No, I'm actually on board with that too. Sadly, it'll never happen. But also? DeSantis is a fuckin' psychopath. Trump is just a sociopathic narcissist. The whole GOP field is insane in the membrane, at this point, really.
I find that the minute you argue your opponent is not rational is the minute you have given up understanding the problem. LOOK The current it-girls of the Republican Party are Viktor Orban. Roderigo Duterte. Augusto Pinochet. "The base" wants strongmen, and it wants them old-school - none of your "spin dictators" here, they want dissidents dropped out of helicopters. Only... they live in a democratic republic with a long and healthy history of human rights and political protections for minority parties. So they have to appear ruthless and strong - cracking down, talking tough - but they can't actually be ruthless and strong... except to the truly defenseless. Ron DeSantis is treating librarians the way Duterte treated drug dealers... within the confines of a modern civilized republic. All the flourish, all the bravado, all the ruthlessness, none of the stakes. And they do this because they have not yet reached the tipping point where rationality and reasonability out-poll red-blooded queer-bashing... not when you're talking to the true believers, anyway. Get a time machine. Go talk to 2004 Mitt Romney. Tell him "so 20 years from now your party will choose to make the merits of slavery a wedge issue. Do you have any advice to your future self?" I imagine he'd take a few board seats and nope the fuck out 'cuz the middle of the country ain't comin' round on that, not never, not no how. But nobody took a time machine to Mitt, so he's gotta sit there going "so my team has painted themselves into the worst corner imaginable... but they're still my team." (Hey has anybody seen Paul Ryan lately?) I have no doubts that the fair weather Republicans will be back. They're gone now, though... so you're not going to get their money for your campaign and if you go for their vote, you're going to piss off the only people who are paying you. Remember: 2023 is the year that the governor. Of Florida. Picked a fight. With Disney. And he did that not because he's bugshit... but because it's what the mob wants. If you're not in a mob? You stay away from the mob. And if you're in the mob? You either lead it by being the most bloodthirsty or you try to stay alive by hanging towards the back. One thing you don't do is go "look here old chaps are we sure these torches and pitchforks are really called for" because that ship has sailed. I wouldn't say they're insane. I would say they're (A) desperate (B) out of options (C) convinced that they can ride this out in a direction that benefits them. But (C) is because they're inveterate gamblers. When even Jason Fucking Chaffetz nopes out of this shitshow you know the smart money has long since left town.The whole GOP field is insane in the membrane, at this point, really.
DeSantis doesn’t scare me. He might be worse than trump on policy in a lot of ways, but he doesn’t now and never will enjoy the cult following. Kinda have to have a personality before you can have a cult of personality. His electability is close to 0 and get asymptomatically closer every time he screams about culture war bullshit. Even Trump felt the need to nominally say that he would be lgbtq+ friendly at the gop convention in 2016. And he got cheers for it, if you remember. Which was weird. But it happened. Ronny D has his Herman Cain 999 moment in the sun already. He’s done. The gop is in that trap where the only candidates that the general could elect are the ones with no chance of winning the primary, became their party is run by and beholden to absolute sadist-morons.
Vivek is polling around 10% and with zero msm coverage. I think he has a shot. I would recommend listening to this interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/honestly-with-bari-weiss/id1570872415?i=1000623065583
I respect what he did with roivant, so I’m aware he’s a good thinker. I think he leans a little too hard into the culture wars, but I’ll vote for him in the GOP primary if he’s still a candidate by then. I hadn’t seen him as high as 10%, but it’s not surprising. Lots of people just want trump to fuck off and also can’t stand desantis. Will listen. Thanks for the link.
Vivek seems pretty wild too - raising the voting age to 25 unless they pass a poll test or work in the military ?? halt any mandate to even measure carbon dioxide ?? no offense but this guy sucks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Ramaswamy#Political_positions if you want a moderate republican vote for biden lol
I mean yeah that's where we're at. There was a time I thought Nikki Haley had a pretty good chance to make a run at it from the normal seats. But she took one look at the state of play in 2022 and went "normal ain't gonna win a primary within my lifetime" and yolo'd straight into fascism. I think Liz Cheney had the same look around and went "when you come to your senses and look back on this moment, I'll be there, staring you down" and knew she could sit out an electoral cycle or two. I doubt we've heard the last of Paul Ryan either. The fact of the matter is, however, there's a snowball's chance of a moderate Republican even making it through the debates at this point.if you want a moderate republican vote for biden lol
Vivek has some crazy ideas. I feel like that’s how change happen though. There are decades of presidents that tow the line, they make changes that are incremental and then BAM there’s an FDR and society is fundamentally altered. Vivek could be that guy. Not saying that’s a good thing. FDR wasn’t all good either. But big swings could be good right now. Lots of tools exist that have never existed before. I get the attraction of the citizenry test for all voters. But it seems like it would be a hard pill to swallow for the left. “ Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights” -TJ We have a lot of dumbasses voting. On both sides.
Its a hard pill to swallow for the left because it is very explicitly voter suppression against them. Why target youth specifically? What makes the military so enlightened that they don't need to take the test? (rhetorical- its because the military votes republican)
I'm due for a re-watch of this, thanks. Some people were unable to detect the satire. So sad.
It's not that nobody got the satire, it's that Heinlein was deadly serious about it while Verheuven wasn't. The satire in Robocop isn't a whole lot subtler but it also had some stuff that wasn't satire that allowed everyone to attach to it. One of my big beefs with "golden age" science fiction is it's mostly a one-world-government libertarian triumph of the white man. Heinlein was the worst. Starship Troopers was such a McCarthyist screed that Scribner refused to publish it. I've never read it; my family worships Heinlein but that one was just a bridge too goddamn far. It's worth noting, however, that without Starship Troopers there would be no Forever War, a vastly better book with a much greater influence on culture.
Vivek doesn't want a citizenry test for all voters. He wants a citizenry test for people aged 18-24. It's very obviously targeted to help Republicans.