#conservadems
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🗣️Republicans are funding conservative Democrats to primary progressives
Republican megadonor Jeff Yass recently gave to a super PAC that is trying to topple a progressive incumbent in Pittsburgh.
The Moderate PAC, an outside group that aims to support centrist Democrats, has been boosting a primary challenge to Rep. Summer Lee, a member of “The Squad.” Lee and her supporters are quick to point out that Yass, a Pennsylvania businessperson, donated $1 million to the PAC in 2022, when it spent in support of Democratic Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Don Davis of North Carolina.
Yass is a major donor to the conservative Club for Growth. He has also been in headlines recently amid the congressional push for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company — which Yass has investments in — to sell the app. Strong said that Yass “has no lean in this other than he likes a moderate Democrat, as opposed to a far-left Democrat.”
Moderate PAC released its second ad on Tuesday, accusing Lee of “opposing” President Joe Biden. The group has placed more than $500,000 on television and digital advertising since the beginning of the year, according to ad tracker AdImpact. (Patel’s campaign has spent around $150,000.) Strong said that future investments will be dependent on fundraising, but the group will “stay in the race and keep up at the same pace as long as we can.”
Outside players are also coming to Lee’s aid. Working Families Party, the Muslim advocacy group Emgage and Justice Democrats are planning to spend $500,000 combined on TV and digital advertisements boosting the incumbent, said Ari Kamen, mid-Atlantic regional director at the Working Families Party.
Lee in a statement decried “super PACs bankrolled by Republican billionaires,” saying they “have no place in our Democratic primaries or our democracy.”
“I am never going to stop defending our abortion rights, protecting our public schools, or demanding billionaires pay their fair share, so I welcome being an enemy to an extremist like Jeffrey Yass,” Lee said.
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#politics#summer lee#moderate pac#centrism#the squad#jeff yass#clintonism#conservadems#conservative democrats#conservative democrats = republican lite
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Hi, big fan of your fics. I've just found your Tumblr and binged everything Icemav-related. When reading about Icemav's political beliefs, I've gotten curious. Does Bradley share the same political beliefs as Ice (and Mav)? Does being raised by them or them pulling his papers influence how he votes? Or there are other factors in the play (e.g. generations, social media)? How about Jake and the other Daggers? How does this young generation of the Navy perceive politics (elections, gender, etc.)? My apologies for bombarding you with questions. But as a non-American, American politics have always been something we must pay attention to. I've seen many interesting interpretations on Tumblr but it feels more or less wistful than realistic, but I might be wrong (again not an American) so I would love to see your perspective on this. Thank you.
a good politics roundup post before i leave this blog
icemav & their conservatism: here, here, here
ice’s NECESSARY conservatism as commander of the pacific fleet (i.e. officers who are most likely to get promoted to the highest ranks do NOT break the service line when it comes to domestic politics, so by necessity ice would’ve had to keep his mouth shut, he Cannot be both a four-star and a revolutionary, like he just can’t; and being a revolutionary is otherwise antithetical to his character anyway): here, here.
and the original “ice & mav politics post” which is being updated here: here
I’ve gone back and forth on everyones politics over the last year of me being involved with these characters, but let me just tell you where I’ve ended up headcanoning them politically, if ur interested
ice: reagan democrat. “educated moderate” who was more right-leaning pre-9/11. now just a regular ol liberal (did you SEE those gay little round glasses in tgm? no way this guy isn’t a straight-up lib) with absolutely no strong feelings about most domestic politics besides “fascism bad”. Has some foreign policy opinions that areeeee questionable at best, like all members of the military elite (hangman voice: DO NOT ASK ICEMAN ABOUT CHINA. WORST MISTAKE OF MY LIFE). foreign policy neoliberal favoring the dovish side of the spectrum. A force conservator (“let’s save our military assets [read: my boyfriend maverick 🥺] for when we really need them, not for any old conflict. the deterring specter of the American war machine should outweigh the risk of underperforming”). He’s in favor of marriage equality of course, but treats it like a privilege and not a right. would be sad/upset if it got repealed but wouldn’t necessarily fight for it. “well at least my marriage will always be legal in california so i just won’t leave, problem solved.” Normie median Biden voter.
mav: political wildcard tbh. original 1986 mav is DEFINITELY right-leaning (i think i’ve written elsewhere, “he fully believes bill clinton is an affront to god”). i get young republican vibes from him. Full on patriotic (but dispassionate) 1980s reaganite anti-commie neoconservative. but after the 2010s i am very confused tbh. Tom cruise’s political aura is an insanely confusing one. idk. No matter what, Mav has some Hot Takes that a.) can immediately be shot down by ice using Facts and Logic at any time and b.) are not strictly partisan. He’s registered democrat just to support marriage equality (his marriage is his top priority but he doesn’t care about Other gays’ marriages, only his own), doesn’t care about any of the party’s other lines. Votes however ice tells him to. I get real “kind clueless libertarian” vibes from 2022 maverick tbh. Especially with the “isolating himself in a hangar in the middle of the mojave desert.” that has a political connotation to it for sure. bro just does whatever he wants out there
also, ice & mav live in San Diego, which… while in blue/democrat leaning California…is famously a bastion of right-wingers & has a hitler particle level off the charts… (sorry its not my favorite place in the world). That’s why they’re both continually so disgusted by San Francisco (a metonym for effete liberal homosexuality). Theyre from San Diego, hatred of SF & liberal SF politics is kinda par for the course down there.
Bradley: as u will see in the extras i definitely hc Bradley as an activist, but because he’s… in the navy and also like in his 30s… It’s not college campus activism, it’s just “things all of us in the left wing can agree upon” activism. so, like, BLM or pride, etc. He’s an “in this house we believe” yard sign liberal. He is 38 years old. hes a solid millennial so not politically hip with the kids (me)
Bradley & ice/mav disagree on the VISIBILITY of politics. Ice & mav, who did live through the vietnam era draft/near-dissolution of American society in the 60s and 70s, are not in favor of possibly losing their job/honor they have fought and killed for, for the sake of a political statement. And they believe their relationship IS a political statement, whereas Bradley would rather encourage them to treat their relationship like, I don’t know, a relationship that has a right to exist independent of politics!
