BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

What is it with Democrats? Do they really need to get clubbed over the head to realize what the hell is going on?

That’s not a rhetorical question.

According to a new CNN poll, 56 percent of Americans believe democracy is under attack, and 51 percent think it’s likely that election officials whose party loses a future election will overturn its results.

A staggering 93 percent of Americans believe democracy is at least being tested. Only 7 percent think democracy is safe.

Republicans are much more fearful of danger to democracy than Democrats, with 75 percent of GOPers and 46 percent of Democrats saying democracy is under attack.

As usual, it’s the details that matter, and these details set off my alarm system.

According to the poll:

Republicans are much more likely (75%) to say that democracy is under attack than Democrats (46%).

Digging a bit deeper into the numbers, it look like this:

American democracy is under attack: GOP 75%, Dems 46%

American democracy is being tested, but is not under attack: GOP 22%, Dems 48%

American democracy is in no danger: GOP 3%, Dems 7%

What the holy fuck? Do Democrats really think that they can go back to sleep till 2024 now that Biden’s in the White House?? (Admittedly, it would be nice if true - BUT IT ISN’T!)

So, Republicans take the Trumpist made-up threats to democracy – Deep State, mass election fraud, etc. – much more seriously than Democrats take the actual threats to democracy – the insurrection, the Big Lie, the threats of political violence.

It took Democrats in California getting the shit scared out of them in the July poll that had the recall in a statistical dead heat, but once they “got it,” they Got It. I don’t know how to gauge the electoral consequences of this urgency gap - but if it continues it’s guaranteed to be reflected in turnout numbers.

What this shows is that the Democratic base takes their cues from the slow-footed, ambivalent, conflicted response of elected Democrats. You know, the damn fools who can’t see that if they don’t fix this their own damn careers will be at stake - and they’ll lose them.

What does it take? Does El Blobbo del Mar A Lardo actually have to invade the Sudetenland to wake these people up?

Folks, in case you have just returned from your extended vacation traveling to Mars with SpaceX, the insurrection isn’t over! It’s on pause. (Think the Russian 1905 revolution as the precursor to the 1917 Revolution).

The threat to democracy is AT LEAST as great now as it was on the afternoon of January 6! The treasonous insurrectionists learned from what they failed to accomplish back then, and they are creating a battlefield on which they cannot lose: partisan control of vote counting, partisan control of vote certification, Republicans in the House overthrowing the Electoral College at the vote certification in 2025 if they take power there in 2022.

THEY KNOW WHAT THEY NEED TO DO TO “WIN” NEXT TIME +AND THEY ARE DOING IT!

In the meantime, the surrender monkeys - Manchin, Sinema, the House Moderates whose seats are most at risk if they don’t do something now - are tut-tutting us that all’s well and of course we can work with people who are obviously dedicated to our destruction.

Can they really not see this? Can they really lack the urgency of the historical moment?

Another poll cited on MSNBC last night has 78% of Republicans saying that Biden was not legitimately elected. That’s 78% of 74 million people, which comes out to around 60 million people who think they live under an “occupation government.” When that many people feel that threatened by reality, nothing good comes of it.

We often talk about the enthusiasm gap in electoral politics, but we now face an urgency gap. Republicans under Trump have not only succeeded in selling the Big Lie that Democrats are out to destroy democracy, they’ve got Republicans more stoked about doing something about it than Democrats are about the verified, believe-your-own-eyes threat to democracy that reached its current pinnacle with a GOP-led violent attack on the Capitol to subvert an election.

Taken together, what you have is the institutions of the Republican party - the Maximum Leader, the state-level heavyweights, the money, the propagandists at Fox News - working the base (or being worked by the base) to create a unified alternate reality with its own in-world continuity.

Rather than merely celebrating the failure of the Republican Recall in California, Democrats should focus on what that failure revealed about their opponents.

The recall election was only the latest evidence of how just how seriously dark and delusional the place that Donald Trump has led the party to is.

The recall was the product of the same undemocratic impulses that sparked a “fraudit" of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, which is now in process of being replicated elsewhere; a political strategy that has stoked the fears of demonstrably non-existent fraud that undermines confidence in the electoral system, leading to the likelihood we will see Republicans no longer willing to accept the result of any election a Republican doesn’t win. This fear-stoking has given GOP officials the necessary cover in states they control o pass measures that will make it harder for people to vote.

What we see now, in the recall, in the spreading “fraudit” campaign, is that Republicans are now willing to do whatever it takes to win, with the exception of putting forward a program that might make more people vote for Republicans.

This isn’t about having a different policy agenda. Or different ideological preferences. It’s about whether or not Actual Real Reality will be acknowledged as true and valid. Right now, that likelihood that it will not be acknowledged is as close to nil as you can get.

When the people fomenting political violence are more fired up by their made-up pretexts to justify violence than their opponents are by the actual violence, I don’t know how that possibly ends well.

TA-WHEE! TA-WHEE! NOW HEAR THIS! GENERAL QUARTERS! ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS!

Anything less is going to be too little, too late.

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