If they were feeding security info, I suspect it was via back channels, not in meetings with Congressmembers present. But that's only the most likely; no explanation is too stupid to be viable.

there was also the buttonholing of Reps/Sens to block slates of electors from certain states, and calling legislators and other officials in those states to prepare them to "decide to approve alternate slates of electors". After all, executing the Dem Reps/Sens is only useful, if you can then get Trumpist electors approved.

Gotta preserve the forms of democracy, natch!

I think they were focused on somehow keeping the certification from happening. I think it was scattershot and they of course hoped Pence would cooperate. There were reports on the day that people in the WH claimed the rioters were going to stay all night*. Never really seen that followed up on specifically but I'm guessing communications were happening via the Willard House group (other than those directly to Reps and Senators).

I think no one--certainly including Trump--really knew how far the various players (including his plants at places like DoD) would go in the moment. But I think Trump realized chaos was his friend. I

Many more thoughts on this. In the meantime our thread from 1/12 is worth a skim.

*In particular a tweet from Jim Acosta. (In the past few days since the Costa/Woodward book came out with much of the detail I incorrectly recalled that it was Costa and he sat on it for the book, but no, it was Acosta not the Costa.)

I am really annoyed I id not send in a guest post that AM (because it would have helped, of course ...).

Trump skipping New year's Eve at Mar-a-Lago to come to DC was really one of the most ominous forebodings of my life.

Did Trump ever plan to actually go with the crowd to the Capitol as he indicated in his speec?/ I think not. He always knew he was going to have a bad bone spur day.

He knew he'd have to betray the rioters regardless.

I have not moved off my conviction that the Q Shaman accidentally saved democracy.

It's easier to believe that than that Pence did.

Is there time to put Danny Quayle up on Mt Rushmore before AOC knocks it down?

3 I was just looking at my posts in that old thread, which hold up decently, I think. Especially the quote about how Trump is always winging it, and was waiting to see what would happen.

7: I think I still believe that the Q Shaman was unhelpful to the Trumpist cause, but I also think it's pretty clear that US democracy is in an irreversible slide, and the bottom is not yet in sight.

I'm hoping at least we can see the tattoo on democracy's iliac crest.

How come when I look up photos of the Q Shaman Ramalama ding-dong, he seems to be baying at the moon in half of them?

I hope Abigail Adams from that thread is doing okay.

11 I agree with this. I'm not sure what happens when we have the death of Trump. Something like the Sunni/Shia split? A gang of four led by Melania?

My guess is the Florida fuck takes over after a brief struggle and does better than Trump because he's not an unconstrained id.

11: Eh, I generally tend to be pretty pessimistic, but I think "irreversible" is putting it too strongly at this point. An off-the-cuff optimistic path forward:

1. As slowly as the legal proceedings against the people involved with the Jan. 6 attempted coup are going, they're still going, and seem to be working their way up to bigger fish.

2. Trump is 75 (younger than Biden, true, but Biden has a vice-president) and about 240 lbs. He'll be lucky to not need a walker by 2024. I'm not optimistic about him (a) dying (b) debilitated (c) soon (d) in jail, but at least some parts of that seems likely. He won't anoint a successor before it's too late because he can't imagine a world without him in it. His personal and political heirs will be too busy fighting among themselves and fleecing the rubes for another serious coup attempt for the next few years.

3. The Democrats do well in 2022 elections.

3a. In the Senate, Democrats are defending 14 seats, of which none are retiring except maybe Leahy and Vermont feels safe. Republicans are defending 20, of which at least five are retiring. I can't forecast the Democrats getting to 60 votes, or Manchin's, McConnell's, or Sinema's heart growing three sizes, but getting to the point where those three individuals don't matter so much seems likely.

3b. Keeping the House is less likely than that, especially since the 2020 redistricting, but there are a number of paths to it, from general covid and economic recovery to the Republican brand being tarnished by recent events.

4. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are unusually unpopular. Turns out that confusing Paul Revere with the horseman of pestilence is helpful in the Republican primary, but maybe not elsewhere. If Texas goes blue, it's historic. People were talking up the chance of it in the past two presidential elections and nothing came of it, but that was before covid. If Florida does, it's not as amazing but it's still good news.

I agree that it's genuinely hard to predict what happens to the Republican party when Trump dies. But the basics of the irreversible decline of American democracy is as much about our broken constitution, gerrymandering, the senate, and the supreme court as they are about Trump. I'm pretty pessimistic. Presidential systems always turn into dictatorships, the US has gotten really lucky to avoid this so far, and the luck could run out at any moment. The default assumption should be that a poorly designed 300 year old presidential system is not long for this world, unless there's a really good reason to expect it to survive.