Jake and the other daggers: idk. i don’t really give a shit about the daggers sorry. They r blank slates 2 me. jake especially is canonically frat-boy sexist in a way that gives me the heebs, much like original 1986 maverick and ice. But the navy tends to be the most left-wing (or thought of as left wing in common thought) service of the military, if that helps. But it is also the most traditional service of the military, and by traditional I mean BRITISH!!!! 🇬🇧💂there’s so much pomp and circumstance and hoity-toitiness that comes from the navy’s origins in the Royal Navy. A lot of sticking to outdated tradition in the very fabric of the navy itself, while the navy’s enlisted demographics shift younger and more left-wing/“revolutionary…” some interesting conflicts there. Like that one sailor who got blasted by multiple congressmen on social media for (with permission!) reading a poem about their queer identity on the USS Gerald ford’s intercom a few months back, if I remember correctly. Hoo boy the Takes that day were wild. Younger Americans tend to be more liberal but YMMV with officers, who are by nature trying to uphold outdated traditions of the navy for the sake of keeping the navy a unified service
i am of course writing carole as a christian republican who has gay friends and a gay kid not by choice but by the Grace of God
#i realize some terminology in this post is so hyperamericanspecific that you may need to Google it#like the in this house we believe yard sign#it’s… like… i can’t even describe it. it’s a kind of well meaning liberal who can sometimes be a little cringe.#and Reagan democrats (which ice is) are a whole political subgroup in and of themselves#maybe not Reagan democrat but like conservadem? but no that’s different too#blue dog democrat? but not sure he’s that conservative#THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS BECOME SUCH A BIG TENT POST TRUMP THERE ARE 50.000 TYPES OF DEMOCRAT YOU CAN BE#san francisco as a metonym for effete liberal homosexuality of course (it’s where im from 😎😎)#it’s a ten hour drive from SF to San diego like they might as well be different countries. san diego secede from the US when 🙏🏽#pete maverick mitchell#tom iceman kazansky#top gun#icemav#top gun maverick#jake hangman seresin#bradley rooster bradshaw#normie median biden voter ice#the navy is liberalizing but veeeeery slowly#most of the conservative pressure ive seen towards the navy is external! policymakers & budget drafters etc#the navy is very liberal BUT that makes it a laughingstock among conservatives!#so a desire from higher-ups to push the Navy more conservative to be taken seriously…is kinda understandable#when being taken seriously means more ships more capability more money etc#instead of GOP culture-war-pilled pennypinchers going ‘hey why are we givin the gay service so much money’#take this post with a grain of salt. i have never been old enough to vote in a federal election.
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i love how noone saying to vote for biden anymore believes he can be pressured leftwards (or even just "common fucking human decency to not bomb as many people If Any"wards). like, oh noooo if we don't vote biden then trump might get elected its. not like. biden should be DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THAT. instead of US. "if you don't vote biden we'll get trump" yes thats the po~int. look trump sucks we ALL fucking agree on that but maybe biden (or, feasibly, a more populist candidate that isn't a fucking republican or conservaDem) should actually consider the desperation people are sinking to that they're considering "the cart runs over us all including the person with the lever" to try to get him to BUDGE IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY ON THIS.
#ITS CALLED THREATENING SOMEONE WITH A BAD TIME THE ONLY WAY WE ELECTORALLY HAVE THE MEANS TO#ITS HOW DEMOCRACY IS *SUPPOSED* TO WORK#IDEALLY WE'D BE ABLE TO PICK A *BETTER* CANDIDATE BUT WELL HOO BOY THE PARTY SYSTEM FUCKED THAT BEACHED WHALE DIDN'T IT
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An effort by nine conservative House Democrats to force a quick vote on a bipartisan infrastructure bill reportedly began to collapse over the weekend as progressive lawmakers—and Speaker Nancy Pelosi—made clear that they would not allow the legislation to advance until the Senate also passes a sweeping reconciliation package, a centerpiece of the majority party's agenda.
Earlier this month, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and eight other Democrats sent a letter to Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatening to vote down a $3.5 trillion budget resolution—a measure that sets the stage for the reconciliation package—unless the House first passes a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill that the Senate approved on August 11. Their stance won the support of powerful actors in Washington, most prominently the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending corporate lobbying organization in the country.
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@multiheaded1793, continuing from my response to this, I wrote up some alternate history scenarios for the 2020 election to illustrate to you how I think this sort of discourse would be happening in multiple very different scenarios. I think there’s only one scenario that centrist liberals wouldn’t interpret as vindication of their beliefs, and that’s a huge Dem win with a leftist like Sanders at the top of the ticket (a resounding democratic leftist victory is the one experience that’s incompatible with their beliefs about politics!).
It would have been more elegant to just tag you about this, but for some reason I can’t.
These aren’t “proper” alternate history scenarios, e.g. the Sanders victory scenario is “worked backward” to give a final result that’s basically just like OTL, cause the “joke” of the scenario is that the result is basically exactly the same but it’s interpreted differently because it’s Sanders at the top of the ticket instead of Biden. I think “realistically” a Sanders victory scenario would be more different. Or maybe not; one possible interpretation of the 2020 election is elections are very deterministic and it basically doesn’t matter who the candidates are, in which case if we could see a Sanders victory world we might indeed be shocked by how similar their election results maps are to ours.
I hope I didn’t make any silly mistakes. It’s hard to remember and keep track of the twists and turns of this election and the complexities of the United States’s kludgey spaghetti-coded election system! This is why I prefer writing science fiction: there’s less of a chance of getting something wrong!
Anyway, I hope you’ll find these entertaining if nothing else. Warning, this is kind of long.
Resounding Biden victory world:
The point of divergence that leads to this world is obscure. Perhaps it happened decades or centuries or even millennia ago. Whatever the differences are, for a long time they remained hidden in the vast but subtle sociological forces that do more to shape history than all the politicians, generals, philosophers, and prophets. It was only on November 3rd 2020 that these differences produced a manifestation on the flashy surface of politics, as a volcanic eruption might alert humanity to vast slow movements happening in the hot darkness deep within the Earth. On November 3rd 2020 the Democrats get the resounding victory and resounding repudiation of Donald Trump that they were hoping for.
The differences become obvious on election night. As in our world, there is a “red mirage” created by in-person voters favoring Republicans while mail voters favored Democrats, and this briefly creates the impression that the Republicans are doing surprisingly well, but with a much more lopsided vote this “red mirage” lifts much more quickly than in our world. Wisconsin and Michigan flip blue relatively early on election night, while swing state after swing state goes into the Biden-lead column: Arizona, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania ... Texas. Not long into election night Texas flips blue for the first time in two generations; when the news goes out on the TV a hundred million liberals cheer and a hundred million conservatives groan as it becomes obvious that the Republican Party is headed not merely toward defeat but toward a historic once-in-a-generation disempowerment and humiliation. Trump reacts predictably, going on TV to make baseless allegations that he is only losing because of massive voter fraud, but against the background of such a monumental defeat it seems more comical and pathetic than anything else. By the time the sun rises over the CONUS Atlantic coast on November 4th the election is basically all over except for the formalities.
In this world Joe Biden wins all the states he won in our world, and he also wins North Carolina, Florida, and Texas. He also wins one of Nebraska’s electoral votes (as in our world), and wins all four of Maine’s electoral votes (in our world he only won three of Maine’s four electoral votes). Trump still wins Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri, but they’re thin squeaker victories, instead of the comfortable margins of victory he enjoyed in those states in our world. The final electoral college count is Biden 389, Trump 149 (in our world it’s Biden 306, Trump 232). In the popular vote the election is a spectacular landslide blow-out, with over 85 million people voting for Biden while only a little over 50 million people voted for Trump (as of the count on 11/25/2020); Biden’s huge popular vote margin of victory doesn’t make any difference legally but it’s a nice solid symbolic repudiation of Trump.
