What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Jacob]

I was more thinking prior to that moment, FrunkMonk - is work being done to fight money and funding of anti-American groups by hostile foreign interests. The US was fairly decent at fighting Communist influence on the Left in years past. Is it even considering doing the same to fight the same sort of subversive influences when it's happening on the right?

[Admiral Yi]

You think the activities of the House Unamerican Activities Committee is worthy of emulation? 

If Hungarians give these guys money it could be a crime.  Otherwise it's just words and photo ops.

[Sheilbh]

I was more thinking prior to that moment, FrunkMonk - is work being done to fight money and funding of anti-American groups by hostile foreign interests. The US was fairly decent at fighting Communist influence on the Left in years past. Is it even considering doing the same to fight the same sort of subversive influences when it's happening on the right?

I'm not sure foreign interests are that important here - I think it's domestic billionaires. The Claremont Institute which is utterly unhinged gets a lot of (tax deductible "philanthropic") support from people like the De Vos family. Claremont's very tied to Orban's regime, but is also the home of Anton of the "Flight 93 Election" article, are the guys who published articles praising Salazaar and calling for an American Caesar and are the home of Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the memos detailing how Trump could do a coup.

I mean the Birchers were set up with donations from very wealthy conservatives. There's lots of money that fund various institutes and colleges all over the US and provide fellowships and scholarships for talented young conservatives - and if you're a talented young conservative the area that probably looks exciting (and is well funded) is this "national conservatism" stuff. It's how they have a pipeline of new writers and new (suspiciously well-funded) magazines and think-tanks - there is nothing like that infrastructure on the left in America and only a fraction of it for liberals. Sad truth is I think there's enough domestic billionaires who are into super-paranoid conspiracy theories or would sacrifice democracy for low taxes (or just think they're the sheep in the two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for dinner analogy) that they don't really need foreign subversion.

If anything I'd look the other way at what international projects those billionaires are paying for/funding.

The Danube Institute is based in Budapest and, I think, only operates in Budapest, but it pays for "visiting fellows" from the US, UK, Belgium, France etc (mainly think-tankers, writers, journalists). There's no doubt that a lot of what they do is legitimate, think-tankery with a take - but I think those foreign trips are less to convince their guests that Orban is great and more about providing a Potemkin village. They'll go there and stay in a lovely flat in the city centre, enjoy the cafe culture, chat with clever, interesting Hungarian scholars - and then just raise doubts every time they hear back home what an awful illiberal leader Orban is.

Edit: In part I suspect the reason there's less of that institutional framework on the left is that there are relatively few left-wing billionaires for very good reasons. Among liberals though I suspect it's because they're busy funding projects on promoting media literacy, researching how to combat disinformation, promoting non-partisan policy research etc - basically everything except funding their side's infrastructure to actually politically fight back.

[FunkMonk]

I was more thinking prior to that moment, FrunkMonk - is work being done to fight money and funding of anti-American groups by hostile foreign interests. The US was fairly decent at fighting Communist influence on the Left in years past. Is it even considering doing the same to fight the same sort of subversive influences when it's happening on the right?

I don't know, but I'm not even sure if fighting foreign subversion is all that important in the grand scheme of the American Right. It's increasingly clear that domestic right-wing extremist ideologues are ascendant in the Republican party and in mainstream conservatism and, as Sheilbh points out, these new, young conservative intellectuals will be the ones establishing the ideological standards with which American conservatism will rally around in the near future.

[Jacob]

You think the activities of the House Unamerican Activities Committee is worthy of emulation? 

Nope.

If Hungarians give these guys money it could be a crime.  Otherwise it's just words and photo ops.

Yeah what I'm wondering is whether there's any investigation into money inflows or not.

[alfred russel]

Apparently Hershel Walker is running for US Senator from Georgia as a Republican.  A Trump friendly Republican according to CNN.

Help for Yuros: retired black football player.

Dude has dissociative identity disorder, hard to see him overcoming that.

There are betting odds on him getting the republican nomination for Senate. He is at 90%.

There are also betting odds on Republicans winning the senate race. They are at 62%.

Just how disconnected from the country are you?

