I doubt this will get posted on The Space Review. If so, then fine. If not, also fine. I am not happy about doing this, but I want it out there.
A “true” Space Station provides a Near Sea Level Radiation 1 Gravity (NSLR1G) environment for long duration missions Beyond Low Earth Orbit (BLEO). Dosing and debilitation causes permanent damage to astronauts and cuts short their careers in space due to rapid accrual of a career dose. This is the single critical obstacle to humans living in space and the most difficult to overcome. Because astronauts will still be dosed transiting to and from this protected environment, and the effect of the heavy nuclei component of galactic cosmic radiation on lesser shielding schemes, the amount of shielding is not negotiable and far beyond what people interested but not knowledgeable would guess. To meet this requirement these stations will likely have 4 distinct features.
The “true” Space Station would be constructed using “Fat Workshops”, which are double-hulled upper stages with a 17-foot outer envelope to be filled with a cosmic ray water shield. Such a construct only becomes efficient on a scale much larger than NewSpace-everything-cheap accepts as practical. The numbers automatically generate shock, outrage, and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I will leave it to space enthusiasts with an open mind to calculate the tons of water needed for a sphere with a 17 foot outer envelope and an inner envelope equal in diameter and totaling 68 feet. The concept really starts providing an adequately spacious crew compartment at around 100 feet. This is actually about how large one Shuttle concept, the Chrysler SERV was.
The “true” Space Station would utilize a Tether Generated Artificial Gravity (TGAG) system several thousand feet long spinning at around 1 RPM to provide 1G of artificial gravity. The reasoning behind such long tethers is simple in that tether materials are so strong that the savings in weight for a partial gravity rating are not great, and the Fat Workshops used are already rated to withstand max Q launch stresses so there would no savings in that either. The multi-tether system would allow a crew compartment to travel from the end of the tether at one 1G to the center at zero G for various purposes such as docking and transferring personnel. As long as an equal mass was also relocating to keep the system balanced this would keep the tether system operating smoothly and water can also be used to dampen oscillation.
The “true” Space Station would utilize thousands of tons of water not only as a Cosmic Ray Water Shield (CRWS) and as a dampening and balancing mass in the tether system, but also in a closed loop life support system providing years of breathable air, purified water, and basic calories. “The European Space Agency is coordinating an international research project called the Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative, or MELiSSA. The goal of the project is to create a completely closed life support system that could be used for space travel. MELiSSA is an artificial ecosystem modelled on an aquatic ecosystem. The MELiSSA system would contain living plants and algae.”
The “true” Space Station would require an Ultra Heavy Lift Vehicle (UHLV) to launch the Fat Workshops to the vicinity of the Moon where they could be loaded with lunar-ice-derived-water launched from the Moon using 23 times less energy than from Earth. Eventually rail guns, or mass drivers as Gerard K. O’Neill called them, might be used. Once a construction pipeline for these Space Stations is operating the next step would be to provide them with Nuclear Propulsion as only nuclear energy can efficiently move these large masses. Nuclear Thermal is a dead end and the only presently feasible and practical system is Nuclear Pulse. Unfortunately, while transporting packaged bomb pits safely is possible using human-rated capsules with escape towers, it is politically problematic. However, advances in ThermoPhotoVoltaics and overpowering ion thrusters may make Nuclear Electric a viable option in the near future.
I think the wet workshop concept was the path to take (with the Shuttle) and design based on the Chrysler SERV would have made it work. The problem with the SERV was of course it was SSTO. With an outer ring of engines, an inner ring, and a single central engine, I believe the SERV would have worked quite well. The outer ring could have been F-1A’s with their kerosene propellent load incorporated into the ring and used splash doors and parachutes to be recovered at sea. A J-2 inner ring would have required a heat shield to reenter and then also been recovered at sea. The central engine might have also been heat shielded and been parachute-air-recovered with a helicopter. And eventually the rings might have been propulsively landed Phil Bono style. After the engines were jettisoned the roughly spherical tankage would have been made into a crewed platform. Eventually such workshops would be used as crew compartments docked with Earth Departure Stages and leave LEO for….out there.