14: Seconded.

17.2: I was reminded that Henry Kissinger is still alive (and still terrible) at 98, so I'm not counting on Trump exiting the picture anytime soon. I realize you're offering the optimistic scenario.

18:
Presidential systems always turn into dictatorships,

There are many counterexamples. The US is older than them, but then again it's older than lots of governments of other forms too.

But the basics of the irreversible decline of American democracy is as much about our broken constitution, gerrymandering, the senate, and the supreme court as they are about Trump.

The Supreme Court can be packed - hasn't happened yet but there's no reason it's impossible. The Constitution can be amended. Gerrymandering can be reset every 10 years. The Senate is the only thing I can't come up with a cause for optimism for.

20 was me. Stupid phone.

Move an entire federal department to West Virginia for a start.

The Senate is the only thing I can't come up with a cause for optimism for.

More states. DC and Puerto Rico to start, then start carving up the existing ones.

I'm not sure that I buy it, but the optimistic case is that the internet is hitting the contemporary U.S. the way cheap gin hit England in the early 1700s and we're right
here.

I might live to see us get back to no worse than we were in October 2016, but only if Lipitor really does work.

24 is an amazing comment; bravo.

(Depressing Trump piece du jour. This is David Frum in the Atlantic, and I would just love to completely discount it because he sucks; on the other hand I hadn't actually seen Trump's credo of disproportionate revenge cited anywhere before.)

Yes. We're still in the middle of the coup.

How to win Georgia: Have your followers threaten anyone counting the votes who says you didn't.

The constitution is pretty damn broken, and de facto un-amendable. I think if there's hope, it lies in the possibility that the younger generations are progressive enough that conservative rule through undemocratic means becomes unsustainable. Perhaps we have to go through a period of right-wing dictatorship in order to get to a better constitution afterwards.

Another endorsement of 24. Moby gets the problem and the hope, but the hope is slim. A really rich country with a spectacular military can stay drunk for a loooong time.

As bleak as Moby's assessment seems to be, he makes the optimistic case more persuasively than does Cyrus. It really is possible that enough people will sober up.

Cyrus, on the other hand, offers this:

The Supreme Court can be packed - hasn't happened yet but there's no reason it's impossible. The Constitution can be amended. Gerrymandering can be reset every 10 years. The Senate is the only thing I can't come up with a cause for optimism for.

Once you concede the Senate, you're not going to get a packed Supreme Court, an amended Constitution or (as teo proposes) a new state. State legislatures, where the gerrymandering takes place, are also a huge structural problem, and there's no particular reason to suppose that viable democracy survives until the next redistricting.

And even if the Senate stays Democratic next year, huge hurdles remain to accomplishing any kind of important structural changes.

Trumpism isn't about Trump; it's about the people who voted for him (and, to a much lesser extent, about people who voted for Jill Stein equivalents). Cyrus rightly supposes that Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are unlikely to be president, but that is because they are among the softest, most reality-oriented authoritarians on offer. All of the likely Republicans alternatives are worse. It's reasonable to suppose that Donald Trump could be dead or debilitated in 2024, but that just opens the door for Don Jr. or Tucker Carlson. Now that it's understood that any shameless racist fool can be president, there will be plenty of them experimenting to find the right approach.

If I had to bet today, I'd bet on Joe Biden's re-election. If it happens, that won't be enough.

It really is possible that enough people will sober up.

I'm hoping more that watching the destruction will scare others away. I don't think appreciable numbers are going to sober up but their kids might never start.

Perhaps we have to go through a period of right-wing dictatorship in order to get to a better constitution afterwards.

Yeah, that always works out so well.

23. Samoa? If you can assimilate one Pacific island colony, why not two?

33: First take Samoa, then take Evenmoa.

Trumpism isn't about Trump; it's about the people who voted for him

This is the central truth of the situation we find ourselves in, and I am pessimistic about getting out of the spiral until those voters have to pay a tangible personal and social cost for signing on to fascism.

That's the genius of the Herman Cain Awards, but sometimes I worry that it is too optimistic.

A chunk of my extended family knows they are no longer welcome in my house or around my kids. And honestly, my life has improved since putting up that fence.

I don't actuality know what the Republicans in the family think about covid or q or Trump. They never mention stuff like that around me. I don't know if that will last now that mom is dead.

I don't really see any of my relatives except my siblings, their families, two uncles, and like five cousins.

I am still Facebook friends with the sister of someone who took a plea deal for his role in the riots, but she's not mentioned him since he went big for Trump.

23: How do we get California split in 2? I genuinely think it would be in *their* interest to have more representation and am not sure why that has not happened.