The picture elsewhere is somewhat less spectacularly rosy for Democrats, the big story of this election being more repulsion toward Trump than repulsion toward Republicans in general. Still, the overall picture is very good for Democrats.
Doug Jones loses his seat in Alabama as he did in our world, but in this world Democrats pick up Senate seats in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and Maine (in our world only Arizona and Colorado flipped to the Democrats). This gives the Democrats a net gain of four seats and a 51 seat majority, with a strong possibility of picking up the other Georgia Senate seat in the run-off election in January 2021. It’s a very thin majority, leaving them vulnerable to conservadem defections, but it’s probably about as good as could realistically be expected under the circumstances. In the House of Representatives the Democrats increase their majority to 243 seats (it was 235 seats after the 2018 “blue wave”); it wasn’t needed, but it’s nice to have. Democrat governors are elected in Vermont and New Hampshire (unlike in our world, where Republicans won those races). Perhaps best of all, the Democrats do well in the state legislature races, and that means they will control much of the next round of redistricting; the consequences of that may profoundly shape the political landscape in the future.
The most obvious discourse implication of this result is an apparent vindication of the Biden strategy of inoffensiveness and reaching out to affluent suburban centrist swing voters. The “Bernie can’t win, we need an electable moderate to take down Trump” people are feeling totally vindicated and credibly claiming credit for this huge victory and drawing lessons for the future that basically amount to “the strategy we advocated was clearly the correct one and we should keep doing it”; they think that if it had been Sanders at the top of the ticket the Democratic victory would have been much narrower or not happened at all. The 2020 election result map also suggests a new geography for the Democratic Party. While the blue wall held this time, in the context of this resounding Democrat victory it looks kind of Trumpy: Trump still won Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa (barely), the Democrat candidate lost the Senate race in Iowa, and Biden’s margins of victory in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania aren’t overwhelming. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has made huge inroads into the south on the strength of southern blacks, Latino/as, and highly educated affluent suburban white swing voters. Political analysts observe that Biden could have lost the Blue Wall and Texas and still narrowly won (with 304 electoral votes). The “recipe” for the huge Biden win was to get lots of non-white votes while peeling off suburban moderates. This strategy is likely to get more effective in the future as the non-white population grows and the country becomes increasingly educated. Put together, this suggests that the Democrat faction in the ascendance will the the moderate “identity politics” faction that wants the Democratic Party to be an economically centrist and institutionally moderate-reformist minority advocate party (think: the sort of people who unironically see “more black lesbian CEOs” as a significant metric of social improvement). On the uglier fringes, this shades into the idea that the Democratic Party doesn’t need those Trumpy culturally conservative poor white people and should just leave them to vote for Republican politicians and rot.
On the left flank, response is divided. Some think that Trump was so bad a potted plant with a smiley face could have won a huge victory against him so the actually existing huge Democratic victory means very little; they think a more leftist party with somebody like Sanders at the top of the ticket would have done even better (a favorite argument of theirs is to paint the mere 51 seat Democrat Senate majority as pathetic). Others think the moderates are probably right about their strategy being the most effective one; it’s hard to argue with spectacular tangible success.
On the Republican side of the aisle, Trump and his hard-core supporters are digging in their heels and claiming with no evidence that the Democrats only won because they cheated. In the other parts of the Republican party, there’s a lot of soul-searching and distancing themselves from Trump and rats fleeing the sinking ship. A decisive repudiation of Trump-style politics within the Republican Party seems likely.
The version of me that exists in this world really enjoyed election night. He bought a nice dinner for himself to celebrate and sat back and enjoyed watching the Republicans get what was coming to them. He has a fond memory of joyously yelling “HE’S BODIED! HE’S FIRED!” as Texas flipped blue. He was in a good mood for days after the election. He feels kind of conflicted about the wider implications of this election though. It sure will be nice to have Trump gone, and the decisive repudiation of Trumpism sure is nice, but... Joe Biden will have most of what he needs to be the next F.D.R., but will he want to be that? Probably not. He still wistfully thinks it would have been better if Sanders or Warren was up there: they might really do something with a once-in-a-century opportunity like this! He expects Biden and his centrist faction to more-or-less squander it. And he’s very much aware of what factions within the Democratic Party will reap a huge PR win from this victory, and he doesn’t enjoy thinking about it. He’s not looking forward to watching Kamala Harris’s inauguration speech in 2024. Still, this will be an opportunity for the left to build. Maybe if A.O.C. can primary Harris in 2024... And if it was Sanders or Warren at the top of the ticket they might have lost, so maybe this is the best that could realistically be hoped for. He’s decided that for now he’s just going to enjoy the beautiful knowledge that Donald Trump’s Presidency will end on January 20th 2021; the future can be worried about when it comes.
Narrow Sanders victory world:
The primaries:
Perhaps this world too was subtly different from ours long before the differences effected the flashy surface of politics, but the obvious point of divergence between this world and ours is Joe Biden unknowingly accidentally eating some contaminated food on February 23rd 2020 (the day after the Nevada caucuses). On the evening of February 23rd he becomes violently ill and is taken to a hospital, where he is diagnosed with a very serious case of food poisoning. His symptoms are severe and there is a tense period when his doctors are not sure he’ll survive. There’s a miscommunication somewhere along the line, and on the night of February 23rd a member of Biden’s staff tells a reporter he’s ready to leak a huge scoop: Joe Biden is dying. By the morning of February 24th the story has hit the presses.
Reports of Joe Biden’s imminent demise prove greatly exaggerated. Though Biden’s illness is severe, it passes quickly: by late morning on February 25th Biden has more-or-less recovered and is out of the hospital and being driven to an airplane that will take him to South Carolina, where he will hit the campaign trail, trying for that win he needs to save his floundering campaign. Still, the incident raises concerns about his health and age at the worst possible time. On February 29th Joe Biden gets the big win he needs in the South Carolina primary, but it’s not quite as big as in our world; the delegate count from South Carolina is this world is Biden 37, Sanders 17 (in our world it was Biden 39, Sanders 15). It is a portent of things to come. With the food poisoning incident raising concerns about Biden’s age and health, different political calculations are made, and Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar don’t sacrifice their Presidency ambitions to give Biden a clear shot at the nomination.
With Buttigieg and Klobuchar still in the race super-Tuesday is a bit of a muddle, instead of the clear Biden victory it was in our world. Sanders wins the west, manages a narrow plurality win in Texas, and manages a strong second or third place in many other states. The super-Tuesday map is rich with southern states where Biden’s conservative reputation and connections with the black community serve him well, and Biden does well. If Democratic primaries were winner-take-all Biden would have managed the sort of resounding victory he had in our world, but they are proportional, so Buttigieg and Klobuchar cut deep into his delegate share and he’s unable to top Sanders the way he did in our world. Amy Klobuchar gets a plurality win in her home state of Minnesota, and Klobuchar and Buttigieg do well in the northeastern states, allowing Sanders to claim plurality wins in all of them. After throwing an obscene mountain of money at the primaries, Michael Bloomberg performs disappointingly. Elizabeth Warren also performs disappointingly. Political analysts in this world see the big winners of super-Tuesday as Sanders and Biden. Biden has gone from floundering to being the clear front-runner among the moderates. Sanders doesn’t really perform all that much better than in our world, but with the moderate vote split he comes out of super-Tuesday the biggest winner, with a solid delegate lead and a good enough performance to look like a strong candidate.