This is one more indicator of what is going to happen. People will take to the streets with guns, and it will spiral out of control. These Trumpists are saying things they hope will get them a foot in the door after the coup.
We the People, the democrats, are not going to let it happen. We will end up in the streets fighting them. Millions of us will finally say no more.
9:10 “America’s Oligarch moment makes this more like 1990’s Russia than we want to believe. Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law; sound familiar? I can identify half a dozen laws Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement, Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution.”
11:30 “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that all this is being driven, ultimately, it’s not the only issue, but I do believe it is very much the central issue, is by race. By the question of race. And that is a particularly American problem because of our history of slavery and our history of hostility to immigrants.
“-the immigration issue is a race issue…..as Trump (has said) it is about poisoning the blood. Race is at the root of all this.”
Kagan and Krystol talk at the end about violence and how this “is just getting as ugly as it can possibly be.” To me, much of this seems like a continuation of “Democracy in Chains.”
What woke me up? I was in the military and my shop supervisor happened to be a democrat. This was the early 90’s and few people in the enlisted ranks were political in any way. This was changing though. I was skeptical about the whole political thing and considered it a waste of time until I was in another shop for a couple months… where they played Rush Limbaugh loud all day long. My coworkers reciting Rush’s talking points made me a democratic for life. This and other learning experiences and events eventually led me to a revelation: being political is the primary feature of actually being an American. How can anyone claim to be a citizen if they do not exercise the most basic duty of a citizen?
We the People ARE the government and the country.
We are now apparently deciding to end the Republic, to throw away our representative democracy and become an Oligarchy, a Plutocracy. And under Trump it will be a Kleptocracy. All these terms mean something and the primary tactic of the fascists trying to end America is to confuse and complicate these concepts. Fascists calling anti-fascists fascists as “schizo-fascism”, “flooding the zone”, and inundating all channels with “the firehose of falsehood.”
Destroy the truth, stack the courts, terrorize into submission. They are eating the pets.
11:58 “The whole reason we have freedom of speech is to protect us, protect normal people, who have their own truths to tell, in a world where there are too many Trumps and too many Musks. That’s what it’s for. If it gets flipped around to be a weapon of the Trumps and the Musks, then it gets completely perverted and we have to start thinking again.”
Trump’s Tax Cut may have been like the Apollo 1 fire. Aerospace interests realized going to the Moon was going to be hard money and chose the easy money of cold war toys. The Space Age was over before it really began. In the same way the Trump Tax Cut may have ended America. I cannot shake this really bad feeling. I have also been sick three times in just over a month. I had the flu, then I had Covid for the first time, and now I am sick again. I think the stress of the last couple months may have made me vulnerable. Maybe. I rarely get sick. I worry every day about my country. I am a part-time transit driver and take people to medical appointments and I have been paying attention over the last couple months. What I see is a society of manipulated consumers and not involved citizens. And only a citizenry that are focused on their government can keep a representative democracy functioning. I have a strong feeling that 250 years of American democracy will likely be declared over by the rest of the world a few years after Trump is elected. America as We the People think of it as our collective being will be dead.
Jeff Bezos, the oligarch owner of the Washington Post, and also another less well-known billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, have both intervened to stop their newspapers from endorsing a presidential candidate. Musk has poured over a hundred million into the Trump campaign and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is essentially the creation of Peter Thiel. We the People may be about to see the end of America. It is a truly historic moment. Yet…it seems to be business as usual. Comedians make it all a joke and the media look to make money for their advertisers. As a few super-wealthy entities are trying to end this troublesome limited rule by the lower class and take absolute power.
—————————————————————————————————————————————-
Story by John Naughton for The Guardian:
There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as toothsome yet was doted upon by a host of glamorous women.
The other powerful aphrodisiac is immense wealth. This has all kinds of effects. It makes people (even journalists who should know better) deferential, presumably because they subscribe to the delusion that if someone is rich then they must be clever. But its effects on the rich person are more profound: it cuts them off from reality. When they travel, writes Jack Self in an absorbing essay: “The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cozy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer)… The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see.”
