Once upon a time I real­ized that the writ­ing I do on my pub­lic Face­book page should total­ly count as work, and so I start­ed bundling the posts up and post­ing them instead of a fresh post every few Fri­days. It made my life eas­i­er, but still got up con­tent. The end. (Also, my edi­tor is on vaca­tion and though she deserves to stay there for a month, she won’t be back until next week, so I did my best, but this might be a lit­tle rough around the edges.

The “What have the Dems ever done for us” is real­ly shock­ing­ly like that Mon­ty Python scene in Life of Bri­an about Rome

“But besides defend­ing abor­tion, the ACA, insti­tut­ing DEI poli­cies, the vot­ing rights act and civ­il rights, con­sumer pro­tec­tions, Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare/Medicaid, the Eco­nom­ic Recov­ery Plan, Stu­dent Loan Reform, the Bank­rupt­cy Exten­sion and Relief act, and now expand­ing vot­ing rights and coun­ter­act­ing the dis­en­fran­chise­ment efforts of Repub­li­cans and being the only viable option in a two par­ty sys­tem to try and slow, the advance of Open throat­ed author­i­tar­i­an fas­cism……..

….what have the Democ­rats ever done for us?”

I want you to watch very care­ful­ly what is hap­pen­ing and pay atten­tion.

Repub­li­can are show­ing us that they have under­stood all along how ger­ry­man­der­ing works and how they are dis­en­fran­chis­ing vot­ers. That inno­cent disin­gen­u­ous look they slapped on their face while talk­ing about “I guess y’all can’t win an elec­tion…” was always bull­shit. They new EXACTLY how it worked, what they were get­ting away with, and how it advan­taged them. And the reason—the ONLY reason—that THE PARTY IN POWER has­n’t essen­tial­ly rolled back the prac­tic­ing of ger­ry­man­der­ing across the entire coun­try in the last 48 hours is because then they know that then they’d lose the nation­al elec­tions.
They have known this entire time that they were cheat­ing. And they’ve known this entire time that cheat­ing was the only thing keep­ing them in pow­er.

Remem­ber this the next time they’re talk­ing about purg­ing vot­er rolls. Remem­ber this the next time they’re talk­ing about mail in bal­lots. When they do that pouty five year old thing and say it’s JUST about vot­er fraud! Heck, remem­ber this the next time they’ve slapped that inno­cent disin­gen­u­ous look on their faces and with croc­o­dile tears drip­ping that you could doubt their sin­cer­i­ty, swear to you up and down that a fas­cist para­mil­i­tary group using Gestapo tac­tics in our cities is about “crim­i­nals” and not racism.

I’ve got­ta be hon­est. I think this crit­i­cism and the dif­fi­cul­ty the left has with what is per­ceived as mes­sag­ing come from the same place:

Over­ly sim­plis­tic analy­sis.

The Democ­rats will use facts, which require nuance and be unable to out­strip Repub­li­cans’ “sim­ple lie” slo­gans. So you’ve got a real prob­lem with a lie going around the world before the truth can’t even get its shoes on type thing. I don’t mind that we’re out here fact, check­ing our­selves and mak­ing sure our memes aren’t com­plete bull­shit. The truth will actu­al­ly get it done almost every time. But if we do, that, it is vital to also acknowl­edge that the oth­er side isn’t, and we should have a very sim­ple “oh, that’s because they lie,” expla­na­tion of THEIR mes­sag­ing. (No mat­ter how basket-of-deplorable’s angry it makes them. We need to stand up and call it what it is: lies.)

Democ­rats also have to con­tend with the very real, not-even-hid­ing-it agen­da that the con­sol­i­da­tion and “par­ti­san-iza­tion” mass media has under­gone has affect­ed the ABILITY to mes­sage. We had a gold­en era of Balka­nized media, and it is dif­fi­cult for the cul­tur­al Zeit­geist of lib­er­als to shift its gears to the very real fact that bil­lion­aires now con­trol­ling what we see almost every­where would rather have fas­cism than a 2% tax increase.

