A combination of appealing to the rank and file's better angles and social ostracism for the pundits glorifying state violence might restore decency in American politics
I liked the discussion, but not the way it ended. What's fundamentally important isn't that the bad guys get what they deserve, but that the good guys win: win rule of law, win democracy, win safety, and win common prosperity. Hypothetically, if a court or tribunal or Congress finds that Trump or his minions committed crimes (though remember that the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court preemptively ensured that Trump will not face charges for anything he has done as president or will do in the future), the very same rhetorical tricks and media empires that convinced people to ignore court findings in the past will simply do so again.
Trump is a convicted felon, but Trump said that all his trials were "witch hunts" so the influencers did what they always do: they made Trump's claims into the gospel truth. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am sure that yearning for "repercussions" won't help us find the answer.
We need to fairly tax the wealthy and the corporations to create more livable wages, more affordable housing, less poverty, get Medicare for all. Until the government works for all the people, it will not work at all!
Charlie, give me a break! You are not addressing the gender issue. These whiney men who now want a trad wife. Women have had the audacity to get educated and excel in jobs and demand respect in the workplace and the home. Women have had to put up with being raped and then blamed for it. They have been beaten by their husbands and expected to stay and take the abuse. Now it is even being discussed to take away a woman’s right to vote. Women have lost the right to choose regarding their reproductive choices, it have voted against that in some states.
The bottom line: We can't continue this way. The hard left and hard right, of which Trump is the leader, are ruining America.
Of course w the hard right in power and doing everything they can to stay in power, we need mostly to deal w them at present bcuz they are, by far, the bigger illiberal threat. Trump has and will continue to try to control the midterms to keep Rs in control of Congress. Wouldn't surprise me if he confiscated voting machines from states where he didn't like the results.
Fasten your seat belts, unlike MW Mullins from OK. It's going to be a helluva ride in 2026.
First he cut the funding for programs that had been working to lower the crime rate, then he tells every that the way to “fix” it is with troops on the streets wielding guns and pulling people out of cars. This may look like it is working for awhile, but it is temporary and does not address the root causes of the crime. The community based approach, focusing on gangs, keeping youth in school, getting more young people into sports, working with boys who do not have fathers in their lives to guide them, getting more guns off the street, attacking the drug dealers and helping the addicts, providing more affordable housing, etc. These are the things that have contributed to the crime rate and the programs were defunded by this administration!
Great piece! It stirred up a lot of thoughts for me, as you’ll see.
>If Franklin were alive today, he would say, “You know, when I said that, I was worried about a Caracalla or a Sulla or a Caesar.”
I don’t think he would. And if he did, he’d be getting it wrong. It doesn’t take brains to overthrow a republic. A republic is an unnatural state of affairs, held together by thin reeds like the rule of law, and especially that even people who can’t be forced to (like the President) follow that rule, and norms, too. All it takes to break it is a lack of ethics and shame, not competence. Hitler was incompetent, and a lunatic to boot.
>Charlie, given that he seems to be a singularly uninspiring personality, what happened?
He’s remarkably inspiring to a lot of people, and that fact that we liberals think he isn’t is a symptom and part of why we are struggling. He’s inspiring for a simple reason: he gives permission. People who want to say all sorts of things get to say them now. People who want to do all sorts of things get to do them now. Or, if not do them, believe they could if they wanted to. The challenge is how many people wanted to do those things (and that’s how social media plays into this – it let them know how many others there were who were like them). And that now that they have permission, he could drop dead tomorrow (my lips to God’s ears) and we’d have a population that cannot be governed by liberal means.
The problem with us liberals is that we refuse to admit that anyone disagrees with us. We believe that everyone is liberal deep down, and is just mistaken about one thing or another. So we just need to fix that. But people hold real ideas that we disagree with, and we need to take that seriously.
>But I think it’s important to acknowledge that “crime” is just the reason that he’s found right now. This is something that he’s been planning to do forever.
A lot of people have latched on to the message that red states have a worse crime problem, and Texas (let alone Arizona or New Mexico) isn’t sending troops to Galveston. (The most dangerous thing he’s done, by the way, isn’t the use of federal police or even troops in DC. It’s allowing states to occupy DC.)
