in their retconning and Manichean story-telling.

Thanks everyone for your comments. There’s a lot to consider above — much that I agree with, and some things that I do not. I would make just a few additional points:

I would just note that I have not called it a “coup” — my own view is that it is some kind of cross between a political riot and an abortive putsch run by fools (not a coup, a putsch), that quite clearly had sympathizers inside the security services. I agree that that is a large and untold story (and not entirely surprising, given the far right proclivity of various “back the blue” types).

So far as the argument above from Soredemos that “the actions of the Dems after losing in 2016 leads directly to Republican claims about invalid elections. Clinton may have shown up to the inauguration, but behind the scenes she was spearheading a conspiracy to render the result invalid (if I recall correctly, the very specific explanation was that staffers circled around to Russia as the culprit in abhotel room surrounded by Shake Shack containers). This set the precedent for being to throw a sissy fit when you lose and just claim it was a fake result. This is now the new political borm; it’ll likely happen with every election.”

My answers to this are several-fold. First, I am in agreement with you that Russiagate was bad, I said so at the time, and I argued to my friends who didn’t really have a problem with it that it was reactionary nonsense based on basically unfalsifiable premises.

But I do not see how it “leads directly” to the GOP deciding that the actual vote counts are wrong, and the electoral vote count must be ceased. What Russiagate did not entail, and what all the Hamilton 68 nonsense (which, notably and happily, did not come to pass) did not entail, was a denial of the actual vote counts. Nor was the argument that the electoral results were facially incorrect and illegal, and that the transfer of power at a legal level was not legitimate, one that the various HRC 2016 ultras made.

One may view this as pedantic or hair-splitting, but I view it as quite serious, this move to denying the legality and factuality of things that are demonstrably both legal and factual.

I would note additionally that an attempt to spin PR against a President based on spurious foreign influence is actually pretty old in the history of the Republic; according to their bitterest detractors, both Jefferson and Adams were the dupes of France and Britain, respectively (short answer: no, they weren’t). Not good, but not new.

What is new, however, is the violent disruption of the legal mechanics of the transfer of power itself, with the single and extremely massively significant exception of the Secession Crisis of 1860-61, which I believe proves my point — the legal mechanics of things matter a great deal.

This is why I say there is a categorical difference between, on the one hand, attempting to use the intelligence community, the press, and a special prosecutor to smear and McCarthyite style slander a candidate and political faction — which is bad! — and on the other hand, a violent storming of and seizure of the seat of the national legislature with the Vice President having to flee for his life before an enraged mob, a mob ginned up to heights of ferocity by no less than the Chief Magistrate himself, who is tasked with seeing that the laws are carried out.

In general, I would like to see a defense or minimization of whatever we want to call it of January 6th that does not rely on “tu quoque” arguments with respect to the Democrats. That defends it on its own positive grounds. Their absence here and elsewhere is notable to me.

Finally, different clue — I agree with and have taken very seriously the idea I believe you and others have raised here, of “Civic life rafts,” which I think of as “civic arks”; one of the themes of Ian and others here is that survivalism must take place in communities, and therefore, I consider my participation in local town meeting politics — which note are not electoral politics, a Town Meeting is a parliamentary body that every registered voter is a member of — quite a strong form of survivalist activity, if that makes sense.

For instance: My town produces a great deal of food (seafood, primarily), and we are used to managing these commons together, and at least with the forms of the law and direct democracy (of course, rich oyster farmers dominate small oyster farmers, we aren’t utopia). I see this becoming more, not less important.

I would also just say, in general: things are more mixed in the offline world than in the online world. It’s really hard to tell a New Dealer from a DLC Democrat in real life until you apply pressure of events and crisis. Most of them just like every Democrat, no matter what; only events pressure them do we see if FDR or Clinton comes out.

Same is true on the GOP side. Is this person Everett Dirksen or Ronald Reagan? I will say the center right-hard right fight locally is the most bitter and interesting. They hate each other. 50 votes of thousands cast separate the center right and far right State Senate candidates locally, e.g.

Thanks again to all for your comments.

another example of the ineffectual nature of “right-attitude” politics: the politics of universal health care.

there are factions that will push for the slogan/concept “health care should be a human right” as if universalizing that belief is the goal of the political campaign.

there are a lot of reasons — taken altogether wildly contradictory — to favor some form of universal health care. small-d democratic politics requires papering over those contradictions and making all the arguments that can secure support and/or deflect opposition. in any democratic deliberation there’s a lot of more agreeing-to-disagree than there is kumbaya.

trying to instill “right-attitudes”, such as “health should be a human right”, imho, is often motivated as much by laziness with regard to fleshing out more prosaic nuts-and-bolts arguments as it is a desire to signal personal virtue. too much of either motivation effective campaigning and organizing.

