Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, January 18, 2025
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44 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
This…is so dystopian, I’m not sure where to even start.
JFC.
Searches for ‘What Is an Oligarchy’ Spike After Biden’s Warning (The Daily Beast)
Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2025, incoming.
I asked a well-known anti-abortion nut – er, I mean, activist – in my neighborhood why he (you knew it was a “he”, right?) didn’t campaign for men to keep their dicks in their pants unless they were willing to assume the duties and costs of fatherhood. After all, it’s not like thousands of women are using turkey basters to get pregnant. Men are involved. Of course, he didn’t have an answer beyond it wasn’t men getting the abortions.
Inauguration day and it’s already time to dig the “Bunker King” meme back out because he can’t handle the cold.
I still believe mockery is the best approach to protesting.
@Tony W:
I don’t know how cold it is forecast to be in Washington, DC on Monday. Here, the forecast is for cold enough to come with the warning “old people should stay indoors”.
Why Chicago? Why not Houston? The choice of location shows it is a total political operation. And that law enforcement is subordinated to his political agenda.
Trump plans large immigration raid in Chicago on Tuesday – report
From WaPost:
Gift”
“GiftAtlantic
Long piece, much more …
@Tony W:
@Michael Cain:
I think the forecast was for a small crowd at the mall, with occasional bursts of protests.
@Kathy:
As I said, the cold weather will be Trump’s excuse for the paucity of the crowd.
A .jpeg of some horse shit:
“JPEG“
@charontwo:
Horse shit has uses. Trump doesn’t.
@charontwo:
The hoi polloi DGAF about policy, they never have. They don’t vote their economic self-interest because it’s a delayed pay-off and too complicated. They vote feels. This makes them easy to manipulate because fear and resentment are very easy to trigger. Hope is not high on the emotional scorecard of a Wal-Mart stock clerk in Lower Mootown, but fear and resentment are right at their fingertips.
We aren’t hearing the masses complaining about Social Security, or the EPA, the word-du-jour is, ‘woke.’ Woke is their all-purpose description of people who make them angry, or resentful. Woke comes from college-educated people who look down their noses at working people. Woke means: college kids and Hollywood millionaires are demanding changes that do nothing for you, but benefit some minority. Changes that challenge your core beliefs, changes that shift you down the social hierarchy and make you feel inferior. And sometimes changes that are facially ridiculous to the vast majority of people.
When Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t define the word, ‘woman,’ that seemed flatly insane to most people. ‘Defund’ was flatly insane to most people. Trans athletes. The pronoun obsession. ‘Pornography’ in public school libraries. ‘Toxic males.’ Denigration of White people, and their replacement in popular media. The neologisms, and the instant moralistic condemnation leveled at anyone who did not immediately fall in line. Every rude, ‘Hey, you can’t use that word.’ The entire progressive agenda was undisciplined, un-prioritized, defined by the loudest voices on Twitter rather than by a savvy leadership.
Just about everything the Left wanted was obtainable – had they not been so fucking impatient, so fucking condescending, so fucking obnoxious and so utterly contemptuous of anyone not ready to instantly pull a 180. For our sins we’ve had our asses handed to us on social issues, on wokeness. A little patience, a little tolerance and a lot less arrogance would have been very helpful. And good lord, a sense of humor, FFS.
Civil Rights was built over the course of decades of disciplined and often dangerous work. A foundation was laid. Inclusion was offered. Virtue was displayed not just preached. Allies, even imperfect ones, were courted. Patriotism was appealed to. Same with gay rights. Same with equal rights for women. It takes time and persistence to turn a tanker around. You don’t just snap your fingers and start attacking anyone who dislikes the new direction. In this era the foundations were not laid, allies were not courted, inclusion was not offered and there was zero patience.
We have a unifying issue waiting to be exploited: class. Not race, not gender, class. But it’s damned hard to preach about class from a college seminar. We need to learn politics. Had we learned politics 101, we’d be inaugurating president Kamala, rather than plotting how to smuggle morning after pills into Texas.
I walked out of my apartment and into the stairwell. I didn’t check my pocket to know I had my keys and fob. I didn’t! At that point I was just fucked.
No biggie, get to the elevator lobby. It’s 10:45 pm. I could ride the elevator up to the Skywalk, and climb to the 5th floor. I got this. Been here since April, I know most everybody by sight, and in some cases by name.
Nope. Nobody came.
I was stuck in the 5th floor elevator lobby from 11pm until 4:45am. Just stuck. My phone was near dead on battery – 4%.