There’s a good and bad way to say that. The bad way is the way most liberals instinctively do, as a gotcha or some sort of inconsistency. As if Mike Johnson is going to be asked this question, as he was the other day, and change his mind. The good way is as part of the case that they don’t care about crime at all.
> And yet he ran on crime. I think that it’s important to push back and say, “Wait a minute, no, Obama did not cause a massive spike in crime. There was a tiny uptick in 2015, but that was only because 2014 was basically the safest year in recent memory.”
Problem is, that number means nothing to certain people. Obama increased crime because he’s Black. Period. How do we know this? Well, for one thing, one of the most solidly blue cities in the country did exactly the same thing. Dinkins gave NYC the largest single-year crime drop in history, while Rudy led a police riot, which is, you know, a crime. But Dinkins a) was Black, and b) did it through non-traditional means, and didn’t bust heads (well, he let some people bust Jewish heads, but that aside) so it doesn’t count.
>The Christianity that many Americans hold to, this is not the way that Jesus tells them to act.
Americans, particularly conservative Americans, have given up on Christianity. Now I don’t think religion is any great friend of liberalism, but certain strains have been very good at promoting liberal values. But there is a new religion now. I first articulated it to myself when Kennedy v. Bremerton came to the Supreme Court. There’s this religion that fuses elements of Christianity, mostly Old Testament strictness, with ‘50s Americana and Friday Night Lights. That stuff isn’t new, but what’s new is treating it as a religion. This new religion doesn’t think prayer is enough (or usually required); what’s required is specifically prayer in public schools, performative prayer. And prayer isn’t about talking to God, in this new religion. It’s a performance all the way through. A public ritual whose meaning is entirely extrinsic.
Add to that that the right has had to create room for pagan religions that used to be on the alt-right fringes.
>One of the reasons that the anti-civil rights movement, the counter-movement, was as vicious and as ugly as it was is because it was a group of people who felt like they had a status level by virtue of being white, of being men.
These are the same people who walk into Walmart, see a Black manager, and say “ugh, in my day, they hired on talent, not DEI” without knowing a damn thing about that person. But it’s worth noting that they think they believe in merit, even though they’re terrified of meritocracy.
>In the state of Wisconsin, overwhelmingly white voters voted for Barack Obama, a Black man, twice in a row before voting for Donald Trump.
Yes, because Trump hadn’t come along yet to tell them being racist is good.
>But let’s be honest about it. We moved from a Civil Rights Movement that was morally based on fairness and the immorality of discrimination to one that increasingly was identity politics that morphed into DEI, which was profoundly illiberal.
Strong, strong disagree. We made mistakes in between, but DEI is a return to the liberalism of the civil rights movement. And we simply can’t give it up. What, exactly, is illiberal about saying, look, we want to hire on merit, so that means encouraging people who might not apply, from underprivileged communities, to apply, so that we have a big pool to choose from? That’s DEI, and it’s fundamentally required if you don’t want a permanent racial underclass.
The attacks on DEI are just like the attacks on Justice Jackson, which are sort of a pre-determination attack. But that ignores that, for 100 years, there was a strong form of pre-determination, and no one objected, certainly not the people crying today.
>So, I agree that there was I guess what you could call an illiberal approach to a mutual exchange of ideas on college campuses. There was a lot of shouting down of conservative speakers. In some cases, there were invitations revoked to valedictory speeches.
Schools, too, have rights. They aren’t required to have Nazis speak at graduation.
99% of complaints about schools were in bad faith. There’s the old joke about the conservative who says he can’t express his opinions in class without social feedback (which isn’t bad, either). “Wow, you were attacked for wanting lower taxes?” “Well, no, not that one.” “Oh, for less regulation?” “No, not that one…” “So what, exactly?” “Oh, you know the ones.” And that’s true. The defense is of indefensible positions, and the right to speak them without having them questioned. The complaint was that other students didn’t just sit back in awe as the conservative student enlightened them about race realism.
>This is part of the problem. People spent decades accusing others of being racist on flimsy grounds. If you support Mitt Romney, you’re a racist. If you support tax cuts, you’re a racist.
You know, Mitt Romney stood up to Trump, at least, after he didn’t. But that doesn’t change the fact that he ran for President on his record as a leading figure in destroying vibrant companies by feeding off their assets and income. The PE revolution is a leading evil in society, and maybe the Republicans could have done better than to nominate a person who helped lead it. So I don’t really buy all the “you were mean to our decent people” handwringing.
