I've led a fortunate life, much to be thankful for. I've been to 80 countries. Wherever I went I was thankful I lived in the U.S. where evils like autocracies & theocracies were impossible. Since 2017, we've discovered that's not so. Today's SCOTUS decision underscores that.

Trumpism is no more a thing than Justin Bieberism. It's a fad. 5 years ago there was no Trumpist majority in the GOP. What's enduring is the GOP formula of exploiting the racism/nationalism of rural/suburban Americans to provide political fuel for policies that benefit the rich.

That formula--populism in the service of corporatism--has been with us for ages, was reshaped for the modern age under Reagan and has driven both the widening economic and political divides in America ever since. It will long survive Trump.

Trump weaponized it-fanning the flames of social division so that he could do even morefor a smaller & smaller percentage of the population. The reality was, he has not be very good at it. While he has GOP support, his popularity in polls has lagged all other recent presidents.

At the same time, growing recognition of shifting demographics in the US and the advent of social media have created new opportunities for the most extreme members of the GOP coalition to unite, mobilize and increase their voice.

That isn't just bad for the US. It's a problem for the GOP, particularly in terms of national elections. (The GOP has won the popular vote only once in the past eight presidential elections. While they benefit from electoral college advantages, this is a terrible trend for them.)

This might be a good time for folks to take a deep breath before interpreting election results. We don't know how much of victory was due to Biden's campaign message, Biden's record, Kamala's boost to the ticket, hatred for Trump, Trump errors on the campaign trail...

...the enduring appeal of Trumpism, the effectiveness of GOP campaigns for the Senate or the House, the mistakes made in Dem campaigns for the House, vice versa on both the preceding counts, the role of the GOP disinformation echosystem, COVID, the economy...

...mobilizing progressives, mobilizing centrists, racism, anti-racism, the movement to defund the police, the use of the word socialism, media blunders, voter ignorance, the impeachment process, corruption in DC, campaign finance abuse, the power of the establishment...

...the power of the Murdoch's, the hard right, the evangelicals, the Russians, the young, the old, whites, Latinos, blacks, women, men or any of the other countless factors (divine intervention, etc.) that have been cited in the media, by pols, on social media, in the days since.

For Dems, this is definitely not the time for finger pointing and division. There must be a laser-like focus on winning the run-offs in Georgia. There should be a widespread effort to mobilize the broadest possible support for the agenda of the Biden-Harris administration.

Pretending that voting for Trump or denying climate change or suggesting the solution to every problem is more guns is a legitimate point of view, worthy of respect is not "how America works." It is how it dies.

People in a free society are entitled to any point of view no matter how obviously wrong or outlandish or destructive provided they do not impose their views on others.

But suggesting that something ignorant or divorced from reality warrants the same kind of treatment in public debate as something based in fact or at least credible is absurd and when done on behalf of a society in public media or academic settings it is self-destructive.

We would not grant media coverage or much bandwidth at all to a group that argued that unicorns exist or that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet views like denying climate change or basing policy decisions on sweeping, obvious lies, are just as unsound.

Somewhere, somehow, judgments must be made. Some behaviors are wrong and must be condemned. Someone must challenge lies and demand facts. Coddling people who embrace idiocies does not help them no matter how loudly they demand to be coddled.

@JonathanTurley suggests the founders would not react so quickly against a president who led an insurrection. Washington led an army of 13,000 people against a small group of farmers who wouldn't pay their taxes on whiskey.

One founder actually did lead an insurrection. His name was Aaron Burr. He was arrested and charged with treason. He walked on technical reasons and was already out of office so impeachment was not the right option, but he ended up in exile for years afterward.

(Beautifully, while in exile Burr lived in a house on Craven Street in London.) Turley also says that Trump's incitement to insurrection was protected speech. This is beyond ludicrous and shows a lack of understanding of the law that would get him kicked out of any law school.

As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes laid out in his famous ruling on this matter in Schenck v. United States in 1919 in which he said there was no right to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater...

"The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

Things the GOP did not find "divisive": Launching an insurrection against the US government, seeking to disenfranchise 81 million Americans, seeking to negate the votes of entire states, seeking to negate the votes of African Americans, attacking the Capitol...

...killing Capitol police officers, inciting a riots that claimed five lies, participating in the largest act of domestic terrorism in US history, hunting down Congresspeople in the halls of Congress, supporting and defending white supremacists...

...supporting and defending Neo-Nazis, turning US federal force against peaceful demonstrators across the country, calling Mexicans rapists, discriminating against Muslims, putting children in cages, ending protections for children born innocently in the United States...

...promoting economic policies that help only the rich in America and fostering the worst inequality in our history, seeking to stigmatize those who sought to do the right thing to protect America from a deadly pandemic...

contributing to the spread of a disease that has killed hundreds of thousands--disproportionately people of color & the elderly, seeking policies that deny COVID relief to states with Dem leadership, seeking to help only those close to the GOP leadership with COVID relief...