The plan I saw was split CA in five, which would result in one red and four blue states. TX counters that they're allowed to split too but I think that would also help generate more blue states unless they gerrymander state borders like they do congressional districts which would be really weird. Different governor, tax rates, laws if you drive down the block!

I feel like Texas has such a strong cultural identity that they wouldn't want to be split up. But it doesn't have to be Texas, or California for that matter. There's nothing stopping Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware or Alabama from being split into multiple states in order to game the electoral college and Senate.

Any modifications of states still has to go through Congress.

Yes. I don't understand how this is supposed to be part of the solution when it's going to be harder to accomplish than the things that it is supposed to help accomplish.

I wouldn't say it's harder, necessarily. (Equally hard, yes.) It does require current control of Congress, but that's not impossible. We have it right now. The problem is that the Democrats' structural disadvantage in the Senate is bad enough now but likely to continue getting worse over time, since there isn't any sort of automatic rebalancing procedure like redistricting to adjust to changing demographics. It has to be done manually and adding new states is the way to do it without amending the Constitution.

38: I don't actuality know what the Republicans in the family think about covid or q or Trump. They never mention stuff like that around me.

Same for the Republicans I know. I believe most were somewhat squicked out by Trump, but I'm guessing most voted for him at least the first time (or even if not, certainly did not for HRC).
I believe almost all of them would vote Youngkin if they were in Virginia. They do tend to bring up the most random Foxianshit about other stuff.

This is a decent interview with Hunter Walker who wrote the story in Rolling Stone* mostly based on several rally organizers who are cooperating with the select committee. He does a good job of clarifying what he knows versus what he thinks. He was there at the Capitol and really feels that there has been a pretty significant underreaction to what happened all things considered.

46: It isn't just Congress that must act. The states themselves have to make this decision. There are a lot of hurdles to convincing Californians -- and especially California politicians -- of the merits of something as unusual and fundamental as dividing the state.

48*: I think he recently started writing for them I think. Must be thrilled with how far around the bend Matt Taibbi has gone on this (and other) stuff.

I listened to a very long interview with Costa and Woodward about their book Peril that they had touted as what they thought was one of their best interviews. Only after I clicked on it did I realize it was with Andrew Sullivan. Listened anyway and the first 80% was pretty good and informative. Sullivan being a reasonable interviewer and learned quite a bit (taking into account how Woodward in particular goes out of his way to make his sources look good). But at the end racist Sullivan came to the fore when he lamented the crazy Dems blowing everything by having an "equity" agenda and wanting immigration. It was "only liberals have agency" in spades--drop your support for equality and immigration or we will be forced to kill democracy and support things like the coup attempt.

Infuriating, but he it is also evident to me that many, many people are just as warped as he is and reacting similarly (in lots of different way--left wing cancel culture overreporting and believing is just one). A quandy.

Andrew Sullivan's residence in the U.S. is a good argument against immigration.

I think he specifically said at one point "the wrong kind if immigrants." Something like that.

He's clearly not taking a job that Americans are unwilling to do.

43: Vermont is small enough that breaking it up would take away anything like economies of scale to State government.

Plus a Northern California and Southern California seem to have distinct identities.

51: It's not the most annoying thing about the right since they upped the ante to include a fucking coup, but the idea that everyone right of center would just stop if the left just didn't make them so mad (why do you make me do this to you?) angers me. Sorry had to support a fascist because some where in New York a liberal enjoyed a donut with rainbow sprinkles....

And we can't even call them Jimmies any more.

55: Could they restore economies of scale by sharing various administrative functions? E.g., have one department of motor vehicles issuing drivers licenses for North, South, East, and West Vermont?

I suppose this would get harder to do if the new states' laws diverged. Like, you couldn't have one department collecting taxes if each state had different tax laws.

Potential solution: just have one (unicameral) legislature for all four states, to make sure the laws don't diverge in any way that would be inconvenient to administer.

Just be really blatant about it: Yes, we are splitting into four states in order to have more senators and for no other reason. We are doing this because this part of the US Constitution is stupid and this is our way of working around it.

Yeah, I know Congress might not want to go along with it. I just feel like our absurd constitution calls for equally absurd workarounds.

Massachusetts declines to be split again. It has already been split as a part of a solution that was not one at all.

Interstate compact where everything is as before but it's four separate states each with two senators and one representative.

51: The recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast (with Ross Douthat interviewing) is wild. Mostly an interesting conversation between two people I disagree with, and occasional WTF moments: link

[The prior episode with Douthat talking about chronic illness was solidly good. ]

Ross Douthat interviewing Sohrab Ahmari above.

I'm not sure my nerves would ever recover from listening to Douthat and Ahmari chat for an hour. I did listen to the Meghan O'Rourke interview while sewing a kid Halloween costume yesterday; at the end she recommends the diary of W.N.P. Barbellion, which happily is online.

