It all comes down to the midterms
If Trump fires Mueller and the GOP congress does nothing, the last hope is the mid-terms. Relying on Democrats to get their shit together doesn’t exactly fill me with optimism though.
“If this crisis unfolds as depicted here, the country’s final hope for avoiding a terminal slide into authoritarianism would be the midterm election, contesting control of a historically gerrymandered House of Representatives. That election is 16 months away. Between now and then, Trump’s DOJ and his sham election-integrity commission will seek to disenfranchise as many Democratic voters as possible, while the president himself beseeches further foreign interference aimed at Democratic candidates. Absent the necessary sweep, everything Trump will have done to degrade our system for his own enrichment and protection will have been ratified, and a point of no return will have been crossed.”
Jason, authoritarianism? Are you kidding. What seems to be reality is that Jason is always completely wrong.
A day of reckoning is coming for you Dils. Are you an American, or are you a Trumpet? Every Republican is going to have to decide.
Relying on voters to do the right thing is an equally bleak prospect.
@dils
Hate to go all Godwin on you, but Hitler was elected in a democracy.
@meatball, yes, a democracy, but by any reasonable standard, it was a failing democracy. Hyper inflation, massive unemployment, international shaming and ruinous war reparations, the far left and the far right at it, physically, murderously. What democracy can survive that? And, at that point, the democracy was fledgling, having emerged from the monarchy at the end of WWI. It was like the fledgling democracy was in Egypt. Almost doomed to fail. What I see as similar is the “cold civil war” that Carl Bernstein referred to when he was a guest on CNN about a week ago. He made some highly salient points, IMHO. Let’s hope the crazies on either side don’t resort to physical violence. At that point, I would be truly worried.
I know, don’t over think it.
@puck: They don’t have to “do the right thing.” They just have to get tired of the shitshow.
The key item, I think, is that Trump is giving up world leadership without the military drawdown that should imply. In other words, we lost the advantages that our enormous military provided without losing the price of the enormous military. It’s hard to find a winner in lose-lose propositions.
It seems like a “cold civil war” has been going on for the past 20 years and the South won.
Our esteemed host wrote:
Thing is, President Trump will not be on the ballot; I will have a choice between my current congressman, Representative Andy Barr (R-KY 6th) or the Democratic nominee. Shouldn’t my choice be between which of those two candidates is better?
Hillary Clinton got stupid and decided to call people who support Donald Trump a “basket of deplorables,” something which did not work out well for her; you have, in effect, called everyone who chooses to vote for a Republican candidate not an American. Do you believe that will win you any votes, or friends, from people who do not already think like you do?
By the way, I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. I do not like Mr Trump as a person, but I absolutely loathed Mrs Clinton.
“Shouldn’t my choice be between which of those two candidates is better?”
Yes but not the way you think. If you agree, as the evidence shows, that GOP majorities are harmful to the country, then if you vote to reinforce those majorities, you are complicit. The time has long since passed when policy differences between the parties can be written off as just politics.
The “better person” is the one who gives the majority to the party with the better pro-America agenda. And that’s not the GOP with or without Trump.
To be fair though, I’ll grant that Dems have not been running quality candidates in KY.
Jason, wasn’t the “north” winning the cold civil war pretty handily until the trumpian reaction? gay marriage, affirmative action, increased awareness of what defines sexual assault, increased sensitivity to racial balance in arts and entertainment, a black man as president, discriminatory laws long off the books, to name a few. most things were headed in the liberal direction. the forces of reaction caused a setback, but there’s no reason to stop thinking “the arc of history always bends toward justice” (or whatever that phrase is) as long as liberal/progressives not only keep fighting for it but also understand they will hurt themselves by thinking they can just turn a switch and have what remains undone in that “northern” agenda put in place immediately. those last steps are going to get pushback for sure. Paul Hayes is right. American democracy is a far cry from Germany’s pre-war version. even our corporate moguls are not calling for an end to the advances I cited above. they still take entirely too much money for themselves, and that’s where the focus of left-resistance should be right now — along with anything that will stop trump.
Gary Johnson voter = libertarian. Why bother?
@redux: “even our corporate moguls are not calling for an end to the advances I cited above.”
Quite the opposite. Corporate America is foursquare behind acceptance of social change. But they’re highly resistant to any change in current corporation-favoring law.
