Let’s hope it’s at least a generation before they do.
23 thoughts on “Democrats”
Over 70 million people voted for Kamala, so that’s not great. They still have a lot of support. But Trump going after their institutional power is excellent and if it is something that lasts beyond his term, is great news for the longevity of the country. The benefits might even trickle down into blue states.
The question now is how many of those Kamala votes were due to political inertia and how many to neo-Marxist identitarian true believers.
As real change occurs and the world not only doesn’t end but gets better, I think a lot more Democrat “bad habit” voters can be peeled away.
The hard core lefties are probably irredeemable but at least we can disassemble/purge the Deep State agencies and Dark State NGOs that constitute their base of patronage employment. Having to root, hog or die on their own resources and not on oceans of Other People’s Money, illegitimately acquired, should prove wonderfully instructive.
The Democratic Party, being, in essence, an organized crime syndicate, will find far tougher going when it can no longer pay its foot soldiers, has less and less influence to sell and can no longer credibly threaten those who oppose it.
Even a retreat to formerly secure blue state fastnesses isn’t likely to save the Progressive cause. What Elon and his DOGE-boys are doing at the federal level can be replicated at a state level, especially in blue states that have an initiative process such as California, Oregon and Massachusetts. As it got notably redder in 2024 than it has been in decades, I think CA is the next place the DOGE enema hose needs to be inserted.
The benefits might even trickle down into blue states.
Right Right the enshittification of the most successful states turn them into Red States. The anti trump eastern seaboard from Maryland to Maine plus Vermont has a GDP higher than Red state darlings Texas and Florida Combine. While containing a lower population and containing half the area than Texas+Florida. The eastern seaboard also represent 21% of the Federal tax base while only consuming 17% of federal expenditures. While Florida and Texas represent 14% of the tax base and 12% of federal expenditures. I am not even getting into Northern Virginia, Washington DC and Philadelphia. Then there is the blue west coast with California, Washington and Oregon, and let say Minnesota and Chicago which make the numbers even more lopsided. Funny how all this seems to correlate with this while the red states are waging war on education and suffering for it. Too bad Colorado and New Mexico(yes the poorest of the blue states) is surrounded by red state lunacy.
And yet for some reason a lot of people keep leaving the supposedly sterling blue states for the allegedly shitty red states. Why is that do you suppose?
One reason is the grim reality behind those allegedly superior blue state per capita GDP numbers. Among other things, GDP numbers include government spending exclusive of transfer payments. That’s why DC’s per capita GDP number is so preposterous even compared to the figures for blue actual states – about half the federal budget counts as part of DC’s “GDP.”
Blue state per capita GDP numbers, then, exceed those of otherwise comparable red states because blue states have wastrel state governments. TX’s population, for instance, is nearly 80% as large as CA’s, but the Lone Star state’s annual budget is only about 35% of the Golden State’s. The Empire State, for its part, annually spends 70% more than FL and 20% more than TX even though both of these states have significantly greater populations than NY.
And it isn’t as though all of this profligacy is producing any benefits for the blue state citizens groaning under the tax burdens required to fund it all. CA, for instance, which did once have the best K-12 education system in the country, has, in recent years, been down near the bottom of the list, keeping close company with a few of the perennial “Dueling Banjos” states of the Old Confederacy. TX schools, meanwhile, categorically leave those of CA in the dust.
Another component of GDP that is overly fat in blue states is housing. House prices are far higher in blue states than in red ones owing to the statutory limitations and regulatory burdens placed on housing construction. Blue states, except for CA where Prop. 13 has limited property taxes for nearly a half-century, have high property taxes and they also have a major incentive to keep a sort of permanent housing price bubble going so as to maximize property tax receipts. That incentive also applies to CA. Housing is kept expensive here, even by blue state standards, because keeping prices ultra-high is the only way Sacramento can squeeze more tax revenue out of homeowners when the property tax percentage-of-value is capped by Prop. 13.
And then there are the “education” differentials. These should properly be seen as credential differentials. Blue state teacher unions have contracts that pay their members extra for getting masters and doctoral degrees in “education” – like “Dr.” Jill Biden. Half or more of all “advanced” degrees conferred annually in the US are in “education.”