I stood all night looking at my shoes, the walls. Almost six hours of standing. I thought. I ruminated. I thought about moral quandries. I got very frustrated and annoyed. I just want to go home.
It’s 2am. There’s 30 apartments on this floor, so probably 50 folks. Surely, either a patron who stayed until closing time, or a bar worker will take the elevator up to 5 and hopefully let me in. Nope. Nada. Wait, you dumb idiot.
Eventually a guy, good dude, I know by sight who is a manager at the coffee shop two blocks away finally opened that precious door at near to 5am. Thank effing Christ Starbucks opens at 5:30.
I owe that guy a premium sixer or a nice bottle of wine. Saved my sorry butt. That was brutal! Spent six hours standing and looking at my feet.
Bill Gates on Trump meeting: ‘Frankly I was impressed’
Et tu, Bill?
@Michael Reynolds: One of the hardest things of any movement, or even organization, is how to handle the people who appropriate it for their own ends, but cloak their own motivations by becoming the purest of the pure in espousing the orthodoxy of the movement. This is bigotry disguised as zealotry. These are people who really, really want to belittle and demean someone they consider “lower” or “other”, but need to do so from the shelter of moral righteousness. We on the left are so good at seeing the phony “Christians” for the bigots they truly are, but we have so much trouble seeing the exact same behavior on our side.
@charontwo: Pssstt–rural and non-college educated voters are neither interested in policy NOR CAPABLE of digesting the nuance, scope, and direct/indirect effects of ‘policy’. It requires a level of post-secondary training they don’t have–which is no knock on them, a functional society needs people who think as well as people who can ‘do’.
Democrats lost their previous core constituency because they failed to keep up with politics. Politics is always a moving target. The environment USED to be– a little bit of culture war and a lot of policy. That is over. While Republicans rightly saw that the game is now ONLY culture war, Democrats doubled down on Policy–insistent on fighting WW1 with Civil War tactics and technology. Dems should continue to do good policy–but only in Mitt Romney’s quiet rooms. They need to go on the offensive against the Social Media algorithms, with a cultivated stable of content producers and podcast-capable politicians that know how to capture eyes and ears.
I get that it would be great to turn down the temperature–its not possible now or in the foreseeable future. These people mean business–and we’ve allowed foreign billionaire media people to come in and stir the pot. Forget the DOJ–start planning today for how to weaponize the FCC in 5-7 years — against the RW eco system.
Until there is a infrastructure to delivers content to my handymans smartphone that makes him question the RW talking heads that yap away unchallenged in his FB and YouTube feed–Dem will continue to work hard for marginal gains and losses–Despite being the better product.
So Trump has made $25 billion on paper in less than 24 hours. He launched a crypto that he gets 80% of the total capital value. I guess all the pumping he has done recently of the crypto industry is paying off. But it’s totally ok, no conflicts there.
The most amazing thing to me is that this doesn’t even seem to be a major story. Business as usual in the age of Trump. At this point it wouldn’t shock me if Trump were to start getting stock options from companies that do business with the federal government.
@Jen:
This enrages me. These men don’t want the women they’ve impregnated to abort? Fine. Let them assume ALL responsibility for the child’s raising. They want to be fathers? Again, fine. Make them be fathers.
@Jen: More women should consider same sex relationships, if there’s any inclination that way. Given the current political climate, they can just be “roommates.”
For our conservative friends — yes, this is literally the LGBTQ recruiting!
@Jen:
Unfortunately, we’re not that far from some Red States enacting laws that require physicians to report pregnancies and miscarriages to state officials. Pretty sure there would be a ‘sell your girlfriend out’ hotline too.
@Gustopher:
It took me several decades to realize my maternal grandmother was a lesbian.
She had a “roommate”. A fellow school teacher. So-called “Boston marriage” was not uncommon back then, especially for school teachers. Share a space and split the cost.
It wasn’t until my mid 20’s until I realized they were more than roommates. Growing up, it never occurred to me. I just accepted at face value that Elaine was basically my aunt. She was pretty cool and awesome.
Hey, that was the 60s and 70s. Out and proud lesbianism was not okay then. You certainly wouldn’t want to parade it. They were roommates.
Here’s how dumb and oblivious I was. They shared a bed.
When I had the insight, I was annoyed I hadn’t cottoned on sooner. It was pretty fucking obvious. Awesome for them – they figured out a way to make it work without attracting unwanted attention from local scolds and busybodies.
Hell, I didn’t know and I was her grandson.