Mr Self estimates that there are currently 2,781 of these gilded creatures in the world. He divides them into two kinds: “self-made” and “second gen”. He seems to feel sorry for the latter. “To inherit a condition of unjustifiable wealth,” he writes, “means to never experience cause and effect. All external pressures are alleviated by capital: there are no consequences to missing a deadline, to not finishing a project, to dropping out or giving up. It is terrifically difficult to fail, in any normal sense.” Aw, shucks.
On his honeymoon in Rome, Zuckerberg took so many photographs of Augustus that his wife joked that it was as if there were three people on the trip
The self-made billionaire, however, is a different proposition entirely. He (and it’s overwhelmingly a male) has “a tendency towards aggressive megalomania” when confronted with opposition. Which brings us neatly to the Zuckerbergs, Musks and Thiels – the self-made titans of the tech world.
Enter Mark Zuckerberg, supreme leader of Meta (née Facebook), who looks like an aggressive megalomaniac from central casting. Even the Economist, that bastion of neoliberal baloney, saw through him early, with a famous cover in April 2016 portraying Zuck as the Emperor Augustus on a weathered throne. But the guy’s Augustan complex goes back further than the Economist realized. On his honeymoon in Rome in 2012, for example, he took so many photographs of Augustus that his wife joked it was as if there were three people on the trip.
Of late, though, Zuck seems to have gone off Augustus. In his new role as a part-time fashionista, he recently appeared in a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, which classicists immediately recognized as a play on an early Roman political slogan: “Aut Caesar aut nihil” (“either Caesar or nothing”), signaling a determination to be supreme leader at any cost. At his 40th birthday party he wore a T-shirt with the slogan “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”). It’s not clear yet who plays the role of Carthage in this new scenario.
Elon Musk, for his part, doesn’t see any need for historical analogies to fuel his megalomania. As the writer Franklin Foer puts it, Musk has “long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image”. And Musk sees Donald Trump as the perfect Trojan horse for this purpose. Many other tech titans are supporting Trump. But Musk is “the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state – and therefore American life – in his own image.”
So, here’s the question. Here are two individuals who totally control two organizations – Facebook and X – that have had devastating impacts on the lives of some of their users (and in Facebook’s case, whole countries such as Myanmar), as well as polluting the public sphere and undermining democracy in the west. Why has neither been held accountable for the societal damage their organizations have wrought? The answer is simple: they have the impunity that their immense wealth provides.
Interestingly, freedom is inextricably linked with inheritance. Start with land….this is where the indigenous Americans were in conflict with Europeans. We acquire and hold land and pass it down to our children and eventually, without checks or balances, all the land concentrates into a small group or even into one family. The rest are denied the freedom to own land because there is none left. Everything…. economics, wars, culture, etc. starts with this. Find a way to give citizens a birthright to a certain amount of land and they will start to care about democracy.
After making the comment I googled the amount of arable land in the United States and then divided that by the population and come up with just a little over 1 acre. I then googled how much land it takes to feed one person. An “off-the-grid” website stated that about half an acre would provide calories in fruit and vegetables for one person. Modern agriculture of course produces yields an order of magnitude greater than this, perhaps orders of magnitude.
Fox News has always used “Freedom” in a certain context that makes the term interchangeable in their reporting with “Greed.” I noticed this many years ago that Fox is usually using “Freedom” in terms of taxation or regulation and substituting “Greed” actually worked quite well and even made their view clearer.
The point being that America was originally about owning land, so you were not owned by a landowner. That land either fed you or produced something you could barter for food. Western democracy did not start with ancestral landowners; it started with city dwellers in ancient Greece with no such franchise who were craftsmen or merchants or another profession. These city dwellers were dictated to by kings or some entity that was a proxy for landowners. These landowners also were the citizen warriors that defended the city state and were not to challenged.