And let’s not for­get that Demo­c­ra­t­ic mes­sag­ing keeps win­ning.

Hon­est­ly.

Democ­rats are clean­ing the clocks of Repub­li­cans SO bad­ly that Repub­li­cans have to fig­ure out a new way to dis­en­fran­chise mil­lions of vot­ers Every. Sin­gle. Elec­tion. just to squeak out anoth­er one or two point vic­to­ry. If we actu­al­ly had free and fair elec­tions in this coun­try, they wouldn’t win more than a few state leg­is­la­tures and about 35–40 per­cent of con­gress.

But they steal the vote in broad day­light. And I do observe that instead of being absolute­ly incensed about what is large­ly BIPOC vot­er sup­pres­sion, a lot of white peo­ple turn around and crit­i­cize their mes­sag­ing. (The Save Act only got whomped because it came after white women.) We could be debat­ing UBI and uni­ver­sal health­care at this point but instead we’re strug­gling with bath­room bills, gut­ting pro­tec­tions, and try­ing to keep the ACA from being a real­ly cool thing that hap­pened for “a brief moment” in the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry. And that’s large­ly because white peo­ple go after things like “mes­sag­ing” instead of step­ping the fuck UP.

And you kind of have to remem­ber that Dems are an oppo­si­tion par­ty right now. There’s a REASON they’re not writ­ing leg­is­la­tion or doing a lot of pol­i­cy work. They CAN’T. They can get a few things in back rooms where the sausage is made, and decide who’s in safe enough dis­tricts to do the grand­stand­ing. But it takes me like a whole minute on a web search to find half a dozen news arti­cles about a coor­di­nat­ed response to this admin­is­tra­tion’s bull­shit, and less than that to find their plat­form with every thing they are “for.“

So I have a prob­lem with peo­ple stand­ing in the mid­dle of this mael­strom of cor­po­rate pro­pa­gan­da, lies, an out­right cheat­ing, com­plain­ing that the Democ­rats mes­sage isn’t hit­ting them in the face. If you’re only ever on Face­book or watch­ing the sound­bites at the top of the news that are at least for rat­ings (if not to out­right make Dems look bad), that’s prob­a­bly true.

Dems are tak­ing out ad buys, and ads cov­er exact­ly what mar­ket research says will be most effec­tive. And they are hold­ing town meet­ings. And they’re hold­ing press con­fer­ences about what is impor­tant. And they have a cohe­sive vision (although they won’t ignore the sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers to get what they want). And they are doing all the things that arm­chair polit­i­cal oper­a­tives say they “should” do. I think this is a lot less about how much they suck or don’t suck and about how much their oppo­si­tion is will­ing to cheat and lie to remain in pow­er.

MAGA: Com­par­ing him to Hitler is just delu­sion­al hyper­bole. You have Trump derange­ment syn­drome.

Trump: I will destroy this entire civ­i­liza­tion.

Stay ground­ed, friends. You’re not crazy. They’re gaslight­ing you. He’s as bad as you think he is and if he weren’t so fuck­ing incom­pe­tent, it would be a whole lot worse.

It’s eal­ly impos­si­ble to know what dam­age a third-par­ty can­di­date or a “don’t vote for democ­rats because they’re not lib­er­al enough” posi­tion actu­al­ly does.

There’s a huge flaw in think­ing that you can just add the two num­bers togeth­er and get the num­ber of votes the Democ­rats would have made.

