A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 648 of 725
Why Zombie Reaganomics Still Rules the G.O.P.
I’ll summarized the essence of the Commitment to America announced by House Republicans last week:
What’s my plan for the next two years? I will be happy, healthy and successful. What will I do to achieve these things? What are you, a Marxist?
https://www.republicanleader.gov/commitment/
This “plan” was obviously meant to evoke Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract With America, which was followed by a Republican takeover of Congress. But the Contract With America offered a fairly specific policy agenda, with a list of planned legislation. What Republicans have just released, by contrast, is mainly a list of good things they claim will happen, with barely a hint of how they propose to make them happen.
If you squint hard at the economics section of the Commitment to America, however, you can see the faint outlines of a familiar set of ideas — zombie Reaganomics. Which raises a question: Why are deregulation, benefit cuts and tax breaks for the rich still the ruling ideology of a party that now claims to stand for the working class?
Before I get there, a couple of notes on what the economics portion of the commitment actually says.
First, it’s striking how many of the economic complaints are about things that are barely, if at all, affected by government policy, like the price of gas (which has come down a lot since its peak) and supply-chain disruptions (which have been diminishing).
Second, immediately after declaring that “we have a plan to fix the economy,” House Republicans say that they will “curb wasteful government spending.” As anyone who follows budget debates knows, that’s the ultimate weasel phrase. What spending are we talking about, specifically?
Bear in mind that the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army: The great bulk of spending is on health care, retirement and the military. You can’t meaningfully cut expenditure without attacking at least one of these. So which parts of that spending are wasteful?
Well, Senator Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has called for sunsetting all federal programs — including Social Security and Medicare — every five years, which would open the door to gutting America’s social safety net. Other Republicans have tried to distance themselves from that idea, although without removing Scott from his position. But again, what is this wasteful spending they propose to cut?
But back to the commitment. Its economic program, such as it is, calls for “pro-growth tax and deregulatory policies.” No specifics, but this is clearly a call for zombie Reaganomics.
Why “zombie”? Because we now have four decades’ worth of experience showing that deregulation and tax cuts for the rich do not, in fact, produce higher wages and faster economic growth. So the idea that tax cuts are the secret of prosperity should be dead, yet somehow it’s still shambling along, eating Republican brains.
Of course, I’m just saying that because I’m a Marxist. (I’m not, but that’s what modern Republicans call anyone who supports progressive taxation and social insurance.) But for what it’s worth, financial markets share my skepticism. Look at what’s happening in Britain, where Prime Minister Liz Truss’s recent announcement of a Reaganite economic plan sent interest rates soaring and the pound plunging.
Which brings me back to my original question: Why is the G.O.P. still committed to a failed economic ideology?
For a long time, the G.O.P. seemed to fit the portrait famously drawn by Thomas Frank in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” That is, it was a party mostly dedicated to making the rich richer that managed to win elections on social issues — which in practice meant catering to bigotry while campaigning, then pivoting to tax and benefit cuts immediately afterward.
With the rise of MAGA, however, catering to bigotry is no longer a marketing device; it’s the party’s main agenda. In that case, however, why continue plutocrat-friendly policies? Why not add
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Republican states keep refusing to expand Medicaid — until you ask their voters
Medicaid expansion is 6-for-6 with voters on ballot initiatives. South Dakota could make it seven in a row.
A 2012 Supreme Court decision made Medicaid expansion optional for states, and a dozen Republican-controlled states still have not accepted the expansion a full decade later, leaving 4 million people without Medicaid coverage who would otherwise be eligible. (5 Republican Justices voted to deny Medicaid expansion.)
In the face of that obstruction from Republican state officials, health care advocates have taken the issue directly to voters in largely Republican states, with remarkable success.
GOP leaders have still tried — unsuccessfully to date — to stop or subvert these ballot initiatives by changing the laws controlling ballot initiatives.
https://www.vox.com/health-care/2022/9/30/23377495/medicaid-expansion-
states-south-dakota-ballot-initiative
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
News Flash! Deaths that were NOT covered by the national news! It seems so unfair that you can be squished by a car and nobody on fireflyfans.net will be aware of your death nor will they blame the Democrats for a dead Republican:
How disingenuous.
