I hate to say, “I told all y’all so!” but, I told all y’all so! Okay, okay, I love to tell anyone who will sit still long enough to listen, and, of course, when I say all y’all, I mean the ten or twenty of my readers who stayed longer than 1.89 minutes… okay, five or six readers… okay, my mom. My mom read the blog posts, but she didn’t believe me. Still. It’s right there in pixels and bytes. Check these out! I’ve been warning of it almost from the inception of the blog. It seems like every other post has been on the very real and present danger that the Repubes pose to our democracy. Don’t worry, I’ll only list the first three, but check them out. They are snarky, sarcasticky, profaney, and prescient.
23 June 2016
Well, this one is obvious, ain’t it? Way back in June of 2016 I was warning us about the dangers the Repubes were posing to our democracy with their refusal to compromise. It is what got me started blogging in the first place.
We Are A Single Party Democratic Kleptocracy
27 March 2017
Here I warn that our two-party system means that you take a side. There is no neutral. You are either a Dem or a Repube, and it has reached a crisis since the Repubes were engaging in kleptocracy willing to allow the country to go belly up as long as they could transfer the nation’s wealth to the one percent. It felt prescient since I talk about the Trump admin’s inability to handle a crisis.
Gaslighting Perceptions of Politics
20 May 2017
One of my favorites since it goes through several psychological principles such as the way cognition affects perception and the very real pain we feel when our beliefs are challenged. In it, though, I come to the stark conclusion that “We are not perceiving the world in accurate enough detail to allow for us to survive. Eventually the divide that exists between the two ends of the political spectrum’s perceptions of the problems and solutions will lead to a real schism that will be nearly impossible to heal. To paraphrase President Obama, reality has a way of biting you in the ass. And that makes us the United Fucking States of Fucking Stupid.”
Now we come to the a Vox article that confirms the whole shooting match! The Repubes really are actively trying to destroy our democracy. I’m not just a raving paranoid lunatic! I’m not! I’m not! It’s not a conspiracy theory! It’s all true! Hear that mom? I was right!
Of course, so were a lot of other folks. But, I feel like I figgered it out on my own and was on the leading edge of it all. I guess, that’s just about enough of my crowing and tooting my own horn. Let’s have quick dip into the charts and stuff before I turn you over to the article.
“The MAGA Movement is a Clear and Present Danger to American Democracy”
In a survey of MAGA voters who are“engaged and committed Republican partisans, disproportionately likely to influence conflicts within the party like primary elections” a survey by political researchers found that over 90% of respondents thought that the election was stolen, nearly 80% didn’t trust the Congressional election, and over 70% supported an unconstitutional third term for the Ol’ Pussy Grabber. While that is troubling in and of itself, it isn’t the worst of it.
Repubes Support Violence
Almost 40% of Repubes surveyed agreed that violence against Dems could be justified! That was more than twice the Dem response rate of 17%. This poll was conducted after Trump’s 6 January Insurrection.
If we think about it for a minute. If you believed the Big Lie that the election really was stolen from the Ol’ Pussy Grabber is some kind of massive international conspiracy to deprive him of a second term, that our democracy really had been corrupted, then, you too might believe that violence would be necessary to protect it.
And, that is the danger of the Big Lie.
Repubes Dislike Compromise
Compromise is the heart of democracy. Democracy is the blending of all of our thoughts on the problems facing of us and how we should address them. It’s like we are averaging our points of view. When there is disagreement between large numbers of people on each side of an issue, of course, you compromise. You do it to keep the peace. The majority compromise with the minority to prevent rebellion.
For too long the racist conservatives among us have exploited this spirit of compromise to perpetuate the oppression of Black Americans and other communities of color, but, now, that it is clear that they will not only be a minority but that white people will be a minority in the next few decades, they are willing to give up on compromise. They are willing to give up on democracy. This effort was started by Gingrich and his dreams of a permanent majority and carried on by McConnell who believes winners make policy and losers go home. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy and one that will destroy us.
Remember Obama’s presidency and all the times that Repubes just refused to participate? Congress has been paralyzed by this refusal to compromise forcing the president to act unilaterally using executive orders. That alone is wrecking our government by eroding the public’s confidence in it to perform. It also justifies each sides use of unilateral decisions since the other side had been doing it, too. Never mind that the Dems would be happy to engage with Repubes if they would act in good faith, but they don’t. They refuse to act at all even when they have the majority in both Houses and the Presidency.