“they still take entirely too much money for themselves, and that’s where the focus of left-resistance should be right now”
With all due respect, this blanket covers many issues and approaches. I think the primary splits in the Democratic Party are between the well-off meritocracy, who support your position, and wage workers, who have been getting shafted by retreating regulations for decades. That’s why so many of them voted for Trump. He told them lies, but they were lies they wanted to hear. The other constituencies are single-issue, but the bloc everyone takes for granted — minorities — must decide which side of the main split they want to be on.
“along with anything that will stop trump.”
Even there, I disagree on strategic grounds. One problem is Trump, but the longer-range one is the conservative agenda. Check the record: The more Trumpcare is in the news, the more likely it becomes that poll numbers will drop that week. If he leaves, say, next week, Mike Pence and the Congress will get along much better than Congress does with Trump, who is our only stopgap against that agenda becoming law.
The best way to stop any policy is to bring it to Trump’s attention.
@puck: Rep. Barr won election in 2012, by 11,000 votes, after losing in 2010 by 700. He won his last election by just under 100,000 votes. From his Wikipedia entry it appears the campaigns dwell on long-past purported sins, proving that the concept of the “better” person is highly flexible. Barr sounds like a standard-issue Republican, from a prominent Lexington family. His only past sins were getting busted for a fake ID back in college and working for a crooked governor, though he actually was hired to clean up the mess after the fact. He’s a lock.
Dana does not specify what the yardstick for “better” representation might be, so it’s a sort of circular logic, and we’re outside the circle. It all depends on what he wants his representative to do. He seems to support Republican positions, so a standard-issue Republican is highly likely to better represent Dana’s own views than most if not all Democrats would.
If that’s true, then the only possible reasons for voting Democratic in 2018 would be:
a) if Barr held some position that ran strongly counter to Dana’s position;
b) if Dana wanted the country to return to more orderly management, in which case a Democrat could help counter Trump’s anti-constitutional ways (you can always vote the Democrat back out in 2020);
c) if Dana recognized that any district is better off with a representative in the majority, and he thought the Democrats might win the House.
Absent any of these reasons, Dana will either vote for the Republican, a minor-party candidate (any Libertarians in them thar hills ‘n’ hollers?) or stay home.
Hope that clears up any confusion.
alby, agree with you completely about corporate America’s embrace of at least certain kinds of social change.
also agree that democrats are split between a “well-off meritocracy” and “wage workers.” my point (maybe just an unclear implication) was that the democrats should put more focus on the wage workers and back off a little from the identity politics, which have a lot of support from people in that “well-off meritocracy.” they have had a lot of success in the past 20 years but are starting to look like ideologues to many who would otherwise side with them.
corporations support identity politics (catch-all phrase but it’s short and everybody here knows what it means) partly to distract democrats from the economic imbalance. this is a big reason why Hillary lost.
I get what you’re saying about pence. he is vile. I just think pence and the like can always be voted out next time. parties coming in and out of power — that’s the way democracy works. I think trump is a threat to democracy itself.
If Trump fires Mueller and the GOP congress does nothing, then all Republicans will need to make a choice. Are they Americans first, or Republicans first.
I may have to ban Dana for stupidity again. I don’t think he was trying to miss the point of the post. He simply wiffed because he is dumb.
Puck wrote:
At lost, I could only vote to retain that majority in the House; since my congressman is a Republican, I can’t vote to increase the GOP majority. Neither senator is up for re-election in 2018.
However, I do not agree that GOP majorities are harmful; I think that they are very much a good thing. President Trump hasn’t gotten all that much done yet, but we did get Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, and that is, quite possibly, the most significant thing he will accomplish. If Justice Kennedy retires, as has been speculated, or Justice Ginsburg health fails, as is possible, we could lock in a conservative majority for another decade.
Mr Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 29.8% in the Bluegrass State, so I’d say that it’s less a problem of Democrats not running quality candidates as Kentucky is just thoroughly conservative. For the first time in his history, Elliot County was carried by a Republican presidential candidate, 70% to 26%. Mrs Clinton carried only two counties, Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington), the two most urbanized counties in the state.
