The last item suggests to me, and not for the first time, that the “liberal” and “conservative” labels have lost whatever coherent meaning they may have had. Let’s take, as an example, “whether to allow homeless people to camp in public spaces.” I am on the old-style left, which I define as strong support for unionization and for health care coverage as a human right. When it comes to homeless people camping in public spaces, I consider it a societal failure that this is where anyone lives, and we need to address it humanely. So, for me, this is not a matter of either allowing or prohibiting camping out in public spaces, but rather a question of what we need to do as a society to address the underlying issues—very often mental illness—that contribute to homelessness. Where I personally come out on this is that such people need to be in supportive housing, not camping out in the public square.
Agree, though based on my personal life experience and work with homeless I would amend “very often mental illness” to “very often mental illness and/or substance addiction.”
Support from Karl Rove is not a good look. Liberals were right about him back in the day and should not embrace him now. MAGA pretty much despises him and that you should celebrate.
This is an old point that some say is just linguistic. But it is not merely linguistic. It is substantive.
The terms liberal and conservative as used in this post do not have the meaning that they have had for a few generations. Liberals are not progressives; conservatives are not MAGA Trumpers. We (liberals and conservatives) want nothing to do with those usurpers of the parties we once belonged to. Sensible pundits like you have got to stop using those terms to mean what they were never intended to mean. It confuses people.
I'm going to offer a few contrarian thoughts here. 1) I not only think most polls---nearly all---are wrong, but have absolutely failed to adjust to a) massive new (3m) GOP registrations since November 2024; 2) deportations/self-deportations of about 5 million illegals (of whom, I think, most reasonable people would accept that SOME voted and of those who did vote, they voted D); the 3) massive voter roll purges (again, over 3m---maybe 5---and again disproportionately D voters). When these are factored in, I think polls are off anywhere form 4-10 points in the direction of Ds. Paxton will win by 4; OH (always, always, always underpolls Rs---in 2016, they missed Trump by 8; they missed JD Vance by 4; in 2020 they missed Trump in OH by 4, and so on). So I don't think Husted or Vivek are in trouble. AZ has a 311,000 GOP lead in voter reg. What may be happening as well is that thanks to people such as El-Sayed, Mamdani, Pressley, AOC and others, voters have already internalized a major FEAR FACTOR of Democrats that they will not state out loud, namely that they really do fear that Democrats will be a threat to their lives and families, but can't say so. Rs may be incompetent, lazy, even corrupt, but I do not think Rs are viewed anywhere as a threat to people's lives. We'll see. I was dead on in 2024 (in July of 2024 I said Trump would win with 312 EVs and win the popular vote by 1.5%, and I also called the senate then perfectly (well, I was LOW on the number of Republicans by one). In 2016, in October, I said Trump would win with "Between 300 and 320 EVs." Again, final was 304.
I think you make some good points, Larry. However, I think Trump’s undisciplined antics (Lake Ontario, trade spats, $5,000 if Republicans keep Congress, crypto earnings, etc.) will cost Republicans big time.
The Republicans are going to be murdered in the mid-terms and probably 2028 no matter what Trump does. The brute fact is that enough independents hate both parties, and it's a lot easier to run as an outsider who brings "change" than an insider who has to defend the status quo.
In five or ten years, everyone on the left will pretend they never supported defund the police, (trans)gender ideology, open borders, socialism, rewriting American history, the white fragility thesis, Latinx, hating men, hating Western Civilization and so on.
But they'll gradually retreat and the 2020s will seem like a bad dream. It won't impact elections.
I don't. By the time the election comes and jobless claims continue to plummet and fuel prices drop and Ds continue to be dangerous, "antics" won't matter a whit when you're voting for a congressman.
Karl Rove? he still around? The worst deep state neo con out there. Democrats can have him, he's terrible.
I'm an independent. Both parties are bad and unworthy to support. I lean republican these days. Democrats are way to out there for me. Too much liberal woke there.
I want to support a party that supports working people, the middle class. Not out there and hasn't been since FDR died. Republicans support money and owners only; democrats support feel good social causes.