No, I wouldn't recommend it as good for one's blood pressure. Douthat seems conscious of trying to frame the conversation for an NYT audience, and Ahmari just seems contentious. I did find it oddly interesting.

I'm sure! I would also like to make it clear that I rarely listen to podcasts, infrequently read NYT op-eds, and yet was overcome with some fit of perversity and need for entertainment during the annual sewing spree. Because I know it's easy for all you lurkers to formulate the thought "I just went to see what was up with Unfogged and people are, like, listening to New York Times podcasts and talking about Ross Douthat and WTF" and to be clear, my response to that is: WTF, indeed. WTF.

I still haven't figured out how to play a podcast. My only ipod is the old kind with the wheel.

I think first you have to put the fake cassette tape with the spiral cord in the car cassette player and then plug the jack into the wheely ipod, and then Sohrab Ahmari will haunt your car until the transmission fails. Might deter theft.

I just threw away that thing. Don't tell my wife. She wanted to keep it.

56: If they don't come out of the process as Lo-Cal and No-Cal, I don't want to play.

What is to stop Republicans playing the same game: you'll end up with North Dakota, South Dakota, East Dakota, West Dakota, NE Dakota ... until finally you get to somewhere like SSE Dakota which turns out to have no inhabitants at all.

SSE Dakota would basically be a suburb of Sioux City, Iowa.

71: My only real hope with that is that the game gets ridiculous enough that both sides eventually agree to just abolish the Senate.

71: My only real hope with that is that the game gets ridiculous enough that both sides eventually agree to just abolish the Senate.

I think it's weird to focus on this like a fix for the bigger problems when holding the House is going to be difficult.

OK NNW Dakota, veering northerly, visibility good

The fundamental problem is that in the long run the Democrats are going to lose approximately 50% of the time. If the consequence of a couple of terms of such losses is a right-wing dictatorship, eventually we will have a right-wing dictatorship.

75, 77: My general view is that there are no long-term fixes for the bigger problems absent a supermajority of the people being committed to actual democracy and unwilling to accept undemocratic rule. I don't think this country has ever yet had that type of supermajority.

In theory we could fix the bigger problem of climate change without first establishing democracy, but since it happens that the antidemocratic and pro-climate-change forces are on the same side, we can't do one without the other.

The supermajority to fix climate change is smaller than the supermajority required to redraw states. Probably.

Anyway, I think the focus should be on flipping a couple of the current states.

It's even worse than 77. The house and the presidency will be controlled by each party around half the time, but we're genuinely headed into a regime where the Senate (and hence the Supreme Court) is never in Democratic hands. So not only will the Republicans have frequent opportunities to stage a coup, there's nothing the Democrats can do about it in the periods in between. Same for state legislatures in key states, which also don't switch anymore.

"we're genuinely headed into a regime where the Senate (and hence the Supreme Court) is never in Democratic hands"

This seems highly unlikely. It is 50:50 now, and you reckon the Republicans will never ever lose any of the seats they now hold?

The state legislators are the problem.

I don't think we need to concede Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. Or NC, if we can get a candidate who can keep his pants on, which has proven a problem in the past.

Pennsylvania is a natural aphrodisiac.

Currently the Democrats have four seats in AZ and GA plus one in MT and one in WV. Manchin is the last Democrat who stands a chance in WV, and MT is getting really unlikely. You have to win the election by 6-8 percentage points in order to get the Senate, and it's only going to get worse as rural states empty out further. Yes we can pick up seats in PA, WI, NC, FL, or ME but we're going to lose the WV, MT and OH seats sooner rather than later, and we're very very lucky to have four senators in GA and AZ. It's really really hard to win elections by 8 points with any regularity.

I think the way to go is to turn the Senate into a ceremonial body, like the House of Lords but with less power.

But I guess that would take a constitutional amendment, eh?

Adding new states is definitely not a substitute for winning in the existing ones, which is absolutely crucial for doing anything at all. And it definitely is possible in the short term.

Another long-term strategy is for liberals to move to small red states, of course. But that's a tough sell.

I think this overestimates the predictability of elections. Not long ago there were Republican senators in Vermont. The political landscape can evolve - in either direction.

That's true, but the changes of recent decades have resulted in an alignment of the structural features of the system with the political fortunes of the two parties in a way that's historically unusual and very bad for Democrats for as long as it continues. It certainly could shift, but there's no sign yet that it's going to any time soon, and the damage in the meantime is likely to be immense.

