Still catching up!
Dumb Lib Take: “The debt ceiling was originally a way to prevent fiscal apocalypses! So anyone who’s using it for brinksmanship now is just a poopy-head.” Look. The debt ceiling may have started out a certain way, but pretending that it hasn’t changed in its political role is stupid, naive, and borderline misleading.
We’re the Left, folks. It’s a really dumb look for us to be ignorantly arguing that something which has clearly changed, totally should just always be viewed the way it originally was, all in service of some other ideological commitments we have (welfare spending, in this case). I have far more respect for the “Abolish The Debt Ceiling Because It Was Stupid Anyways” crowd.
Sinema’s Bad Theory of Leverage: There’s this theory going around liberal circles that you should use all available levers of power to do X. Usually X is “address climate change” or some other priority someone’s screeching for.
In fact, this is essentially an echo of how filibuster abuse got escalated! Activists got fed up waiting for changes in public opinion, so they pressured their congresspeople to act more unilaterally — if you can abuse the filibuster to stop this one bill we really hate, you should, and every time the bar lowers just a little bit.
And this is precisely the danger of not looking too far in the past, lest we uncover something that tells us the struggle is far deeper and less directly linked to the thing we say we want right now. All of this is downstream of the critical American political crisis: When you can’t get shit done “the normal way”, you lose patience with that way. Everyone’s just always waiting for their X. And now, it’s evolved beyond that into pure reflex! IE, people just don’t bother waiting anymore, because that’s the new norm.
Not sure if I’m really getting through here. But it’s annoying to watch everyone rationalizing their latest tactical moves as if there’s always been some great wisdom to them, instead of it all just being more clicking along the teeth of the ratchet of our national doom spiral.
What WOULD it take to get the GOP off Trumpism? I think this is a great thought experiment, because thus far, most commentary has focused on how Trump has slipped through each “this would end any other politician’s career” scandal, and after 6 years of this bullshit, I think our capacities for astonished shock have long since been overloaded.
The best I can figure is to answer the hypothetical with another hypothetical: “What if Texas flipped?” After all, Texas is the holy grail because it’s 2 Senators and enough EVs for Democrats to keep winning the presidency. Far be it from me to predict that this Of Course Would Lead To An Age Of Democratic Dominance; rather, I’m humbly satisfied with just saying that threatens to establish said dominance so much that Republicans would have to take dramatic action to counter it.
I’m also under no illusions that “dramatic action” means anything remotely like “what Democrats think the GOP should do”, which of course is “be more like Democrats”. It could accelerate the GOP’s insurrection/plot to steal 2024 timetable, for instance! But I do think that Texas is a good starting place for thinking about the downfall of Trumpism, because either way — whether the GOP remakes itself, or ignites a Trumpist insurrection — Trumpism would be dead. Fascism generally doesn’t win in countries like the US with strong democratic traditions.
On second thought, fascism did sort of win Reconstruction in the South. So if I’m absolutely wrong in my previous paragraph, then what it probably looks like is a Third Jim Crow where a nationally weak but regionally strong Trumpist sub-state is established in the US, and the rest of the country resigns itself to move ahead.