#the Christian one is better for society

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

the Christian wants to influence the culture around him because he knows God’s ways prevent the most suffering for the most vulnerable. not because he believes he can hasten the next coming or build the Kingdom by human effort.

[july-19th-club]

forced myself to finish this book even though by the last hundred pages or so all i was doing was picking apart the post-catholicism of it all. bc i feel like it's important to read shit you don't gel with . just because. even though the whole way through i was like they HAVE to prove it's not real. they HAVE to. so not the point of any of it but i was desperate for them to Find The Body etc. and of course instead they have mystical time travel experiences and all that because that is the kind of book the actual star is but i was desperate for them to realize that the star you see is the actual star. and then it wasn't

[shock-micro]

the practice of taking multiple names... i do wish it was a bit more supported in places like the united states. i love my family name, my family means the world to me,

but there's also the last name of berri that i'd love to take. it was the second name that stuck with me after "mira", and i've nicknamed myself "miraberri" in a lot of things over the past year i've had it...

...i suppose the other trouble is that i've already changed my legal name once, and so now i'd have to pay for it to be changed again... ahh, the wonders of capitalism and rigid social systems.

wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a society that embraced Change?

that freely allowed, even encouraged changing oneself? embracing the fact that everything will change eventually, and must do so for things to not become stagnant?

that some things might not be right as they are, despite the state of things being comfortable for many people? that the status quo, or our time-honored traditions, aren't infallible, perfect concepts?

i guess the idea is too much for some people to understand.

maybe some day, that'll change, too.

[seeveekat]

I need elections to be over cuz this is what its been basically like dealing with (mainly) white leftists (accelerationists tbh)

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

Can people stop the "Don't call yourself a feminist if-" crap? Y'all still believe in the blatant lies of that movement and ideology?

[snekdood]

Ill probably never know if i have native american in me and even if i did find out i probably wouldnt be welcome but even if its not true thats not going to stop me from respecting the land and the native people who have come before me and to try to make them proud in the best way i can. I want them to know that someone cares, idk.

[eggthew]

my mum identifies as wiccan (pagan I think? I'm not sure exactly) and my dad grew up extremely religious (seventh day adventist?). idk how me n my sibs managed to grow up with like. near-zero religious or spiritual influences

[pftones3482]

My favorite part of the baseball/basketball one is like......

A Christian baby is not a ball. Nor reasonably ball shaped. No umpire/ref is going to see someone falter to not kill a baby and say "oops sorry you had to hit this BABY in order to win" they're gonna go "who the FUCK threw a baby?" and then let you redo the shot. You ever seen the videos where they stop entire games to get a cat safely off a field? Yeah.

The thing most fundamentally wrong with these "tests" (other than everything) is that in reality, people WOULD take care of the Christian baby, but it also wouldn't cost them the big winning shot because that's not how the world works - you don't have to give up everything (your beliefs, your money, your reputation) in order to help others.

But try telling Christians that 🙄

🤔

[knightofdeer]

Starting to think that political ethics are a completely meaningless concept.

Politics are just struggle of classes for resources, and any ethics can be used to justify any position, and they are used. Social Darwinism can be used to argue for liberation (after all it's democracies built on equality that prosper and rule the world and can stomp and destroy any traditionalist country), and care ethics is exploited to say "but it's mean and selfish to demand bourgeoisie and men to give up their positions 😢, they feel hurt by it!"

Conclusion from this is that all ethics is mere self-aggrandizing talk - the only thing that matters is which class you swear your loyalty to (it doesn't have to be your class, and it happens both ways).

Society is a battlefield and live is eternal war

[assemblyofoddities]

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion." No, they're not. They aren't entitled to respect when they take it away from others. No matter what anyone's beliefs may be, if they impose them on another person in a way that harms them, dehumanizes them, or strips them of their dignity, they no longer deserve dignity in return. If someone doesn't treat you will respect and dignity, even in the case of opposing beliefs, they no longer deserve, or should have, your respect and dignity, and vise versa.