Okay Timmay, now there is concrete polling on this - an Emerson poll was conducted.

Walker is up by 44% for the GOP nomination - he has 57% support and his nearest competitor is at 13%.

In a matchup with Warnock in the general, he is up 49 - 45.

Now do you see the path for him to get to the senate?

By the way, as you live on the other side of the country, there are negative ads up on him and plenty of press about his problems.

[crazy canuck]

I can see how Orban appeals to a right wing fundamentalist like Duhrer.  And it is noteworthy that the Christian fundamentalists are willing to abandon Liberal Democracy.  But I would never have guessed that sort of extremism would take over the GOP. Well I would never of guessed it five or six years ago. This ties into a story the times had a couple of days ago about how Trump rallies have turned into right wing Christian fundamentalist worship meetings.

[OttoVonBismarck]

There are actually a ton of Democrat-aligned, and liberal American billionaires, they just simply aren't that politically active/don't care that much about politics. There's a number of conservative billionaires who really do.

In some ways I think things like the upcoming overturning of Roe v. Wade may help with that. A lot of the modern conservative billionaire-propaganda complex is built out of an era when social conservatism and even fiscal conservatism were seen to be in serious decline in the country with limited power and dim prospects. It helped build a sense that if you were of those ideologies, you were literally "losing your country" in a catastrophic sense. I think most liberal billionaires don't live in a world where they feel things are catastrophic. I think it's easy to say "but what about Trump?" but then you look at how most of the mainstream Democrats really behaved during Trump's Presidency and I just don't think a lot of them feel things are catastrophic yet. There's tons of writers and thinkers on the left and in the middle who realize we are in a serious crisis of democracy, but a lot of the Washington type Democrat insiders and wealthy Democrat billionaires just don't seem to have the same sense of urgency.

We can speculate on why that is and maybe it's just because creatures of power are the last to feel real worry--and also because probably on the social front there's been a lot of socially conservative rhetoric in the last few years but overall the wins haven't been all that meaningful. If you're a socially liberal Democrat of means, you're likely age 55+ and have seen things like gay marriage get legalized etc I think you just don't feel the same sense of panic. Roe v. Wade being overturned this year may actually wake some of those people up, not because it will directly affect them but because it's kind of a talisman of social liberalism's place in America.

I think one of the core weaknesses of the modern Democrats is lack of understanding how bad things are and how bad their situation is, at an institutional level. What's unfortunate is the progressive wing of the party seems to realize it, but their policies and behaviors are incompatible with anything resembling a winning political platform. Democrats I think are also "sleeping" on how important the culture war stuff is. Time and time again people in this era are voting directly against their economic interests because of their cultural preferences. I realized this was going on when I read report after report of Midwest farmers who were literally losing their family farms because of Trump's badly conducted trade war with China, who still rapturously supported him because of how he was doing culture war stuff they really cared about (literally more than their livelihood.)

The Democrats are asleep to the fact that the Republicans have pivoted to culture war issues that in many parts of the country have strong majority support. The Florida legislation on teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity for example has like a 55-25 support margin overall and is even supported by a majority of Democrats in Florida when they are told what the law does. Previous eras of culture warring the Democrats actually either held the positions that had slight majority support or they stayed neutral. As an example in the 90s and 00s, as now, abortion being legal is slightly favored by the country, and Democrats have supported it. Gay marriage was not favored during that time, and Democrats largely either opposed it themselves or stayed neutral with support for things like civil marriages etc.

The Republicans have shrewdly built a package of culture war grievances that hit on issues many Americans dislike the progressive/very liberal cultural view on. Democrats don't care because these are issues that often affect almost no one--like there's very few people who actually deal with the reality of a transgender athlete, or CRT, or a school teacher at the 3rd grade level talking about sexuality. Because these aren't problems that really exist in a meaningful sense at scale, Democrats believe they don't matter. Unfortunately Republican propaganda turns these into relevant things, and unlike gay marriage which is now well supported, on all of these issues most Americans (sometimes even most Democrats) disagree with the far left position.

