We need a comprehensive voting rights act among the first order of business in Congress after the inaguration, along with Cabinet appointments and Executive Orders to roll back as much Trumpishness as possible.
That will allow us to prevent further evil gerrymandering in 2021, and to take back more states in 2022, in whole or in part, and to solidify our control of Congress in 2024 for, we suppose, President Kamala.
The best for everybody. Progressive measures that the real and vocal majority of Americans want on every issue. Even gun safety and women’s medical choices.
Progressives are not “far to the Left”. Gerrymanders and voter suppression and fear-mongering have pretended to move the country far to the right for the last half-century. But Bush 41 lost to Clinton, and neither W nor Trump was legitimately elected.
Then we need a full-court press against lies in education, the MSM, and social media. Even before we get there, we should note that they are getting out much more information than misinformation now, which was not the case in 2016.
That will do to begin with.
- Then we can watch what the Never-Trumpers do After Trump. We can welcome the genuine converts, even as we ask ourselves, "What were they thinking?"
- There will continue to be millions of their children reaching voting age while rejecting the old fears and hatreds.
- Many have found out about various major lies, like the End of Racism, for the first time. Few of those will go back.
Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.
Molly Ivins (For her, it was the fan fiction that Black water fountains were "dirty".)
Similarly, some (but of course not enough) of the more wacko Evangelical Christianists have found out that they are lying about abortion and Global Warming. For example, abortion rates go down under Democratic administrations, but not Republicans.
Anyway, after we get all of that started, it's back to the grind.
Major social change requires changing minds, and at the same time it requires that its opponents die off in the normal manner. This tends to shift opinion by about 1% annually, in favorable cases, so that from a standing start we can get to a voting majority in favor of the new policy in about 50 years. It is very occasionally less...
As at the end of the Marriage Equality fight, just before Obergefell, opinion was shifting at about 2% annually. If we break up or effectively counter their propaganda going forward, this could be one such period on a number of issues beyond where we have majorities today.
What we really want, of course, is a total R implosion in the manner of the Federalists. They were the original Party of No Way, Nuh-Uh! to Thomas Jefferson, 1801-1808. Their last vestige vanished away in 1815.
Or the Whigs, whose 1856 fracturing and implosion over the Fugitive Slave Act was much more sudden, clearing the way for the Republicans to campaign on stopping the expansion of slavery, and then to evolve into an Abolition party.
They say that history doesn't repeat, but it sometimes rhymes, and I hope this will be one of them.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Karl Marx
Normally I wind up with Animals, Weirdness, and Science. This week has had enough weirdness to carry us for months.
Big Animals
Science of Big Animals