You can’t real­ly know how much effect months of attack­ing a can­di­date might do. Or spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion because it’s out­rage porn. Or just hav­ing Meme-lev­el nuance about com­pli­cat­ed issues.
You would have to be able to know how many non vot­ers didn’t par­tic­i­pate because of that sus­tained cam­paign. How many just gave up because there didn’t seem to be any good options (and two years of being told harm reduc­tion was the rea­son we have fas­cism). You’re not gonna get that from adding two num­bers togeth­er and say­ing “ha ha, Democ­rats wouldn’t have won any­way, so stop blam­ing us.”
Per­son­al­ly, I think the far left has enough influ­ence to pick and choose a few bat­tles (if they could agree on any­thing), and not near­ly enough to be act­ing like they should be run­ning the fuck­ing coun­try. They’re going to have to do the much hard­er work of win­ning hearts and minds if they want their posi­tions to be main­stream, and not just show up every four years of the “sexy” elec­tions and become a vol­un­teer troll farm for car­pet­bag­ging fundrais­ers who exploit them… because no one ever lost mon­ey, drag­ging the Democ­rats.

The whole idea that you can spend two years using every bit of social cap­i­tal you have to con­vince peo­ple not to vote,and this some­how isn’t con­tribut­ing to the rise of Repub­li­cans is clown­shoes absurd.

I do think that once you take out vocal accel­er­a­tionism, acceller­a­tionists who know bet­ter than to say that part out loud, overt white suprema­cists who think the only votes that mat­ter are some­how rur­al (read WHITE) votes and/or work­ing class white peo­ple, peo­ple try­ing to pass off all wars as class wars in just a breath­tak­ing­ly let’s ignore racism and the foun­da­tion­al way it has shaped EVERYTHING in our cul­ture sort of way, folks who have allowed Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da farms to shape their hatred of Democ­rats beyond the point that they are even capa­ble of coher­ent­ly using Google to check to see if a meme is accu­rate before becom­ing enraged, white peo­ple who are large­ly unaf­fect­ed by the poli­cies that harm oth­ers and don’t see the point in harm reduc­tion if they have the option to try to “spank” the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty by tak­ing their ball and going home, and folks who who have ignored the fun­da­men­tal pol­i­tics of pow­er that when a whole coun­try (that is NOT lib­er­al and NOT left­ist and NOT divest­ed of their white male suprema­cy) are under exis­ten­tial threats (like Trump) that threat will do ANYTHING but push Democ­rats to the cen­ter (because they “can’t afford to lose”)…

What you are left with is a van­ish­ing­ly small num­ber of folks whose heart might be in the right place but who are ignor­ing some fifty years of demon­stra­ble prece­dent that the only time Dems go left is when they’re safe, in favor of what they would LIKE to be true…and who are not pay­ing atten­tion to the sub­text of the oth­er folks swelling their ranks.

There’s some­one in my DM’s demand­ing I answer for the Democ­rats about Trump’s threats.

That is not a typo.

You read that cor­rect­ly.

The Repub­li­cans run the table, con­trol every branch of the gov­ern­ment, have turned the leg­is­la­ture into a rub­ber stamp, and have done their very best to lit­er­al­ly paint Democ­rats as rad­i­cal ter­ror­ists to kneecap their pow­er, and this guy is in my DM’s say­ing that it’s DEMOCRATS fault for not doing enough to stop Trump.

Not the peo­ple that elect­ed him.

Not the white male suprema­cy wave that he rode to vic­to­ry.

Not his par­ty for fail­ing to even be a speed bump.

Not two Repub­li­can led sides of a bicam­er­al Con­gress that they will cur­rent­ly not put in ses­sion while the pres­i­dent threat­ens geno­cide on social media.

Not even Trump him­self.

Democ­rats.

“Why don’t they have a plan?” he said.

He has­n’t both­ered to do so much as a Google search about what they ARE doing. (I’m not doing his home­work for him, but they ARE doing stuff.) He has­n’t con­sid­ered what they CAN do. He has­n’t thought to him­self that the tac­tics he’s insist­ing they engage in would be equal­ly pos­si­ble (and just as use­ful) for HIM to do since we’re basi­cal­ly talk­ing about warm bodies—but that he won’t do.

This is where we are.

I’m nev­er going to for­get that this is what a cer­tain sub­set of vocal left­ists is bring­ing to the table. Full throat­ed, “Why did­n’t you do more to stop your hus­band, Mrs. John­son?” ener­gy.