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Will Stancil Profile picture
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11 Jan, 5 tweets, 2 min read
"People agree Jan. 6 was bad but are very confused about whether or not to connect it to the current Republican Party or why we're still talking about it" is a failure of the Democratic Party, not an intrinsic property of moderate swing voters
Never forget that the total non-scandal of "Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State during a terror attack in an obscure Libyan city and received emails about it" turned into years-long albatross for Democrats. That wasn't inevitable. Republicans DID that.
Democrats can do things too! I promise! They've just adopted a passive paint-by-numbers politics, instead.
The problem here isn't that people are cool with authoritarianism, corruption, or coups. It's that people's politics are not self-executing! Voters will struggle to react to terrible things if the leaders of the other side indicate it's business-as-usual.
This idea of political homeostasis is killing us, the expectation that the body politic should naturally fight back if the GOP goes too far right. "Either it'll fix itself or it can't be fixed" is a convenient way to rationalize inaction, but a lousy way to solve any problem.

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More from @whstancil

Will Stancil Profile picture
13 Jan
Basically just a broken record at this point, but the problem facing Democrats, most fundamentally, is that they're a gerontocracy
It's not just that the people in charge are old (but they are so, so old), it's that they THINK old. And by that I don't just mean that they're more conservative than they should be. It's that they're stuck in a version of America that no longer exists
They still envision America as a country dominated by Archie Bunker types (which it arguably was, in their youth), and think the key to politics is pandering to those Archie Bunker types. They still envision America as a place where liberals have to hide their views
Read 16 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
12 Jan
Pretty wild how our medical system is experiencing a historic meltdown and the main thing the political system is worried about is that any efforts to fix it will be perceived as annoying alarmism
As someone who has studied a lot of history, I've always been fascinated by how leaders could blunder into disasters that were evident in the moment, shielded by nothing but groupthink and conventional wisdom. Now we get to watch it happen in real time!
Again, stories like these are rocketing all over social media, and the surge is hitting every place in the country. You'd think the party that deeply believes its electoral fortunes are tied to health care would be a little more proactive.
Read 5 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
12 Jan
In polls, 75% of Americans say they wear a mask always or sometimes. Even if the real number is lower, you still reduce transmission by making it easier to mask, and using higher-quality masks. Acting like masks are only popular "on certain corners of Twitter" is outrageous.
Honestly, a perfect example of how liberal smugness cripples liberal politics. Too many DC Dems WANT to believe many or most Americans are simply unreachable mouth-breathers - it excuses their own failures, rationalizes inaction, and makes them feel superior, in a single stroke.
This isn't hard, there's a massive pandemic killing 12,000 people a week that's spreading through the air. Mail people masks because maybe it'll help. If it doesn't, points for trying.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
11 Jan
One of the lessons of the pandemic has been that it’s often the people with the most advantages who will complain the loudest at the smaller inconveniences.
Your neighbor’s house is burning down. Don’t be the guy who keeps trying to point out the fire engine has double-parked your Range Rover.
And then invariably it becomes “Oh, you’re ENJOYING this, you’re addicted to it,” because it’s inconceivable that lots of people are totally miserable but understand that sometimes life is just hard and bad and you gotta push through and make do so other people don’t die
Read 7 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
10 Jan
I'm just repeating myself at this point, but the existence of vaccines should not delete all the non-vaccine options from the policy menu for COVID mitigation, especially when you consider that the 75% of Americans interested in trying to mitigate COVID are already vaccinated.
We have to stop thinking about COVID mitigation in terms of "fairness and unfairness," and start thinking of it in terms of "problems and tools for addressing those problems."
Yes, vaccinating the remaining quarter of the population would be ideal. We should absolutely crack down on the unvaccinated however possible. But we have strong reason to believe that many of those people will resist getting vaccinated. That is just a harsh reality.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
9 Jan
The charter school lobby here in Minnesota is shameless. Our charters are openly segregated - they’re much more segregated than traditional schools, and sell themselves as racially exclusive. They’ve adopted the Orwellian term “culturally affirming” to defend this practice.
It has been clear since Brown v. Board of Education that you cannot operate public schools in the US and hang a sign over the door saying “This school is for black kids. That school is for white kids. This other school is for Asian kids.” But that’s what our charter schools do.
It’s a huge scandal happening in plain sight. Traditional MN K-12 education is segregated, and the state should be required to desegregate. But what’s happening with some charters is on another level entirely. It’s a restoration of Jim Crow thinking and astonishingly illegal.
Read 4 tweets

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