John McCain did a lot of things right, but if you want liberal approval, don’t sing about bombing people.
>And I think we need to go back to things like the rule of law.
Absolutely.
>I will say this: I think one of the big reasons why we are where we are today is that there wasn’t a proper reckoning, and no real accountability, after the Civil War and Reconstruction. It’s been the same with Jan. 6. There was no real accountability. The Democrats waited too long for impeachment. The DOJ was slow.
100%. The seeds of Trumpism were planted in 1876. And we will never solve these problems if we aren’t serious about it.
> I’m not saying that we throw everybody in the Trump administration in prison,
I mostly disagree. There are some people who should walk (John Sauer comes to mind) but there should be a presumption of guilt. They should have to show an affirmative defense.
>But I also think there need to be civil society repercussions.
> He’s inspiring for a simple reason: he gives permission.
> The problem with us liberals is that we refuse to admit that anyone disagrees with us.
I basically agree with all this. I keep thinking about the Rwandan genocide. The striking thing about it was the sheer number of killers, the number of people who carried out the killings. If I remember correctly what the professor of genocide studies said, there were 150,000 to 200,000 killers. These were people who had heard a narrative and needed permission to act on it, and a leader stepped up to give that permission to them. Now that's a mind-boggling number of murderers. But it was less than 2.5% of the total population, and probably no more than 3% of the Hutu population.
I think about this because these were humans, like us. It gives us a rough estimate of how many people would go kill their next-door neighbor if they had permission (and a story to tell themselves about why they should. I don't know what that story was, sorry). Apparently that's around 3%.
Then there are those who weren't killers themselves, but egged on those who were. These would certainly have been numerous, but I bet they would still have been a smallish minority. And then there's the big blob in the middle, the followers, the sheeple: people who hold opinions on behalf of others, rather than having their own, but hear enough moderate and contrary voices to avoid becoming extreme. I think these are the majority in any human society. And I figure a genocide requires these people to stand back and do nothing. Now it's not that the "sheeple" are easily manipulated - they're stubborn like anyone else - but they lack core principles and/or mental models, which makes it possible to mold them through years of steady effort.
(Though if they have been molded to be relexively partisan, then they can change their apparent views very quickly simply by telling them that there is a New Party Line.)
The Republican party used to be headed by traditional conservatives, people who wanted low taxes on the rich, and bans on abortion and gay marriage, and unbridled fossil-fuel burning "because global warming is a hoax". But these people also invaded Iraq, which their base loved--until they didn't. I think the Republican elites eventually got detached from their base: people who love conspiracy theories but not so much billionaires. Trump comes along and validates their conspiratorial views, poo-poos W Bush's war (which his voters no longer cared for) and even tries spinning some of his own (global warming is a *Chinese* hoax!) And the moment he got the nomination, right-wing media fell in line. And so it was that the leaders of the GOP became leaders in name only, and by 2025, were pushed out entirely.
This is a story of two minorities: people who think like Mitt Romney, and people who think like Trump. And notably, one voted to impeach the other. I think both groups are small minorities, and there is a much bigger group of sheeple known as "Republicans" who reflexively follow the party line. When the party line changed in 2016, they changed to match it.
And I guess what I want to point out is that (1) Republicans, like Democrats, remain a minority of the population and (2) most Republicans are fundamentally followers who are NOT looking for permission, but are simply committed to their tribe and will never push back against what their more extreme members do. In the long run, we need Republicans to want a different group to lead them, but I don't know any way to influence them.
What we can do, though, is to promote decency like this podcast suggested, highlight all the ways that the authoritarians are bad, and to win elections by avoiding the various things that turned swing voters against Democrats (cancel culture, ideological purity tests, suggesting every white man is "racist") to reemphasized things that Swing voters liked about democrats, such as support for better health care policies. I think Abundance will play well too - housing abundance, clean energy abundance (without attacking fossil fuels), "big-ass truck" abundance, cutting red tape, etc. Finally, I want to see facts and honesty re-emphasized. To me, Trump's most distinctive characteristic was that he lied constantly. The problem for Democrats is that they are also perceived as lying constantly! And while I think Democrats are unfairly maligned relative to Trump, I do think it's true that Democrats say a lot of things that are clearly (and sometimes obviously) untrue, and they need to cut that out to help them win elections.