[sadfraudfrogs]

I currently need to throw my phone into a river because if my mum looks through my phone I'm fucked

[grison-in-space]

Has Biden actually done anything at all? There's evidence going around and I think it's compelling, the alternate to voting is instead doing actual social work and participating in protests and organizing political action, which is a good idea i think

1) Yes. Inarguably this has been the most effective progressive domestic administration since I have been alive, and I'm in my thirties. What in the fuck are you talking about? It's not perfect, but it's better than we've seen in fifty years: Obama tried, but Democratic Congressional organization was just not yet used to working with a completely obstructionist GOP Congress in the wake of the tea party.

Even in terms of foreign policy, this is also pretty much as good as US involvement gets. Sorry. Our foreign policy has been shaped by monsters for decades, and that's even without dealing with our huge and active branch of Christian doom cultists. There ain't a candidate in the world that could stop the entire accumulated momentum of geopolitics with a snap of the finger, and I'm not really willing to pretend that Biden is particularly notable for not managing to fix Israel/Palestine relations.

2) In your own words, anon, what precisely does organizing political action entail without participating in the political process? Do you think that abstaining from the part of the gig where you, the citizen, get to say which official gets the job somehow makes your opinions matter more to your elected public officials? Have you ever organized to get so much as a municipal one-time library project budget expanded? Are you perhaps only skilled at political argument with people who already agree with you on the Internet?

What is your leverage, and could it reasonably be described as "extortion" or "blackmail" or "political corruption?" Because those are pretty much the only things on the table that can work more effectively to drive an elected official than a disciplined coalition of political allies (who can be purchased with, you guessed it, votes) or a reliable bloc of voter support. Your vote matters less than the ones you bring with you, sure. Do you think that not voting yourself somehow helps people organize to drive more votes? Have you perhaps replaced your complex reasoning skills with a rapidly dying jellyfish?

3) Holy passive vagueness, Batman! "Evidence is going around." What a masterpiece of a sentence! How it suggests everything while providing nothing! What evidence? Who collected it? Who is talking about the evidence "going around?" Who is listening? How many of them are there? What did they think before? The more I think, the more questions I have, and damn if they ain't predisposing me to be even less charitable.

Like, this is so catastrophically poorly supported that I have to confess that I not only believe this is probably an ask in bad faith (i.e. by someone who is expecting to piss me off or otherwise engage with me adversarially, probably spammed to a whole host of blogs at once with no expectation of response) but I actively hope that it is. The alternative is to have to grapple with the reality that some people are so uncomfortable with the responsibility of moral agency that they're willing to release useful levers of legal and social power just so that they never do anything problematic with that power. Much better, of course, to wash one's hands of anything that might have the stink of responsibility clinging to it. Might fall from the membership of the Elect if you actually get yourself all muddy by doing things, I reckon.

I don't even believe that voting is the only lever we have when it comes to our elected officials or that votes are necessary to secure change, and I am certainly not talking about the presidential ticket alone when I talk voting. What I do believe is two things: one, that voting is a potential lever of power on the emergent chaos of the society in which we live. And two, that anyone telling me to leave a lever of power on the ground without a damn good reason is either incompetent, malicious, or both.

[toalwaysbeme]

You know how one of the big things that people who grew up atheist/agnostic can't understand about Christians is like a fundamentally different motivation? Like they will be baffled when a Christian deadass does not care about finding happiness in this life. And like I get it, I also think we only get this one life and making the most joy in it is the point, if there's any point at all. But like I have not figured out how to do that. I often feel like scattered moments of happiness that will never outweigh how I feel the rest of the time is really as good as it will ever get and I'd so much rather not have been born than live. So like I fucking get it, I get why someone would be so steadfast in believing this is not all there is and it doesn't matter if we're happy here. I get needing to believe there's joy promised just beyond the horizon. Delayed gratification sucks but it's easier than facing the much more likely conclusion that general happiness or even contentment simply is not achievable, ever.

[euniexenoblade]

Sex as an act is only ever glorified by society when said sex is cis straight white abled etc. Gay people, trans people, poc, the disabled, women, get their sex lives mocked, made illegal, banned from literature and cinema, you can literally get killed for being one of these things and expressing a sexuality. At the same time, rape is used as a punishment for existing as these things, weaponizing sex against us. This is similarly why ace people are treated like shit, abstaining from this is treated as a nasty aberration worthy of mockery and corrective rape. Things like "public" sex laws in the USA don't exist for some betterment of mankind, they existed as a way to arrest the gays having sex in a hotel room, they exist to harass the homeless who have no private spaces, they exist to harass trans people for simply existing. It's important to remember when talking about the act of sex, yes society pushes having sex as this important thing you should be doing, but only for men having sex as defined by Christian conservatives.

