My personal take is that we’re going to be dealing with dumb GOP shit for the rest of our lives, but they’re never going to be (even close to) a majority of the country which is going to make it hard for things to go full fascism even when they do control the government.
I’ll note that I am a serial optimist so if you think this take is ridiculous then just consider it the yin to the WAAF yang.
As a charter member of team WAAF I think this is a pretty reasonable outlook of the bull case of the future of the US. Also as (mostly ex)poker players we should all be looking at the potential outcomes as a range of possible outcomes. Your prediction is definitely is in the range of likely outcomes and may even be the most likely outcome. Even if Trump winning in 2024 and then taking out his anger over 2020 and beyond on his political enemies as the country goes full fascism is a less likely outcome it probably still is worth paying attention to the possibility of because the ramifications of that result are so bad.
If 95% of the time things turn out fine and 5% we descend into full GOP fascism that still seems pretty bad to me. And it may be much higher than that for terrible outcomes. We barely won an election that could have gone the other way. We barely faded having members of congress executed on Jan 6th. It’s a little results oriented for my tastes to look at that kind of stuff and say the WAAF crowd is wrong really.
I’m not even saying they’re wrong, I guess it’s more like WAAF seems to cover a pretty wide range of outcomes, some worse than others. The scenario I described could also be considered WAAF, given that it’s a fucked system that would allow a minority party to completely control the government. And I think that’s true. But I think it’s a different WAAF than the Killing Fields of Ann Arbor that others seem to be envisioning.
And I’m completely with you on 2020 being a close fade. What gets me is all the people I interact with in my daily life that were on board to go full fascism back in Nov-Jan which I’m now supposed to pretend didn’t happen?
I do think there are some outcomes where the GOP gets destroyed after this Trump embrace, but unfortunately they’re probably less likely than one would hope.
ETA: re, the poker thing, I would say it seems like people are taking that 5% likelihood and making it 40%+ because the outcome is so bad. I actually think I made that exact analogy about this situation a few months back in one of these threads.
Dat pony
I mean I’m team WAAF but I don’t really think the chances are high we end up in camps, we will have a dear leader fascist head of sate or anything. I’m not worried about about Nazi like state, even though I guess thats a small possibility.
My WAAF is GOP basically has a stranglehold on government for decades through jim crow type laws, but life won’t change that much for well off white people.
What will happen is climate change will continue to rage out of control getting worse and worse, inequality will continue to skyrocket, and with GOP backing police brutality will get worse and worse.
There will be some fascist shit like a brutal crackdown on leftist protests etc, jailing political opponents, and a crackdown on media, but for people who don’t pay much attention to politics they probably won’t notice a huge change, as long as they have money.
That is still a super, super fucked up society and still worthy of WAAF. If you don’t think that is WAAF for the climate change issues alone I don’t know what to tell you.
I wouldn’t even ascribe a 0.001% likelihood to this. Trump gained 11 million voters between 2016 and 2020.
And I don’t know what “destroyed” means to you, but it surely must mean that they are in worse shape than after the 2008 elections, when the Democrats had 60 senators. People thought the GOP was destroyed after that too. 8 years later, they had the presidency, the house, the senate, the majority of governors, the majority of state legislatures, and a stronger hold on the supreme court and lower federal courts.
I think it’s really hard to make predictions at the decades level. Just to take the climate example. As it gets worse, more people will be hit by it at the margins. The political viability of outright denying it is likely to be affected by that. I don’t think you see a 2020 GOP position on climate doing very well in the 2036 world where the climate is collapsing.
Okay. Hard over on one out of one hundred thousand(?).
Trump was a one term president who lost the House and Senate. I don’t think that has happened in ~100 years? In his wake, Dems control all three branches of the federal government despite massive structural disadvantages.
To me, destroyed is he gets nominated in 2024 and they lose by a bigger margin then in 2020 and then the party splits between people who have had enough and the true true believers. I do think that’s in play. It wasn’t so long ago people saw that as a likely outcome after 2020, in fact.
I mean if you don’t think there’s some chance Trump goes down and takes the party with him then I don’t know what to tell you. That seems like a highly plausible outcome here.
Eh I think its very very likely he gets nominated in 2024 and loses but there’s no splits in 2 stuff happening unless something unexpected happens, DeSantis or whoever just runs on “trumps legacy” etc in 2028 and probably wins. They are all true believers now, the Romneys and Cheneys are the extreme outliers. They can’t make a new party from those 2 are you kidding.
Of course not, but it may be that the Trump coalition is not enough to win the WH going forward. If you have a party where they’re all scared of going against him but can’t win with him, that seems like a good situation to fade the WAAF outcomes we’re discussing here.
There is no split. 95%+ of GOP voters are all in on Trumpism, there is no meaningful opposition.
And that may not be enough to win the WH. So if what you say is true and the party refuses to go any other way, then there are plenty of outcomes in play where Dems control the WH until Rs are forced to adjust.
Of course it’s enough. Trump only barely lost in 2020. What are we even talking about here?
And as time goes by, the small sliver that didn’t vote for him “because of his tweets” or whatever will come back to him the next time around because the Right is furiously backfilling plenty of narratives that make him sympathetic and place any and all blame for anything/everythjng on the left.
He won’t be an incumbent and his voters are significantly more likely to die than the D voters in the next four years. Of course he could win, but it seems unlikely. What percentage chance do you give him?
Certainly north of 40% and possibly past 50%.
Not being an incumbent might be an advantage.
Also have you seen the voter suppression bills that are all over the country? It is going to be MUCH HARDER to win in Georgia and Arizona going forward. And LOL at winning new states. What does Biden have a chance at in 2024 that he lost in 2020? North Carolina? ME-02? After than you’re in absurdist territory like Iowa or Ohio.
Not to rip on you but I feel like I’ve heard this for at least 15 years.
With the new voting laws he’s actually a favorite to win in 2024.
With the current voting laws in place he wins 2020 in a landslide.
Only thing possibly stopping him is being banned off social media.
Once we lose the governorship in places like PA/MI/WI its all over, those states will look like Georgia.
