Just trying to figure out what the path forward is.
From posts made by those on the left, such as
@Padawanbater2 and
@schuylaar, we can see that nothing they have to contribute in the is of value in the short term. Mostly, they want revenge. Fuck that. Those losers would have bungled the opportunity and delivered this country back to Trump if they had their way. To them, suggest that they learn how to win in districts that are not safely Democratic. The country is moving in their direction but they talk as if it's already there.
The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority.
A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together?
www.theatlantic.com
The Republican Party has treated Trump’s tenure more as an interregnum than a revival, a brief respite that can be used to slow its decline. Instead of simply contesting elections, the GOP has redoubled its efforts to narrow the electorate and raise the odds that it can win legislative majorities with a minority of votes. In the first five years after conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 39 percent of the counties that the law had previously restrained reduced their number of polling places. And while gerrymandering is a bipartisan sin, over the past decade Republicans have indulged in it more heavily. In Wisconsin last year, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes cast in state legislative races, but just 36 percent of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans tried to impeach the state Supreme Court justices who had struck down a GOP attempt to gerrymander congressional districts in that state. The Trump White House has tried to suppress counts of immigrants for the 2020 census, to reduce their voting power. All political parties maneuver for advantage, but only a party that has concluded it cannot win the votes of large swaths of the public will seek to deter them from casting those votes at all.
When Trump’s presidency comes to its end, the Republican Party will confront the same choice it faced before his rise, only even more urgently. In 2013, the party’s leaders saw the path that lay before them clearly, and urged Republicans to reach out to voters of diverse backgrounds whose own values matched the “ideals, philosophy and principles” of the GOP. Trumpism deprioritizes conservative ideas and principles in favor of ethno-nationalism.
The conservative strands of America’s political heritage—a bias in favor of continuity, a love for traditions and institutions, a healthy skepticism of sharp departures—provide the nation with a requisite ballast.
I see the glimmerings of an answer in this article. It covers a lot of ground, including examples in US history where once dominant factions reshaped themselves after political defeats. It warns that our Civil War was a result of inability of the Old South to do so. The last sentence that I posted from the article makes me think that there is a path forward for conservatives in this country to take back their party from Trumpism. US conservatism in the past held our elections system in high esteem but not Trumpism. The GOP could rebuild itself by discarding the most vile aspects of it -- ethno-nationalism. Witness the growing number of Hispanic voters and even some Black voters that crossed over to the GOP in this election. Diversity could save that party. Barring that, there might be other ways to peacefully negotiate the turbulence of change that is to come over the next ten years. I don't know what that is.