The city dwellers created democracy to limit the wealth and power of the richest landowners who became ever more rapacious and ruthless and fixed prices to impoverish others who ended up as slaves. They also regularly started wars for land the city dwellers were called to fight in for little benefit unless defending against aggressors. The modern world has in some ways become simpler than the ancient world in that almost everything is now organized to worship a single god…money. Where money took third place to food and then land for most of history it has now become a universal religion that determines all things.
This is the story to teach to people so they might have a basic understanding of democracy. The purpose of democracy is to keep the dangerous and ruinous ambitions of individuals in check and enable the greatest good for the greatest number. The Representative Democracy found in our Republic was created in part to balance this check by enabling citizens to pursue their personal goals and aspirations, which rewards individuals and is valuable to the whole nation. A feature of any functioning democracy is some form of “Limitarianism.” This is what I call “walking the tightrope” between the needs of the populace, or, to use the term conservatives have demonized, the collective, and the wants of individuals. That billionaires in America are presently stepping up and without apology pouring vast sums into electing, what those not in his Cult know to be, a fascist, is almost unbelievable. But it must be believed because it is happening. Sadly, our complacent consumer programmed society does not seem too concerned.
The election that may end America is less than two weeks away and democrats like me, or about half the country, are terrified. That we cannot understand how the other half of is so gullible and committed to ending democracy is profoundly depressing to many of us. All we can do is pray…and vote.
I have wanted to break away from the toxic social media community I have been immersed in, on and off, for over 15 years, and I am hoping this is it.
As the character Riddick in the science fiction movie said about the destruction of the universe, “Had to end sometime.”
The Musk Cult worshipers there were getting to me anyway….they are just too disconnected from reality and they were never healthy to interact with. Always disturbing but now that Dark MAGA has manifested they have gone too far and are poison to the soul.
Goodbye you freaks. Good riddance.
I am thinking of an arc between two ends of a spectrum. At one end is limitarianism, a limiting of personal wealth. At the other end is sufficientarianism, a basic level of individual needs being met by the collective. As a triangle, these two sides are moderated by the base of the triangle that has a datum point dividing what is taken to maintain limitarianism and what is given to maintain sufficientarianism.
More on this to come.
Likely a quarter billion dollars from billionaires poured into pro-Trump PACs. Using every devious trick they can pull out of their behinds.
A visitor wears a face mask with a picture of former President Donald Trump’s mouth on it during the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 26, 2021, in Orlando, Florida.| Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
The Republican Party is the biggest threat to American democracy today. It is a radical, obstructionist faction that has become hostile to the most basic democratic norm: that the other side should get to wield power when it wins elections.
A few years ago, these statements may have sounded like partisan Democratic hyperbole. But in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on the charge of inciting it, they seem more a plain description of where we’re at as a country.
But how deep does the GOP’s problem with democracy run, really? How did things get so bad? And is it likely to get worse?
Below are 13 charts that illustrate the depth of the problem and how we got here. The story they tell is sobering: At every level, from the elite down to rank-and-file voters, the party is permeated with anti-democratic political attitudes and agendas. And the prospects for rescuing the Republican Party, at least in the short term, look grim indeed.
Today’s Republicans really hate Democrats — and democracy
1) Trump’s supporters have embraced anti-democratic ideas
This chart shows results from a two-part survey, conducted in late 2020 and early 2021, of hardcore Trump supporters. The political scientists behind the survey, Rachel Blum and Christian Parker, identified so-called “MAGA voters” by their activity on pro-Trump Facebook pages. Their subjects are engaged and committed Republican partisans, disproportionately likely to influence conflicts within the party like primary elections.
These voters, according to Blum and Parker, are hostile to bedrock democratic principles.
They go further than “merely” believing the 2020 election was stolen, a nearly unanimous view among the bunch. Over 90 percent oppose making it easier for people to vote; roughly 70 percent would support a hypothetical third term for Trump (which would be unconstitutional).
“The MAGA movement,” Blum and Parker write, “is a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
2) Republicans are embracing violence
The ultimate expression of anti-democratic politics is resorting to violence. More than twice as many Republicans as Democrats — nearly two in five Republicans — said in a January poll that force could be justified against their opponents.