This "crisis of masculinity" thing is so weird. Tucker Carlson goes on and on about it but I have rarely seen anyone more testosterone challenged.
The often steroid induced cult of body sculpting reeks of 1950s homoerotic physical culture magazines.
The Tate brothers internationally known misogynist masculinity influencers are perfectly manscaped as is incel activist and white supremacist Nick Fuentes who has interest in facial routines.
I suspect most of them grew up in the suburbs and therefore missed out on what normal Americans considered masculine. Masculinity was about establishing and protecting families---not about dominating and controlling women. Masculinity was about going to work and bringing home a paycheck or working from dawn till dusk most of the year on a farm or ranch.
These seem to be lost on the "cult of masculinity" so fashionable today.
Thank you for featuring Radley and Charlie, two trusted voices in the sea full of liars and fluffers for the regime.
Radley is correct that Trump is lying about the statistics, but Charlie is spot on how poor governance in blue cities giving Trump a political gift. Murder rates may be down, but visible drug use, retail theft (causing stores to lock up detergent and deodorant), and graffiti are making people feel less safe and are great for propaganda on Fox.
There's a need (and an opportunity) for a new framework for the effects of mental illness and drug abuse on public order. The current regime is downstream of the 1975 O'Connor v. Donaldson decision, which made it much harder to put someone in an asylum.
Liberals would do well to develop a Clinton-style approach that favors public order over maximum freedom to be homeless.
Trump and MAGA has brought out all the ugliest, cruelest racism and hatred of the “others”. It was always there, but it was more in the shadows. On top of that, the extreme disparity of wealthy and poverty, the corporate greed, the corruption of our government have created a general feeling of despair and loss of control in the general populace. I think that all of that has brought us to where we are today. It plagues me and causes me to alternate between anger and depression.
It was great to meet both of you at the Liberalism conference. I believe that the issue of upholding common decency has legs among the general public and could really hurt support for Trump and the growing MAGA police state. We should own this cause of defending decency. #DefendDecency #DecencyMatters anyone?
I liked the discussion, but not the way it ended. What's fundamentally important isn't that the bad guys get what they deserve, but that the good guys win: win rule of law, win democracy, win safety, and win common prosperity. Hypothetically, if a court or tribunal or Congress finds that Trump or his minions committed crimes (though remember that the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court preemptively ensured that Trump will not face charges for anything he has done as president or will do in the future), the very same rhetorical tricks and media empires that convinced people to ignore court findings in the past will simply do so again.
Trump is a convicted felon, but Trump said that all his trials were "witch hunts" so the influencers did what they always do: they made Trump's claims into the gospel truth. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am sure that yearning for "repercussions" won't help us find the answer.
The rule of law demands that those who break it face the consequences regardless of status or popularity. You can't have it both ways.
We need to fairly tax the wealthy and the corporations to create more livable wages, more affordable housing, less poverty, get Medicare for all. Until the government works for all the people, it will not work at all!
Charlie, give me a break! You are not addressing the gender issue. These whiney men who now want a trad wife. Women have had the audacity to get educated and excel in jobs and demand respect in the workplace and the home. Women have had to put up with being raped and then blamed for it. They have been beaten by their husbands and expected to stay and take the abuse. Now it is even being discussed to take away a woman’s right to vote. Women have lost the right to choose regarding their reproductive choices, it have voted against that in some states.
The bottom line: We can't continue this way. The hard left and hard right, of which Trump is the leader, are ruining America.
Of course w the hard right in power and doing everything they can to stay in power, we need mostly to deal w them at present bcuz they are, by far, the bigger illiberal threat. Trump has and will continue to try to control the midterms to keep Rs in control of Congress. Wouldn't surprise me if he confiscated voting machines from states where he didn't like the results.
Fasten your seat belts, unlike MW Mullins from OK. It's going to be a helluva ride in 2026.
First he cut the funding for programs that had been working to lower the crime rate, then he tells every that the way to “fix” it is with troops on the streets wielding guns and pulling people out of cars. This may look like it is working for awhile, but it is temporary and does not address the root causes of the crime. The community based approach, focusing on gangs, keeping youth in school, getting more young people into sports, working with boys who do not have fathers in their lives to guide them, getting more guns off the street, attacking the drug dealers and helping the addicts, providing more affordable housing, etc. These are the things that have contributed to the crime rate and the programs were defunded by this administration!