The Democrat party of today isn’t the Democrat party of 30 years ago. The centrists have been forced out and replaced by corrupt totalitarians, progressives, that are hollowing out their state’s budgets and populace.
One day you guys say billionaires shouldn’t exist and the next you brag about being wealthy lol and there are indeed a lot of wealthy Democrats as they are the party of the rich and corrupt.
The Progressive Marxists have taken over and are coasting on controlling the ports and big cities but we all see these places deteriorating and people fleeing. Even Democrats are not happy.
One thing you should remember, there are a lot of people who aren’t Democrats who drive success in blue states and Republicans have acted as a safety valve preventing the worst excesses. I think if blue states had better election integrity, Democrats wouldn’t control these areas.
“The question now is how many of those Kamala votes were due to political inertia and how many to neo-Marxist identitarian true believers.”
I think there is the possibility that more leave the party but not tens of millions. Since they have a hive mind, a popular leader could shift the party but it wouldn’t be away from totalitarianism but a different form of it. I could be wrong, as millions of Democrats switched parties, but a look at their media shows zero change in the party.
There is a chart showing how political views have shifted over time and Democrats have gone far far to the left while the right hasn’t changed their core beliefs. It will be hard to get them to move back toward the center.
Trump hasn’t bothered with persuasion and instead focused on taking out their corrupt source of power and government funding and hopefully that will buy us enough time for people to change.
“ARLINGTON, Va. (7News) — Registered sex offender Richard Cox, 58, is facing more charges in Arlington County after he allegedly exposed himself to women and children in women’s locker rooms at Arlington schools and rec centers. [….]
Arlington police said more charges may be sought as more victims come forward. One of those alleged victims spoke at Thursday night’s Arlington School Board meeting, demanding the school board to change their locker room policy that allowed Cox in the girl’s locker room.”
I wonder how many Americans are like the typical Ars Technica commenter. I was a Dem voter through 2008, then sometime in 2009 I had the horrible realization I’d been on the wrong side for my whole life.
It seems you were – pre-2009 – one of those “bad habit” Dem voters I referenced above, but not a true-believing cultist. The real cultists, I think we’ll find, are far fewer than the Wizard of Oz illusion they have been able to project using copious quantities of pilfered tax money. Once that is gone, at all governmental levels, they will be revealed as the not especially imposing – or numerous – Men (and Women) Behind the Curtain.
I’ve heard it described as default liberal. Popular culture said Democrats were cool, and people want to be cool. Not much thought given to ideology, just identity.
“As promised, he pardoned more than 1,200 people convicted for crimes committed in the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. He said that they, too, had been the victims of weaponization and was effectively extending to them the grace he thought he deserved. This was a grave offense against common sense, since everyone he pardoned had either acknowledged guilt in the form of a plea deal or was found guilty by a jury of his peers.”
Not sure I would agree with it being a “grave offense against common sense”. The action of pleading guilty under enormous pressure to (reduced) trumped up charges to avoid an almost certain conviction on more serious trumped up charges by a biased court/jury etc. while technically an admission of guilt in a legal sense isn’t necessarily “guilt” in a factual sense.
“As promised, he pardoned more than 1,200 people convicted for crimes committed in the January 6, 2021..”
And the key words would be “As promised”; in otherwards (unlike Joe Biden’s post election end of term in the dead of night so to speak pardons contradicting himself) Trump ran on the promise he was going to pardon them. If the American public had strongly disagreed they had ample opportunity to say so loudly and publicly. And not just on election day.
If there were no such thing as “plea bargain,” fewer people would be charged without certainty of conviction. My only speeding ricket was pled down to “improper equipment.” Justice? Cop got his quota; I got a civil fine.
“Let’s hope it’s at least a generation before they do.”
You would need the Schumer/Pelosi/Biden/Clinton/Obama/etc. to relinquish power and pass into history and be replaced from within by the party. You would need the owners of CNN/MSNBC/etc. to sell and major house cleaning occurring by the new owners. Another major house cleaning at liberal ivy league colleges of leftist professors (abolish tenure) who keep turning out these radicalized youth who become the next generations of ideas like wokeness/DEI. In other words it’s not happening any time soon.