It would be easy to dismiss this kind of finding as meaningless were it not for the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill — and the survey was conducted about three weeks after the attack. Republicans recently saw what political violence in the United States looked like, and a large fraction of the party faithful seemed comfortable with more of it.
These attitudes are linked to the party elite’s rhetoric: The more party leaders like Trump attack the democratic political system as rigged against them, the more Republicans will believe it and conclude that extreme measures are justifiable. A separate study by political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found that “Republicans who believe Democrats cheated in the election (83 percent in our study) were far likelier to endorse post-election violence.”
3) Republicans see Democrats as something worse than mere rivals
Democracy is, among other things, a system for taming the disagreements inherent in politics: People compete for power under a set of mutually agreeable rules, seeing each other as rivals within a shared system rather than blood enemies.
But in the United States today, hyperpolarization is undoing this basic democratic premise: Sizable numbers of Americans on each side see the members of the other party not as political opponents but as existential threats.
The rise of this dangerous species of “negative partisanship,” as political scientists call it, is asymmetric. While many Democrats see Republicans in a dark light, a majority still see them more as political rivals than as enemies. Among Republicans, however, a solid majority see Democrats as their enemy.
When you believe the opposing party to be an enemy, the costs of letting them win become too high, and anti-democratic behavior — rigging the game in your favor, even outright violence — starts to become thinkable.
4) Republicans dislike compromise
America’s founders designed our political system around compromise. But for years now, majorities of Republican voters have opposed compromise on principle, consistently telling pollsters that they prefer politicians who stick to their ideological guns rather than give a little to get things done. It’s no wonder the past decade saw unprecedented Republican obstructionism in Congress (more on that later).
The hostility to compromise on the GOP side has at least two major implications for democracy.
First, it has rendered government dysfunctional and ineffective — and consequently has decreased public trust in government. Second, it has pushed Democrats in a more polarized direction; in 2018, Pew found, Democratic support for political compromise plummeted to roughly Republican levels. This seems in part like a reaction to years of GOP behavior: If they aren’t going to compromise with us, the Democratic logic goes, then why should we compromise with them?
But the more Democrats eschew compromise, the more cause Republicans have to see them as fundamentally hostile to conservative values — and to redouble their intransigence. It’s a doom loop for political coexistence.
5) The Republican Party is a global outlier — and not in a good way
The Democratic Party does better than the global median on metrics of respect for norms and support for ethnic minority rights. The GOP does far worse.Pippa Norris/Global Parties Survey
The Global Party Survey is a 2019 poll of nearly 2,000 experts on political parties from around the world. The survey asked respondents to rate political parties on two axes: the extent to which they are committed to basic democratic principles and their commitment to protecting rights for ethnic minorities.
This chart shows the results of the survey for all political parties in the OECD, a group of wealthy democratic states, with the two major American parties highlighted in red. The GOP is an extreme outlier compared to mainstream conservative parties in other wealthy democracies, like Canada’s CPC or Germany’s CDU. Its closest peers are almost uniformly radical right and anti-democratic parties. This includes Turkey’s AKP (a regime that is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), and Poland’s PiS (which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment).
The verdict of these experts is clear: The Republican Party is one of the most anti-democratic political parties in the developed world.
How things got this bad
6) The Republican turn against democracy begins with race
Republicans with high levels of “ethnic antagonism” generally agree with statements like “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”Larry Bartels
Support for authoritarian ideas in America is closely tied to the country’s long-running racial conflicts.
This chart, from a September 2020 paper by Vanderbilt professor Larry Bartels, shows a statistical analysis of a survey of Republican voters, analyzing the link between respondents’ score on a measure of “ethnic antagonism” and their support for four anti-democratic statements (e.g., “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”).
The graphic shows a clear finding: The higher a voter scores on the ethnic antagonism scale, the more likely they are to support anti-democratic ideas. This held true even when Bartels used regression analyses to compare racial attitudes to other predictors, like support for Trump. “The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism,” he writes.
