A huge number of Democrats believed that Donald Trump (or Russia) stole the 2016 election, and for a while it was fashionable to claim Trump was an illegitimate president and even that one day justice would be served by annulling his presidency, thereby doing a ctrl-v on all of his wicked actions as president. Magical thinking like this …
A huge number of Democrats believed that Donald Trump (or Russia) stole the 2016 election, and for a while it was fashionable to claim Trump was an illegitimate president and even that one day justice would be served by annulling his presidency, thereby doing a ctrl-v on all of his wicked actions as president. Magical thinking like this happens because the president has way too much power and congress is increasingly (and embarrassingly) useless every year, and so every election becomes the “most important” and so on. We’d be better off with a parliamentary system if we intend to keep being this polarized.
It's true that a sizeable number of people believed that Russia literally hacked voting machines to tilt results in favor of Trump, and a significantly greater number believed that Trump was "illegitimate" to varying degrees of meaning. The Russia plant theories were very dumb indeed, but there's no equating it to the lunatic depths that MAGA election deniers plumbed into.
Yeah, sorry if that sounded like an equivocation from me. There may have been a lot of blue anon crazies on cable TV and newspapers, as well as from the mouths of high profile politicians who knew better but couldn’t help themselves, but it does not compare to what I saw the last time I visited the deep south. There were bumperstickers and truck graphics about how Biden is illegitimate and the election was literally stolen, etc. There is a brazenness to making this refusal-to-accept politics so public that I think we’ll see repeat regardless of who wins in November or whenever it is that we have ballots counted. Before it was just a handful of sore losers but now both sides are saying the other guy will destroy “democracy.” Exciting things to come.
Yes, it's a problem and not one easily squared. People are using the same vocabulary (e.g. illegitimate) to talk across dimensions and the inevitable result is confused antagonism.
A huge number of Democrats believed that Donald Trump (or Russia) stole the 2016 election, and for a while it was fashionable to claim Trump was an illegitimate president and even that one day justice would be served by annulling his presidency, thereby doing a ctrl-v on all of his wicked actions as president. Magical thinking like this happens because the president has way too much power and congress is increasingly (and embarrassingly) useless every year, and so every election becomes the “most important” and so on. We’d be better off with a parliamentary system if we intend to keep being this polarized.
It's true that a sizeable number of people believed that Russia literally hacked voting machines to tilt results in favor of Trump, and a significantly greater number believed that Trump was "illegitimate" to varying degrees of meaning. The Russia plant theories were very dumb indeed, but there's no equating it to the lunatic depths that MAGA election deniers plumbed into.
Yeah, sorry if that sounded like an equivocation from me. There may have been a lot of blue anon crazies on cable TV and newspapers, as well as from the mouths of high profile politicians who knew better but couldn’t help themselves, but it does not compare to what I saw the last time I visited the deep south. There were bumperstickers and truck graphics about how Biden is illegitimate and the election was literally stolen, etc. There is a brazenness to making this refusal-to-accept politics so public that I think we’ll see repeat regardless of who wins in November or whenever it is that we have ballots counted. Before it was just a handful of sore losers but now both sides are saying the other guy will destroy “democracy.” Exciting things to come.
Yes, it's a problem and not one easily squared. People are using the same vocabulary (e.g. illegitimate) to talk across dimensions and the inevitable result is confused antagonism.