@de stijl:
A hundred years ago, it was common for entire families to share one bed. Beds were expensive. Look at the beginning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And let’s not forget that Lincoln often shared a bed with another man.
Your grandmother may have simply been reviving an old tradition, with her —um— roommate.
@Gustopher: Hell , in Lincoln’s time if you stopped alone at a crowded inn the expectation was you shared a bed with a stranger or even two.
A week or two ago I commented that Trump sees himself as Hitler, and Greenland and Canada are his Belgium. From an article at the Atlantic:
@Lucysfootball: I dunno. I’ve met significant numbers of people over the years who make a good first impression but are really [expletive, deleted]. I can’t imagine Trump being one, but I don’t know what kind of people Gates hangs with either.
At around 8:25 in this video you can see Xtarship blow up.
@Michael Reynolds:
Somewhat valid, but maybe also a tinge of overly-nostalgic, rose-colored revisionist history. John Lewis and Co., gay activists, and feminists were widely reviled at the height of their hard work. The same hysterics now hurled at today’s young reformers — they’re obnoxious, they’re impatient, they hate white men, they’re condescending moralists, they’re awful, it’s all their fault blah blah blah — were hurled at Bus Boycotters and Freedom Riders in the 50s-60s, bra burners in the 70s, AIDS-addled Pride Marchers in 80s.
There are editorial cartoons of that halycon Civil Rights Era accusing Dr. King of violently inciting riots. He notoriously never enjoyed majority approval in polling until well after he was murdered.
The same old heads who claim to support the goals but not the tactics are descendants of the scolds Rev. Dr. King wrote about in his Letter From the Birmingham Jail. They want to believe they would have supported his “militant nonviolence” back then; yeah right.
And in 50 years, me and the arthritic, geriatric millennials of my generation will lament that the bigoted activist zealots of the 2070s aren’t disciplined, patriotic consensus-builders like those nice wokesters from the 2020s.
Rinse, wash, repeat. Liberal disruptors are always demonized in their day. They killed Jesus, they killed Lincoln, they killed King. But time vindicates the righteous.
@DK:
No, duh John Lewis was hated. That’s not the issue. Civil Rights had been building for a long time and not getting very far. Post WW2, that changed. 1946 on, there were large numbers of Black men who could point at their uniforms and their ribbons and draw grudging support.
From 1946 it was just two years before Hubert Humphrey (whose political career was later destroyed by clueless anti-war demonstrators) was being booed at the Democratic convention for saying Dems should reject segregation. This led to a rupture in the Democratic Party. But the speech laid down a marker. Seven years later, 1955, Rosa Parks. Two years after Parks, Little Rock. Eight years later, the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Same year came the voting rights act, and the Civil Rights Act.
Leaders arose, and learned how to lead. White public opinion began to shift. Civil Rights had leaders, they had an ideology, a set of goals and beliefs. They were smart. They played politics well. They won. But it was 20 years between the end of WW2 and the Civil Rights Act. It takes time to turn the ship.
If the Tuskegee Airmen had come home and started demanding instant adherence to their full list of demands, if they’d come home and started telling people how to talk, if they’d come home and acted the way progs have acted this last couple of cycles, we might still be waiting for a CR law. Civil Rights was won by dedicated men and woman – men and women dedicated to the point of giving their lives to their cause – and leaders equally willing to risk death. And so smart. PhD in politics. A game brilliantly played.
Look, a historical point on blame. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. They were to blame. They did it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t after the fact point out that you don’t fucking line planes up wing-to-wing when there are expectations of imminent war. No critique, no progress, no lessons learned.
Just because ‘they’ are wrong, and ‘we’ are right, that doesn’t excuse incompetence. Incompetence that has now set every progressive issue back 10 years and helped usher a rapist pig into the White House. Progressives would not have had to surrender a single major point – not on abortion, not on trans rights, not on environment, not on unions – all they had to do was tone it down, stop lecturing and irritating everyone, stop denigrating people by race or gender, and learn to play the game.
@Michael Reynolds:
https://youtu.be/Jb-JIOWUw1o?si=T5IvXdjhSjJxl8Xs
You might not remember history. But I have not forgotten my mothers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Gwen_Araujo
I have not forgotten my sisters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Teena
I have not forgotten my brothers.
Every time you talk about history or how we just need to kick trans women out of sports for political expediency, all I hear is that you don’t remember and you don’t care to actually learn. You’re bitching about stupid pronouns and punching at us, instead of fighting for us.