In 2014, the Democrats thought that they had a good chance of unseating Mitch McConnell, running Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, who had already won a statewide race; she was trounced. Attorney General Jack Conway, another Democrat who had won a statewide race, was favored against Matt Bevin in the 2015 gubernatorial contest, and the last poll had him leading Mr Bevin 45% to 40%; Mr Bevin won 53% to 46%.
In the 2016 elections, Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives, until then the last state legislative chamber the Democrats controlled in the south, turning a 53-47 Democrat majority to a 64-36 Republican margin (those are seats, not percentages, the chamber having an even 100 members). Greg Stumbo, the Speaker of the House, and a man who had won every election in which he’d run since 1980, including a statewide race for Attorney General, was voted out of office. It’s difficult to call Democrats who had won a lot of elections in the past not “quality candidates.”
In 2012, when electoral districts were redrawn, the Democrats controlled the state House and the gubernatorial seat.
alby asked:
It was my way of saying that I couldn’t support either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and I don’t just not vote.
Mr 330 wrote:
I don’t think that you understand: Republicans see themselves as more American than Democrats, and, in a recent Washington Post poll, 61% of respondents said that the Democrats stood only in opposition to President Trump, while only 37% thought that Democrats stood for things other than opposition.
Mr Mueller was a contributor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, something which should have disqualified him as biased from the beginning. That could be tolerated, I suppose, but since his appointment, he has loaded up his staff with other Clinton contributors; could no one be found who at least had the appearance of being unbiased?
If Mr Mueller is fired, someone else will (probably) be appointed to the position; maybe that person should be someone who isn’t obviously biased?
However, most Republicans — meaning: the people who put all of those Republican congressmen and Senators in office — see the ‘investigation’ as wholly politically motivated, and they are more likely to support those Republican officeholders if Mr Mueller is dismissed and they do nothing.
Well, I can’t stop you from doing that, but why? My comments are usually loaded with straight facts; aren’t those useful to your readers? Or is it that my points are too challenging.
alby wrote:
You kind of guessed wrong. My most notable Democratic votes were for Doug Wilder for Governor of Virginia in 1989, not because I particularly liked him, but because his opponent, J Marshall Coleman, was an [insert slang term for the rectum here]. In 2004, I voted for Bob Casey for Pennsylvania state Treasurer, because he was (supposedly) pro-life, and I wanted to see some pro-life Democrats in office. Way back in 1972, I voted for George McGovern, because I believed that President Nixon was a crook.
Yeah, voting Republican is my default position, but it’s not a guaranteed thing.
“republicans see themselves as more American”: of course they do, but they have a peculiar idea of what is American and are not smart enough to understand that. except for the ones who understand very well that their party is mostly about trying to get them more money. those republicans are just selfish. I’m talking mainly about far-right republicans, but I guess that’s most of them these days. (I still have hope for the others.) and by the way, even if trump survives the Russia investigation — which he may well not after the financial stuff comes to light — he’ll still go down as the worst president in American history. small comfort for the rest of us, but we’ll know who the traitors were.
This fucking idiot is America. Still doesn’t get that Trump firing Mueller, and that firing endorsed by Congress, would change the country into something other than a Republic.
When President Pence pardons Trump, our long national nightmare will just be beginning.
@dana,
When I said Dems were not running quality candidates in KY, I was thinking specifically of Alison Grimes, who couldn’t even admit to having voted for Obama.
The Trump/Repub margins in KY were due in large part to two things: One, Hillary’s accurate but ill-advised comments about coal mining. And two, all Republicans continue to run against Obama in KY, because they know KY is as racist as the day is long.
By the way, how’s Trump’s rebirth of coal coming along in KY?
@Dana: Investigators’ personal beliefs are not “bias.” When conducting an investigation, only facts matter. Mueller also happens to be a Republican.
That you would swallow such foolish objections makes me doubt the quality of your thought process — but then, I’d feel that way about anyone who would move to Kentucky on purpose. 😉
Puck wrote:
Not exactly her best moment, to be sure, but she not only won a statewide race, she won another one, being re-elected as Secretary of State in 2015. Mrs Grimes was a member of one of the two big political families in Kentucky, the Lundergans, and was thought to be a quality candidate; she stumbled badly on that one.
She also had a pro-Second Amendment ad which matched the positions of most Kentuckians, but it did her no real good, because a lot of people saw it as a ploy.