A few days after super-Tuesday Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren drop out of the race and Elizabeth Warren endorses Bernie Sanders. Sanders is the biggest winner from this, as the left flank of the Democratic Party now fully consolidates around him while the moderates remain divided.
The next round of primaries is March 10th. It’s again a muddle, which ultimately favors Sanders. Joe Biden wins big in Mississippi, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg do fairly well, and Sanders wins in Washington and manages a solid second or third place in most other places, which given the proportional nature of Democratic primaries means he continues to build a plurality delegate lead.
The Democrat machine politicians can see where this is going and don’t like it. They well remember what happened to their Republican counterparts in 2016, when a divided field helped their insufficiently house-trained disruptive outsider candidate win the nomination and ultimately the Presidency. They have no intention of letting the same story play out on the opposite side of the aisle in 2020. Having proved himself with his good performance on super-Tuesday, Joe Biden has re-established himself as the Democrat establishment’s favored candidate, and pressure is brought on Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg to drop out. In mid-March Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg suspend their campaigns and endorse Joe Biden.
Sanders and Biden head into their first one-on-one round on March 17. Biden wins big in Florida, while Sanders gets a modest majority of the vote in Illinois and consolidates his dominance of the west by winning in Arizona.
Meanwhile, COVID19 has been spreading as in our world. By mid-March cities all over the country are under shelter-in-place orders and the Democrats are scrambling to try to figure out how to manage a still very competitive primary election in the middle of a once-in-a-century plague year. Then, in late May, the next punch comes; George Floyd dies as he did in our world, and as in our world his death catalyzes a huge eruption of protest and civil unrest.
The whole thing feels queasily mystical. It is as if someone Upstairs thought the Donald Trump Presidency wasn’t as exciting as they’d hoped it would be and tweaked the parameters of the simulation to make 2020 an Interesting Times speed run. Donald Trump seems to only become more vicious and delusional as he presides over a country increasingly riven with civil unrest and fully under the power of the coronavirus. The streets are eerily quiet, like tombs, when they are not increasingly filled with protest and rage and violence. Bernie Sanders is claiming dominion over the Democratic Party and seems poised to do for the left what Donald Trump did for the right. Opinions are divided about exactly how that last thing feels queasily mystical. Is it the light rising to challenge the growing darkness? Or is the horseman of socialism riding with the horseman of plague and the horseman of civil strife? Whatever value judgments one makes about what’s happening, it seems that the old order is being pummeled from many directions simultaneously and is being driven to its knees. Or perhaps it is dying in the way an AIDS patient might die; killed by half a dozen secondary infections that are all fundamentally consequences of the same disease.
With Klobuchar and Buttigieg out of the race Biden surges. In the later one-on-one primaries against Sanders, Biden usually either wins or comes in a strong second. Biden is particularly strong in the south; he wins big in almost every southern state. Many are surprised by the strength of Biden, who many had previously dismissed as an uncharismatic doddering old man who seemed to struggle to string together coherent sentences. However, unlike in our world, in this world Sanders looks like a winner, so many fence-sitters who voted for Biden in our world vote for Sanders in this world, so Biden is unable to dominate the later primaries the way he did in our world.
The final Democratic primary debate in April looks much like it did in our world: two old men in a mostly empty room; an elbow-bump instead of a handshake because they don’t want to risk coronavirus infection by getting close to each other. It’s a test of how well the notoriously gaffe-prone Biden will do in a one-on-one debate, and he passes that test fairly well, allaying fears that he may have some sort of age-related cognitive decline. Biden’s promise to choose a woman as his Vice President is a clever bit of political maneuvering; Sanders is clearly unprepared for it and struggles to respond gracefully. The only big difference is the mostly unstated background knowledge of who is winning and who is losing. In this world Sanders comes into the April debate fresh from an unspectacular but fairly solid win in the Wisconsin primary.
With neither candidate able to dominate the race the Democratic primary remains competitive into June in this world. Biden gains on Sanders, but is unable to overtake him. Political pundits speculate that Sanders has an unfair advantage: he has an ally in the coronavirus: Biden’s vulnerable older supporters stay home in fear of the coronavirus, while Sanders’s younger and less vulnerable supporters go to the polls without fear.
In early June, Joe Biden and Democrat machine politicians face a choice. Biden can stay in the race to the bitter end. Maybe he can overtake Sanders, reach the magic 1,991 delegates, and go into the Democratic convention the unquestionably fair-and-square winner with a clear majority. Or if he can’t do that, he can still try to win on the conventional floor. Klobuchar’s and Buttigieg’s state-level delegates will be proportionately redistributed between him and Sanders, but their district delegates will be in free play and, with the blessings of Klobuchar and Buttigieg, will almost certainly back Biden. Biden can likewise probably expect the superdelegates to side with him. If it comes to convention floor politics Biden will probably easily crush Sanders. It will all be perfectly legally correct. It can even be credibly argued to be the will of the people; everyone knows Sanders is only winning because the moderate vote was split. But does the Democrat establishment dare alienate Sanders’s supporters this way, when they are going into one of the greatest political fights of the twenty-first century against Donald Trump? A long, bruising primary that drags into July may harm the party in the general election. And they know that inside Sanders’s clothing there is more than a man: there is the human mascot and spear-tip of a movement. Biden gaining the nomination through convention floor political maneuvers may be perfectly legally correct, but it takes no great political genius to see Sanders’s supporters will not see it that way; they will see it as their hero being undemocratically cheated out of his victory by a dirty trick. There is a great fear that if this course of action is taken Joe Biden’s 2020 nomination will go down in history as the twenty-first century equivalent of Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 nomination. And there’s also a real fear that a Sanders defeat by convention floor political maneuvers might trigger an eruption of violence as Sanders’s fanatical supporters respond by violently rioting in the streets. The fact that Sanders is so popular with the young, relevantly with fighting age men, starts to assume an ominous dimension in these speculations.
The last competitive primary happens on June 9th. Biden wins big in Georgia, while Sanders gets a surprisingly big win in West Virginia. The day after that, Joe Biden and top-level Democrat machine politicians make a decision. It is perhaps the most important decision of Joe Biden’s life. They will make a sacrifice for party unity in the face of Donald Trump. On June 11th 2020, Joe Biden goes on TV, announces that he is suspending his campaign, endorses Bernie Sanders, and urges party unity in the face of Trump. Immediately afterward, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg also endorse Bernie Sanders.
The general election:
In August, it is announced that Elizabeth Warren has been chosen to be Sanders’s Vice President if he wins. There is speculation that there was a deal made to get her to drop out and endorse Sanders in March and this was the reward she was promised, though she is a logical choice in important ways. She has name recognition, has similar politics to Sanders while being somewhat younger than him (unusually important in this election because Sanders is so old and is an “outsider” candidate; he will need somebody who can pick up the torch from him if he dies in office, or in 2024 when he’ll be in his 80s), has a cooler and more analytical intelligence that compliments Sanders’s charisma, and may be attractive to some voters who are less enthusiastic about Sanders.