I agree with 92. Also want to distinguish two points: 1) Yes political trends are difficult to predict more than 20 years out and 2) Although the anti-Democratic bias of the senate may reverse, the anti-democratic bias is only getting worse. A tiny fraction of the country will have huge representation in the senate unless something truly dramatic changes. You just have to be able to somehow redraw lines when population shifts.

I kind of doubt things are going to shift in favor of the Democrats, but who knows what will come out of the crop of young people raised during this shit?

I'm going to go back to my optimistic case of people sobering up. I don't think the sobering up, if it happens, is going to mostly be "hey, we've been voting for awful people." I think it is more likely that the people who see the main interest of the United States as maintaining military and economic power starting to get more assertive in pointing out that you can't do either very well with white nationalists making the rules, especially when most of their backers are ready to trust rumor over science. If you do believe we are or should be in a new cold war with China, a national policy of being shitty to working class to the point where many of them are not healthy enough to serve in the military and even more of them aren't getting a sufficient secondary education to do it well is very stupid.

But that's a tough sell.

I know I ain't going back. I spent around 17 years in the South, and there are a lot of fine people there, but Lord I am glad to be out.

94.1: Children are the future! Will enough Republicans die in the next decade? Stay tuned ...

No, not enough.

This is a nice graph though.

I spent around 17 years in the South, and there are a lot of fine people there, but Lord I am glad to be out.

I feel the same way about the US. I spent about 18 years in the States, and there are a lot of seriously awesome people there (many of them so much more interesting than my boring old Canuck compatriots), but holy Mother of God, am I ever glad to be out of there.

Yes. I see from the Economist that San Francisco has 50% more users of injectable drugs than it has registered high school students. And I grew up believing that it was both the future and some kind of earthly paradise.

Presumably the high school students figure is dragged down by the fact that no one except the very poor and the very rich can afford to live there now. Everyone else is across the bay somewhere.

San Francisco is very unusual among American cities in a lot of ways, but one of the most significant is that it has avoided aggressive annexation of surrounding areas so much that it is now much smaller than most of the rest of the famous big cities. By most measures it's not even the largest city in its own municipal area anymore.

The City of London hasn't been the biggest city in London for a very long time indeed.

I wonder if Ely, also a city, is bigger than the City of London by population. I knew the rector of one of the most beautiful City churches, often full, who said that technically he only had two parishioners. One was the governor of the Bank of England, and I forget the other one. No one else was registered as living there.

Teo, where would it have expanded, if it had? Down the peninsula?

101: Boston annexed some areas. The town of Brookline declined to join. As a New Englander, I find the Canadian practice of amalgamating cities foreign and kind of horrifying. The actual city of Toronto is vast sprawl. But I'm used to being able to participate in democracy in my town in a meaningful way.

There was a thing where Omaha wanted to take over a small city, but the law made it harder for Omaha to take over a bigger small city, so the small city tried to take over a smaller city before it could be taken over by Omaha.

105: One of the big problems with non-expandable cities is that people can benefit from living in the orbit of a city without paying for the upkeep of the city.

That's the Pittsburgh problem. The parking tax really helps.

Also, the new trend of young professionals wanting to live in the city.

I don't think it's a coincidence that cities mostly stopped annexing the white-flight suburbs during and after the civil rights era. This scholar found that over the century intercity segregation became more prominent than intra-. It's easier to keep a city white than a neighborhood.

(Or more specifically, it became easier to keep a city white after the end of racial covenants and the Fair Housing Act.)

San Francisco has been a combined City and county since the mid-1850s (only one in California) which locked it in very early. Apparently they were combined as part of an anti-corruption measure but to pass had to accept the newly formed San Mateo County being carved out and leaving it a relatively small area.

Annexation laws are quite variable state by state but generally easier for cities to incorporate new areas in the west. In much of the eastern US, the only real bigger city expansion in the last 50 years or so has been by various forms of city-county merger (Miami-Dade, Jacksonville, Nashville).

Back on topic. I don't think that Trump's health is going to be an issue in the the near to medium term. Fucker does seem to have vitality.

Sadly.

I was just talking about the city-county thing with Sally. Are there other American multi-county cities, or is it just NYC?

Fucker does seem to have vitality.

It baffles me.

You can totally buy vitality if you're rich. It's not a mystery.

And if you go out to Colorado and other parts of the west, there is unincorporated County areas. Our counties in New England run the courts and jails but not much else.

My uncle was the town manager of a small town in Colorado called Georgetown which is a territorial charter municipality, unique in Colorado. Everybody said that it was appropriate to have a New Englander in charge, given that that muni opal organization was more like the New England towns.