You’re fighting the wrong battles and the wrong people. You’re the parent of a trans. You should know better than to be bitching about pronouns. You should know better and be fighting for our inclusion in sports. You’re not and it is killing me.
As an aside, does anyone really think this is about sports? 1. Every single trans could agree that we would all be blocked from sports if we got out full rights and that would never be enough, it’s not about sports. 2. I’m waiting for the day some 6’4” trans dude shows up with a full beard and demands to be let on the women’s team cause of his birth cert. That’s gonna be way funnier than all the genital inspections cis girls are gonna get.
Also, lemme just throw this out here, I’m not actively suicidal cause some 20 year old is demanding to use stupid pronouns. I’m suicidal because the White Men of the GOP have decided that their road to power is through denigrating my existence and taking away my rights.
You of all people should know better. You don’t and that makes me sad.
I’m going to add this here because I want people to know. When I said I’m actively suicidal, I’m not bullshitting or dealing with the kind of hyperbole that I usually truck in. I am a suicidal person and I am actively suicidal right now.
You should know I’m not suicidal because I’m trans. I’m suicidal because I am a childhood abuse survivor and because cis het society would trans torture trans people than do the work of actually learning or making their own lives better. For some of you, this election won’t change your lives much. For some of us, millions of dollars was spent telling everyone how disgusting and threatening we are. I’m leaving my home because it. I’m a lucky one. I don’t feel lucky. I feel like a coward.
Last year my small trans support group had two members successfully commit suicide. Our group does a lot of work to get people who are just starting their transitions up and moving. Give them friendship, knowledge, and love. We are on the front lines doing the work that Reynolds claims no one is doing.
One of the successful suicides was a friend of my friend S. I’ve known S. for quite a while. We knew each other early in our transitions. We’ve gotten to watch each other grow into our bodies, our happiness and our power. On Monday of this week S. call me to help talk through calling for a wellness check on a different friend of S. Imagine for a second delaying calling for a wellness check cause you’re terrified the police will harm or mock your friend. We delayed. Turns out while we were dithering, she was busy trying to kill herself. We were lucky that she was unsuccessful. We then had to plan out what we needed to do to make sure that if she’s successful, her unaffirming parents won’t deadname and misgender her in death. I’ve had to put on a whole presentation on the form that the State has made to prevent that.
Let’s pause a second and think about how the state of Illinois has a statute and a form to protect dead trans people from the parents and families that HATE them.
While all that was going on I went to a gay dive bar here in chicago that feels like home. I am safe and unequivocally loved there. I got blind drunk and spent Wednesday hungover and puking. I did that to quiet the voice in my head, that was installed there by the people growing up that called me a fag, by the people laughing at the amazing women that went on Maury Povich, by my mom that wouldn’t even look at me when I came out to her, the voice that says that everyone hates me and I’m disgusting.
The thing is, if I kill myself, if S. kills herself, if a handful of other women in our small group kills themselves, we will drag down other people. We have do do the job of living because other people are counting on us. I want this pain and despair to end so bad.
Tonight I’m going dancing. I’m going to take some edibles, drink and dance to techno. I need to pound the voice out of my head. But, thanks to the cis hets, I agree with that voice. Maybe this world would be better without us. Maybe Magneto was right. Maybe Reynolds should shut the fuck up and listen.
This weekend, if you know any trans people, even as friends of friends or tangentially, call them. Talk to them. Let them know they are seen and valuable. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say we’re all terrified.
In the meantime, I’m gonna try and not kill myself.
@Beth:
He’s the quintessential straight guy who has never heard of ACT UP or Larry Kramer, none of whom were exactly patriotic.
Regarding sports, let’s be honest. America is not a fit country. Beyond bigotry and hate, anti-trans sentiment about girls is so tied to this fact. I mean, nobody talks about funding of athletic programs or how many private sports leagues exist which require parents to pay for their kids to play. They don’t talk about that because they don’t care about anything except bigotry and their own grievous insecurities. It’s like Nancy Mace with three marriages and guys cheating on her before her wedding blathering about bathrooms. A deep connection exists here.
Guys who did not fight in a war, but they love to talk about war. Men who didn’t play football in high school, but love to sound like the dumbest coach you ever met. That’s America.
Have a blast tonight!
Incoming Trump administration reconsidering mass deportation raids in Chicago, report says
Should anybody believe this?
@Beth: thanks for sharing, and I’m sorry that it was necessary. Whatever good I can offer from a distance, I’m sending as positive vibes and love.