On August 17-20 the Democratic National Convention formally nominates Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Presidential candidate for 2020.
The mood among liberals going into the general election is tenser and less confident than in our world. Sanders has a lead over Trump in most polls, but the polls don’t look as good for the Democrats as they did in our world. And Sanders, a man who openly calls himself a socialist, a man who said something nice about something Fidel Castro did and dug in his heels when called in it, is a candidate who naturally inspires electability worries. Many liberals are convinced the Democratic Party has collectively made a terrible mistake, and hope they are wrong.
The first Sanders-Trump debate is on September 29th, and it’s the same kind of spectacle the first Biden-Trump debate was in our world. The highlight (or perhaps lowlight) is Trump making a “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by” statement which many interpret as a call to stand ready to act as brownshirts on his behalf. Some moderates have a vague idea that a Biden-Trump debate might have been somehow more dignified and Presidential, some leftists chuckle about how if it was Biden up there he’d probably have soiled his pants in the middle of the debate or something, the general sentiment among everyone to the left of Mitt Romney is simply that Trump lived down to their worst expectations.
The Vice Presidential debate between Mike Pence and Elizabeth Warren on October 7th is a note of normality: they actually sound like normal politicians instead of like two old men having a Thanksgiving table argument about politics while the rest of the family wishes they’d quiet down. There’s a 2020 touch when a fly rests on Mike Pence’s head for a few minutes.
In the final Sanders-Trump debate they put in a mute button to stop Trump from interrupting so much, and it’s actually a huge favor to Trump, disciplining him into actually being an actually not bad debater.
Election night and after:
The mood among liberals going into election night is tenser and less optimistic than in our world. There’s no confident expectation of a big blue wave and a resounding repudiation of Trumpism, and there’s a lot of fear that Sanders is simply unelectable and he will drag down the down-ballot with him.
Election night seems to confirm the worst. Swing state after swing state goes into the Trump-lead column, and aside from a couple of wins in the west the Senate race picture looks bleak for the Democrats. It looks like Trump will win Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania. Sanders’s margins of victory in crucial swing states are mostly tighter, so it takes longer for the “red mirage” to lift. One of the few bright spots for the Democrats is Arizona, which is a sour note for Donald Trump; at this point he’s mostly confident of victory, but losing Arizona is a humiliation, and Donald Trump hates being humiliated. Late in election night, Donald Trump goes on TV and makes a confident victory speech. He has some worries about the red mirage though, so in typical Trump fashion he follows his confident declaration of victory by claiming that the Democrats are committing voter fraud on a massive scale and trying to steal the election, and he says that the vote counts should stop. A defiant Sanders goes on TV and reassures his supporters that there are many voters yet to be counted, and then goes on the attack, saying Trump is blatantly trying to steal the election. He also says something that some interpret as a call for his supporters to riot if his victory is stolen from him, giving the left its own version of Trump’s “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by” scandal.
There’s a lot of tension in a lot of mixed-generation liberal households on election night, as older, more cautious and moderate liberals quietly or not so quietly blame the youngsters for the disaster they believe is unfolding in front of them. “This wouldn’t have happened with Biden or Mayor Pete or Klobuchar,” they think, “How did you expect middle America to react to a guy who calls himself a socialist and defends Fidel Castro? We told you this would happen!” The election picture most liberals go to bed with that night is bleak.
In the last dark pre-dawn hours of November 4th the red mirage finally begins to lift. Wisconsin flips to Sanders-lead. By late morning on November 4th Michigan has also flips to Sanders-lead. Millions of older liberals who went to bed blaming the Berniebros for four more years of Donald Trump check the news and breathe a sigh of surprised relief: it’s not much but maybe Bernie did have what it takes after all; he managed something he needed to do, something Hillary Clinton failed to do: he held the blue wall! All eyes now turn to Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania actually flips somewhat earlier than in our world, to the absolute jubilant delight of young liberal “Berniebros,” the cautious relief of their liberal elders, and the disappointment or outrage or terror of a hundred million conservatives. Not long afterward, a surprise: Georgia flips to Sanders-lead too. It’s a real squeaker, even tighter than Biden’s Georgia win in our world, and Sanders would have won without it, but it’s a pleasant surprise for liberals.
With the election basically all over but the formalities Sanders makes his formal victory speech, with raucous cheers from enthusiastic supporters. In contrast to the almost therapeutic victory speech Biden gave in our world, Sanders’s victory speech is darker, angrier. The speech has its hopeful and conciliatory notes, but the general thrust of its message is that Sanders intends to fight for the ordinary American and his fight has just begun.
Sanders’s victory is greeted with an outpouring of joy and celebration by his often young supporters. Most liberals are happy just to get rid of Trump. Many moderate liberals aren’t really looking forward to what they see as another four years of an obnoxious angry extremist in the White House, but at least Sanders isn’t evil. On the right the mood ranges from grumpy disappointment to ... dark. There’s a significant number of people who are under the sincere impression that Sanders is basically Lenin and the relationship between him and Antifa is similar to the relationship between Hitler and the Blackshirts.
So far the much-feared Trumpist brownshirts seem to be a paper tiger; there have been some rowdy protests but no serious violence. Lots of people are very fervently hoping things stay that way.
Somewhere there’s an immigrant from China who’s old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution and is very, very frightened. She doesn’t follow politics much but she’s heard that Bernie Sanders is a communist and she’s got just the right mix of garbled information about him filtered through her Fox News watching neighbors to be very alarmed. It’s starting here too! It’s all starting again! She’s trying to give her family a crash-course in how to survive in a communist dictatorship, but they’ve never known anything but freedom and don’t seem to be taking her very seriously, which is frustrating and heartbreaking to her; “they don’t realize these things will soon be matters of life and death!”
Comparing the election results in our world and in this world, most people would be struck by how similar they look, how little difference the top of the ticket made.
Compared to Biden, Sanders did better in the west but worse in the south. He did worse with affluent moderates and center-rightists and better with liberals and poor people. He did worse with blacks but better with Latino/as. He actually has a bigger popular vote win than Biden, mostly because he creates greater enthusiasm in liberal areas such as California, but his margins of victory in swing states are mostly tighter. Sanders didn’t poll as well as Biden in the lead-up to the election, but he also did not underperform expectations in the same way; Sanders supporters tend to be the sort of people who don’t answer polls much. Compared to Biden, Sanders’s success relied less on peeling off swing voters and more on bringing in politically disengaged people; the sort of people who don’t answer polls much, don’t trust or like the talking heads on TV, usually don’t vote, and are usually poorer and less formally educated than the conventional electorate. In short, the “dark horse” Sanders voter looks a lot like the “dark horse” Trump voter.
