"To Biden and like-minded Democrats, working with the GOP whenever possible is good policy and good politics, a way for the president to fulfill what pollsters agree was one of his most popular campaign promises. But Biden’s repeated emphasis on his ability to cooperate with Republicans has stirred concerns among some Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans, and nonpartisan democracy advocates, that he is obscuring the threat mounting against democratic institutions as Trump strengthens his hold over the GOP, and extremists such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar solidify their beachhead in it. The overriding fear is that more Republicans appear to be radicalizing by the week and Biden is making the GOP seem normal." -- Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic, on "When Bipartisanship Risks Undermining Democracy."
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"The irony of all the throbbing metastatic insanity among Republicans is that it looks quite likely that they will win the 2022 midterms fair and square. If they nominated someone other than Trump or one of his many clones climbing the Republican ranks, they would likely be odds-on favorites to win in 2024 as well.
"One major reason for this, I submit, is that Democrats have failed to convince their own voters — a substantial majority in the last election — about what Republicans are really up to. The leadership doesn't act like the republic is on the line, or can't bring themselves to believe it. That leaves their base either thinking things are basically fine, or despairing at the thought of fighting back without even their own president on their side." -- Ryan Cooper in The Week, on "Democrats Are in Denial About What They're Up Against."
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"... [H]however much the people may have voted for Biden in the hope for a return to normalcy, there is no normalcy on the horizon and efforts to provide it aren’t going to be politically rewarded. The only hope is to start fighting as hard as the Republicans are fighting. That means using the law (since it still exists for a little while longer) very aggressively. It means the effort to right the ship through reestablishing norms will fail spectacularly.
"I’d say that we should do away with the legislative filibuster and pass voter reforms, and that we should develop an intelligent and politically savvy legislative plan for 2022, and that we should do more and better messaging. But most of that won’t happen and the rest won’t be sufficient. The coup-plotters are in the driver’s seat and if we don’t have a radical and preemptive response, they’ll do next November what they failed to do on January 6.
"And we won’t come back from that." -- Martin Longman in Progress Pond, on "I Must Issue the Direst of Warnings."
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"The Rittenhouse verdict matters because it is a symbolic representation of what the American right wing and its avatar the Republican party have become: A movement of heavily armed religious and quasi-religious fanatics, who wish to purify and thereby restore the traditional greatness of the Real America through the cleansing power of violence.
"There’s a word for that kind of thing, but no prominent Democratic politician can use it accurately, because to use it accurately would imply the need for radical resistance to the Republican party and what it has become. And almost no one in any position of power or influence is ready to advocate for that, because people in positions of power and influence aren’t the kind of people who can look this particular species of reality in the face, because doing so would call into question the very system that has made them so powerful and important and respected.
"But that doesn’t change that reality: it only exacerbates it, through continual and systemic denial." -- Paul Campos at LGM, on "Why the Rittenhouse Verdict Matters."
Particularly with the ramping up of violent speech by Republican officeholders and their frothing base and the on- going coup against American democracy, the response should be to a "radical and preemptive response" to the existential threat these nihilists pose, not downplaying the danger in a fog of "bipartisanship" or denial. It would also help Democrats' sagging poll numbers within their own party if they stayed on offense and showed some self- confidence and passion for defending our democracy!