Speaking of history, a lot of Civil Rights activists wanted MLK to cut loose March on Washington organizer Bayard Rustin, who was openly gay in the 1960s. King did the right thing and kept Rustin as one of his closest allies.
@Mister Bluster:
Who knows? It could have been a bullshit threat/promise to begin with. But the MAGAs will be displeased if it doesn’t happen.
@Mister Bluster:
The head of Chicago’s police union is an open white nationalist and MAGA asshole. I bet he had a hand in it. It’s meant as punishment and to scare us.
@Beth:
There is a very big chance I will develop dementia / Alzheimer’s. And that is entirely and absolutely unacceptable to me. I will not go down that path. Seen it twice up close. Yeah, no. Won’t. I refuse.
My grandmother forgot how to chew. She lived (if you can call it that) another few months off a feeding tube.
I have a plan. I have the means (stashed in an unremarkable pharmacy pill bottle). I have the will to execute the plan if push comes to shove. I’d prefer not to, but what can you do? Time will tell.
Eventually the grim reaper comes for all of us. If I get a whiff of dementia, then I execute the plan. Early exit. No problem. If it’s cancer then I wait and watch to see how treatment goes. How it plays out. But there will come a point where pain outlasts resilience. I have a plan and the means and the will.
I am not going to tell what to do or how to think. All of that is your choice.
@Mister Bluster: Watch Fox News Tuesday night–you will have no doubt that Trump is making us great–again.
@Beth:
This cri de coeur, while genuinely moving, has nothing to do with politics and getting what you want. You’re a lawyer, you know the difference between winning and losing. Politics is a war, you can lose it, or you can win it. Right now, are you winning the war? If not then figure out why.
You’re terrified? So am I, for my daughter, and now, for a niece. And I am sick of posturing and self pity as a substitute for winning the rights and freedoms I want for them. My daughter has fewer protections today than she did when she transitioned.
And don’t guilt me. When the trans athlete issue first came up I told my daughter it was a mistake. You were never, ever going to win on that issue. Not ever. And pushing it rather than taking a tactical retreat was just stupid. But the disconnect of progressives goes beyond trans issues. DEI. Climate change. Health care. Women are dying because we lost on abortion. Babies are being tossed in dumpsters. On an issue where the country is actually with us.
The. Left. Fucked. Up. The entire social media-driven, out-of-touch, elitist, entitled, condescending, scolding, humorless, intolerant approach was stupid. Not just wrong, stupid. I used to think AOC was the person to play progressive Moses. Let’s see.
Beth, I imagine all the fucking time. At three o’clock in the morning, I’ll be imagining. For two decades I woke in the wee hours breathing in pure, distilled essence of fear. Tell me to imagine? My imagination is a place darker than any horror movie ever made. Now, my wife, herself possessed of a formidable imagination, and I, are getting old and not a day goes by we don’t bring up the topic of death. Death and pain and horror, oh my!
Now, I’m going to finish this joint and drink enough Bourbon to hopefully turn off my imagination. It makes me money, it isn’t my friend.
@Beth: And because other “liberal” white men keep saying we can’t support you, we’ll lose.
deStijl called on us to honor our values on another thread. Sadly, that’s what Republicans and their “tack to the center” henchmen on the left are doing.
@Michael Reynolds:
Ah yes. The one simple solution that would have magically solved all problems. The magic tone and one true message that would have brought harmony, changed minds, and brokered progress.
And here’s MLK in 1963 on those who were telling him to tone it down, back when he was being told to stop his hectoring denigration of the poor, put-upon majority:
King’s daughter Bernice posted this on socials today:
The more things change, the more some things stay the same.
Anyway, those dumb kids are always a convenient scapegoat for elders in every era, and for folks on the left and right both. But they’re not responsible for American voters being unable to resist rightwing propaganda blaming trans woke DEI hire Biden’s age migrant CRT elites for oligarchy- and gerontocracy-created problems in the midst of a global anti-incumbent backlash.
Although, since the days of the Salem Witch Trials, it’s always cathartic for the mob to find one simple scapegoat to pile on for complex, overdetermined issues.
I pushed a Death Cab For Cutie song in another thread earlier, but this seems appropriate. I Will Follow You Into The Dark.
Swingin’ Party by The Repacements.
@de stijl: omg I love Death Cab!
Soul Meets Body
I Will Posses Your Heart
Crooked Teeth
Classics.
Whatever. You all obviously know better than me.
@DK:
I pitched Where Soul Meets Body in the other thread.