In short, compared to Biden, Sanders has a rather Trumpy profile, and his winning strategy looks kind of like a sort of left-wing mirror of Trump’s 2016 winning strategy: super-charge the base, draw in some politically disengaged people, rely on partisan tribalism to fill in the gaps, with this build the sort of narrow winning coalition that can just manage to defy conventional political wisdom and propel an “extreme, outsider” normally “unelectable” candidate into office.
Sanders won the same states Biden won in our world. His margins of victory are bigger in Arizona and Pennsylvania but smaller in Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia. Sanders didn’t win that one electoral college vote in Nebraska, which in this world went solidly to Trump, so his electoral college total is slightly smaller than Biden’s.
In the Senate, the picture is broadly similar to our world, though with some differences. Warren and Sanders were both Senators from states with Republican governors who would have the responsibility of appointing their replacements if Sanders became President. The governor of Vermont agrees to appoint a Democrat-aligned independent to replace Sanders if he wins (much as he did in our world), but the governor of Massachusetts intends to appoint a Republican to replace Warren. However, the Democrats did get one stroke of luck in this world that they didn’t get in ours: the Democrat Senate candidate won in Iowa; this saves Warren from going down in history as having cost the Democrats a Senate majority by accepting the Vice Presidency post. Other than this the Senate picture looks basically just like in our world. This puts the Democrats in a somewhat better position than in our world, as there will be a special election for Warren’s Senate seat in 2021 that is likely to elect a Democrat, but the Senate majority is going to come down to two run-off races in Georgia, just like in our world. The House races went a little worse for the Democrats than in our world: as of 11/25/2020 the Cook Political Report calls the House as 220 Democrats, 213 Republicans, and 2 uncalled races (in our world it’s 222 Democrats, 210 Republicans, and 3 uncalled races). Likewise, the governor’s races went the same way they went in our world, except that the Republican also won the governor’s race in North Carolina (in our world, the Democrat won that race). And the state legislature races are the same depressing picture as in our world, so Republicans will control much of the next round of redistricting.
The post-election discourse:
Of course, people in this world cannot compare their election results with ours and see how similar they are. They can only speculate about what our world might look like, just as I can only speculate about what their world might look like. And speculate they do.
Many centrist, moderate, and “pragmatist” Democrats think they know exactly who’s to blame for the Democrat’s disappointing performance: Sanders, and by extension the primary voters who put him at the top of the ticket. How could a President be as bad as Trump was, get 250,000 U.S. citizens killed through incompetence, and then come so close to winning? How could so many people vote for such a person and for the politicians who did nothing to stop him and aided him? Well, maybe if the opposition party did something incredibly, mind-bogglingly stupid, like putting at the top of the ticket a guy who openly calls himself a socialist and who defends Fidel Castro... They are convinced that the election results look the way they do because Sanders turned off huge numbers of persuadable voters. They think the Berniebros took the perfect storm of conditions for a once-in-a-century huge Democrat victory that was 2020 and used it to get an ordinarily unelectable extremist into the White House, at an enormous opportunity cost to the rest of the party (and a little less luck and they’d have blown their own goal too and gotten everyone four more years of Trump!). They are convinced that if it were Biden or Klobuchar or Buttigieg at the top of the ticket the party would not be in this mess. Many of them are sure that the Democratic Party would have surged magnificently to crushing dominance of the Presidency and both branches of Congress, if only the Berniebros hadn’t insisted on burdening the party with a toxic albatross.
The predictable tweets and thinkpieces blaming the disappointing election results on Sanders have been written. The disappointing results in the south are blamed on Sanders’s inability to reach out to black people and persuadable white moderates. Somebody looks at exit polls, notices Trump seems to have improved his performance with everyone except white men (a pattern that exists in our world too), and multiple high-profile articles and blog posts are written blaming this on Sanders’s “class reductionism” and supposed insensitivity to the problems of everyone who isn’t a working class white man. The election map represents the Democratic Party turning away from its vibrant diverse future and doubling down on its decaying past as the party of “white working class” Midwesterners. The fact that non-white people still overwhelmingly voted Democrat and Sanders has many female and minority supporters is, of course, quietly soft-peddled in such analysis. The disappointing election results are blamed on the Democratic Party’s embrace of socialism, of Medicare For All, of “defund the police,” of BLM. Criticism that paints Sanders as “class reductionist” and insufficiently sensitive to the needs of women and minorities coexists happily with criticism that castigates the Democratic Party for embracing anything that makes affluent culturally conservative suburban white people uncomfortable.
Many leftists are, of course, convinced that the moderates have it all backwards and the Democrats would have gone down in epic humiliating defeat under Klobuchar or Buttigieg or, God, can you imagine; Biden. The closeness of the election just shows how badly the Democrats needed a leader like Sanders who could inspire people and had something real to offer; without him the Republicans would have wiped the floor with them; he saved the party from total defeat and ingratitude and backstabbing is his predictable reward, because liberals would rather lose to fascists than win with leftists. It just shows electoral politics is a waste of time anyway, watch 2024 when Warren gets primaried by Mayo Pete who then loses to Tom Cotton.
The version of me that exists in this world had a tense election night, breathed a cautious sigh of relief when he opened his computer and saw Wisconsin had flipped blue in the morning, breathed a bigger sigh of relief when Michigan followed it, and spent a week feeling good when Pennsylvania finally flipped for Sanders. It’s a far from ideal election result, of course, with Sanders’s power likely to be sharply constrained, but still, there’s a President who might really do some good! If nothing else, he thinks Sanders will be good at using the soft power of the Presidency to shift the Overton Window. He’s very excited that Sanders will be going to the White House.
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President Obama inspired a lot of progressive disappointment for often failing to live up to his lofty rhetoric. But a strain of liberal thought defended him by insisting that presidents just weren’t that powerful. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan mocked the mindset of the uninitiated by calling it the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, after the DC Comics hero who possessed a ring that gave him near-total power, bound only by his imagination and will.
To Nyhan, partisans hold the misguided notion that a president “can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.” In reality, he argued, a strong legislature, a Supreme Court that can overturn laws, and the dynamics of a polarized age make policy accomplishments a difficult climb.
Theoretically speaking, this is all correct. A president has a thicket of checks and balances to maneuver through. But America has also been passing laws for over 232 years, and buried in the U.S. Code are the raw materials for fundamental change. It doesn’t take Green Lantern’s ring to unearth these possibilities, just a president willing to use the laws already passed to their fullest potential.
The Prospect has identified 30 meaningful executive actions, all derived from authority in specific statutes, which could be implemented on Day One by a new president. These would not be executive orders, much less abuses of authority, but strategic exercise of legitimate presidential power.
Without signing a single new law, the next president can lower prescription drug prices, cancel student debt, break up the big banks, give everybody who wants one a bank account, counteract the dominance of monopoly power, protect farmers from price discrimination and unfair dealing, force divestment from fossil fuel projects, close a slew of tax loopholes, hold crooked CEOs accountable, mandate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, allow the effective legalization of marijuana, make it easier for 800,000 workers to join a union, and much, much more. We have compiled a series of essays to explain precisely how, and under what authority, the next president can accomplish all this.