If there were a MAGA bumper sticker on that car and the tables were turned, Ted would have made a thread about it that day and it would still be getting posts from you losers here every single day.
They buried this almost as quick as they buried the Christmas massacre in Wisconsin.
And you fuckin' idiots still can't stop talking about the "deadly" "coup" almost 2 years ago, even though the only people who died were Trump supporters, and the FBI plant that egged them all on didn't get any prison time while the corrupt DOJ was throwing everyone else in jail.
The media is completely one sided, and you know that it is.
And the media is dying.
Add Trevor Noah to the LONG list of Leftist media that is being fired post Trump.
Nobody watches them anymore.
--------------------------------------------------
Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Three traits all Trumptards have: fear death, whine about how mean Democrats are to them and follow the leader. 6ix, you showed all traits in a few sentences. That Trumptard psychology is the reason Trumptards struggle to remain in the middle class. Trumptards were born to be followers, whiners, and fearful. Not a pathway to success, 6ix, but you got to be you.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
News Flash! Deaths that were NOT covered by the national news! It seems so unfair that you can be squished by a car and nobody on fireflyfans.net will be aware of your death nor will they blame the Democrats for a dead Republican:
How disingenuous.
If there were a MAGA bumper sticker on that car and the tables were turned, Ted would have made a thread about it that day and it would still be getting posts from you losers here every single day.
They buried this almost as quick as they buried the Christmas massacre in Wisconsin.
And you fuckin' idiots still can't stop talking about the "deadly" "coup" almost 2 years ago, even though the only people who died were Trump supporters, and the FBI plant that egged them all on didn't get any prison time while the corrupt DOJ was throwing everyone else in jail.
The media is completely one sided, and you know that it is.
And the media is dying.
Add Trevor Noah to the LONG list of Leftist media that is being fired post Trump.
Nobody watches them anymore.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Three traits all Trumptards have: fear death, whine about how mean Democrats are to them and follow the leader. 6ix, you showed all traits in a few sentences.
I don't fear death. I can be a lot more mean than you or any Democrat can be. I don't respect any authority other than my own autonomy, and certainly don't follow anybody.
Speaking of follow the leader, how many hours would you say you wore a face mask in the last two years, Mudblood?
Get that fifth booster yet, didja?
You should be the one afraid of dying right now. Don't put any undue stress on that little heart of yours, mkay?
--------------------------------------------------
Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Sackett v. EPA seeks to hobble federal protection of wetlands under the Clean Water Act.
When Brian Fletcher got up to defend the EPA’s position, the conservative justices jumped down his throat. Justice Neil Gorsuch — whose mother tried to dismantle EPA while leading it in the 1980s — performed outrage over the plight of homeowners persecuted by government bureaucrats. How, he asked, does “any reasonable person know” if wetlands on their property are “adjacent to” protected waters? Would 3,000 feet be close enough? How about three miles? Fletcher tried to explain that the EPA has to study the actual ecosystem to decide if wetlands affect nearby waters, but Gorsuch wasn’t deterred: “If the federal government doesn’t know,” he pressed, “how is a person subject to criminal time in federal prison supposed to know?”
This line of questioning is classic Gorsuch: shallowly persuasive and easily refuted. Jackson then asked Fletcher: “Is there a process by which a homeowner can ask?” Which, of course, there is: Homeowners can request a free determination from the Army Corps of Engineers. “And so,” Jackson continued, “you’re not really facing criminal liability without the opportunity to get an assessment from the government regarding your particular circumstances.” You could almost hear the air going out of Gorsuch’s balloon.
Throughout Wednesday’s arguments, the usual battle lines revealed themselves: The three liberal justices were concerned about the environment; the six conservatives were worried about landowners. The three liberals sought to enforce the text of the statute that Congress wrote; the six conservatives suggested that vague concerns about federalism gave them a license to rewrite the law to their liking.
