You know what's the easiest decision in the world to make?
You have two jugs.
One contains rat poison and one contains apple juice.
Both are clearly and accurately labeled.
You might not love apple juice, but you're thirsty and this is what's available.
Which do you drink from?
Easy, right?
OK, here's another one.
You have two political parties.
One is the Republican party. Political rat poison. Openly racist. Deranged. Contemptuous of democracy. A paranoid, rage-drunk cult of personality.
The other is the Democratic party. Political apple juice. Multiracial. Fact-based. Pro-democracy. A big, rambunctious tent.
Both are clearly and accurately labeled.
You might not love every Democratic policy, but your democracy is at stake and this is what's available.
Which do you vote for?
Easy, right?
Right now there is a stark, binary choice between two political parties. Two ideologies. It's that simple. Which is why I have written once or twice or three times:
People who begin every critique of depraved Republican policies with "This is not about Left or Right" are almost exclusively Republicans who don't wanna talk about their deranged party, or are mushy Centrists trying to win David Brooks' approval.
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) July 12, 2019
"This is not about Left or Right."
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) July 31, 2019
The fuck it's not
Drink!#DemDebate
Whenever you hear, "This is not about Left and Right" or "This is not about Republicans and Democrats" grab your wallet and hold on tight because you are about to hear a whole lotta bullshit.
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) June 7, 2020
So, as you may or may not know, the Lincoln Lads have leveraged their hugely outsized media presence to launch a new project called The Union. They have pimped it at the top of every Lincoln Lad-adjacent podcast for months, urging everyone within the sound of their voices to sign up now!now!now! They got Axios to promote it for them. They even hired Peter Coyote to do a Civil War-style voiceover for a Union commercial.
No, not this Union commercial.
They make it very clear that they are not a labor-thingie.
Anyway, every Lincoln Lad has been hard-selling this thing like an army of car-warranty scambots, and yesterday it officially launched so Lincoln Lad senior executive whatevers Reed Galen and Joe Trippi spent an entire podcast talking it up.
And here were literally the first words out of Joe Trippi's mouth:
Galen: So Joe, why don't we talk about how we got to this place? And how you see that fitting into the broader pro-democracy movement.
Trippi: Well I've said the greatest catastrophe for the country right now is to not understand that this is no longer about Right versus Left or Republicans versus Democrats.
Trippi: It's all of us.
driftglass: Except for the +70M Republican meatheads who voted to re-elect Donald Trump, right? And if you're too liberalphobic to hear that from a Midwest flyover lefty? Fine. Ask Jennifer Rubin:
Fringe Republicans are not the problem. It’s the party’s mainstream.
But please continue:
Trippi: That it's going to take all of us to defend our democracy.
driftglass: Except for the entire leadership of the Republican party and virtually every Republican elected official, right?
Trippi: To defend the union, our republic.
driftglass: To defend the republic...against what? Against whom? Oh yeah! Against the +70M Republican meatheads who voted to re-elect Donald Trump, the entire leadership of the Republican party and virtually every Republican elected official.
Trippi: And in a lot of ways there's not a place out there where if everybody who we've heard, Reed, as we've, y'know, talked to people, as we've gone around the country, people responding to the videos or on Twitter. And the constant question is, "What can we do besides give money, or re-Tweet a powerful video? What can I do?"
driftglass: I know! I know! Call on me! What you can do is ... directly support the Apple Juice party in whatever way you can. You can donate your time, money, energy and talent to any of hundreds of Democratic/Liberal organizations that already exist and have been in the trenches for years or decades.
Trippi: And The Union (tm) is a place where you can go sign up, give what your interests are, what your talents are, what you want to bring to this fight, are able to bring to the fight, without getting hammered for donations now 18 times, that's not going to happen.
Trippi: ...across ideologies...
Trippi: ...put our past differences aside and bring people together who believe in one thing and one thing only, maybe, in many cases.
driftglass: Is that "one thing" the swift and orderly demolition of the Republican party?
Trippi: And that's that we're all together, trying to do everything we can to defend and protect our democracy at the ballot box in 2022 and in 2024 and to fight the disinformation and other things that are going on.
Galen: We started talking about, right around the time you joined us last summer, that defeating the anti-democratic forces on the march in this country...
driftglass: And by "anti-democratic forces on the march in this country" you mean the +70M Republican meatheads who voted to re-elect Donald Trump, the entire leadership of the Republican party and virtually every Republican elected official, right? Right?