We’ll see. Going Woke bore a striking resemblance to what Hemingway said about going broke – that it happens slowly over a long period of time, then all at once. But I think the change in the zeitgeist that saw Trump re-elected and the collapse of Woke and its institutional support structure is analogous and proceeded in parallel, just a few steps behind.
“Mini-DOGEs” will soon be popping up at the state and even city levels. When the public gets a hard look at what’s been going on with their educational institutions – especially higher ed – the scourging of the academies may well occur with considerable dispatch.
You’ve come close to a salient point: DOGE and the state mini-doges can expose and reveal. And Trump and state legislatures and governors can cut the waste, fraud and abuse.
But in the end it’s the people who have to maintain the vigilance and pressure.
As with the federal DOGE, any smaller chips off the old block can be for-a-limited-time-only deals – like the McRib sandwich. And, also like the McRib, DOGEs at all governmental levels can be brought back now and again to cut down any new weeds of corruption that have sprouted since the last go-around. It seems all but inevitable that DOGE will be institutionalized in some fashion.
Like so many products of technology, DOGE is one of those things that looks like becoming indispensible once it has been invented.
The fourth branch of government? Headed by the Auditor General of the United States?
It does tie in nicely with what Mortimer Adler claimed was the a remaining facet of liberty left unaddressed by the US Constitution. And that was an economic bill of rights. Political rights don’t mean much when you live in a company town.
While it would be awesome, such a thing would only happen in a red state and then not in the red states that need it to happen.
“You would need the Schumer/Pelosi/Biden/Clinton/Obama/etc. to relinquish power and pass into history”
This is happening soon. Who will be taking over?
Republicans have some younger folk in congress but they are unruly and Democrats younger ones are genocidal commies but both parties will see near total turnover and don’t have deep benches.
Over 70 million people voted for Kamala, so that’s not great. They still have a lot of support. But Trump going after their institutional power is excellent and if it is something that lasts beyond his term, is great news for the longevity of the country. The benefits might even trickle down into blue states.
The question now is how many of those Kamala votes were due to political inertia and how many to neo-Marxist identitarian true believers.
As real change occurs and the world not only doesn’t end but gets better, I think a lot more Democrat “bad habit” voters can be peeled away.
The hard core lefties are probably irredeemable but at least we can disassemble/purge the Deep State agencies and Dark State NGOs that constitute their base of patronage employment. Having to root, hog or die on their own resources and not on oceans of Other People’s Money, illegitimately acquired, should prove wonderfully instructive.
The Democratic Party, being, in essence, an organized crime syndicate, will find far tougher going when it can no longer pay its foot soldiers, has less and less influence to sell and can no longer credibly threaten those who oppose it.
Even a retreat to formerly secure blue state fastnesses isn’t likely to save the Progressive cause. What Elon and his DOGE-boys are doing at the federal level can be replicated at a state level, especially in blue states that have an initiative process such as California, Oregon and Massachusetts. As it got notably redder in 2024 than it has been in decades, I think CA is the next place the DOGE enema hose needs to be inserted.
lol
Right Right the enshittification of the most successful states turn them into Red States. The anti trump eastern seaboard from Maryland to Maine plus Vermont has a GDP higher than Red state darlings Texas and Florida Combine. While containing a lower population and containing half the area than Texas+Florida. The eastern seaboard also represent 21% of the Federal tax base while only consuming 17% of federal expenditures. While Florida and Texas represent 14% of the tax base and 12% of federal expenditures. I am not even getting into Northern Virginia, Washington DC and Philadelphia. Then there is the blue west coast with California, Washington and Oregon, and let say Minnesota and Chicago which make the numbers even more lopsided. Funny how all this seems to correlate with this while the red states are waging war on education and suffering for it. Too bad Colorado and New Mexico(yes the poorest of the blue states) is surrounded by red state lunacy.