Bruce Wilder,

I have several responses to your statement above. The first comes in response to your statement that “Puffing out their chests, as you do as well, and pretentiously asserting a ‘categorical difference’ is just more posturing, not a real argument.”

How is this not a real argument? My argument is that these actions by the Dems post 2016 and the Republicans post 2020 are in different _categories_: one is violent, the other is not. The plain evidence that one was violent, and the other was not, is before us all; unless we are going down postmodernism road and going to maintain that Hamilton 68 or Russiagate was just as “violent” as the storming of the Capitol.

I say, no: they are both bad, but they are different categories; they are different in kind and in degree, in my view. The ways they are different is that no physical force was used in one, and it was in the other. I don’t see how you overcome this elementary difference between the two examples. So, yes, this is an argument, it’s simply one you have difficulty meeting.

As far as Tucker Carlson et al’s defense of 1/6/21 goes: there were sixty-some adjudications of the claims of vote fraud and electoral irregularities, largely by GOP-appointed judges; none were proven to have any merit by any court. I don’t see how Carlson et al. overcome the fact that the riot which they defend was not, unlike the Black Lives Matters riots of 2020, based in some actual material grievance; it was, in short, entirely made up. This is surely germane.

On that notion of made-up, you write above “I do not see objective proof that voting and vote-counting were not fraudulent in many places, including my locality (Los Angeles County) where the vote count is designed to be impossible to audit or verify properly.”

I’m not sure how much in earnest you are here; I remain of the perhaps old-fashioned view that we have to have proof _for_ something, and that not being able to prove something isn’t true is, well, not how reasoning works. If there is evidence of fraud, by all means, bring it forward. But not having evidence something didn’t happen is, in short, nothing.

As for the idea that Trump was asking that crowd to be “peaceful” and restrained: that is belied by the timeline of that day. At 1:30 pm, the Capitol Police lose control of the Capitol. Trump is aware of this fact. He tweets at 2:24 pm:

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

Subsequent to that, according to the Executive Summary of the Jan. 6th Committee report, “The sentiment expressed in President Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet, already present in the crowd, only grew more powerful as the President’s words spread. Timothy Hale-Cusanelli—a white supremacist who expressed Nazi sympathies—heard about the tweet while in the Crypt around 2:25 p.m., and he, according to the Department of Justice, ‘knew what that meant.’ Vice President Pence had decided not to keep President Trump in power.

Other rioters described what happened next as follows:

‘Once we found out Pence turned on us and that they had stolen the
election, like officially, the crowd went crazy. I mean, it became a
mob. We crossed the gate.
Then we heard the news on [P]ence . . . And lost it . . . So we
stormed.'” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack; https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-REPORT/pdf/GPO-J6-REPORT.pdf)

I don’t see how Trump avoids culpability given these facts. The degree of special pleading which I’m-not-really-defending-Trump-but-here-I-go-defending-him interlocutors, whether on this site or others, rely upon is truly remarkable, and would not be extended to the Democrats by these same interlocutors (note: I am unenrolled).

Since you’ve engaged in a number of ad hominems above (“Puffed up their chests, as you do”; baselessly impugning me as “disingenuous” — note that I say above that the “absence [of non tu quoque arguments] here and elsewhere is notable to me. ” I didn’t say, as you purport I did, that “[these] arguments haven’t been made” ), I think it appropriate to engage in some pro-hominems: I’m an academic historian of America from the colonial era through 1865, and to say that the Secession Crisis was did not involve the Confederates “disput[ing] the national vote count or the validity of the Electoral College poll. There was a lot of fear of the potential for violent interference with the ceremonial transfer of power, but nothing of the sort happened,” as you do above, I believe misses the point of the Secession Crisis entirely.

They didn’t dispute the legal mechanics of the transfer of power because they were disputing the Union itself, and they were doing so, in large part, because the electoral results were ones they did not accept as legitimate. We can see this by examining the Alabama Ordinance of Secession dated Jan. 11th, 1861, which reads, in part:

“Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section, is a political wrong of so insulting and manacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security, therefore:

Be it declared and ordained by the people of the State of Alabama, in Convention assembled, That the State of Alabama now withdraws, and is hereby withdrawn from the Union known as “the United States of America,” and henceforth ceases to be one of said United States, and is, and of right ought to be a Sovereign and Independent State.” (https://web.archive.org/web/20190809080450/https://www.constitution.org/csa/ordinances_secession.htm#South%20Carolina)

So, no, they aren’t disputing the electoral college because they are doing something much worse and bigger, exploding the Union itself.