Great piece! It stirred up a lot of thoughts for me, as you’ll see.
>If Franklin were alive today, he would say, “You know, when I said that, I was worried about a Caracalla or a Sulla or a Caesar.”
I don’t think he would. And if he did, he’d be getting it wrong. It doesn’t take brains to overthrow a republic. A republic is an unnatural state of affairs, held together by thin reeds like the rule of law, and especially that even people who can’t be forced to (like the President) follow that rule, and norms, too. All it takes to break it is a lack of ethics and shame, not competence. Hitler was incompetent, and a lunatic to boot.
>Charlie, given that he seems to be a singularly uninspiring personality, what happened?
He’s remarkably inspiring to a lot of people, and that fact that we liberals think he isn’t is a symptom and part of why we are struggling. He’s inspiring for a simple reason: he gives permission. People who want to say all sorts of things get to say them now. People who want to do all sorts of things get to do them now. Or, if not do them, believe they could if they wanted to. The challenge is how many people wanted to do those things (and that’s how social media plays into this – it let them know how many others there were who were like them). And that now that they have permission, he could drop dead tomorrow (my lips to God’s ears) and we’d have a population that cannot be governed by liberal means.
The problem with us liberals is that we refuse to admit that anyone disagrees with us. We believe that everyone is liberal deep down, and is just mistaken about one thing or another. So we just need to fix that. But people hold real ideas that we disagree with, and we need to take that seriously.
>But I think it’s important to acknowledge that “crime” is just the reason that he’s found right now. This is something that he’s been planning to do forever.
A lot of people have latched on to the message that red states have a worse crime problem, and Texas (let alone Arizona or New Mexico) isn’t sending troops to Galveston. (The most dangerous thing he’s done, by the way, isn’t the use of federal police or even troops in DC. It’s allowing states to occupy DC.)
There’s a good and bad way to say that. The bad way is the way most liberals instinctively do, as a gotcha or some sort of inconsistency. As if Mike Johnson is going to be asked this question, as he was the other day, and change his mind. The good way is as part of the case that they don’t care about crime at all.
> And yet he ran on crime. I think that it’s important to push back and say, “Wait a minute, no, Obama did not cause a massive spike in crime. There was a tiny uptick in 2015, but that was only because 2014 was basically the safest year in recent memory.”
Problem is, that number means nothing to certain people. Obama increased crime because he’s Black. Period. How do we know this? Well, for one thing, one of the most solidly blue cities in the country did exactly the same thing. Dinkins gave NYC the largest single-year crime drop in history, while Rudy led a police riot, which is, you know, a crime. But Dinkins a) was Black, and b) did it through non-traditional means, and didn’t bust heads (well, he let some people bust Jewish heads, but that aside) so it doesn’t count.
>The Christianity that many Americans hold to, this is not the way that Jesus tells them to act.
Americans, particularly conservative Americans, have given up on Christianity. Now I don’t think religion is any great friend of liberalism, but certain strains have been very good at promoting liberal values. But there is a new religion now. I first articulated it to myself when Kennedy v. Bremerton came to the Supreme Court. There’s this religion that fuses elements of Christianity, mostly Old Testament strictness, with ‘50s Americana and Friday Night Lights. That stuff isn’t new, but what’s new is treating it as a religion. This new religion doesn’t think prayer is enough (or usually required); what’s required is specifically prayer in public schools, performative prayer. And prayer isn’t about talking to God, in this new religion. It’s a performance all the way through. A public ritual whose meaning is entirely extrinsic.
Add to that that the right has had to create room for pagan religions that used to be on the alt-right fringes.
>One of the reasons that the anti-civil rights movement, the counter-movement, was as vicious and as ugly as it was is because it was a group of people who felt like they had a status level by virtue of being white, of being men.
These are the same people who walk into Walmart, see a Black manager, and say “ugh, in my day, they hired on talent, not DEI” without knowing a damn thing about that person. But it’s worth noting that they think they believe in merit, even though they’re terrified of meritocracy.
>In the state of Wisconsin, overwhelmingly white voters voted for Barack Obama, a Black man, twice in a row before voting for Donald Trump.