And yet for some reason a lot of people keep leaving the supposedly sterling blue states for the allegedly shitty red states. Why is that do you suppose?
One reason is the grim reality behind those allegedly superior blue state per capita GDP numbers. Among other things, GDP numbers include government spending exclusive of transfer payments. That’s why DC’s per capita GDP number is so preposterous even compared to the figures for blue actual states – about half the federal budget counts as part of DC’s “GDP.”
Blue state per capita GDP numbers, then, exceed those of otherwise comparable red states because blue states have wastrel state governments. TX’s population, for instance, is nearly 80% as large as CA’s, but the Lone Star state’s annual budget is only about 35% of the Golden State’s. The Empire State, for its part, annually spends 70% more than FL and 20% more than TX even though both of these states have significantly greater populations than NY.
And it isn’t as though all of this profligacy is producing any benefits for the blue state citizens groaning under the tax burdens required to fund it all. CA, for instance, which did once have the best K-12 education system in the country, has, in recent years, been down near the bottom of the list, keeping close company with a few of the perennial “Dueling Banjos” states of the Old Confederacy. TX schools, meanwhile, categorically leave those of CA in the dust.
Another component of GDP that is overly fat in blue states is housing. House prices are far higher in blue states than in red ones owing to the statutory limitations and regulatory burdens placed on housing construction. Blue states, except for CA where Prop. 13 has limited property taxes for nearly a half-century, have high property taxes and they also have a major incentive to keep a sort of permanent housing price bubble going so as to maximize property tax receipts. That incentive also applies to CA. Housing is kept expensive here, even by blue state standards, because keeping prices ultra-high is the only way Sacramento can squeeze more tax revenue out of homeowners when the property tax percentage-of-value is capped by Prop. 13.
And then there are the “education” differentials. These should properly be seen as credential differentials. Blue state teacher unions have contracts that pay their members extra for getting masters and doctoral degrees in “education” – like “Dr.” Jill Biden. Half or more of all “advanced” degrees conferred annually in the US are in “education.”
The Democrat party of today isn’t the Democrat party of 30 years ago. The centrists have been forced out and replaced by corrupt totalitarians, progressives, that are hollowing out their state’s budgets and populace.
One day you guys say billionaires shouldn’t exist and the next you brag about being wealthy lol and there are indeed a lot of wealthy Democrats as they are the party of the rich and corrupt.
The Progressive Marxists have taken over and are coasting on controlling the ports and big cities but we all see these places deteriorating and people fleeing. Even Democrats are not happy.
One thing you should remember, there are a lot of people who aren’t Democrats who drive success in blue states and Republicans have acted as a safety valve preventing the worst excesses. I think if blue states had better election integrity, Democrats wouldn’t control these areas.
“The question now is how many of those Kamala votes were due to political inertia and how many to neo-Marxist identitarian true believers.”
I think there is the possibility that more leave the party but not tens of millions. Since they have a hive mind, a popular leader could shift the party but it wouldn’t be away from totalitarianism but a different form of it. I could be wrong, as millions of Democrats switched parties, but a look at their media shows zero change in the party.
There is a chart showing how political views have shifted over time and Democrats have gone far far to the left while the right hasn’t changed their core beliefs. It will be hard to get them to move back toward the center.
Trump hasn’t bothered with persuasion and instead focused on taking out their corrupt source of power and government funding and hopefully that will buy us enough time for people to change.
“ARLINGTON, Va. (7News) — Registered sex offender Richard Cox, 58, is facing more charges in Arlington County after he allegedly exposed himself to women and children in women’s locker rooms at Arlington schools and rec centers. [….]
Arlington police said more charges may be sought as more victims come forward. One of those alleged victims spoke at Thursday night’s Arlington School Board meeting, demanding the school board to change their locker room policy that allowed Cox in the girl’s locker room.”
https://tinyurl.com/5de5p544
I would never laugh about sex crimes. Therefore I am serious when I say we probably exist in a simulation set to tragicomedy mode.
https://x.com/HeathMayo/status/1890403438959194492#m
I wonder how many Americans are like the typical Ars Technica commenter. I was a Dem voter through 2008, then sometime in 2009 I had the horrible realization I’d been on the wrong side for my whole life.
