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Kamala Harris dips in key states, making US election contest a toss-up
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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It's like they're both trying to lose.
No, that’s just strategic thinking for the long term.
The Democrats want to become the Republican Party. They have been explicitly trying to do so for the last few decades. Now they have a real chance of capturing the traditional bourgeois sectors that have always been core to the Republican base - the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry, and to a lesser extent, the national security state. Trump has managed to piss off all of them on top of the Wall Street finance capitalists that he himself is a part of.
Because of the way Citizens United works, no political party in America can win elections without campaign contributions. Capturing the donor class thus becomes the key priority to win elections. The Democrats can lose this election (they won’t though), but if they strip away the bourgeois donor base of the Republican Party and leave the latter with their Trumpian MAGA petty bourgeois voters, then the Republican Party is as good as dead.
This is why support from the Reaganites and the Cheneys are so important to the Democrats. They represent a new paradigm where traditional Republican donor class is now jumping ship to the Democratic Party. The Republican Party will end up being the MAGA culture war party with barren financial support to sustain their future electoral campaigns.
In other words, the Republican Party is cooked.
I dunno about that. The Republican Party is a political cockroach. It's unkillable. Every time they're cooked, they just survive inexplicably.
If after Trump they can find a new figure who can re-capture the appeal of the bourgeois elites, or if the Harris administration failed so badly that they ended up worse than Trump (never say never because the blowbacks in a multi-front war can be very real), then it’s a possibility.
But the paradigm shift right now happens because Biden has managed to regain the confidence of the bourgeois class - the war in Ukraine propelled weapons sales and defense contractor stocks through the roof, the US regaining its leading role as a global net exporter of oil and natural gas after the fossil fuel industry (literally the Bush family stronghold) got screwed hard by Trump, the national security state getting its wishes of finally having a war with Russia and Iran (and soon China), and the Wall Street are having fun with Bidenomics handling the inflation by sacrificing the working class to make the line go up. S&P has never been higher especially under such high interest rates and inflation.
All the bourgeois bases are consolidating around Biden’s performance, compared to how Trump had utterly failed advancing all of their interests from 2016-2020.
NGL, that kind of explains why we get all the smuglord fascists saying “if you’re the counterculture, then why are all corporations so blue?”
I know that in its current state the Working Families Party is just Democrats off-shoot, but I seriously hope they split.
Working Families-Farm-Labor-Progressive-Nonpartisan League
Just merge all the various left-wing fusion parties into one thing.
love your posts/POV, but disagree strongly.
The Dems are not becoming/ cannot become Republicans. if fusionist republican orthodoxy was sufficient to win, the GOP would still be doing it; Paul Ryan would be in his second term as president. it's not, you need some popular juice, because only appealing to the donors is not sufficient. and yet, the Trumpist, pseduo-populist GOP still promises corporate/capital gains tax cuts; it will still be for exporting war and imperialism and deregulation of industry and markets, and there's no way it loses fully the donor class, which itself has different interests and constituents.
the current harris attempt at triangulation only works, if it actually does, because Trump has unique weaknesses -- attempting to foment a constitutional crisis, instead of peacefully transferring power, and pissing off, in a personal way, prior GOP powerbases. harris can attempt to appeal to the Never Trumpers to squeak over this electoral line, but that won't be a viable long-term strategy: the WSJ readers will uniformly return to the GOP.
if anyone is cooked, its these waffling dems. the Obama coalition is collapsing in real time: the demographic inevitability/ ascendency thesis is no more, as the dems are hemorrhaging support from non-whites. woke-capitalist/imperialist rhetoric will not be enough after Trump: if the dems can't provide material support to the non-college educated, many will be drawn to the inclusive, non-PMC-inflected cultural posture of the Trumpists.
You’re spot-on. The republicans are no stranger to factions and periods of weakness. They still manage to come back every time. The current state they’re in is nowhere near as dire as it was during the Great Depression era when articles were being made about their “inevitable” death.
This current period is closer to the Gilded Age when Democrats had support from big business and the added benefit of European immigrants largely favoring them. The Republican Party had many factions with a lot of members jumping to the very business-friendly Grover Cleveland.
People need to look harder at the Republican Party history to understand why they’ve been able to pull back after so many people over the years have prematurely declared them “dead.”
I want this timeline to be the one where the GOP pivots towards MAGA social democracy.
You mean MAGA fascism?
No, I mean they'll pivot to something like MAGA communism except the "communism" is watered down to social democracy with herrenvolk characteristics. As part of domestic counterinsurgency, there will always be two parties. If the Democrats are going to pivot towards being the bad cop, the GOP will have to pivot towards being the good cop.