114 Yeah. But he's not immortal, and I think folks are discounting how much of Trumpism really is just about Trump. There will always be rich people who want tax cuts, white supremacists, single-issue pro-life voters, gotta own the libs, but what made Trump is wrapping that up in a 'successful' business man, married to a model (with decades of tabloid coverage), with the comic timing of a 50's Catskills performer. The question, then, on the survival of democracy, is whether Republican legislators can set up a system so biased that even non-Trump Trumpists can win. I have real doubts about this.

What happens on our side is a big part of it too. We're getting down to the wire on congressional redistricting here, and I think we're going to end up with a decently competitive western district. On paper. None of the three women running for the Democratic nomination is so impressive that they can clear the field, and each has issues. (I have something of a history with the one I saw again yesterday: she's probably the strongest of the three, and I'll hold my nose if I have to . . .) On the Republican side, former congressman Ryan Zinke is a clear winner, and despite actually living in Santa Barbara, despite having been fired from the cabinet as too corrupt for the Trump administration, he's a very formidable opponent. It's going to depend on turnout.

115 I can't think of any. We have a couple of combined city-county arrangements here, both designed, I think, to constrain union power.

It's odd that NY hasn't gone the route of Maryland or Virginia, and just taken NYC out of the county structure. There must have been some kind of complicated power dynamic back when the city was consolidated that made Albany make the choices it did.

Boston is weird because it expanded in certain directions (south, a little east, a little west in a weird way), but not in others (especially northwest). Boston plus Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville is a very sensible core metro area. But it doesn't really make any sense to have West Roxbury in Boston but Cambridge not.

Maybe Cambridge has some kind of big-deal institution there? I'm not sure as I've never been to Massachusetts.

I think it's misleading to call boroughs counties - the vast majority of NYS county functions are done by NYC, right? With a few exceptions like DA and sheriff, and the token elected position of BP.

"Borough President" is a cool sounding title. Like Alderman or Prothonotary.

The courts are organized by county without reference to the city government, which is a big deal. Other than that, it's a little blurry for me when government functions are organized through boros as convenient administrative sub-units for the city, and when they're organized through counties in their own right.

But I wouldn't say at all that it's misleading to call the boros counties. They are counties by law.

I know that from Law & Order.

Census Bureau: "In most States, multi-county places are common; however in the New England States and the States of California, Montana, Nevada, and New Jersey, incorporated places do not cross county lines."

List of multi-county cities. Quite a lot on scan, including Atlanta and most big Texas cities. Even a few in Nebraska. Technically Chicago, but that's just a bit of O'Hare.

Now's the time to mention Marble Hill, right?

Something can be both misleading and technically correct, surely.

Even a few in Nebraska.

Those aren't "cities" even by Nebraska standards.

https://lihj.cc.stonybrook.edu/2011/articles/brooklyns-thirst-long-islands-water-consolidation-local-control-and-the-aquifer/

It always comes back to water rights.

125: I think Medicaid was run at the county level in NY. It came up in the context of elder care. In MA, it's managed at the state level.

121: West Roxbury is a little weird that way, but Brookline is more suburban. I've always felt that Chelsea should be part of Boston, and, indeed, they are both in Suffolk County. But it's a really poor city, so I guess Boston wouldn't want it.

127.2 Huh. It seems like a pretty dumb idea.

Lloydminster is in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

127: Ah, beat me to it. Wikipedia comes through as it often does with oddball geographic classifications. Also did not see any in New Mexico (and of course Alaska and Hawaii).

Texas unsurprisingly has the most given their very loose annexation laws and the relatively small size of counties there.

County maps have no bearing on city boundaries, as noted, and school board districts are independent from both. Figuring out who gets which ballot must be a nightmare.

They certainly have messed up that around here even though school districts don't cross municipal boundaries. You have city council districts, state house, state senate, and U.S. House districts that basically match nothing anyone identifies as a "place" for anything but elections.

Speaking of which and semi-OT, I believe it was heebieville where the info just came out on the 911 calls to the police where they refused to escort the Biden bus which was being shadowed by the Trump brigade sort of trying to run them off the road.

Among the elements that have me pretty convinced that we are going into an Orban-Manchinema-style pseudo democracy is the stance of most police forces. (Also courts*, the press, and of course that we have so many people willing to support the politicians inexorably bringing that about.) They will handle dissent like they did the guy in Portland as opposed to how they did('nt)Kyle Rittenhouse.

Alsoa very thorough three-part look at Jan 6.

Seems like some new stuff, but not through it all yet, and not completely sure what has been previously reported. Either there or elsewhere in the last few days, there was new info that pushes the narrative closer to them expecting an occupation*. Eastman texting Pence's staff (maybe the CoS?) while they were sheltered at the Capitol that the riot was Pence's fault.

*They may have just opportunistically taken advantage of the occupation but it is clear they were prepared for a situation where the vote could be delayed.