[phddyke]

Hazbin Hotel is actually healing my inner ex-Christian so hard.

No joke, I nearly started cheering when Lute called Charlie and Vaggie’s love “vile and blasphemous” (and then burst out laughing when Adam immediately followed it up with “Hot as fuck though”). I know that may sound weird considering that I am, in fact, a lesbian, but here me out:

Seeing Christians being explicitly homophobic onscreen? It validates me. It makes me think “Oh yeah, I’m not crazy, Christians are that hateful!” And, call me crazy, but I think homophobia being tied in with villainy is a good thing. Neither Adam or Lute are supposed to be good people; they are very obviously the villain, and that establishes their behavior as bad. Someone on Twitter said that Lute gave them religious fanatic vibes and I couldn’t agree more.

And here’s the thing, too: it’s explicit homophobia, not some dumb metaphor. There’s no way to take it as anything else. And I really need that. I need to see Christians being explicitly homophobic onscreen in the same way that other people need and create worlds where homophobia doesn’t exist.

But me? I want my pain and suffering acknowledged. I want the harm that Christianity does acknowledged. Homophobia is real and the religious kind doubly so. I related to Vaggie so much in that episode; I felt her trepidation about going back to Heaven. Felt like a good metaphor for escaping a fundamentalist church only to be forced to visit again.

And Viv is not afraid to explicitly point this out and criticize them. Like, yes! Say it! They are hypocrites! They don’t care about people being better, they only care about punishment! They maimed one of their own and left her to die because she spared a child! They’re homophobic freaks! They would never see the good that Angel does and how he’s improved and is wonderful, they only see that he’s a drug addict and a sex worker and think he’s worthless for that even though Jesus broke bread with sex workers and people considered the dregs of society. (And of course Angel is gay on top of that.)

And another thing: not only did the Adam line make me laugh, but the second homophobic Lute line about “he blew his shot like the cocks in his mouth” cracked me up too. It reminded me of the pilot where Katie Killjoy said “I don’t touch the gays” to Charlie, which is a line that made me laugh for 4+ years straight. When I told my brother that was the funniest homophobia I’d ever heard in media, he very wisely said, “All homophobia is funny if you think about it.” And you know what? He’s right. It is funny, because it’s so fundamentally goddamn stupid, so let’s give characters ridiculous lines so everyone can laugh at how idiotic they and their beliefs sound.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Winning coalitions aren't always governing coalitions

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

Winning an election is easier than it looks: all you have to do is convince a bunch of different groups that you will use power to achieve their desires. Bonus points if you can convince groups with mutually exclusive goals that you'll deliver for them – the coalition of "people who disagree about everything" is hard to assemble, but it sure is large!

Politically, a "conservative" is someone who believes that there is a small group of people who were born to rule, and a much larger group of people who were born to be ruled over. As Corey Robin writes in The Reactionary Mind, this is the one trait that unifies all the disparate strains of conservative thought: imperialists, monarchists, capitalists, white supremacists, misogynists, Christian nationalists, Hindu nationalists and supporters of Israeli genocide in Palestine:

https://coreyrobin.com/books/the-reactionary-mind/

These groups all agree that power should be hierarchical, that your position in a hierarchy is something you're born with, and that letting people who were "meant" to be at the bottom of the hierarchy rise to the top puts society so out of balance that it's actually a threat to human survival. That's why conservatives of all stripes get so furious about "DEI" – any kind of affirmative action program serves as a defective sorting hat, putting the incompetent and unsuitable into positions of power over other peoples' lives. It's why "DEI" is the go-to scapegoat for any kind of disaster, including giant ships crashing into bridges:

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/03/26/baltimore-bridge-dei-utah-lawmaker-phil-lyman-misinformation

But while conservatives all agree that some of us are born to be in charge and others are born to be bossed around by our innate superiors, they have irreconcilable differences about who is meant to be in charge. British imperialists who pine for the Raj have views that are fundamentally at odds with the views of Hindu nationalists. They're both "conservative" movements, but they're actually bitter enemies.