For students of American history, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act cemented Democrats as the party of racial equality, causing racially resentful Democrats in the South and elsewhere to defect to the Republican Party. This sorting process, which took place over the next few decades, is the key reason America is so polarized.
It also explains why Republicans are increasingly willing to endorse anti-democratic political tactics and ideas. In the past, restrictions on the franchise served to protect white political power in a changing country; today, as demographic change threatens to further undermine the central place of white Americans, many are becoming comfortable with an updated version of the Jim Crow South’s authoritarian tradition.
7) Partisanship causes Republicans to justify anti-democratic behavior
This chart looks at early versus in-person voting in the 2017 Montana House special election. After the Republican candidate assaulted a reporter the day before the election, he appears to have lost support in Democratic precincts but saw gains in some heavily Republican ones.Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik
This chart is a little hard to parse, but it illustrates a crucial finding from one of the best recent papers on anti-democratic sentiment in America: how decades of rising partisanship made an anti-democratic GOP possible.
The paper, from Yale’s Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik, uses a number of methods to examine the effect of partisanship on views of democracy. This chart shows a particularly interesting one: a “natural experiment” in Montana’s 2017 at-large House campaign, during which Republican candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted reporter Ben Jacobs during an attempted interview just before Election Day.
Because many voters cast their ballots by mail before the assault happened, Graham and Svolik could compare these to the in-person votes after the assault in order to measure how the news of Gianforte’s attack shifted voters’ behavior.
The blue lines represent precincts where Gianforte did worse on Election Day than in mail-in ballots; the red lines represent the reverse. What you see is a clear trend: In Democratic-leaning and centrist precincts, Gianforte suffered a penalty. But in general, the more right-leaning a precinct was, the less likely he was to suffer — and the more likely he was to improve on his mail-in numbers.
For Svolik and Graham, this illustrates a broader point: Extreme partisanship creates the conditions for democratic decline. If you really care about your side wielding power, you’re more willing to overlook misbehavior in their attempts to win it. They find evidence that this could apply to partisans of either major party — but only one party nominates candidates like Trump and Gianforte (who won not only the 2017 contest but also his reelection bid in 2018 and Montana’s gubernatorial election in 2020).
The chart here is from a study covering 1997 to 2002, when Fox News was still being rolled out across the country. The study compared members of Congress in districts where Fox News was available to members in districts where it wasn’t, specifically examining how frequently they voted along party lines.
They found that Republicans in districts with Fox grew considerably more likely to vote with the party as it got closer to election time, whereas Republicans without Fox actually grew less likely to do so. The expansion of Fox News, in short, seemingly served a disciplining function: making Republican members of Congress more afraid of the consequences of breaking with the party come election time and thus less inclined to engage in bipartisan legislative efforts.
“Members with Fox News in their district behave as if they believe that more Republicans will turn out at the polls by increasing their support for the Republican Party,” the authors conclude.
How America’s political system creates space for Republicans to undermine democracy
9) Republicans have an unpopular policy agenda
Support in polls on major legislation since 1990; Republican bills with tax cuts for wealthy people and Obamacare repeal were especially unpopular.Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets
The Republican policy agenda is extremely unpopular. The chart here, taken from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s recent book Let Them Eat Tweets, compares the relative popularity of the two major legislative efforts of Trump’s first term — tax cuts and Obamacare repeal — to similar high-priority bills in years past. The contrast is striking: The GOP’s modern economic agenda is widely disliked even compared to unpopular bills of the past, a finding consistent with a lot of recent polling data.
Hacker and Pierson argue that this drives Republicans’ emphasis on culture war and anti-Democratic identity politics. This strategy, which they term “plutocratic populism,” allows the party’s super-wealthy backers to get their tax cuts while the base gets the partisan street fight they crave.
The GOP can do this because America’s political system is profoundly unrepresentative. The coalition it can assemble — overwhelmingly white Christian, heavily rural, and increasingly less educated — is a shrinking minority that has lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential contests. But its voters are ideally positioned to give Republicans advantages in the Electoral College and the Senate, allowing the party to remain viable despite representing significantly fewer voters than the Democrats do.