Finally, to say that Lincoln was a “conservative” in the context of the Election of 1860 betrays a remarkably tendentious and ahistorical understanding of the politics of the 1850s-1860s and the rise of the Third Party System.

Lincoln is a part of the moderate wing of one of the more radical parties in American history, the original Republican Party. To say he was “a conservative” is simply not supported by the evidence, since that entire party was devoted to undoing the prior political order, the Second Party System of Jackson vs. the Whigs. “Conservative” is, first of all, an ahistorical term in the way it is used above; if we are even to use it, which we shouldn’t, but if we are, in 1860 “conservatives” are people like Stephen Douglass, or Buchanan or Pierce, or the late Daniel Webster — people who see essentially avoiding the question of slavery as the chief goal of US politics. The Republican Party, whether led by dark horse Lincoln or by Seward, the original leading candidate, is thus in no sense “conservative” here, and I’m not sure, given the realities of US politics in the 1850s-1860s, on what basis anyone could fairly say it was. They are reformers, and they aren’t burning the Constitution like some, but “conservative” simply isn’t accurate.

Garrison was a radical, to be sure; and his radicalism was massively ineffective until coupled with the political power of the Republican Party and the military power of the Union Army.

I think in general a lot of people have let their anger at the Democratic Party, which is justified, cause them to lose sight of the fact that the GOP are in fact vicious reactionaries who are worse. Perhaps spending more time among these latter would prove clarifying.

*sorry, H_____ is one of the last hold outs _locally_ in not adopting the CPA; its adoption is far from universal among the 351 towns and cities of Massachusetts.

The BLM riots were not political violence in the way Jan 6 was because material interests were involved? The looting absolved the Democrats?

If I were to say that ( insert name here) is a one-shtick phony, that could well be not-publishable on the grounds of being ad hominem and personally insulting. But if I were to note that a visible pattern of advancing and re-advancing fake non-arguments and offering irrelevant rhetorical tricks in order to lure the unwary into engaging with velcro decoy tarbabies set up by the side of the road is the visible sign of a ” one-shtick phony” in action, would that also be unpublishable as potentially ad hominem and potentially personally insulting?

@Eric Anderson — agreed on the strange disconnect, where someone is pretty rational on other issues, and then it’s like you turn a switch on with respect to state or national politics, and suddenly our extremely cautious moderateDem governor is a Communist (she’s not).

@Glasshammer — I think you’re really onto something with honor culture. It’s part of their fixation on being able to use guns in personal defense, which is basically a pre-industrial, honor culture attitude — I think Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s book on Southern honor culture is interesting here.

@Mark Level — This is undoubtedly true, on the whole: “The Dimmie voters are passive suckers who won’t just vote for, but will sincerely “love” whatever sellout, soulless ShitLib dogshit the party (s)elects for the top of the ticket. ”

I will have to vote for Harris/Walz, especially comparing the Democratic and GOP platforms, but I think it’s important that we not delude ourselves about them. Whereas many PMC friends just went in whole-hog for the “vibes” nonsense. The reduction of politics to pop cultural tribalism is a real problem. This isn’t football or Taylor Swift; I’d like arguments, not memes.

@Willy — I certainly imagine they are buying bot subscribers, on both sides. I think one of the key differences is that many contemporary liberals I meet are just so conflict-averse they have difficulty advocating for and defending their own position.

Whereas the conservatives/hard right have no problem with that, though they have serious and basically disqualifying flaws with respect to empiricism and rational argumentation. But that’s hard to make clear if no one will engage them (I do have rules about that, which are basically similar to “standing”; meaning I argue against them when they are in my town or on an issue that crosses town lines; one can’t argue against all right-wingers everywhere all the time, we all have limited resources).

I wrote a long, more reflective comment that I imagined would precede the BLM comment. Lost in the aether I guess — no regret, since it wasn’t that great, but it does leave the BLM comment as something of a lone potshot. Glad it landed, though.

Bruce, congrats on your attempt at a potshot (by which I understand: a glib and meritless distortion of someone else’s argument).

The answer to a simple question would help this discussion, which I did ask above, but haven’t received an answer from you on: do you believe the claims which underlay the Jan. 6th riots — e.g. the assertion by Trump et al. that the 2020 election was stolen — are true?

There is a missing “jump” in my third paragraph in the second clause of the second sentence. My apologies!

I knew of a “far leftist” commenter who after being unable to persuade rationally, began ad hominem-ing profusely. When I told them that behavior caused them to lose the argument in the eyes of many, I became their next target. Sadly, it was too late for me to go by the handle “ad hominem.” With “Willy”, they had less to work with.