Let's track some of Donald Trump's solutions to problems: Give Hurricane victims paper towels (to sop it up), rakes to wildfire fighters (make America rake again), teaching kids to look at solar eclipses (they're too smart for that), and asking for global warming in cold winters.

This is the perfect asymptotic approach to the extremes of both Republican and Democratic rhetoric (which are both inevitably devoid of any sound logic) - you eventually get presidents like this. This is a warning call to dissolve the Republican and Democratic parties.

It seems to me our nation is now tossed between two insane extremes, bickering and arguing with each other, embodied in the Republican and Democratic parties. When you get extremist politicians who adhere fully to broken logic and rhetoric, our future is laid waste.

New parties must emerge soon. For fun, I propose a new party : "Uniters" and call the other parties "Dividers" (Republicans and Democrats). We can say that the Uniters believe in uniting people rather than dividing people.

That implies that one 'dominant' world view cannot prevail (including the illusion that we are in fact a set of states United right now) - we have to work and labor hard together to fulfill the promise the founders sought to build this country upon.

In regards to the #CapitolCoup, I’m in a unique position. I monitored forums ahead of time and then was present for the coup itself.

These are my observations based on what I saw and the evidence that’s been collected so far. I reserve the right to adjust my analysis as needed.

Let’s talk about the organization of the coup first. Seeing some people insist that the coup must have been highly planned and coordinated.

Yes and no. This was a #StochasticCoup. We’ll see little evidence of direct communication between Trump and the insurrectionists.

Within the insurrectionists, there was not one group that executed the storming of the Capitol.

Rather, there were a number of smaller groups working independently towards the same goal. I expect you’ll see little evidence that these various groups communicated with each other.

What you will see is detailed planning and coordination within these small groups.

Then there were the joyriders, those Trump supporters who weren’t directly involved in any plotting but who were more than happy to go along for the ride once the coup was in motion.

After four years, the insurrectionists were carefully attuned to Trump’s messaging.

Every tweet and statement of his was treated as marching orders and carefully dissected for meaning.

It’s why shutting down Trump’s Twitter account was so important.

They’re shooting into the chamber.

THREAD: Following multiple defeats in the 2020 election, Georgia Republicans are returning to their voter suppression tactics to hold onto waning power. #HB531, presented by voter suppressor Rep. Barry Fleming, includes several rollbacks on voting rights. ⬇️ 1/ #gapol

#HB531 could:

❌Eliminate Sunday Voting
❌Slash 108 Total Available Hrs of Early Vote
❌Remove 1 of 2 Saturday Vote Options
❌Force Counties To Raise Taxes To Pay For Elections
❌Slash Time Counties Can Mail Ballots
❌Prohibit Early Voting on Holidays

2/ #gapol

Slash Mail Ballot Application Window By 113 Days
Require Photocopy of ID for VBM App If No Driver's License
Set Restrictive Ballot Return Deadline of 11 Days Before Election

3/ #gapol

Allow Counties To Set Arbitrary Time For Ballot Return On New Fri Deadline
Require Counties To Pay For 24/7 In-Person Drop Box Security Official
Limit Drop Boxes To Only In EV Locations Only During Voting

4/ #gapol

Ban Use Of Drop Boxes After Early Vote Has Ended
Reject Every Single Out of Precinct Ballot
Allow Problematic Precinct Splitting That Will Confuse Voters
Ban Mobile Voting Used Primarily At Nursing Homes During Pandemic

5/ #gapol

(THREAD) The main problem with that @DanDrezner piece in the Post is that it's an international politics prof writing about the field in which I'm a professor—communications. No one in communications would *ever* compare the blogosphere to either Twitter or Substack. Here's why.

1/ Back in the mid-aughts, I was a Koufax Award-nominated political blogger (I don't know what Drezner was doing then; I first heard of him about a year ago). So I was into the blogosphere pretty deep, as I also ran a second high-traffic blog that was focused on the art world.

2/ The "blogosphere" was an outgrowth of MySpace and LiveJournal, inasmuch as in the heady early days of the internet people suddenly realized that they could engage in private diaristic writing—a very specific subgenre of writing—in the public square, and it was suddenly "okay."

3/ So the blogosphere as such had *nothing* to do with journalism, which needless to say was in a different state just 15 years ago (note: unlike Drezner, I also teach writing and journalism at the university level, so this thread is squarely "in my area," unlike his Post piece).

4/ The blogosphere was a manifestation of the transformation of the public-private binary at the dawn of the internet—and *also* connected to the "creative writing" explosion (what I did a PhD on); in the aughts, creative writing was the fastest-growing discipline *in the world*.