The need for a Day One agenda is particularly acute as we head into 2020. I keep sensing an undercurrent of despair when talking to liberal partisans about the election, a sigh that beating Trump is not enough but all that can be done. Yes, Democrats are only an even-money shot, at best, to flip the Senate. And yes, even if they succeed, Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell can obstruct the majority with the filibuster, and it would not be up to the next president, but the 50th senator ideologically, someone like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, to agree to change the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for legislation. (There’s always budget reconciliation, but that limited path goes through the same conservaDems.)
But this reality does not have to inspire progressive anguish. Anyone telling you that a Democratic victory next November would merely signal four years of endless gridlock hasn’t thought about the possibilities laid out in this issue. And if you doubt the opportunity for strong executive action, let me direct your attention to Donald Trump.
MAKE NO MISTAKE: Trump is an autocrat, more than willing to break the law to realize his campaign promises. His invocation of inherent, extreme executive power, egged on chiefly by Attorney General William Barr, is in fact dangerous, as former Representative Brad Miller lays out for us later in this issue. Trump has asserted the right to ignore Congress’s oversight function, reinterpret laws based on his own preferences, hide information from lawmakers and the public, promise pardons before illegal actions take place, appoint acting heads of federal agencies without advice and consent from the Senate, and raise the specter of emergency to follow through on his campaign promises.
But in a significant number of cases, Trump’s pathway has sprung from a simple proposition: When Congress gives the executive branch authority, the president, you know, can actually use it.
Trump’s health and human services secretary is employing the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 to test the importation of lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada. His education secretary canceled student debt automatically for 25,000 disabled veterans, implementing part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008. His agriculture secretary is resurfacing the work requirements already present in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program statute, to prevent states from waiving them.
We’ve similarly seen Trump apply Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to impose tariffs on imports he deems present a risk to national security. He also used the Commodity Credit Corporation, established in 1933, to send billions of dollars to farmers, to protect them from the blowback from his own tariffs.
Even his most tyrannical action, transferring billions from the Defense Department to build sections of a wall along the Mexican border, had the backing of a federal law: The National Emergencies Act of 1976 allows limited circumstances for presidents to move around money, despite Congress holding the purse strings. (It was such an emergency that he waited seven months to announce the second batch of funding shifts.)
Few of Trump’s ideas have been good policy, from a progressive perspective. Some, like the invocation of emergency powers, are a common tool of despots which never turns out well even when used by small-d democrats, from Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus to Roosevelt’s Japanese internment camps.
(Continue Reading)
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*Also troubling: Kavanaugh eats babies*
The sham confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh ended last week, but not soon enough to prevent Democrats from drawing some blood. Kavanaugh is, of course, a constitutional-republic-busting trainwreck on most issues. But what continues to hang out there like a smelly sock is the fact---again, the fact---that Kavanaugh has repeatedly lied under oath. Lisa Graves is a former deputy assistant Attorney General, and she says the bastard should be impeached, not promoted:
Newly released emails show that while he was working to move through President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees in the early 2000s, Kavanaugh received confidential memos, letters, and talking points of Democratic staffers stolen by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda. That includes research and talking points Miranda stole from the Senate server after I had written them for the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counsel for nominations for the minority.
Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.
No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it.
He's a serial perjurer. It's right there on paper and on video. So my point being: Democrats have no reason whatsoever to vote for this guy. Even conservadems have a legitimate justification for casting a no vote. Ten words is all it takes in a press release or a tweet, and wouldn’t it be nice if they all issued them at the same time: "Judge Kavanaugh repeatedly lied under oath. We don’t confirm perjurers." (And don’t forget to put little hearts over the i's.)
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This is so fucking offensive, and it’s one of the things about neoliberal conservaDems that drives me bonkers. They truly believe that by praising someone like Ronald Reagan—a deeply racist and homophobic person who didn’t lift a finger to to help people with HIV/AIDS—that they will somehow get conservative Republicans who hate them to vote for them in significant numbers.
There’s more:
JFC, this wannabe Reagan “Democrat” doesn’t belong anywhere near the White House.
👉🏿 https://www.wired.com/story/californias-governor-gavin-newsom-vetoes-state-ban-on-driverless-trucks/
👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/24/us/newsom-veto-bill-child-gender-affirmation.html
👉🏿 https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/newsom-scotus-brief-18383709.php
👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/us/02newsom.html
👉🏿 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Newsom
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okay "normie median Biden voter ice" got me. That's funny. But also so true! It prob took him a bit to vote dem too (though I believe that Ice would have never voted for Trump). Would love to hear more thoughts on Ice and Mav's politics. Also the list of who they would have voted for if you're willing to share.
i do worry that posting my extremely in-depth headcanons about some of this stuff will have the JKR “wizard shit” effect on my writing and ruin it a little, but ask and ye shall receive
copy-pasted straight from my list of “unhinged compacflt!top gun headcanons” that ive been keeping since september: on ice & mav's politics
16. Since their friendship began, Ice has always told Maverick who to vote for, since Maverick doesn't care enough to pay attention to national politics. They are begrudging ConservaDems (conservative political views, would vote conservative every election if Republicans weren’t actively sending them to war/actively promoting fascism). Ice’s voting record (and after 1988, Mav’s too) 1980-2020—note that he has always considered himself an “educated moderate”: 1980: Reagan. 1984: Reagan. 1988: Bush. 1992: Bush. 1996: Clinton (reaction to aftermath of PGW. Doesn’t care that Clinton enacted DADT because “I’m not [redacted], so it doesn’t apply to me”). 2000: Gore (refusal to vote for another Bush). 2004: Kerry (Mav votes Bush this year out of spite as he and Ice are going through their break-up). 2008: McCain (Navy loyalty). 2012: Obama (liked him as a person/worked closely with him, didn’t like his policies so much). 2016: Clinton (no other alternative). 2020: Biden (actually liked/previously worked with Biden, and now actively married to another man and therefore had to make some liberal concessions). 2024-onwards they will vote for any Democrat as long as they aren’t a “socialist.”
17. Also, Maverick didn’t vote in 2016. Partially because in my universe the TGM mission takes place that November, very near the election, and he has bigger fish to fry (something Ice will later take him to task for), and partially because I genuinely think he wouldn’t be able to stomach either mainstream candidate and probably would’ve voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson, which might have torn his relationship with Ice to shreds a few days before schedule. “Are you fucking kidding me? Johnson? Pete, this moron’s moronic party wants to abolish the driver’s license—” / “—Yeah, and then I could ride your sweet wheels with no problem whatsoever—maybe he’ll abolish pilots’ licenses, too, I’d like to see that—” / “If you vote for Gary fucking Johnson, I will very happily stop footing the bill for your piece-of-shit airplane, and you can see how useful your pilot’s license is then—” / So Mav didn’t vote in 2016.