For a conservative movement to win power, it has to convince the people whom it would relegate to the bottom of the hierarchy to support that goal (AKA "getting turkeys to vote for Christmas"); and it must convince other conservatives that they will be able to establish a hierarchy that accommodates multiple, co-equal ruling elites.

The first tactic is well-established. LBJ summed it up neatly:

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

The second one requires far more tactical thinking. Some elite groups are able to form coalitions by carving out exclusive zones: think of the friendly feeling among Modi, Orban, Erdogan, bin Salman, Trump, Milei, et al. These people all aspire to dictatorship, all espouse their superior blood – a source of personal and racial superiority – and hypothetically all believe that the world would be better if everyone (including their foreign counterparts) would take their orders.

One way to resolve this tension is to carve up the world geographically, which is why so many despots who seized power by promising to build ethno-states can co-exist with one another and even cheer one another on. Let Orban have Hungary, give Turkey to Erdogan, and let Bibi Netanyahu annex all of Gaza. Sure, in their hearts of hearts, each of these men secretly believe themselves to be racially and personally superior to the others, but so long as they all stay out of one another's turf, there's no reason to make a big deal out of that.

Another way to resolve this tension is to carve up the world temporally: think of the alliance between Christian nationalists and Israeli genocidiers. In the USA, "Christian Zionists" outnumber Jews who identify as Zionists:

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/qanda-for-every-1-jewish-zionist-there-are-30-christian-zionists-and-netanyahu-exploits-this-15656249

But Christian Zionists aren't philosemites. They hate Jews and believe that we are all going to hell for murdering Christ. Their support for Israel isn't grounded in a belief in the necessity of a Jewish ethno-state – it arises out of the apocalyptic belief that Christ will return once Jews "return to the Holy Land" – albeit only briefly, before being cast into a lake of fire for all eternity.

Like British imperialists and the Hindu nationalists, Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists are not on the same side. However, unlike British imperialists and Hindu nationalists, Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists want the same thing…for a while. Both groups support the establishment of a Jewish entho-state in Israel, they just differ sharply as to what happens after that comes to pass. So long as they don't dwell on that moment in the future, they can stand shoulder to shoulder, fighting together for an Israeli state that operates with absolute US support and total international impunity.

Coalitions who defer the question of how they'll use power to after they've gained power are using time (rather than space) as a buffer that keeps their differences from smashing together until they shatter. But time and space aren't the only buffers for the differences between coalition partners – there's also class.

"Class" has been the most important, most useful buffer for conservativism since the Reagan revolution. Reagan came to power by forging an alliance with evangelicals, whose cult leaders had historically demanded that members focus their energies (and cash donations) on the church, while avoiding politics as "worldly."

Reagan promised the Christian right a bunch of culture war stuff – bans on abortion, punishment for uppity women and racial minorities, prayer in school, segregation academies, etc – that his financial backers frankly didn't give a shit about. By all means, let working class evangelicals homeschool their kids and teach them that the Earth is 5,000 years old, it doesn't matter to Wall Street, who will reap a giant tax-cut and also send their kids to private schools with rigorous curriculum. Bankers' wives and daughters will always be able to afford to fly out of state (or across the border) for abortion care, they will never die of AIDS in the charity wing of a community hospital, their daughters won't be trapped by bans on no-fault divorces.

For the past 40 years, American oligarchs and would-be oligarchs have entered into enthusiastic coalitions with virulently racist, sexist and homophobic groups, and maintained peace within their coalition by passing punitive, cruel laws that the rich can buy their way around. For many self-styled libertarians, the most important liberty is "not paying taxes" and this subordinates all other liberties, such that a "libertarian" will vote for a coalition whose platform promises to ban abortion, birth control, "interracial" marriage, and queer sex, so long as it also promises tax cuts. It's a weird kind of pro-freedom ideology that happily trades away (others') freedom for (your own) tax cuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

Remember, Trump's first CPAC speech was sponsored by Goproud, a group of "fiscally responsible" gay Republicans who believed in gay rights, sure, but not as much as they believed in getting so rich that even if poor gay people were ground into dust, they could float above it all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOProud

Class is the third buffer between the oligarchs of the right and the mass movement that provides the bulk for winning elections. After all, laws are for the little people, so by all means, we can promise – and even deliver – laws that we would never submit to, because we don't have to submit to them. This is Wilhoit's Law in action:

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit#Wilhoit's_law

In a hierarchical society, class separates groups of people just as rigidly as time and space, and is every bit as useful a buffer as the other two forces.