Yes, because Trump hadn’t come along yet to tell them being racist is good.
>But let’s be honest about it. We moved from a Civil Rights Movement that was morally based on fairness and the immorality of discrimination to one that increasingly was identity politics that morphed into DEI, which was profoundly illiberal.
Strong, strong disagree. We made mistakes in between, but DEI is a return to the liberalism of the civil rights movement. And we simply can’t give it up. What, exactly, is illiberal about saying, look, we want to hire on merit, so that means encouraging people who might not apply, from underprivileged communities, to apply, so that we have a big pool to choose from? That’s DEI, and it’s fundamentally required if you don’t want a permanent racial underclass.
The attacks on DEI are just like the attacks on Justice Jackson, which are sort of a pre-determination attack. But that ignores that, for 100 years, there was a strong form of pre-determination, and no one objected, certainly not the people crying today.
>So, I agree that there was I guess what you could call an illiberal approach to a mutual exchange of ideas on college campuses. There was a lot of shouting down of conservative speakers. In some cases, there were invitations revoked to valedictory speeches.
Schools, too, have rights. They aren’t required to have Nazis speak at graduation.
99% of complaints about schools were in bad faith. There’s the old joke about the conservative who says he can’t express his opinions in class without social feedback (which isn’t bad, either). “Wow, you were attacked for wanting lower taxes?” “Well, no, not that one.” “Oh, for less regulation?” “No, not that one…” “So what, exactly?” “Oh, you know the ones.” And that’s true. The defense is of indefensible positions, and the right to speak them without having them questioned. The complaint was that other students didn’t just sit back in awe as the conservative student enlightened them about race realism.
>This is part of the problem. People spent decades accusing others of being racist on flimsy grounds. If you support Mitt Romney, you’re a racist. If you support tax cuts, you’re a racist.
You know, Mitt Romney stood up to Trump, at least, after he didn’t. But that doesn’t change the fact that he ran for President on his record as a leading figure in destroying vibrant companies by feeding off their assets and income. The PE revolution is a leading evil in society, and maybe the Republicans could have done better than to nominate a person who helped lead it. So I don’t really buy all the “you were mean to our decent people” handwringing.
John McCain did a lot of things right, but if you want liberal approval, don’t sing about bombing people.
>And I think we need to go back to things like the rule of law.
Absolutely.
>I will say this: I think one of the big reasons why we are where we are today is that there wasn’t a proper reckoning, and no real accountability, after the Civil War and Reconstruction. It’s been the same with Jan. 6. There was no real accountability. The Democrats waited too long for impeachment. The DOJ was slow.
100%. The seeds of Trumpism were planted in 1876. And we will never solve these problems if we aren’t serious about it.
> I’m not saying that we throw everybody in the Trump administration in prison,
I mostly disagree. There are some people who should walk (John Sauer comes to mind) but there should be a presumption of guilt. They should have to show an affirmative defense.
>But I also think there need to be civil society repercussions.
Absolutely.
> He’s inspiring for a simple reason: he gives permission.
> The problem with us liberals is that we refuse to admit that anyone disagrees with us.
I basically agree with all this. I keep thinking about the Rwandan genocide. The striking thing about it was the sheer number of killers, the number of people who carried out the killings. If I remember correctly what the professor of genocide studies said, there were 150,000 to 200,000 killers. These were people who had heard a narrative and needed permission to act on it, and a leader stepped up to give that permission to them. Now that's a mind-boggling number of murderers. But it was less than 2.5% of the total population, and probably no more than 3% of the Hutu population.
I think about this because these were humans, like us. It gives us a rough estimate of how many people would go kill their next-door neighbor if they had permission (and a story to tell themselves about why they should. I don't know what that story was, sorry). Apparently that's around 3%.
Then there are those who weren't killers themselves, but egged on those who were. These would certainly have been numerous, but I bet they would still have been a smallish minority. And then there's the big blob in the middle, the followers, the sheeple: people who hold opinions on behalf of others, rather than having their own, but hear enough moderate and contrary voices to avoid becoming extreme. I think these are the majority in any human society. And I figure a genocide requires these people to stand back and do nothing. Now it's not that the "sheeple" are easily manipulated - they're stubborn like anyone else - but they lack core principles and/or mental models, which makes it possible to mold them through years of steady effort.