35. In terms of what he Tweets: I do foresee, post-retirement, Ice basically becoming a neoliberal military intellectual type on Twitter a la Mark Hertling (look him up on Twitter). Bio: “Retired @SECNAV. Advisor @WhiteHouse and @VoteVets. Contributing writer @TheAtlantic. Interested in geopolitics & modern warfare. Aviator, husband, Padres fan. [American flag emoji]” Only posts pictures of himself and Maverick at three specific annual events: 1. their wedding anniversary (“36 years with this fool and he’s still surprised to find out that I like the F-5 better than the A-4 #happyanniversary”), 2. every EAA Airventure (huge airplane convention), 3. San Francisco’s Fleet Week (which of course they MUST attend, they even headline it in 2018). Informative, analytical, highly-respected. Maybe goes on CNN or NBC all the time to talk about civil-military relations shit (aversion to FOX since the start of the Iraq War). Gonna say he had like four really viral threads about Russia and Ukraine in April or May and so has 300k followers or something like that. He has a personal website that links back to his Twitter and every essay he writes for international publications, with a pretty braggadocious bio (something along the lines of “Tom Kazansky has directly almost started global nuclear war twice in his life, and in the thirty-year gap in between, sold the Swiss half their entire goddamn Air Force and directed an entire Fleet during the Iraq War”). Lots of tweets like “Military aviation hot take: Compared to the F-22, the F-35 is a waste of money. Source: husband with 400+ hours of F-35 experience.” / “[Quote tweet of Russian Foreign Minister boasting about Su-57 production lines] Oh, so you guys finally figured out how to make more than one every other year?” / “Analysis of the failure of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine, from an ex-US Pacific Fleet Commander’s perspective: a short [thread emoji] [This thread gets 26k likes and 4k retweets]” / “This weekend my husband & I flew in to @EAA Oshkosh #OSH19 & took home first place for best P-51. Not to brag, but.” (A reply to this tweet: “Sir, you really know how to bury the lede that your husband is Adm. Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. I had to look it up on Wikipedia.” / @TKazansky: “What, was it not obvious? Who else could it have been?”) Also, I see him writing a whole bunch of op-eds for international political magazines a la Tom Nichols (look him up on Twitter too). Writing analyses of recent geopolitical/military events for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Bulwark, the Navy Times, the Atlantic, Bellingcat, etc. Not so much focused on domestic issues (but VoteVets [socially progressive vets’ group] board member, and ardently pro-democracy, yay!). He’s a smart guy.
37. This is not a headcanon, just kind of a… a real-life implication. My Ice was Deputy Commander of Third Fleet in 2003, meaning he’d have been there in command of the USS Abraham Lincoln when President Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard that ship in May less than 2 months after the initial American invasion of Iraq. Very premature & embarrassing. Ice would’ve been in direct contact with Bush/Cheney/NSC bureaucrats many, many times during the war. I genuinely believe this is what pushed him over the edge into firm liberal territory.
#they are the opposite of social liberal fiscal conservative#social boomer and fiscal moderate and foreign policy liberal#as they are straight-passing they are also conservative-passing in that they claim they are conservatives because it upholds their view#of American masculinity (as many conservative men do) but they're not actually conservative#sometimes I do think I stumbled upon a stroke of genius with my 'mav is a libertarian' hc though#im sure im not the only person to have had that hc but still. seriously ur gonna look at that mf and tell me he's not a libertarian#guys. when I tell you I have thought entirely too much about this stuff I mean it#top gun#top gun maverick#top gun headcanons#tom iceman kazansky#pete maverick mitchell#I have more of their foreign/domestic policy opinions but I think if I posted any more of this stuff#you would see me for who I am (insane)#thank you for the ask hahahaha#<3
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I feel like there's this vast disconnect with the purity police in desire versus reality in politics
desire: all progressive leftist senators
reality: the only democrat who can get elected in West Virginia or Georgia or Missouri is one that's somewhat conservative and will vote against us some of the time
And the reality is we need those conservadems to ever have a majority again.
By all means hold a california or new york or MA senator's feet to the fire, they SHOULD be progressive. But you have to have a different standard in a red state.
A senator that's with us 50% of the time is a lot better than a senator that's with us 0.5% of the time. At least with the former more times than not they'll be with us when it counts.
#you cannot have a perfect politician who is with you on literally every issue#if you want that run for office#im serious#politics
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Wait Until You See Who's Challenging ConservaDem Stephen Lynch!
Wait Until You See Who’s Challenging ConservaDem Stephen Lynch!
Safely behind its paywall last week, Roll Call ran a post by Colin Diersing about Tulsi Gabbard’s cloudy political future. DownWithTyranny readers are already aware that the conservative Fox Democrat masquerading as a progressive can’t be trusted, despite having noisily endorsed Bernie– in a state where he won the 2016 caucuses 70-30% against Clinton. Digressing wrote that she’s “gained…
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2020-2021 US transition of power watch:
The Democratic Party candidates, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof, have won the January 5th Georgia Senate run-off elections. This means that the Senate will be split 50/50 between Democrat and Republican allegiance. The Vice President is the tie-breaker vote in the Senate, so this means the Democrats will have a narrow advantage in the Senate after Biden is sworn in on January 20th, as after that the Vice President will be Kamala Harris. It’s a very narrow advantage that will leave the Democrats very vulnerable to conservadem defections, but it’s better than a continuing Republican Senate majority.
I expect most of you have already heard about the Trumpist attempt to disrupt the official certification of Biden’s win yesterday; tragically, four people died during the riot. The Trumpist attempt to disrupt the official certification of Biden’s win yesterday was unsuccessful, the Trumpist rioters were removed from the Capitol building in a matter of hours and Congress reconvened and performed the official electoral college vote count and certified Biden’s victory.
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The Tennessee Democratic Party disavows his candidacy, will not do anything to promote or support him in any way, and urges Democrats to write-in a candidate of their choice in November.
The Tennessee Democratic Party • Completely disowning Mark Clayton, the Democratic candidate for Senate. Clayton won the Democratic primary, but his involvement with Public Advocate USA, classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has caused the state party to cut him loose. Public Advocate USA opposes hate crime laws ("thought control legislation"), marriage equality ("the furtherance of so-called 'Gay Rights'"), the National Endowment of the Arts ("federal funding and endorsement of pornography and obscenity"), Roe v. Wade, and "the mainstream media's promotion and glorification of drug abuse, teenage sex, gangs, atheism, homosexuality and other immoral behavior and beliefs." In other words, not exactly the kind of organization you'd expect a Democrat to get involved in. So how did Clayton end up winning the primary? "Many Democrats in Tennessee knew nothing about any of the candidates in the race, so they voted for the person at the top of the ticket," the state party suggested. source (via • follow)
#blue dogs#clayton democrat#conservadems#hate groups#mark clayton#public advocate usa#southern poverty law center#tennessee senate
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By changing from Democrat to Independent, Kyrsten Sinema has quite possibly changed the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.
Instead of having a 51 - 49 advantage, we are back to a 50 - 50 split, where Joe Manchin can continue being the rotating villain to block Democrats, or Sinema can straight up caucus with Republicans. Georgia electing Warnock to the Senate is a bigger save than we realized.
Anyway, Kyrsten Slimema is and has always been a Republican. I hope the DNC and the DCCC can be counted on to campaign fiercely against her (I know, unlikely), and Arizona replaces her with an actual progressive.
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