10) Some of the most consequential Republican attacks on democracy happen at the state level
This map from the Brennan Center for Justice shows every state that passed a restriction on the franchise between 2010 and 2019. These restrictions, ranging from voter ID laws to felon disenfranchisement, were generally passed by Republican majorities with the intent of hurting turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies.
Because Republicans dominated the 2010 midterm elections, Republican statehouses got to control the post-2010 census redistricting process at both the House and state legislative level, leading to extreme gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states unlike anything in Democratic ones.
Conservative control of the Supreme Court enabled this state-level push. In 2013, the Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” requirement — that states with a history of racial discrimination would be required to get permission from the Justice Department on their maps and other major changes to electoral law. In 2019, another Court ruling paved the way for further partisan gerrymandering.
11) The national GOP has broken government
Today’s Senate, where you need 60 votes to get virtually anything done, is a historical anomaly. Its roots can be traced to the unyielding GOP opposition to President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell turned the Senate into a dysfunctional body in which priority legislation was routinely subject to a filibuster. When Republicans won a Senate majority in 2014, McConnell found a new way to deny Obama victories: blocking his judicial appointments.
These actions were an expression of an attitude popular among Republican voters and leaders alike: that Democrats can never be legitimate leaders, even if elected, and thus do not deserve to wield power.
It’s still Trump’s GOP
12) Republicans didn’t care when Trump abused his power
The Trump presidency was a test of Republican attitudes toward democracy. Time and again, the president abused his authority in ways that would have been unthinkable under previous presidents. Time and again, members of Congress, state party leaders, right-wing media stars, and rank-and-file voters looked the other way — or even cheered him on.
The chart here, which shows two NBC polls taken about a year apart, is particularly striking. It shows that support for Trump’s first and second impeachment among Republicans remained exactly the same among Republicans: 8 percent.
Trump was impeached the first time because he tried to interfere with the integrity of the 2020 presidential election — attempting to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into opening up a bogus investigation into Joe Biden. Trump was impeached the second time because he ginned up a mob to attack the Capitol to disrupt the counting of the votes from the Electoral College.
And yet in both cases, the percentage of Republicans who supported impeaching him was the same — a measly 8 percent. There’s just very little popular appetite in the GOP for punishing anti-democratic excesses by Trump, regardless of the circumstances.
13) Trump and Trumpism could return in 2024
This chart shows the results of a Morning Consult poll on the 2024 Republican primary held after Trump’s second impeachment trial. It found that 54 percent of Republicans would choose Trump again, even when given a wide range of alternative possibilities. Six percent would choose his son Donald Trump Jr. — who obviously wouldn’t run if his father did — putting the Trump family support in the GOP primary electorate at around 60 percent.
This shouldn’t really be surprising.
All the reasons for the GOP’s turn against democracy — backlash to racial progress, rising partisanship, a powerful right-wing media sphere — remain in force after Trump. The leadership is still afraid of Trump and the anti-democratic MAGA movement he commands.
More fundamentally, they are still committed to a political approach that can’t win in a majoritarian system, requiring the defense of the undemocratic status quo in institutions like the Senate and in state-level electoral rules. Republicans still control the bulk of statehouses and are gearing up for a new round of voter suppression bills and extreme gerrymandering in electorally vital states like Georgia and Texas.
Every day I see reporting that the polls are even I get more stressed, more afraid. This is unlike anything that has ever happened in my long life….and everyone else seems to be just going with it. It is the most bizarre and profoundly disturbing time I have ever experienced. I realize how incredibly fortunate I have been to have been born in America during the peak of our success and freedom that this is looking like the end of that and the beginning of something….terrible.
At 12:00 Pomerantsev explains the monster chewing up and spitting out democracy perfectly.
The truth and an informed public are a requirement, along with voting, for democracy. The techbro’s are ending that quickly. They are accelerationists who want to burn it all down and then start over… with them as the lords of creation.
Ice on the Moon 