> The GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches—and not only in Texas. Conservatism and the party it dominates have an increasing number of bigoted advocates of a “heritage America” composed of white descendants of the original European settlers.
All leftists need is to find one Republican who makes a politically incorrect joke and they'll feel justified in their hatred and bigotry for years. At the same time as the Bo French (who???) controversy, a famous rapper called Macklemore performed in a fake Hasidic beard and oversized nose to dehumanize Jews. Ed Sheeran dropped him and now every other opening act on his tour has dropped out.
For the overwhelming majority of conservatives, "heritage America" means Christian values and not secular values (like the Reign of Terror, the gulags, the holodomor, the great leap forwards, Social Darwinism, eugenics, (trans)gender ideology, "abortion is healthcare," defund the police, and open borders).
JMan, I don't know why this needs to be viewed through the red-blue tribal lens. French's remarks were abhorrent -- far beyond a "politically incorrect joke" -- and it's okay to say as much. We can simultaneously acknowledge this and also call out Macklemore's abhorrent takes on the Middle East and offensive cosplay. In fact, most people probably fall in that middle camp. It doesn't have to be either/or.
I think it's also entirely fair to acknowledge that there is a subset of the right that does not share your definition of "heritage America" but rather sees it through a much more identitarian lens. Insofar as that term simply means Christian values, I imagine Rove would largely agree with you. (It's worth noting that he has remained in the GOP throughout the Trump era and hasn't taken the path of many of his old colleagues in becoming a Never Trumper.) But his understanding of this idea seems due to the fact that some of the people who espouse it also see brown people at a football game and don't think, "This is an incredible example of assimilation at work," but rather, "The America I want to see would never look like this."
There is excess on both sides of the spectrum. I'm sure a lot of people think it's worse on one side or the other, but regardless, it's okay to call it all out.
The last item suggests to me, and not for the first time, that the “liberal” and “conservative” labels have lost whatever coherent meaning they may have had. Let’s take, as an example, “whether to allow homeless people to camp in public spaces.” I am on the old-style left, which I define as strong support for unionization and for health care coverage as a human right. When it comes to homeless people camping in public spaces, I consider it a societal failure that this is where anyone lives, and we need to address it humanely. So, for me, this is not a matter of either allowing or prohibiting camping out in public spaces, but rather a question of what we need to do as a society to address the underlying issues—very often mental illness—that contribute to homelessness. Where I personally come out on this is that such people need to be in supportive housing, not camping out in the public square.
Agree, though based on my personal life experience and work with homeless I would amend “very often mental illness” to “very often mental illness and/or substance addiction.”
Support from Karl Rove is not a good look. Liberals were right about him back in the day and should not embrace him now. MAGA pretty much despises him and that you should celebrate.
This is an old point that some say is just linguistic. But it is not merely linguistic. It is substantive.
The terms liberal and conservative as used in this post do not have the meaning that they have had for a few generations. Liberals are not progressives; conservatives are not MAGA Trumpers. We (liberals and conservatives) want nothing to do with those usurpers of the parties we once belonged to. Sensible pundits like you have got to stop using those terms to mean what they were never intended to mean. It confuses people.
Two things can be true:
- MAGA is much closer to the conservative Democrats of the 90s than Reagan
- MAGA is far more conservative than the Democrats of today
Did you mean “than Reagan was” or “than to Reagan”?
I think both might be true, and both are certainly compatible with your second item. But I’m curious.