It seems you were – pre-2009 – one of those “bad habit” Dem voters I referenced above, but not a true-believing cultist. The real cultists, I think we’ll find, are far fewer than the Wizard of Oz illusion they have been able to project using copious quantities of pilfered tax money. Once that is gone, at all governmental levels, they will be revealed as the not especially imposing – or numerous – Men (and Women) Behind the Curtain.
I’ve heard it described as default liberal. Popular culture said Democrats were cool, and people want to be cool. Not much thought given to ideology, just identity.
“As promised, he pardoned more than 1,200 people convicted for crimes committed in the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. He said that they, too, had been the victims of weaponization and was effectively extending to them the grace he thought he deserved. This was a grave offense against common sense, since everyone he pardoned had either acknowledged guilt in the form of a plea deal or was found guilty by a jury of his peers.”
Not sure I would agree with it being a “grave offense against common sense”. The action of pleading guilty under enormous pressure to (reduced) trumped up charges to avoid an almost certain conviction on more serious trumped up charges by a biased court/jury etc. while technically an admission of guilt in a legal sense isn’t necessarily “guilt” in a factual sense.
“As promised, he pardoned more than 1,200 people convicted for crimes committed in the January 6, 2021..”
And the key words would be “As promised”; in otherwards (unlike Joe Biden’s post election end of term in the dead of night so to speak pardons contradicting himself) Trump ran on the promise he was going to pardon them. If the American public had strongly disagreed they had ample opportunity to say so loudly and publicly. And not just on election day.
If there were no such thing as “plea bargain,” fewer people would be charged without certainty of conviction. My only speeding ricket was pled down to “improper equipment.” Justice? Cop got his quota; I got a civil fine.
You should go get one just for fun.
“Let’s hope it’s at least a generation before they do.”
You would need the Schumer/Pelosi/Biden/Clinton/Obama/etc. to relinquish power and pass into history and be replaced from within by the party. You would need the owners of CNN/MSNBC/etc. to sell and major house cleaning occurring by the new owners. Another major house cleaning at liberal ivy league colleges of leftist professors (abolish tenure) who keep turning out these radicalized youth who become the next generations of ideas like wokeness/DEI. In other words it’s not happening any time soon.
We’ll see. Going Woke bore a striking resemblance to what Hemingway said about going broke – that it happens slowly over a long period of time, then all at once. But I think the change in the zeitgeist that saw Trump re-elected and the collapse of Woke and its institutional support structure is analogous and proceeded in parallel, just a few steps behind.
“Mini-DOGEs” will soon be popping up at the state and even city levels. When the public gets a hard look at what’s been going on with their educational institutions – especially higher ed – the scourging of the academies may well occur with considerable dispatch.
You’ve come close to a salient point: DOGE and the state mini-doges can expose and reveal. And Trump and state legislatures and governors can cut the waste, fraud and abuse.
But in the end it’s the people who have to maintain the vigilance and pressure.
As with the federal DOGE, any smaller chips off the old block can be for-a-limited-time-only deals – like the McRib sandwich. And, also like the McRib, DOGEs at all governmental levels can be brought back now and again to cut down any new weeds of corruption that have sprouted since the last go-around. It seems all but inevitable that DOGE will be institutionalized in some fashion.
Like so many products of technology, DOGE is one of those things that looks like becoming indispensible once it has been invented.
The fourth branch of government? Headed by the Auditor General of the United States?
It does tie in nicely with what Mortimer Adler claimed was the a remaining facet of liberty left unaddressed by the US Constitution. And that was an economic bill of rights. Political rights don’t mean much when you live in a company town.
While it would be awesome, such a thing would only happen in a red state and then not in the red states that need it to happen.
“You would need the Schumer/Pelosi/Biden/Clinton/Obama/etc. to relinquish power and pass into history”
This is happening soon. Who will be taking over?
Republicans have some younger folk in congress but they are unruly and Democrats younger ones are genocidal commies but both parties will see near total turnover and don’t have deep benches.
IMO, looks good for Vance.