Until it isn't.

Eventually – once you've banned abortion, once you've taken all the "controversial" books out of the library, once you've made affirmative action illegal – you reach the layer of non-negotiable culture war demands that the rich can't buy their way out of.

Like immigration.

Let's start with this: immigration doesn't have to result in wage suppression. Couple immigration with strong unions and a muscular labor rights regime and workers do just great. The more the merrier! America needs workers of every kind. What's more, the unions and labor laws in America owe their existence to immigrant workers, so there's nothing about immigration that is necessarily incompatible with winning rights for workers.

But the possibility of importing some overseas union organizers isn't what motivates the finance wing of the conservative coalition to demand "guest-worker" programs like the H1B visa:

https://twitter.com/RobertMSterling/status/1873175206073626660

H1B visas are "non-immigrant" visas, meaning that they are designed not to offer any path to permanent residence or citizenship. You can live in the US for a long time on an H1B, but you are bound over to your employer like a serf bound to a feudal estate: if you lose your job, you lose your right to abide in the country. That can mean losing your house, your car, your kids' school and friends. It can cost your spouse their job, because if you're kicked out of the country, they might well leave along with you, rather than remain alone here.

H1B tech workers are the workers that tech-barons have dreamt of for decades. An H1B worker can't job-hop, and so needn't be lured to work with gourmet cafeterias, luxury gymnasiums, or other perks of the whimsical tech "campus." H1B workers can't quit if they don't like their stock-options packages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech bosses hate tech workers, and they always have. It's not affection that causes Jeff Bezos to allow his coders to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand, while his delivery drivers piss in bottles and his warehouse workers are injured at three times the national average. Jeff Bezos neither cherishes his coders' kidneys, nor is he especially hostile to delivery drivers' need to pee – he just squeezes any and every worker in any and every way he can.

Same for Tim Cook: the accomplishment that prompted Apple's board to elevate Cook to Steve Jobs' CEO office was the successful transfer of iPhone manufacturing to China. Specifically, Cook figured out how to work with his primary supplier, Foxconn, to create a working environment that produced reliable, precision-manufactured mobile devices, and all it took was creating a working environment so brutal that the company had to install suicide nets to catch the factory workers who couldn't stand it any longer:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

Apple's tech workers aren't worked to suicidal desperation, sure – but not because Tim Cook likes coders and hates factory workers. It's because he's afraid coders will quit, and he's not worried about replacing factory workers after they jump to their death.

The point of the H1B program is to create a tech workforce that bosses no longer have to fear. Recall that when Elon Musk took over Twitter and circulated a mandatory "extremely hardcore" pledge that demanded that workers promise to subordinate their health and wellbeing to his profits, it prompted a mass departure, with the notable exception of workers whose immigration status (and/or insurance for serious health issues) depended on their ongoing employment at Twitter:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/16/23462026/elon-musk-twitter-email-hardcore-or-severance

When Musk's cronies gloated about shedding 20% of Twitter's workforce on "day zero," the workers they had in mind were the ones who didn't fear their bosses and wouldn't frog when the investor class shouted jump. "Sharpen your blades, boys" means we're slicing off workers who are laboring under the misapprehension that they are entitled to a say in their working conditions:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

After all, America does not have a tech worker shortage. The US tech sector fired 260,000 skilled workers in 2023, and more than 150,000 were shown the door in 2024. When Musk and his fellow tech bosses complain that they need more "talent," what they mean is they need workers who are so terrified of being deported that they'll accept low wages, sleep under their desks, refuse to talk to union organizers, and, above all, do as they're told:

https://youtube.com/shorts/N0FkyXFhmpo?si=GCh6bFqd31prazhz

Trump won office by promising mutually exclusive outcomes to different parts of his coalition. To the nativists and bigots (and workers who'd bamboozled into thinking that their low salaries were the fault of other workers, not their bosses), he promised a halt to immigration. To the plutocrats, he promised a large and pliable workforce – of low-waged agricultural workers and of precarious H1B tech workers who'd discipline America's "entitled" tech workers:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-01-02-president-musk-american-workers-h1b-visas/

Now, he has to figure out how to keep everyone happy. Literally: the Speakership of Congress is only nine votes away from collapsing at any time (and until last week, it was just one vote away), and without Congress, Trump's ability to govern will be severely curtailed (see, for example, 2018-2020).

