Thread by @mcjulie

It all makes sense if you realize "somebody who wants to try being a little more inclusive" is a "left-wing radical" to these people.

https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1468007199347810306

Notice, in the whole thread, his only "evidence" of these supposedly all-powerful left wing radicals taking over is the term "latinx" coming into wider use.

That's it! That's the left wing radical takeover! This one word!

The right is always doing this particular pattern — take a single inclusive gesture, give it a “that’s outrageous!” spin, use it as evidence that the left is out of control AND all-powerful.

Note: When I say they give it a “that’s outrageous!” spin, I’m talking about the Reader’s Digest feature.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1382089404018151426

I haven’t read Reader’s Digest in years, but I wonder if they’re still pushing the same middle-of-the-road conservatism and how that kind of thing flies in the Trump era. They usually tried for a “wholesome” vibe which… you know, doesn’t fit the modern Republicans AT ALL

I’m still a bit gobsmacked by how readily & thoroughly the “we’re evangelicals, the smilingest, goodiest-of-goody-two-shoes you’ve ever seen” embraced foul-mouthed old “grab ‘em” Trump — WITHOUT losing their “everybody else is a degenerate sinner” attitude, no less.

This tweet has been playing with my mind all afternoon.

https://twitter.com/leedrutman/status/1467956937379692547

Because it’s easy to imagine scenarios that would improve American democracy, but hard to imagine any of them actually happening.

For example, my idea for Boop News, an anti-Fox-News with actual foxes — I think a true pro-democracy antidote to Fox News WOULD help, but how would such a thing come about? Who would pay for it? Rich people?

Rich people don’t care about Democracy. Republicans slip ‘em a tax cut to look the other way, and they do. I mean, if George Soros or Bill Gates wants to prove me wrong, I’m ready, but I’m not holding my breath, you know?

Another thing that would help — an inverse of the right wing evangelical movement. But what would that even be? How could you replicate the unity and power of the evangelical church with something like a “pro democracy club”?

I mean, the evangelicals will tell you that you have to vote for Donald Trump or literally go to hell, how do we compete with that?

I used to think we had SOME chance to peel off centrist “reasonable” Republicans as their party got loonier & more fascist but that shows NO sign of happening. Instead, formerly reasonable-seeming Republicans have gone all in on the loony extremism.

We need some kind of youth movement, that’s for sure. Younger people voting, running for office, becoming politically aware. BUT there’s a whole “politics is a machine” aspect to contend with, which favors rich, old, white & male — so it also favors Republicans.

We also need Democrats — the ones with the biggest platforms — to stop treating “bipartisanship” as a good in itself and take more of an attitude like “we’re happy to work with our Republican colleagues, if they’re REASONABLE but this stuff is NOT REASONABLE”

But do you think Democratic politicians, as a whole, are going to do that? The “bipartisanship” instinct runs DEEP, they were trained to do it back in the 1980s and they’re old, they find it hard to change.

And we ABSOLUTELY need the mainstream “neutral” media to stop doing that balancer thing, because as the Republicans go completely off the deep end, the “balance” point keeps getting more bizarre, fascist, and dysfunctional.

Are they going to do that?

Seems doubtful.

The road to fascism is a lot like that math problem with the lilies on the pond, you know the one, where they double in number every day?

By the time people are even willing to believe it’s a problem, the pond is already half covered, and the next day it’s finished.

We have all these institutions, powers, narratives, etc. — they were put in place with the end goal of a US white Christian fascism. That’s what the religious right ALWAYS wanted. They weren’t subtle about it!

The religious right was so incredibly unsubtle about their end goal that Margaret Atwood could write a speculative fiction novel ***published in 1985*** about a fascist patriarchal Christian dystopia that differs from the religious right’s playbook only in the particulars.

A Canadian, she missed the specifically racist aspect of their vision, but, you know, she was meant to. They tried to keep their racism under a bushel until Trump came along, but now they’re gonna let it shine.

So, the unfortunate truth is that if you want to save democracy TODAY you kind of have to go back in time forty years and make very different choices during the Reagan era.

What can we do TODAY?
Well, it would HELP if we stopped using the Reagan-era Republican-enabling playbook, but even THAT is apparently too much to ask of a bunch of old white people, so I’m not optimistic about our chances.

But! If anything will save us, it’s getting young people involved. Some kind of “good citizen” movement, maybe.

Also maybe a little “your parents and grandparents screwed you over big time, here’s how to get revenge by saving democracy”

Our biggest problem and our biggest area for hope is the same: most people, most of the time, aren’t paying THAT much attention.

They’ve got their hands full managing their own lives and tend to assume SOMEBODY is taking care of the bigger-picture stuff.

So there’s tremendous power in getting large numbers of people to pay attention to something — the job of the news media. Unfortunately, that power is being used by Fox News exclusively for evil.

Which kind of leads me back to my “parades for everything” idea

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1463501482125234181