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My point is that Republicans are in a position to offend urban voters without loss of power, and part of that is due to the Senate, along with the other things

• throwaway894345 5y ago
  > My point is that Republicans are in a position to offend urban voters without loss of power, and part of that is due to the Senate I'm not sure I agree that Republicans in general are trying to offend urban voters. The Democrats completely ignored rural and blue-collar America for a decade and then for 5 years after that, lambasted them as racists, white supremacists, and the cause of virtually every social ill and historical moral failure in our country. While many Republicans like to lambast certain liberal urban strongholds (e.g., for crime and corruption), they're not categorically attacking urbanites and certainly not to the degree or duration that Democrats savaged rural and blue collar Americans. I certainly don't agree with "due to the Senate". You mentioned several causes: gerrymandering, vote suppression, and Citizens United. I'm pretty sure most of these largely followed the demographic shift (rural areas voting Repulican), so they certainly can't be caused by the democratic shift (although there are ongoing attempts to gerrymander and suppress votes). Moreover, CU was a Supreme Court ruling. To be clear, I think gerrymandering, vote suppression (excluding voter ID requirements), and CU are all bad things that should be reversed, but my point is that these aren't meaningfully products of the balance of power between rural and urban areas. The fact that rural areas are powerful doesn't inherently advantage one party over the other, rather, one party chose to cede rural power to the other party, so this can't be considered evidence that the balance of power is to blame. > Democrats control government by a thread right now, after a Republican president who literally based his entire campaign on fomenting divisiveness and rejecting compromise. You don't have to sell me on "Republicans (and Trump in particular) have behaved badly". I'm with you. But I don't agree that we have to overhaul our constitution so that Democrats can hold power and still abuse rural and blue collar Americans. There's a path forward that gives Democrats power, affords dignity to rural and blue collar Americans, and doesn't involve overhauling our constitution and for any Democrats who aren't hell-bent on maligning rural America, that's a win-win-win. Justifying every bad behavior by pointing out someone else's worse behavior is, while common, deflection and race-to-the-bottom mentality, and it's really killing our country. The country can't afford for the Democrats to aspire to be only 1 moral unit better than the worst caricature of Republicans. Everyone should aim for their party to be morally better than they were yesterday, not just better than they perceive the other party to be.
  • krapp 5y ago
    >While many Republicans like to lambast certain liberal urban strongholds (e.g., for crime and corruption), they're not categorically attacking urbanites and certainly not to the degree or duration that Democrats savaged rural and blue collar Americans. Republicans have been categorically attacking "city-dwellers" and murmuring about a cold civil war and reckoning from the heartland for nearly a decade. Cultural war between the disgraced and disenfranchised white rural male and urban establishment elites has literally been the defining leitmotif of Trump era populism, and that itself draws from the long-held Republican precept that only rural people possess or respect "authentic" American (read Christian and conservative) values. Even the persecution complex Republicans have about that one time HRC said the "d" word is expressed, when it so often is, explicitly in terms of righteous anger by rural people against the urban elites. Whatever the Democrats may have done to alienate rural voters, the Republicans have more than doubled down on in their response. And let's not even get into how often Republicans have attempted to delegitimize black urban activism as domestic terrorism. The Republican party has a long history of weaponizing fear of the Angry Black Man, and that is inextricably linked to anti-urban rhetoric.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      > Cultural war between the disgraced and disenfranchised white rural male and urban establishment elites has literally been the defining leitmotif of Trump era populism This is certainly the impression one gets from the progressive media, but I don't think it bears out considering Trump's popularity among black and minority voters is quite high among Republican candidates in the last 20+ years. Similarly, 40% of women voted for Trump over a female candidate. Further, the media made a lot of hay making Trump out to be the scourge of immigrants (invoking lots of Nazi comparisons, esp 'concentration camps' and so on), but his policies were largely a continuation of Obama-era policies and he deported fewer immigrants than Obama. I do agree that Trumpism opposes the cultural elite and I have many strong criticisms of Trump and his followers, but the gender/racial identity framing is entirely disingenuous. > And let's not even get into how often Republicans have attempted to delegitimize black urban activism as domestic terrorism. First of all, Republicans didn't deligitimize "black urban activism", they delegitimized "woke progressive activism" and the two aren't the same considering only a minority of blacks fall under the "woke progressive" monicker or support any of their policies. Woke progressives (including those in the media) try very hard to give the impression that the culture war is black vs white or male vs female, but it's largely progressives (and if anything, white progressive elites) against moderate liberals and conservatives. The racial component is small and whites and blacks and men and women share far more common ground than woke progressives would have you believe. Secondly, per my previous post, whatever bad behavior you or I attribute to Republicans, it doesn't vindicate bad behavior by Democrats (nor do our attempts to minimize or whitewash Democratic bad behavior).