Media, hot off years of self-flagellation over supposedly missing the story of 2016 election, is missing the story of the 2020 election, which is not about any horse race, but the rapid turn towards violent conspiratorial totalitarianism in Trump's millions-strong base.
Journalists are so addicted to the "Who's up in Florida? What's fundraising look like?" style of coverage, that they're continuing to obsess over it while prominent allies of the president call for violent purges and the seizing of ballot boxes.
Trump himself is echoing this rhetoric, saying he can't lose without fraud, talking about "insurrection." It's dismissed as unserious chatter because it doesn't fit into the horse-race frame. If you reduce all of politics to a 538 poll model, this stuff looks like so much noise.
America's political punditry industrial complex has been a dead weight on journalism for many years, slowly taking over newsrooms.
But now, its inability to comprehend any information that doesn't affect swing-state polling is actively blinding us to an impending disaster.
To put it very bluntly, here's how our media works right now:
Trump: "I can't legitimately lose the election. Anyone who opposes this is an insurrectionist. Retribution killings are necessary. "
Media: "Is this important? That depends on how Florida swing voters react to it."
The election does not supersede all other questions of law or morality or society. It's just a process conducted by our government, as one part of that government. It's totally backwards to ignore attacks on the whole system in favor of focusing on the minutiae of the election.
There is no rational justification for the journalistic primacy of election coverage.
What's happening is that a lot of our pundits are, essentially, sports fans. And the sport they are fans of is "elections." And like a lot of sports fans, they've totally lost perspective.
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The story of 2024 is this: Trump had a plan to destroy US government called Project 2025, which had, literally, not a typo, 4% approval. He lied constantly and said he wouldn't do it.
Then he entered office and immediately implemented AN EVEN MORE EXTREME VERSION OF IT.
There is not a single example in American history of a president doing something like this: having a secret agenda that's incredibly, unbelievably unpopular, spending the entire campaign pretending it's fake, and then, upon winning, going "psyche!" and embracing it.
It is the greatest political lie ever told in American history. An entire campaign on false pretenses. Literal cartoon supervillain behavior: waiting until you get in office and implementing a comic-book plan to annihilate US government virtually overnight.
Dems can demand a rollback of the Supreme Court ICE racial profiling case. It’s a trivial legislative fix. It poses little political risk to them. It protects 68 million people from state persecution. It protects basic constitutional values. No government funding without this.
This is a bare-minimum demand, something any decent person concerned about ICE’s campaign of terror against Latinos should support. There is no reason - none - to leave in place a dangerous rule that allows masked men to brutalize innocent workers for the crime of being brown.
We probably can’t make Democrats fight for our entire wishlist of protections against Trump, to their discredit. But this is narrow. This is simple. We can insist that they make this one clear demand.
Been reading Hitler's rise. So many entities - business, right-wing parties, unions - struck deals with the Nazis after he became chancellor, where he promised to preserve elements of the old system. Then months later he invariably broke them and jailed or killed those people.
Hitler never won sweeping majorities - he secured total power by convincing everyone else that they were better off accommodating his regime rather than resisting the Nazis' nonstop defiance of the law. But once they acquiesced on the law not mattering, he could just kill them.
It never seemed to occur to the many opponents of a Hitler dictatorship - which included everyone from the huge Social Democratic left to many far-right Nationalists - that he was playing by different rules, and that his words and deals meant nothing and would protect nothing.
There were two fundamental problems with the Minneapolis city convention yesterday. First, you had a lot of technical and procedural issues that led to the convention doing essentially no business for the first eleven hours and fifteen minutes, except one confusing ballot.
That ballot was a mess because many people could not tell whether or not their vote counted and received no confirmation of having voted, and despite being an electronic ballot, took hours to resolve and announce.
The results of that ballot suggested that an endorsement was possible but by no means inevitable, and certainly didn’t suggest a huge 2/3s majority for any candidate, which is what would be necessary to throw the rules out and race forward.
I am increasingly convinced that the thing that has driven politics insane is the growing ability of people to find ways to validate their beliefs, no matter how incorrect and irrational. It started in right-wing media but has become central to all political discussion.
Anyone can believe whatever they like and for the most part will never be confronted or challenged. Instead they’re likely to be funneled into or self-select into a social environment where those views are supported, treated as obvious, new facts are invented to support them.
You are encouraged to lie to yourself and endless resources will be provided to ensure that you can. Challenging other people’s false beliefs is deemed elitist. As a result everyone’s politics ends up mirroring whatever assumptions or resentments are lurking in their heart.
It’s clear that if the Holocaust happened today in America huge swaths of MAGA would describe it as “based,” say “this is what we voted for,” and do the “oh are you gonna cry, lib?” routine.
There’s zero reason their gleeful celebration of brutal deportations wouldn’t extend to actual extermination. The psychological mechanism is identical: they tell themselves morals are for suckers and empathy is for losers, so immortality and cruelty become a proactive good.
It’s the politics of sadism - hurting people for pleasure. Do we truly believe that they’d draw the line at killing? Frankly they’ve ALREADY killed and didn’t care at all.