You people need to stop living in a fantasy universe where Dems will ask good questions at a confirmation hearing and voters will suddenly be educated and something will come of it. It will be vaguely reported as “heated” and nothing will come of it.
Attending the hearing won’t sway anyone, very little will come out of it, it would normalize the process as politics as usual. The public already opposes the nomination and it doesn’t really matter. Doing something dramatic and splashy is better politics.
Because I’m old enough to remember the Kavanaugh hearings, I realize that asking tricksy questions in a confirmation proceeding actually makes no difference at all and will be barely be reported.
People are arguing that the Kavanaugh hearings helped Dems, because they've forgotten there were TWO sets of Kavanaugh hearings, and the first were total nonentities that had no impact and were forgotten, despite Kavanaugh theoretically being skewered by Harris and others.
It doesn't matter what happens in a confirmation hearing; barely anyone is watching. To extent any of this matters at all, it's the secondary coverage - i.e., how does it get reported in the evening news. A boycott makes more difference there.
I think one of the worst pathologies of our time is the conviction among so many powerful people that "being reasonable" and "acting powerless" are the same thing - that reacting to events in any way, or attempt to effect change on the world, is inherently unserious.
It's a huge part of what has left our politics so paralyzed in response to things like Trump. "Wow, Trump's bad," some of the most powerful people on earth say. "It's crazy that he's running for reelection after attempting to overthrow the government. Hope he doesn't win!"
Something about the endless bubble of screens and news we live in has trained our society's leaders to believe they're not really part of the world, just observers of it. They've absorbed the passivity of the cable TV watcher or Twitter commenter.
Reorienting the legal system to protect white people, regardless of whether it’s done under the guise of anti-anti-racism or whatever, is effectively the restoration of formal white supremacy. It was always inevitable that Trump’s far right would end up here.
This is the beating heart of Trump’s politics: taking the inchoate resentment of reactionary white people terrified that they are losing their racial privileges and using it to create a regime where those people can endlessly exact revenge on groups they believe subordinate.
“White reactionaries incorrectly believe they have been discriminated against and simply want to compete on level ground” - given that they ALREADY are competing with an advantage, what would a legal regime privileging this group look like?
Biden has been the most progressive policy president in 50 years or more. He's enacted massive stimulus and climate bills, he's governed with a full-employment mindset that has created a booming economy for workers, he's appointed progressives across the federal government.
He's made great court appointments, stood up for labor unions like no president in history, and stood by an anti-monopoly FTC chair that has big business howling in anger. He's cancelled tons of student and tried to cancel more. He's done SO MUCH.
It is ALSO true that his opponent is undisguised fascist and rapist who previously tried to overthrow the government, campaigning on a platform of, quite literally, dictatorship, bloody revenge, and concentration camps for immigrants and other perceived undesirables.
Again, this is not complicated: the fringe of people who are going to sit out this election to punish Biden from the left is quite small. But those people are noisy and contribute to a larger sense of apathy, that both parties are the same. And there are a LOT of apathetic voters
"Both parties are the same, this election doesn't matter, I won't vote or will just vote third party" is a very stupid idea that nonetheless seems to have some intrinsic appeal to a lot of people, and has repeatedly caused catastrophic election results (Bush 2000, Trump 2016)
We were able to beat Trump in 2020 in large part because there was widespread recognition of the stakes of the election (that's why turnout was the highest in history). But right now the public discourse is full of very loud voices playing DOWN the stakes
It’s forgotten now but Dems spent the first 2.5 years of the Biden presidency intentionally slow-walking or closing down investigations of Trump while sternly declaring that they were “looking forward, not back”
The problem here was incredibly obvious at the time: if no one actually did the work of targeting Trump for his many outrageous acts, none of them would stick to him.
Remember that Mueller handed Garland an open-and-shut case against Trump, and instead of taking action, he simply let it expire. Dems didn’t investigate Trump and Russia. Only Jack Smith finally moved forward on an ACTUAL COUP ATTEMPT.