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Sep 6Edited

My gut tells me something like this dominance thesis is true. Maybe not the key to everything but it matters. I recently read a quote in Nixon Agonistes by Nixon’s campaign manager Chotiner which unfortunately I can’t give verbatim but it was about this kind of negative, attack-campaigning (not precisely the same as dominance but related to it)—that you just constantly hit at your opponent but don’t say much about yourself. You jab and jab and mostly defend.

This sounds right to me.

Totally agree about freedom. Right from the start, I was praying they would focus on freedom, and the GOP threat to freedom.

However, I disagree that the Democrats did not push patriotism and strength in foreign policy and all that stuff after Kennedy or Truman. They DID. They were constantly pushing a similar line as Republicans on that. But somehow they weren’t trusted. And it’s mysterious why, just as it’s mysterious why the public trusts the GOP more on the economy when they are constantly destroying the economy. (I guess Mike Dukakis in the helmet on the tank was not mysterious. He didn’t look like he belonged there to people? It’s interesting that this moment was viral before the internet, which we tend to associate with successful mockery. My point is—he got on the tank.(

They always got on the tank. But they were seen as traitors, etc. It was easy to create this false narrative that they didn’t care about this or that. They didn’t care about the working class. They didn’t care about the military. They didn’t care about families. Etc., etc., etc.

Somehow the narrative just doesn’t work the same way though. And I think it partly could be the REALITY of the GOP becoming too salient for them to be credible. It’s incredible this late in the game it is finally becoming salient given that’s always been the reality. But it seems possible that Trump’s general looniness and so many of them going way off the deep end into conspiracy theories and making friends with Nazis is just too much weight for the narrative to bear. The narrative was that they are the salt of the Earth, true patriots, they ‘really believe’ in this country, unlike the squishy Dems, etc. This requires the illusion of a fatherly family man, who will lead everyone out of the wilderness, who has wisdom and foresight and strength but might get mad and kick your ass, and so on. Just the patriarchal fantasy. Biden could be that, and so beat Trump.

But it’s just hard to hold onto the illusion that Trump is ALSO that. He was convicted of felonies, he’s speaking in word salad, he made a mess of things his whole presidency, and so on. Maybe it’s even his age that is revealing the cracks in the narrative.

They GOP will probably get back to that patriarchal dominance trip, and various things will make it tough to sustain the Democrats dominant energy. It will definitely help if fewer people belong to evangelical churches. If the power of the evangelicals wavers, the GOP will struggle mightily to restore their base. There just aren’t enough Nazis to keep the whole thing going with white people.

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