139: Oops first sentence and link got munged, WaPo with a thorough look three part look at Jan. 6

One last thing I forgot to mention above. Clearly different groups had different plans. I thought the vulnerable point was Congress getting into the Capitol (did not have the imagination that it could be breached as it was). I think the planted bombs may have intended that (otr a diversion). And there is evidence of some (Proud Boy, Oath Keepers. someone like that) having a small armed group chilling in some park on the Virginia side.

Aren't I the downer.

And for how a Manchinema-style pseudo-democracy would fare? I believe Adam Smith had it right with there being "great deal of ruin in a nation." Many of us will do pretty well. We'll be pissed and depressed but the actual decline will be long and relatively gentle.

County maps have no bearing on city boundaries, as noted, and school board districts are independent from both. Figuring out who gets which ballot must be a nightmare.

[weeps in Californian]

My county has a lookup tool to show all the different voting districts any given address is in.

In addition to the districts for state legislature, city, county, and school board, my address falls within districts of two different transit agencies, county board of education, state board of equalization, community college district, flood control zone, health care district (near-defunct), parks district, and municipal utilities district.

Manchinema-style pseudo-democracy

What constituency is there for that? I think the future is either Californian or Orbanotrumpist, not much middle ground.

145: Ah, that was just my overly cute term for your "Orbanotrumpist'. Just that I think their approach is leading inexorably to that end.

145: Ah, that was just my overly cute term for your "Orbanotrumpist'. Just that I think their approach is leading inexorably to that end.

I think folks are discounting how much of Trumpism really is just about Trump.

That's me! Partly, it depends on how you define Trumpism. The concepts of "WMD in Iraq" or "enhanced interrogation" are the essence of Trumpism, in my book.

But if you want a stricter definition -- let's say, the will to work outside the rule of law to undermine democracy -- well, there's still the Brooks Brothers Riot and the associated Supreme Court decision.

But OK, stricter than that. Let's say, public officials acting to overthrow a presidential election. I don't even know exactly what's happening in Arizona and Michigan, democracy-wise, but I gather it's bad. (In Michigan, they replaced the guy who certified an honest vote with someone who explicitly opposed an honest vote, right?) The Michigan thing -- and maybe the Arizona thing -- would be at the top of the front page of the NYT, except that the NYT has already accepted our post-democratic future.

All of the machinery will remain after Trump is gone, and people are going to want to use it. The desire of the white electorate that created Trump is not going away, and racism has shown itself capable of gaining some surprising converts. Will the next Trump be Don Jr.? Will it be Tucker Carlson? Or will some other Trumpist rise up? Stay tuned ...

Trumpism is still largely about Trump but even he has his limits, witness the boos in Alabama (?) after suggesting his audience get vaccinated. More frightening, he's activated and concentrated a cohort of racist bigots with a significant paramilitary wing which, I am sorry to say, turns out not to have overplayed its hand or alienated the moderate voter due to 1/6. No, what's happened instead are that fault lines are now deeper. Folk maybe inclined to fret about violence have invented or been fed storylines which justify it.

The only real hope is that Trump will die, and after his death, infighting tears his coalition apart. God knows, those groups absolutely despite one another. But I think it's far more likely that a Carlson or similar steps in and assumes the mantle. Trump is a talented demagogue but he's hardly the only one. His gamble was that the bipartisan moderate consensus on the value of civil society and nominally adherence to the law was an impediment, not table stakes for participating in national politics. Having demonstrated the lack of consequences for any of that, and watching gleefully as the liberals elected to control the judicial state ensure that their political opponents on the right have nothing to fear, others will follow that path.

Trumpism is still largely about Trump but even he has his limits, witness the boos in Alabama (?) after suggesting his audience get vaccinated.

The thing that the normies don't get is that those boos were in support of Trump and Trumpism.

150: Given how quickly Trump pivoted, I think that's true. The advantage to having no principles or positions beyond self-aggrandizement, no problem with hypocrisy or consistency. Trump and Trumpism shape each other.

Like shit in an infected colon.

These are the assholes of our lives.

151: This is all correct, but I think it glosses over some of the implications. To say "No principles beyond ..." while entirely true, tends to de-emphasize the fact that Trumpism is an extraordinarily principled belief. Trumpists affirmatively believe (to use your examples) in self-aggrandizement, hypocrisy and inconsistency. People think of "honesty" as a worldview and "dishonesty" as a deviation, but people take a principled stand in favor of dishonesty.

People are literally dying out of adherence to Trumpist principles, but it's hard for us to articulate what those principles are because we have trouble getting past the first step: Acknowledging that there are principles involved.

people take a principled stand in favor of dishonesty.