It's a whole other post but another interest angle is the growing movement by some to transform the GOP into a marriage of these cultural grievance policies married to fiscal liberalism with "pro-family" economic policies which would largely mean hand outs to married families with children and boosts to things like social welfare that affect working families. It wouldn't shock me if in the coming years the fiscally conservative wing of the GOP (which has always been powerful but not large in terms of voters) ends up "out in the woods", you're already seeing that to some degree as corporate/Wall Street Republicans have long been declining in influence in the party.

[The Minsky Moment]

confronting Soros' university,

Orban didn't "confront" the university, he shut it down.  And the ostensible basis used for shutting it down is that it was an American institution, therefore "foreign".  Definitely something for American leaders to celebrate, no?

It's time to use the f word and call out the increasingly dominant fascist wing of the GOP for what it is. 

[Oexmelin]

I largely agree with Otto. A lot of the Democratic establishment also read the liberal victories of the past as a product of courts reaching the "right" decisions. Such a view erases decades of militancy, in favor of reading most political struggles as a would-be legal battle. It informs quite a bit the way they see their role: deferring to institutions as they function "as they should". For many of them, politics is about mustering the correct arguments in front of respected institutions, freeing them from the dirty labor of actually engaging with politics and pesky militants. Unlike Republicans however, they do not have a propaganda arm that frees them from that labor either, and the ingrained respect for institutions leave them defenseless when they are weaponized against them.

[Jacob]

It's time to use the f word and call out the increasingly dominant fascist wing of the GOP for what it is. 

More to the point, it's time to develop and executing strategies for countering its continual growth. Just calling it "Fascist" isn't going to make much of a difference, I don't think.

[Jacob]

... and yeah, I tend to agree with OvB and Oex on this.

[DGuller]

It is frustrating to see how Democrats continually fail to appreciate the political danger they are in.  It's like watching a mouse infected with toxoplasmosis playing with a cat without a care in the world.

[Sheilbh]

... and yeah, I tend to agree with OvB and Oex on this.

Same.

It's why I was slightly squeamish about that list of "how to resist" that had as one of its pointers "defend institutions" because I think that's part of the problem. I think liberals identify as believers in institutions v wreckers in the GOP - but that means they are very often defending that have been rampantly politicised instead of contesting them. The Supreme Court/judicial system is the most obvious example where the right has clearly identified that in the US that is an arena of political contestation and they want to win those fights. They have developed an entire infrastructure to ensure there is a reliable pipeline of solid, ideologically conservative Republican lawyers who are primed to sit in the appeals courts and the Supreme Court.

There is no equivalent from liberals as far as I can see. Instead they seem very invested in the idea of the courts as a non-political space where legal arguments of principle will be made in front of non-partisan judges - despite all of the growing evidence that that isn't what's going on. So instead you see liberals normally reconciling themselves to whatever conservative jurist gets appointed because they don't want to cause a scandal by attacking the institution. I think it's the dangerous "normalisation" of what's happening - far more than the way the media reports on Trump etc.

It is, incidentally, also why I think a legalist framing of "rights" as something you establish through the legal system is painfully inadequate and does not provide a durable base for those rights to exist - right now we've just seen Senator Cornyn say the gay marriage decision was wrongly decided (he linked it to Plessy as another example) and the court may want to look again. We know what they want to do.

Orban didn't "confront" the university, he shut it down.  And the ostensible basis used for shutting it down is that it was an American institution, therefore "foreign".  Definitely something for American leaders to celebrate, no?

Of course - I'm not endorsing that view I was just saying I think that's the "culture war" people like Dreher and others on the American right admire and want to replicate in response to BB's question. Not endorsing that line.

[Admiral Yi]

There is no equivalent from liberals as far as I can see. Instead they seem very invested in the idea of the courts as a non-political space where legal arguments of principle will be made in front of non-partisan judges - despite all of the growing evidence that that isn't what's going on. So instead you see liberals normally reconciling themselves to whatever conservative jurist gets appointed because they don't want to cause a scandal by attacking the institution. I think it's the dangerous "normalisation" of what's happening - far more than the way the media reports on Trump etc.

When was the last time a Democrat appointed justice didn't toe the party line?