Galen: ...will take the deepest, broadest, most diverse coalition that any of us can remember.
driftglass: Congratulations Reed! You just accurately described [checks notes] the Democratic party.
Galen: Republicans, Independents, Democrats...
driftglass: Except the +70M Republican meatheads who voted to re-elect Donald Trump, the entire leadership of the Republican party and virtually every Republican elected official. They're not gonna join. And those "Independents" are largely imaginary. So what you're really describing is [checks notes again] the Democratic party with a tiny handful of Republicans-in-exile who really, really hate the Left but hate Donald Trump slightly more.
Galen: Northerners, Southerners, Easterners, Westerners...
driftglass: Congratulations on naming all the points on the compass, but big points off for forgetting the existence of the entire Midwest. Which I've come to expect.
Look, this is a free country, and if you're inclined to sign up with these sketchy characters, I won't speak ill of you (so far as you know.) I also understand why certain small Democratic projects, GOTV efforts, civil rights non-profits and equity and social justice groups would sign up, because such groups are always strapped for money and resources and they'll sign up for anything they think might help them.
But at the end of the day, however much you may wish politics were Baskin-Robbins with 31 flavors for you to mix and match to suit your particular appetite, and however many soothing consulting buzzwords and aspirational marketing phrases the Lincoln Lads couch it in, the choice really is stark and binary.
For the foreseeable future, it really is Red versus Blue.
It really is Republican versus Democrat.
It really is apple juice versus rat poison.
Anyone who tells you any different is bullshitting you. And if I were you, I'd really want to know why.
3 comments:
This may be a bit too complicated for some people (and too benign for driftglass), but I tend to frame the contrast this way:
Should wealthy, powerful corporations and industries be held accountable for the harm they cause to the public, workers, consumers, and/or the environment?
If your answer is Yes, vote Democratic.
If your answer is No, vote Republican.
It really is (and should be) that simple.
I find myself focusing and discussing this topic frequently, seemingly more and more by the day. The topic being that of the complete lack of will on the part of these ‘Very Important Former-Republican Allies’ to just commit action and words to what they seem to insist is their desire to save democracy in our country (or Union!) by outwardly backing the Democratic Party without reservation. Because there is no alternative, and it’s blindingly obvious. You never hear these terrified, purse-clutching fucks ever directly advocate for Dems, or make the case that we have a party in this country that checks the vast majority of boxes they claim to value while also allowing for working within the party to argue for changes they identify as important.
The only reasonable conclusions are they’re phony as hell, valuing status and profit over actual change that might better situate our country in terms of strengthening guardrails of democracy and helping Americans with effective policy solutions, or it’s completely disingenuous in the sense that they just don’t want democrats to succeed and have delusions of grandeur about a third way solution that’s completely useless as a conceptual pillar for change, nevermind a real thing that can be grown (or magically materialize!) in the here-and-now. I do believe most of these folks deeply dislike what the right wing base has become, but only in relation to the degree in which it would damage them personally both financially and credibility-wise in the safe space they’re furiously determined to occupy as high-minded centrists whom are ‘above the fray’.
And it’s as if these ostensibly smart individuals don’t recognize how stupid they come across while equating the ‘radical left’, which always boils down to like 6 people in congress, and amorphous antifa when it’s convenient, with the entire fucking Republican Party, base and all. They know better but don’t care because they don’t want to put in any work, don’t want to face scrutiny for allying with Dems, don’t want to parse out and- god forbid! - acknowledge a past in which they were dry humping the leg of some despicable dirtbag they now claim to not like so much, and lastly bc they are greedy assholes. Greedy for attention that comes so easily they don’t even need to devise new talking points more than once a year, and greedy for the largess it affords them to be seen as high minded and above the fray.
They see what happened to Stuart Stevens, and they want no part of that shit. Too risky. Might have to say some stuff that casts a bad light, narrows accessibility to networks, and ultimately reduces their paycheck. It’s transparently gross hypocrisy of saying over and over again how important a thing is and then doing nothing about it (or worse, undermining it outright) while having a platform to do so, and while that thing is ultimately important to the political discourse in this country and therefore to peoples lives.
the difference between barr and romney and the lincoln project is how they look...
the optics....not how they vote and what their goals are...
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/mitt-romney/
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