I'm not disagreeing with this, but I'm having trouble articulating the principle that you're saying people are standing on. What do you think the principle is?

I think the principle is self-aggrandizement and the rest is details.

If they could do that without dishonesty, they would tell the truth because it's easier.

Right. It was "Self-aggrandizing big-lying about the vaccine appeals more than self-aggrandizing big-lying taking credit for the vaccine."

I doubt that I'm going to read the WaPo piece on the insurrection, but Drum excerpts it, and (like everybody in the world except me) totally fails to grasp the import of the language used. Talking about Trump's behavior in not acting to quell the insurrection, the Post says:

He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief -- a president reduced to mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol.

The Post here -- without being explicit -- assumes that there is an American consensus about Trump's responsibilities as commander in chief, and that Trump was in violation of that consensus. In fact, a significant minority believes that Trump acted appropriately -- that he was meeting his responsibility, not shirking it.

"Self-aggrandizement" isn't the point here. "Freedom" is closer to the heart of it: The freedom to do and think as you please, unconstrained by facts and shame. Trump himself is close to a zero. He's Sarah Palin with a Y chromosome and a modest attention span. The problem lies in the literally religious fervor that people need to impose on that zero.

This from Charley is shrewdly observed:

what made Trump is wrapping that up in a 'successful' business man, married to a model (with decades of tabloid coverage), with the comic timing of a 50's Catskills performer.

But unlike Charley, I think the central point he makes is contained in those scare quotes around the word "successful." Trump didn't need to be successful as a businessman. He didn't even need to be plausibly successful. He needed to promote himself that way without a scintilla of shame. Some significant portion of the American public mirrors John Goodman in The Big Lebowski: "Say what you will about shamelessness; at least it's an ethos."

That suggests there will be a rug in the pee tape.

The Post's take on Trump and his inaction and, er, mixed messages brings up what seems like a trivial problem but I actually sense is something close to pivotal in our age.

When the cartoon mob boss says, "boy, it'd be a shame if something happened to that snitch," we clearly recognize the message is precisely the opposite of the naive reading. But the conventions of modern mass media prohibit reporters from stating what is obvious to a bright third grader.

When Trump instructed his followers to "peacefully" match on the capitol, it was clearly understood by many of them that he meant *exactly* the opposite. It's downright insulting that one would even need to entertain the naive reading, but, well, here we are and continue to be.

To the extent that I have any faith in our moldering remains of our pluralistic democracy, which I don't, it's that the young have never known a Republican party that engaged in anything but bad faith and they see right through this bullshit.

Acknowledging that there are principles involved.

This might be worth a post on its own, because yes, we probably do need a working vocabulary for the anti-Democrat, anti-democratic consensus on the right. There's this interview with one of Eastman's colleagues at the Claremont Institute. There's Trump's own quote I noted a few days ago (source, also the Atlantic):

In a 2011 speech, Donald Trump explained his single top rule in life: "Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it." He's repeated the same idea over and over again in speeches, tweets, and books published under his byline. In 2024, the targets of Trump's revenge are American law and American democracy.

That's not "getting even" as in evening the score: here "even with" means "on top of." It's an inverted Red Queen, on roids. Some version of this belief really is widespread. It's not even that everything is zero sum; rather, there is a class of people who deserve more than others, and they shouldn't have to think too hard about justice. They should just get to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I freely admit this is boring even to contemplate, but there is really no shortage of philosophers who don't seem to mind. (Not that the interview with the Claremont guy boils down to this point necessarily, but he clearly thinks the right people need to hold power so the views and interests of the wrong people can be as wholly suppressed as possible.)

"Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it."

Which, except for the constant encouragement of blasphemy from his followers, is the most anti-Christian thing in America today. I think it was Douthat who had a headline about how the post-Christian right was going to be worse than the Christian right. I didn't read the article so I'm not sure what it was about.

"Self-aggrandizement" isn't the point here. "Freedom" is closer to the heart of it: The freedom to do and think as you please, unconstrained by facts and shame.

I don't see the distinction. It's the freedom to dominate others, just as it was for the slavers.

138: It's kind of weird to read names of your local shitheads in a national rag like that.

You get used to it.

The two great mantras of our age:

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

"The cruelty is the point."

When I say Trump/Trumpsim is unprincipled, yes, I was imprecise. What I was intending to underscore was that there are no unifying political positions which are not negotiable in service of these... ideological principles. The Trumpist doesn't really care about tariffs or minimum wage or even vaccination policies. These are just tools to be wielded one way or the other, or even both ways at once, as circumstances dictate.

165, 166: Indeed. (Anyone familiar with Prevo's record in Alaska recognizes this as 100% on-brand for him.)

First clausewitz of 149: You rang?

Of 149.2, that is.