I'm going to offer a few contrarian thoughts here. 1) I not only think most polls---nearly all---are wrong, but have absolutely failed to adjust to a) massive new (3m) GOP registrations since November 2024; 2) deportations/self-deportations of about 5 million illegals (of whom, I think, most reasonable people would accept that SOME voted and of those who did vote, they voted D); the 3) massive voter roll purges (again, over 3m---maybe 5---and again disproportionately D voters). When these are factored in, I think polls are off anywhere form 4-10 points in the direction of Ds. Paxton will win by 4; OH (always, always, always underpolls Rs---in 2016, they missed Trump by 8; they missed JD Vance by 4; in 2020 they missed Trump in OH by 4, and so on). So I don't think Husted or Vivek are in trouble. AZ has a 311,000 GOP lead in voter reg. What may be happening as well is that thanks to people such as El-Sayed, Mamdani, Pressley, AOC and others, voters have already internalized a major FEAR FACTOR of Democrats that they will not state out loud, namely that they really do fear that Democrats will be a threat to their lives and families, but can't say so. Rs may be incompetent, lazy, even corrupt, but I do not think Rs are viewed anywhere as a threat to people's lives. We'll see. I was dead on in 2024 (in July of 2024 I said Trump would win with 312 EVs and win the popular vote by 1.5%, and I also called the senate then perfectly (well, I was LOW on the number of Republicans by one). In 2016, in October, I said Trump would win with "Between 300 and 320 EVs." Again, final was 304.
I think you make some good points, Larry. However, I think Trump’s undisciplined antics (Lake Ontario, trade spats, $5,000 if Republicans keep Congress, crypto earnings, etc.) will cost Republicans big time.
The Republicans are going to be murdered in the mid-terms and probably 2028 no matter what Trump does. The brute fact is that enough independents hate both parties, and it's a lot easier to run as an outsider who brings "change" than an insider who has to defend the status quo.
In five or ten years, everyone on the left will pretend they never supported defund the police, (trans)gender ideology, open borders, socialism, rewriting American history, the white fragility thesis, Latinx, hating men, hating Western Civilization and so on.
But they'll gradually retreat and the 2020s will seem like a bad dream. It won't impact elections.
That would be great news if they really retreat rather than “pretend” and then go back to supporting all those things once elected.
I don't. By the time the election comes and jobless claims continue to plummet and fuel prices drop and Ds continue to be dangerous, "antics" won't matter a whit when you're voting for a congressman.
Karl Rove? he still around? The worst deep state neo con out there. Democrats can have him, he's terrible.
I'm an independent. Both parties are bad and unworthy to support. I lean republican these days. Democrats are way to out there for me. Too much liberal woke there.
I want to support a party that supports working people, the middle class. Not out there and hasn't been since FDR died. Republicans support money and owners only; democrats support feel good social causes.
> The GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches—and not only in Texas. Conservatism and the party it dominates have an increasing number of bigoted advocates of a “heritage America” composed of white descendants of the original European settlers.
All leftists need is to find one Republican who makes a politically incorrect joke and they'll feel justified in their hatred and bigotry for years. At the same time as the Bo French (who???) controversy, a famous rapper called Macklemore performed in a fake Hasidic beard and oversized nose to dehumanize Jews. Ed Sheeran dropped him and now every other opening act on his tour has dropped out.
For the overwhelming majority of conservatives, "heritage America" means Christian values and not secular values (like the Reign of Terror, the gulags, the holodomor, the great leap forwards, Social Darwinism, eugenics, (trans)gender ideology, "abortion is healthcare," defund the police, and open borders).
JMan, I don't know why this needs to be viewed through the red-blue tribal lens. French's remarks were abhorrent -- far beyond a "politically incorrect joke" -- and it's okay to say as much. We can simultaneously acknowledge this and also call out Macklemore's abhorrent takes on the Middle East and offensive cosplay. In fact, most people probably fall in that middle camp. It doesn't have to be either/or.
I think it's also entirely fair to acknowledge that there is a subset of the right that does not share your definition of "heritage America" but rather sees it through a much more identitarian lens. Insofar as that term simply means Christian values, I imagine Rove would largely agree with you. (It's worth noting that he has remained in the GOP throughout the Trump era and hasn't taken the path of many of his old colleagues in becoming a Never Trumper.) But his understanding of this idea seems due to the fact that some of the people who espouse it also see brown people at a football game and don't think, "This is an incredible example of assimilation at work," but rather, "The America I want to see would never look like this."
There is excess on both sides of the spectrum. I'm sure a lot of people think it's worse on one side or the other, but regardless, it's okay to call it all out.