As I’ve said before, including on this site, I grew up in the South, but the most segregated place I’ve ever lived was Hockessin, Delaware.
When I moved to Mt Sterling, Kentucky, in the middle of the third grade, it was into a segregated school system. The school board was working on a desegregation plan, and was going to desegregate over three years, taking four grades at a time. Then, total integration, all at once, was forced when the black school mysteriously burned to the ground. They delayed the opening of the public schools by one week, to get things arranged — the fire was in mid-August, just before school was to open — but I don’t remember a single problem with the integration, though it was the beginning of my sixth-grade year, so I might have missed the perspective of some of the adults. Perhaps you might compare that to what Wilmington/New Castle County did when integration was forced upon you.
From the Lexington Herald-Leader: Company plans to reopen Knott County mine, hire 60 workers
And while not in Kentucky: Democrisy! Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) attends the opening of a coal mine after criticizing President Trump’s withdrawal from Paris climate agreement
Coal will (probably) never recover, in that natural gas, thanks to fracking, has become a superior competitor, but there have been some new jobs created.
alby wrote:
Yes, I did note the smiley.
Kentucky is home for us. I grew up here — from the third grade on, anyway — and my darling bride (of 38 years, two months and four days) was born and reared here, in Ashland. Our families are here.
We left the Bluegrass State in 1984, because there were just no good jobs, and did better in Virginia, then Delaware, and finally Pennsylvania. In 2014, as we were planning for retirement, we found a farm for sale, with 500 feet of frontage on the Kentucky River, for $75,000, and we bought it, in cash. I recently retired, and we moved to our farm earlier this month.
Kentucky is a poor state, no doubt about that, but now that I don’t need to work (for someone else, that is) my retirement income provides us with a decent, if still simple, life.
Our house is definitely a fixer-upper but I have the skills most of the work. Elaine and I have ripped the old carpet out of our bedroom, den and living room, exposing old hardwood that will need to be refinished; we can do that. We’ve torn down the living room ceiling, and will be installing a new tongue-and-grove beadboard ceiling this coming week. I’ve cleared away the overgrown brush from an additional acre + of land, and all of that has been done this month.
“She also had a pro-Second Amendment ad which matched the positions of most Kentuckians, but it did her no real good, because a lot of people saw it as a ploy.”
And yet, the same astute Kentuckians failed to grasp that Trump’s “bring coal jobs back, end Obama’s war on coal” was a Big Lie.
“As I’ve said before, including on this site, I grew up in the South, but the most segregated place I’ve ever lived was Hockessin, Delaware.”
And yet, those same segregated Hockessin-ers regularly elect Democrats including a woman of color.
@Dana: That sounds really beautiful. What kind of farm is it, crops or dairy?
I only hope your new neighbors don’t consider you a “gentrifier.”
@puck: What Dana says about race relations in the north is accurate. In the South, whites live in daily contact with African-Americans. In the north people self-segregate very effectively without the overt resort to Jim Crow.
Those in Hockessin might elect black politicians, but check the record and you’ll find they’re pretty adamant about keeping black kids out of their suburban schools. When it comes to property, between redlining the suburbs and ethnically cleansed charter schools, Northerners have nothing to brag about.
Alby, right now there are four acres under cultivation with soybeans; I have rented that land to the neighboring farmer, and he raises soybeans one year, and feed corn the next.
We’ll be growing vegetables for our own consumption, with some to go in in a couple of weeks: carrots and several other things can be planted in August and be harvested before it freezes. Next spring, we’ll have a full acre garden, and, hopefully, be planting apple and fig trees in another field. We’re planning on a few chickens as well, but only enough to produce eggs for our use, and maybe enough for my sister. One cat has been assigned as a free range chicken herder.
Unfortunately, the property isn’t fenced, which makes raising larger animals impossible.
Sounds like the cost of improvements/upkeep will add up to a good bit more than the purchase price. Happy retirement. I’d love to do the same with mine, but my wife wants to move to the city, so keeping the suburban half-acre is as close as I’ll get.
Don’t know how close you are to the woods, but chickens attract foxes. You might want to add a dog to the menagerie.
alby wrote:
Part of this is due to the nature of small towns: there was only one school for everybody, so there was no forced busing for racial integration. With smaller shopping areas, there’s no way to self-segregate in public life; everyone winds up at the same places.
