Amanda Nelson

Democracy Action Center

Time For A Re-Work?

I think the founders were counting on honorable people, acting in good faith, to keep this little experiment going.

And maybe that turns out to be a fatal flaw, but holding each other to even loosely defined standards of decency, and honesty, and ethical behavior worked reasonably well for a coupla hundred years - certainly not for everybody, but for a lot of us anyway.

Madison and Hamilton worried out loud that what they were putting in place could be used as a guide book for exactly the kind of shitty maneuvers we've been seeing for over 50 years.

We have a metric fuck ton of hard work to do if we're going to get this thing back on the tracks and chuggin' along again.

Robert Arnold

People's suffering is not acceptable collateral for someone else's comfort.

What we're doing now

is what we'd be doing

in 1930s Germany

or 1960s America

Rich On The Numbers

Democracy is not something we have

unless it's something we do.

Democracy Is

It's been going around for some time now, that it's not Red vs Blue, or Conservative vs Progressive, or even Good vs Evil (although we've seen a lot of that too)

And there's certainly a Class vs Class element to it - a big one actually.

But what it's come down to is liberal vs ill-liberal. Do we want our version of democracy to work for us, or do we want a version that just requires us to obey - and work for - the government?

I have one basic bone to pick with Mr Frum - he left out the yang:

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals - and you know it."

--Agent K, Men In Black

And that's the eternal paradox - the necessary rights of the individual, and the necessary commitment to a collective society every individual depends on.

Press Poodles

"Democracy dies in darkness" - and the Washington Post is turning out the lights.

Golden Oldie

Robert Arnold Responds

"...and when they rise, they do not whisper - they thunder and they rage."

Democracy is not something we have

if it's not something we do.

What We Have Is Us

Today's Robert

Powerful monied people have been pressing the Both Sides crap for a very long time, intending (IMO) to collapse our little experiment in democratic self-government in order to install a corporate-style plutocracy.

And it's possible that the Epstein thing is going to blow it all up - if we can get or most of it - or enough of it - out into the sunlight.

Let no ox go ungored.

Today's Robert

They're not waiting for permission to lead. They're longing for an invitation to join.

Today's Civics Lesson

Ali Velshi

Democracy is labor.

DEMOCRACY ISN'T SOMETHING WE HAVE

UNLESS IT'S SOMETHING WE DO

About Last Night

Somebody said: "Americans will always do the right thing - once they've tried everything else."

That was a wipeout yesterday. That was not a simple rejection, or even a big-ass repudiation of this Trumpian GOP Fuckery thing. That was a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, inside a total ass-kickin', all wrapped up tight with a Fuck You And The horse You Rode In On.

First, all politics is local.

And when it works locally, you can apply it generally, tailoring it to suit the needs of a given area, or city, or constituency. But the message for 'small d' democrats is that we are not all that divided. We've allowed some very bad-faith assholes to convince us we need to split ourselves off from everybody else, and fear each other - to the point where we're in real danger of believing we have nothing in common with anyone but the few people who think and believe and behave exactly the way we do.

"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures."

-- JFK

Like the lady said: "When we fight, we win."

The only way we can't win is if we don't show up to fight.

Across the country Tuesday, state and local elections served as the first major test of how the public feels about President Donald Trump’s second term ahead of major national elections next year for control of Congress.

It didn’t go well for him.

Here are winners and losers from these elections.

Winners

Democrats: They took back a governor’s mansion in a critical swing state, Virginia, and kept control of another in New Jersey, while winning a mayoral race in New York City and holding onto three critical state Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania. Voters in California agreed to allow Democrats to redraw their congressional districts to match Republicans doing the same in other states. Democrats also won in state and local elections in Georgia and Mississippi and expanded their majorities in the Virginia state legislature.

These were exactly the results Democrats wanted a year before the next big referendum on Trump, which will be nationwide elections where control of Congress is up for grabs. On Democrats’ big night, turnout in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City was up.

“Tonight we sent a message, ” Abigail Spanberger, the next governor of Virginia — and the state’s first woman to win the office — said in her victory speech. She won almost every coveted voter group: women, independents, younger voters and voters who said the economy was their main concern, according to network exit polls reported by CNN.

Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D) speaks alongside her family at her election night watch party in East Brunswick, New Jersey, on Tuesday. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
In New Jersey, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s win suggests real momentum for Democrats. She won in a state where Black and Hispanic voters have become more open to Trumpism — and overcame history as well: For the first time in 50 years, New Jersey Democrats have won the governor’s mansion for three straight terms.

There are caveats to Democratic wins. Virginia, with its large federal employee workforce, has been uniquely hurt by the government shutdown and Trump’s mass firings of federal workers.