Immigration isn't an issue like abortion: oligarchs can support abortion bans and still procure abortions when they need them. It's much harder to support an immigration ban and still procure precarious, low-waged workers for your business. It will take many years for American-born workers to be so brutalized and broken that they capitulate to the working conditions that American guest workers and undocumented workers accept, and bosses are impatient.

It's hard to put on a convincing performance of banning immigration, as the UK's New Labour discovered. In the years leading up to the 2010 election, Labour – under Blair and then Brown – made a big show of "cracking down on immigration." At one point, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced that she was axing dozens of UK visa categories, while carefully not mentioning these were so niche that hardly anyone qualified for them. This created chaos for the people affected and their families – I lost my own "Highly Skilled Migrant" visa at this time and we had to move our wedding plans up by eight months so I could stay in the country with my British partner and our daughter – but it didn't do anything to quench the xenophobic rage that UKIP and the Tories had been stoking, and Labour lost its next election.

American conservatives are rightly proud of their ability to form coalitions. They trumpet their ethic of "no enemies to the right" and contrast this with the "cancel culture" of progressives:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-year-democrats-lost-the-internet/

It's true that purging your ranks of coalition partners who disagree with you at the margins is a severely self-limiting move. It's also true that the broader your coalition is, the easier it is to win power.

The right has built a coalition of people who want opposite things. Infamously, Project 2025 isn't just a collection of terrifying ideas for running (and ruining) America – it's a collection of mutually exclusive terrifying ideas for running and ruining America:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Trump's top health picks – RFK jr, Weldon, Oz, Makary, Bhattacharya, Nesheiwat – want mutually exclusive, irreconcilable things that are as impossible to compromise on as "banning immigration" while simultaneously "expanding the H1B program":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle

Big, diverse coalitions of people who normally oppose each other are great for winning power, but they're very bad for wielding power. Trump's majorities in Congress and the Senate are razor-thin, and while the Democrats had to suffer under the Manchin-Synematic Universe, the GOP's Klown Kar of Krazies has dozens of swivel-eyed loons who will happily blow up "must-pass" bills just for shits and giggles.

What's more, the GOP has spent decades installing easily blown circuit breakers into the American legislative and administrative systems, from the filibuster to the debt ceiling. By design, these allow small groups of lawmakers to kill bills and hamstring presidential power. Trump's first attempt at removing one of these breakers – the senseless kabuki of the annual debt ceiling showdown – was a total failure:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-12-19-debt-limit-should-absolutely-be-eliminated/

Musk thinks he can ram through policies that sizable portions of the GOP coalition would rather die than support. So far, Trump has proven a pliable puppet for Musk's ambitions. But the Musk-Trump coalition is every bit as fragile as any other in the GOP, and Trump is notoriously sensitive to accusations of weakness. Musk can threaten to primary any GOP lawmaker who gets in his way, but as the Kochs discovered after they unleashed the Tea Party, grievance-fueled, paranoid, heavily armed cults are hard to keep on a leash.

The coming months are sure to be an all-out war of GOP infighting as the coalition must wield power without the useful buffers of space, time and class. They'll be an object lesson in the dangers of a coalition that's so broad that everyone is welcome, even people who'd happily line you and yours in front of a firing squad.

But just because the right's attitude to coalitions is to have a mind so open its brains fall out, that doesn't mean the left should pursue a program of overwhelming ideological purity. Trump is a stupid guy with incoherent ideas, but look at how far he got by erecting such a big tent that anyone fit underneath it (even actual Nazis).

The progressive coalition doesn't need to be that big. We can have enemies to the right. The hugs Kamala Harris bestowed on ghouls like Liz Cheney didn't win the election, and the medal Biden just gave her won't help either:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/us/politics/presidential-citizens-medal-liz-cheney.html

Manchin and Synema can "fuck off until they come up to a gate with a sign saying 'You Can’t Fuck Off Past Here,' Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever":

https://michaelmarshallsmith.substack.com/about

But the fact that some people don't belong in a progressive coalition, it doesn't follow that there's no room to make the coalition looser and broader. Sure, a big coalition makes it hard to wield power, but without that coalition, we'll never win power.