Residential neighborhoods can still self-segregate, and I haven’t been back here long enough to know how much of that is still happening.
However, there is one bit of self-segregation still happening: the county in which I now live is 98% white, and that’s not uncommon for eastern Kentucky. While Kentucky did have slavery, the mountain region was primarily one of very small farms, where holding slaves was simply not an economic advantage. The emancipation of slaves following the War Between the States didn’t mean much in the mountains, as there were very few slaves here to be emancipated, and black Americans didn’t tend to move to this region after they were freed.
The state as a whole has a smaller black population percentage than states further south; Kentucky is 90.1% white, and only 7.7% black. People think of the South as having a high black population, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia all having over 30% of the population being black, but the Bluegrass State is a lot different.
Delaware has a very high black percentage of the population being black, 20.95%, but your total population is so small that I often discount such statistics as being skewed by small sample size.
Kentucky, like Delaware, is is a border state, though its much longer border makes its situation far more complicated than Delaware’s.
Louisville was a major trade center, as was Cincinnati, for the exchange of northern and southern goods, which is why it is more northern than other southern cities, as Cincinnati is more southern than other northern cities.
Growing seasons in Kentucky wouldn’t support cotton agriculture, so its slave population was never as high as the states in the deep south.
How close am I to the woods? The Daniel Boone National Forest is right across the street!
We’ll (probably) have the chickens free-range during the day, and in a coop overnight. And it’s not just foxes: there are coyotes and bears in the forest.
Regarding race, “America Aflame” by David Goldfield lays out the American political landscape from about 1820-1865. One discussion is the emancipation of slaves. Lincoln was terrified as he conducted the war that any end of slavery would enrage slaveholders in the north. He tried to set up a program to purchase slaves held by northerners, but had no takers. This made his head explode. We now know the outcome of his political guess work, but from the point of view of pre-1860, the problem looked to be politically insoluble. The widely held belief is that slavery was only supported in the south, but the evidence suggests that slavery was a nationwide activity and resistance to its abolition was also nationwide. That may explain a few “northern” sentiments toward African-Americans, and an enduring white supremacist mentality in regions other than the south.
Northern support for slavery did not include actual ownership of humans. Here are the results of the 1860 census:
http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html
Nobody liked the abolitionists, though. The economic benefits of slavery were enjoyed by all Americans, north and south, and few wanted to rock the boat.
Alby I must respectfully disagree.
By 1800, all of the “north” except for Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey had prohibited slavery. New Jersey prohibited slavery in 1804. Maryland and Delaware still allowed slavery at the beginning of the Civil War.
@paul: Disagree with what? A census report? Maryland, Kentucky and Delaware were border states, not “the north.” Slavery was outlawed in northern states, as all those zeroes on the census report indicate.
The whole thrust of Goldfield’s book is that religion caused the Civil War, not that the north had slaves. Many in the north supported slavery. That’s not the same thing as owning slaves. Almost everyone in the country was “racist” in the sense that they thought blacks were inferior. If that’s what you were getting at, well, sure. Even Lincoln thought coexistence between blacks and whites was impossible.
alby wrote:
Supported slavery, or simply didn’t oppose it, or just plain didn’t care?
Life wasn’t easy for most people in the first half of the 19th century, and the vast majority had to struggle to survive, every day. I can see where a lot of people simply had too many other concerns to worry about what other people were doing. People scratching the dirt for food in Kansas or trying to survive the winter in Maine might simply not have cared about what was happening on a plantation in Alabama.
Sorry, shouldn’t have used “support” as shorthand for “background economic interest.”
The United States economy, even then, was interconnected enough that many northern economic interests profited from slavery even though its citizens couldn’t own them themselves. The shipping fortunes of New England depended on the triangular trans-Atlantic trade as much as the cotton plantation fortunes did. Slaves were valuable, and so owners of plantations took out insurance on them — usually issued by northern firms. Northern mills manufactured and sold the cheap clothing slaves were clad in; northern factories forged the flimsy farm tools used by slaves.
There’s little in the way of data on attitudes, but abolitionists were considered troublemakers by many northerners as well as southerners. Those weren’t southern mobs destroying the printing presses of abolitionists.
The default position of most people is always “too busy to care.”