“I tend to think we overrate the impact of these off-year elections,” said Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist. “New Jersey and Virginia are more blue than purple.” Democrats I talked to agreed with him.

The poles of the Democratic Party: Virginia and New Jersey elected moderate Democrats with national security backgrounds — Spanberger served in the CIA and Sherrill was a Navy pilot.

After losing to Trump twice, many Democrats approve of this direction as the 2028 presidential election comes into view. “At the end of the day, Democratic voters get really pragmatic about who can win,” one veteran Democratic strategist told me.

But the liberal wing of the party had a great night, too. America’s largest city elected a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, who supports redistributing wealth to provide free bus fare and child care in the city, among many other services.

Republican attack ads for the next year: In Mamdani, Trump and Republicans feel they’ve found the perfect foil for next year’s midterm elections. He’s so far to the left that the top two Democrats in Congress, also from New York, hesitated to endorse him or just didn’t.

“Many people are petrified by the Radical Left,” Trump said on social media, “but I’m not, they keep getting me, and other Republicans, elected!”

Some Democrats say they’re worried about the socialist label sticking, especially in the wake of successful “woke” attacks the past few elections that framed their party as too concerned about special classes of Americans over others.

Stop being afraid of their words, Democrats. You won by (finally) smackin' the other guy right in his fat smug face.

"Oh - you say I'm a socialist? So what? You don't like it? Fuck you - make me stop."

You lose because you're timid. You've developed a bad habit of buckling under the slightest pressure. Knock that shit off. Be bold. Be assertive.

 

And point out the truth:

"We've put together several 'socialist' things in this country that we all know and love."

• The US military's a good socialist thing
• Every local cop shop is a good socialist thing
• Streets and highways and dams and sewer systems are good socialist things
• Public schools are good socialist things
• and and and

Free and fair elections: In the days before the election, Trump floated an allegation without evidence that Democrats were somehow “shipping” votes, and his Justice Department sent monitors to polling locations, in a move that some Democrats viewed as menacing. Despite that tension, millions of voters from New York to California had their say in elections run by states and municipalities. Tuesday night underscored what election experts have been saying for years amid Trump’s fraud claims: It’s very hard to rig an election, especially because they are so decentralized.

Losers

Trump: This election was about Trump. He endorsed major Republican candidates and tied all of these elections to his efforts to lower the cost of living: “If affordability is your issue, VOTE REPUBLICAN!” he posted on social media. But prices are up, Trump is broadly unpopular, and Democratic candidates welcomed making their elections about Trump. Network exit polls showed that most voters in Virginia and New Jersey voters disapproved of Trump.

Republican hopes of keeping control of Congress next year: House Republicans have one of the smallest House majorities ever, and history suggests that whatever party controls the White House tends to lose the midterms. Tuesday did little to dispel that trend: Since the 1970s, when one party has swept these off-year elections — as Democrats did Tuesday — that party has done well in the next year’s congressional elections.

The Senate, which Republicans also control, is a higher reach for Democrats, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Senate Democrats are holding the line against reopening the government without assurances that programs such as food assistance will be restored. As the shutdown becomes the longest ever on Wednesday, Trump is expressing concerns his party will get blamed for it if they don’t make drastic moves to end it. “The Democrats are far more likely to win the Midterms, and the next Presidential Election,” he warned his party Tuesday.

Nothing’s a done deal. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that while voters broadly disapprove of Trump, they’re more open to voting for Republicans in Congress. But to the extent you can read into these elections, analysts say you’d rather be a Democrat than a Republican going into next year.

“There’s a lot of anger on the left,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned his party recently. “And elections can be dangerous when one side is mobilized, is angry.”

52,000 Races

Today's Heather

Nobody likes the gerrymandering crap except the people who gain power &/or stay in power because of it.

It's easy to understand how so many people are so fed up with the system. They don't believe their taking part in it matters because they don't believe they have a real say in what happens - that it's all for show.

My problem with that is:

That's how the Power-Grubbers need us to think, so that's what I'm in this fight to resist.

Fuck 'em.

It Will End

"... and the beginning of the healing."

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Texas Dems

I hadn't heard the part that she asserts as a needed defense that Texas founders built into their Constitution.

Maybe it's a real thing, and maybe not. But at least there are some Democrats getting up on the hind legs - doing something other than sending harshly-worded letters that mean practically nothing, and never see the light of day.

Today's Belle

Capt Mom:

We ain't done yet, ya little boogers. Now get up off your butts and let's get this thing squared away."

I believe we call this leadership.

On Democracy

It Bears Repeating

"In this world, there isn't as much humanity as one would like. But there's enough."

--James Baldwin

In a government that stands on checks and balances - when those checks and balances begin to fail - the last check is the collective will of the people to stand up and demand a change for the better.

We've been here before. And we're still here.