Good news, bad news this morning
First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight:
After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser.
And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass. Opponents of abortion rights fully prevailed only in Nebraska and South Dakota.
So the right ginned up other bogeymen with which to frighten and activate their base and drive them to the polls: immigrants and transgender people. Even so, Trump’s narrow popular-vote margin wasn’t enough to justify “apocalyptic electoral analysis,” Dionne argues.
The right will, of course. And a left still licking its wounds over the election outcome doesn’t exactly feel celebratory. The economy and immigration worked better for Trump than the defense of democracy and women’s rights worked for Kamala Harris. Immigration and trans issues simply lit a hotter, brighter fire under Trump voters even if, as my post below explains, trans people are but 1% of the population. People perceive them as scary Others constituting a threatening 20-plus percent of the population.
The bad news comes from Jason Statler (LOLGOP):
“We can have democracy, or we can have billionaires. Not both. At least with these campaign finance laws,” he writes. The problem is that the billionaires are winning. They are drowning democracy in a flood of dollars:
Just 400 mega-donors outspent every other contributor to the Republican Party based on what we know about the spending in the 2024 campaign. Elon Musk alone appears to have outspent every small donor to the Trump campaign. And that’s if you don’t count the multiple billions of dollars he put into the $44 billion he wrangled to purchase Twitter and turn it into a Trump campaign website. In return, Tesla has skyrocketed 40% since Trump’s election, making Elon about $70 billion he can blow on future elections.
And the way that Elon spent degraded democracy itself. His PAC drowned targeted voters with disinformation of the sort tens of millions are now fleeing from on Twitter.
It’s not a fair fight. But then, the right doesn’t believe in fair:
It’s the billionaires versus the people, and the billionaires are kicking our ass with Elon—and his grudge against his daughter and the culture that accepts her in a way he never can—leading the way. His Phishing Scam Approach to politics has helped him, officially the richest human being ever to live, to become significantly richer.
Many factors have made America the most unequal country in the OECD and now threaten our ability to govern ourselves.
He continues:
There is an obvious solution. We need to take our own side against the billionaires. We must stop behaving like “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” who are just one video or startup from getting high and playing Halo II with Elon.
There are more of us than there will ever be of them. But that only matters if we have a democracy where it’s even possible for us to fight for our interests.
A massive barrier in this fight is that Democrats feel they need their billionaires to fight the other billionaires. This “choose your fighter” strategy has proven to be a failed one. We will never be able to offer these moguls what they want—minimal taxes on the rich, no consumer protections, and an end to our votes mattering.
So, we need a progressive movement that can take the people’s side. The billionaires are activated. We no longer need to fear them turning on us and our Constitution. It’s happened. They sided with an insurrectionist who has made it clear he intends to rule as a dictator and will refuse ever to leave office peacefully. That’s done.
Now, we need to have the debate that matters most: do we want a democracy or billionaires? Because we can’t have both. Not like this.
I’d quibble some with taking our own side against billionaires being an obvious solution. Poorer people believing themselves “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” is a cultural myth dating from before Horatio Alger. It’s sustained by the monied class to keep the poors supporting nonsense like trickle-down economics and buying state lottery tickets in lieu of their organizing unions to rebalance the power dynamics in this country.
It’s not a viewpoint one can just turn off by telling the poors there are more of us than there are of them. Why do you think the less-well-off adopted as their champion a billionaire who would never admit them to his country club?
They don’t hate him. They want to be him. Immune from prosecution, unbound by any rule, truly free to be the biggest asshole in any room and to kick away the ladder behind you. Kicking the downtrodden and making money from it? That’s real freedom, baby.
They learned more from a four-hour Trump rally than they ever learned in Sunday school.