(Though if they have been molded to be relexively partisan, then they can change their apparent views very quickly simply by telling them that there is a New Party Line.)
The Republican party used to be headed by traditional conservatives, people who wanted low taxes on the rich, and bans on abortion and gay marriage, and unbridled fossil-fuel burning "because global warming is a hoax". But these people also invaded Iraq, which their base loved--until they didn't. I think the Republican elites eventually got detached from their base: people who love conspiracy theories but not so much billionaires. Trump comes along and validates their conspiratorial views, poo-poos W Bush's war (which his voters no longer cared for) and even tries spinning some of his own (global warming is a *Chinese* hoax!) And the moment he got the nomination, right-wing media fell in line. And so it was that the leaders of the GOP became leaders in name only, and by 2025, were pushed out entirely.
This is a story of two minorities: people who think like Mitt Romney, and people who think like Trump. And notably, one voted to impeach the other. I think both groups are small minorities, and there is a much bigger group of sheeple known as "Republicans" who reflexively follow the party line. When the party line changed in 2016, they changed to match it.
And I guess what I want to point out is that (1) Republicans, like Democrats, remain a minority of the population and (2) most Republicans are fundamentally followers who are NOT looking for permission, but are simply committed to their tribe and will never push back against what their more extreme members do. In the long run, we need Republicans to want a different group to lead them, but I don't know any way to influence them.
What we can do, though, is to promote decency like this podcast suggested, highlight all the ways that the authoritarians are bad, and to win elections by avoiding the various things that turned swing voters against Democrats (cancel culture, ideological purity tests, suggesting every white man is "racist") to reemphasized things that Swing voters liked about democrats, such as support for better health care policies. I think Abundance will play well too - housing abundance, clean energy abundance (without attacking fossil fuels), "big-ass truck" abundance, cutting red tape, etc. Finally, I want to see facts and honesty re-emphasized. To me, Trump's most distinctive characteristic was that he lied constantly. The problem for Democrats is that they are also perceived as lying constantly! And while I think Democrats are unfairly maligned relative to Trump, I do think it's true that Democrats say a lot of things that are clearly (and sometimes obviously) untrue, and they need to cut that out to help them win elections.
This "crisis of masculinity" thing is so weird. Tucker Carlson goes on and on about it but I have rarely seen anyone more testosterone challenged.
The often steroid induced cult of body sculpting reeks of 1950s homoerotic physical culture magazines.
The Tate brothers internationally known misogynist masculinity influencers are perfectly manscaped as is incel activist and white supremacist Nick Fuentes who has interest in facial routines.
I suspect most of them grew up in the suburbs and therefore missed out on what normal Americans considered masculine. Masculinity was about establishing and protecting families---not about dominating and controlling women. Masculinity was about going to work and bringing home a paycheck or working from dawn till dusk most of the year on a farm or ranch.
These seem to be lost on the "cult of masculinity" so fashionable today.
Thank you for featuring Radley and Charlie, two trusted voices in the sea full of liars and fluffers for the regime.
Radley is correct that Trump is lying about the statistics, but Charlie is spot on how poor governance in blue cities giving Trump a political gift. Murder rates may be down, but visible drug use, retail theft (causing stores to lock up detergent and deodorant), and graffiti are making people feel less safe and are great for propaganda on Fox.
There's a need (and an opportunity) for a new framework for the effects of mental illness and drug abuse on public order. The current regime is downstream of the 1975 O'Connor v. Donaldson decision, which made it much harder to put someone in an asylum.
Liberals would do well to develop a Clinton-style approach that favors public order over maximum freedom to be homeless.
💯
Trump and MAGA has brought out all the ugliest, cruelest racism and hatred of the “others”. It was always there, but it was more in the shadows. On top of that, the extreme disparity of wealthy and poverty, the corporate greed, the corruption of our government have created a general feeling of despair and loss of control in the general populace. I think that all of that has brought us to where we are today. It plagues me and causes me to alternate between anger and depression.
It was great to meet both of you at the Liberalism conference. I believe that the issue of upholding common decency has legs among the general public and could really hurt support for Trump and the growing MAGA police state. We should own this cause of defending decency. #DefendDecency #DecencyMatters anyone?
✊ The Civil rights movement and LGBTQIA2S rights movement have more integrity than anyone in the G.O.P currently.