When Sackett v. EPA comes down next spring, the Supreme Court will dismember the Clean Water Act by a 6–3 vote.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/ketanji-brown-jackson-supr
eme-court-debut-arguments.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
LOL @ Slate.
--------------------------------------------------
Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
A GOP insider on the Republicans who knew Trump was dangerous — and went MAGA anyway
A conversation with ex-GOP operative Tim Miller about how Trumpism swallowed the Republican Party whole.
Sean Illing - Of all the characters in the book, all the operator types, some of them you know personally, some of them you don’t — which of them sticks out to you the most in terms of just like abject nihilism or cynicism?
Tim Miller - It’s Elise for me. Elise Stefanik.
Sean Illing - Can you say who she is?
Tim Miller - Yeah, sure.
So just going all the way back, I worked with her on the Republican “autopsy.” People might remember, after Mitt Romney lost, we put together this document that basically had a bunch of blocking and tackling recommendations for how the party can catch up to Obama’s data nerds, but also said that we should soften our rhetoric around immigration and other issues.
Elise was the editor of that document. And I was the spokesperson at the time. So I was working with her very closely.
So Elise then runs for Congress as a very moderate Republican — climate change is a problem, gay marriage, immigration reform. You know, as moderate of a Republican as you have in Congress when she wins in 2014. 2016, she runs for reelection with Trump on the ballot, won’t say his name. Literally can’t even spit out his name.
In 2018, something happens. Trump comes to campaign in her district, huge crowd. She gets this huge applause on the stage. She starts to reassess her power trajectory. Paul Ryan, who was kind of her mentor, retires. So her little path up through the normal establishment ranks in Congress started to seem not as likely.
And she flips on a dime. And in the first impeachment becomes Trump’s most rabid defender with the most absurd defenses. She was like a foreign policy neocon Republican who would’ve been very much “arm the Ukrainians against the Russians,” flips on it, sides with Trump against Zelenskyy. And is now literally indistinguishable from a MAGA troll.
And there was no policy anything about this. I interviewed tons of mutual friends. She wouldn’t talk to me. She emailed me saying that she sees my tweets and is not interested in participating in the book. And didn’t reply to any other of my entreaties.
So to me, she is the worst because it’s just the most brazen. It also is the worst at some level because it’s paying off for her. I truly think she’ll be on a VP shortlist for Trump, ’cause he’ll want a woman if he runs in 2024. And if not that, I think she’s on a speaker of the house trajectory.
https://www.vox.com/2022/10/4/23386159/tim-miller-trump-maga-republica
ns-stefanik
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Did American Business Leaders Really Try to Overthrow the President, Like in Amsterdam?
How David O. Russell’s movie messes around with the story of the Business Plot.
. . .
Which brings me to the real point: The thesis underlying Amsterdam is that some sinister outside influence — German Nazis, “un-American” industrialists — is needed for fascism to take root on American soil. What Butler knew first-hand was how good Americans were at destroying democracy, without anyone’s help, because he had done that himself, all over the world. Those ribbons on his uniform represented the decades of repression he and his fellow Marines had visited on places like the Philippines, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Those two Medals of Honor were earned crushing resistance to an illegal and avaricious U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915, and killing women and children who tried to stop the Marines from coming ashore in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. It is the habit of such imperial violence, as writers like Aimé-Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Hannah Arendt have written, that makes fascism thinkable, and even seem preferable, to those with a certain kind of mind.
Russell implies that the sterilization clinic that Washington and Robbie stumble upon is part of a Nazi plot. To do that he blows past (save for an earlier, out-of-place, and hard-to-follow aside about Washington’s character’s childhood in Texas) the extensive history of forced sterilization — not only in the Jim Crow South but across the United States and its colonies, especially Puerto Rico. The movie notes (again, without naming names) the support of U.S. industrialists for Hitler, but doesn’t note the degree to which U.S. race policy directly inspired the Nuremberg Laws. It deals with American racism, and to a lesser extent WASP antisemitism, but never seems to ask itself how the structures that it fosters might do more than a couple of glass-clinking plutocrats to bring representative democracy to its knees.