When one side refuses to compromise, it pushes the other side to engage in similar tactics. So, starting in 2014, the percentage of Repubes who preferred compromise among our elected officials dipped below 50%. In 2018, it was at a paltry 44%. Meanwhile, in 2014, the percentage of Dems who believed in compromise was a robust 64%, but in 2018 it had fallen to a shocking 46%.
Our democracy is fucked unless we can convince Repubes to come back to the table and begin compromising again.
Don’t take my word for it, read it yourself.
The Republican revolt against democracy, explained in 13 charts
The Trump years revealed a dark truth: The Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. These charts tell the story.
1 March 2021
Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com
Graphics by Tim Williams
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.
Continue reading at Vox: The Republican revolt against democracy, explained in 13 charts
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Image Attribution
“Banksy floral vomit” by dullhunk is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The Psy of Life 
Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack points to a VOX article confirming much of what he has been saying.
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Our Founding Fathers managed something really rather weird. They proposed and designed a system with a reasonable chance of working democratically starting from a position of one defined group of people actually owning another defined group of people. Of course, they were building on 500 years of English movement away from one person owning everybody else to a constitutional monarchy. That helped.
The Republican Party is acting out (in the psychological sense) the historical and multi-generational trauma to which Joseph Conrad referred when he said, “The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.”
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Howdy Bob!
The devastating effects of European communicable diseases on Native American populations in the Americas meant that across both continents European colonizers and American expansionists were moving into vacuums. I recall the diary entries of Pilgrims thanking god for providing them with ready to harvest fields of crops abandoned by the remnants of the Native American tribes after they were decimated by disease.They felt like god’s chosen people because of the natural bounty of the Americas but also by advantages that disease and technology gave them over the original inhabitants. The same was true for the Spanish in Central and South America. They were able to over come tremendous armies of the Aztecs and Incas because of the technology they possessed the chaos caused by pandemics.
Believing that you’re god’s chosen people as the Europeans did when looking at the clear evidence of it as you stood on the threshold of an undeveloped continent with all of its natural resources played right into the hands of humanity’s worst instincts, didn’t it? Of course they reacted with reckless greed and cruelty.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Exactly so, and set the pattern of seeing the bounty of resources as inexhaustible. We still have people who really believe we can never run out of oil and natural gas, not to mention clean water and great soils.
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Howdy Bob!
You can see this phenomenon in the Amazon basin and in Indonesia. They’ve never lived without the rainforest, so they can’t image the world without it. They see it as their birthright to profit off of the rainforest. One of the biggest victories has been focusing our youth on ecological destruction. There is a reason that Greta Thunberg and her generation are leading on the issue.
I don’t know about you, but I remember being a young man and being really scared when I realized the extent of the loss of topsoil from the Great Plains and the implications of that loss. I remember the fire on the Cuyahoga River and smog blanketing our big cities and being very unnerved. It must be worse for the younger generation.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I remember those things. I remember visiting a friend in LA whose apartment was on a hill, and seeing the color of the air in the LA Basin (1968), and after living out in western IL, driving back into Chicago, into the smog, and having my nasal passages clog up. It too ten years from the publication of Silent Spring for anybody to seriously consider banning DDDT.
One of the enduring themes of sci-fi horror movies is the aliens who come to devour the planet (think of “Independence Day”). We are the aliens.
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Howdy Bob!
Don’t get me started about the pollution in China. In Guangzhou the least polluted Chinese big city, we gauged the pollution by how many buildings you could see. “Oh look! There’s Guangzhou Tower, it isn’t so bad today.” “Oh man, I can barely see the Ramada across the street. It’s no recess day.” On the drive to Hong Kong, you could taste the air inside the bus with the AC on. Seriously. I’ve never been happier to leave a place. But, out in XinJiang where the Uigyhurs live. It was clean clean clean. I loved XinJiang. I wish I coulda gotten a job there and worked.
The person who cuts down the last tree in the Amazon rainforest will have a very good reason for doing it, too.
Huzzah!
Jack
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There is a level of the long future, perhaps 300-500 years out, that I ponder and worry less about the Amazon forest because at maximum possible seal level rise most of that basin is under water (along with a lot else), but it is true that whoever cuts the last tree anywhere will have an argument of necessity. In part of the American West it is likely that argument will be to cut it before it burns because it is already dead.
Recent reporting of research is that wild fire smoke is even worse for humans than industrial smog – more fine particulates. That also hold for the intentional burning of forests in Brazil and other tropical areas to clear for grazing or crops.
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