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On these 71/72 analogies, a key issue. Back in I think 1971 Pat Buchanan, then a young aide and speechwriter to Nixon wrote a memo to the president and his top advisors in which he said - and this is close to verbatim but from memory - ‘we need to cut the country ...
2/ in half and I believe we will have the bigger half.” The big story of the next couple decades in American politics but certainly for 1971 and 1972 is that Buchanan was right. Nixon’s political strategy was abt polarizing the country - around the war, around race ...
3/ around crime. His half was bigger. Watergate upended that briefly. But only briefly. The logic of the Trump presidency is to continually divide the country, maximize polarization. The difference is that Trump’s half is clearly the smaller half. This was true even in victory.
4/ The key is that in our current political moment, especially in the senate and to a degree in the electoral college and the House the smaller half can hold electoral power. The whole logic of Trumpism is light the Trumpian base on fire and keep it at a boiling point while ...
5/ trying as much as possible to demoralize, exhaust and gaslight the opposition, psych everyone out, trigger spoiler third parties and more. There’s really no 12 dimensional chess. Every day is another Trump tally. More racism and rage to keep his diehards boiling.
6/ It all comes down to whether the bigger half votes and votes enough to overcome the structural advantages the Trump GOP holds in the senate electoral college and even the House. The electoral college creates affirmative action preferences for Trumpers. So Democrats ...
7/ have to overcome those tilted odds. But they can. Because there are more of them.