Amsterdam’s ultimate resolution is somewhat like what really happened: Butler was mocked for his allegations, especially by the corporate press — though, contrary to the movie, the publishers of the New York Times and other major newspapers were not part of the conspiracy itself. (Class interest alone enough to bring them in on the side of the accused.) The specifics are wrong, though: Butler’s court-martial for insulting Benito Mussolini happened three years before his Business Plot testimony. What really cast Butler into the mists of American historical memory was not his testimony about the conspiracy, but our forgetting of the wars in which he fought, and the strong antiwar and anti-imperialist stance he took in the years leading up to World War II — years in which he wrote the pamphlet War is a Racket, and denounced himself as having been “a racketeer for capitalism.”
More at https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/amsterdam-movie-true-story-real-hist
ory-business-plot.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How to direct America toward fascism
Jonathan Chait writes:
In mid-September, I attended the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, where Republican politicians, right-wing thought leaders, and various party apparatchiks had gathered to articulate their vision of the conservative movement’s future. The National Conservatives are only one faction vying to define the Republican agenda, but in a short period of time, they have sharpened their focus and expanded their influence, and the conference gave them a forum to display the dominant position their ideas have achieved on the right. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and one of the conference’s speakers, recognized their triumph when he announced from the stage, “I come not to invite National Conservatives to join our conservative movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.”
What exactly this movement entails has been the subject of a long-running debate largely obscured by the figure of Donald Trump. When Joe Biden warned in August of the rise of “semi-fascist” ideas on the right, even many Trump critics suggested that the president had gotten carried away. CNN’s John Avlon said this rhetoric was “not befitting” a president. Larry Hogan, among the most staunchly anti-Trump Republicans left in the GOP, scolded Biden for his “divisive rhetoric.” The implication was that it was a miscategorization of Trump and a smear of his followers to suggest that his anti-democratic behavior in any way resembled an ideology, let alone the fascist regimes of the 20th century. And it is true that Trump gravitates toward power instinctively; as president, he dispensed with democratic norms in large part because he did not understand them. Trump’s authoritarianism is sub-ideological.
But that does not mean his style of governance defies theorization or a philosophical rubric. The chaos of the Trump presidency has given way to a period of rethinking on the right, the result of which is a political and intellectual infrastructure determined to carry out his despotic impulses in a more systemized and, its supporters hope, victorious fashion. They may not call it fascism or semi-fascism, but this is only because the word has become a universally recognized slur since World War II. To most Americans, fascist simply means “bad,” and nobody self-identifies as “bad.” People imagine democracy and fascism as a simple binary, leaving them unable to acknowledge political systems that reside in the vast space between the two. But this middle ground between Reagan and Mussolini is where the Republican Party’s most influential ideologists and power brokers are consciously heading.
Semi-fascism contains many features of democracy, like contested elections and permissible criticism of the ruling party, but without the liberal guardrails that maintain democracy’s openness and stability, such as a judiciary, bureaucracy, and news media that are empowered and motivated to check abuses of power. Thus semi-fascism has a nasty tendency to slide into something more like the outright version, in which effective public opposition to the ruling party becomes impossible. Two decades ago, Vladimir Putin’s Russia looked very much like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary does today, and some observers still considered it a democracy, albeit one with challenges and limits. Today, Putin has seized so much power that even though voters have regular opportunities to defy him at the ballot box, it’s unlikely they ever will.
The Republican Party’s ascendant semi-fascist wing wishes to take several steps down this road. I watched the conference’s attendees practically declare they would do so. Their methods and goals are ones that if embraced by their opponents would unquestionably (and correctly) be described as authoritarian or worse. Nobody expressed any fear that a right-wing state dedicated to endless political warfare might violate anybody’s rights. The only rights they respected were those of red America. The only risk that co
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME