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| Agent Oliver, aka Tirade, from Team Demonicus. |
This reaction is bad, for two reasons. One is that baseless challenges to the election result (including by obliquely lobbying the Electoral College to nullify the result) undermine the very electoral institutions that Democrats were correctly saying we need to honor before they knew they would lose the election.
The other problem is that the obsessive focus on what was so unfair about this year's election — the Electoral College, the FBI, Russia's interference, sexism, and more have all been mentioned — allows Democrats to avoid focusing on how their own errors to contributed to the loss.Instead we need to concentrate on four years from now, nominating a nice old white dude and throwing poor people under the bus. I'm not going to fisk the post, which you might as well just read and argue with at your leisure, though I would like to point out the bothsiderist idiocy of his suggestion that all these activities are basically equivalent to Trump screaming without any empirical basis that "This election is rigged, people!" (We really need to not talk about reforming the Electoral College or preventing hostile governments from screwing around with our politics?)
There's just one broad point I made in a Twitter tirade I want to reproduce below:
.@jbarro I think you're infected here with a horse-race journalist attitude here that prevents you from seeing something important. /1— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro Wih the election of Trump and a Republican Congress and an open Supreme Court seat we face very grave problems now, not in 2020. /2— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro The climate is warming every day now. The entire edifice of the New Deal is in serious danger under Ryan program.— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro The vital things that could be undone in the next four years outweigh the question of who wins in 2020. /4— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro The efforts to prevent Trump from taking office that you mock are certainly doomed, but they have an important function. /5— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro In 2000, GW Bush took his imaginary mandate into a series of catastrophic errors, from tax cuts that are still crippling... /6— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro government today (through that sequester and incompetence of Congress to correct it) through destruction of whole Middle East... /7— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro to wrecking of financial system (which we have made some progress in fixing). Harm that could be done by a Trump administration /8— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro is far more serious than that as we see already in China relations, surging hate crime, appalled European public, and more. /9— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro We must do what we can first to preserve the planet, then Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA, Dodd-Frank, etc. /10— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro and part of that effort must include emphasizing that the American people did not want Trump to be president... /11— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
.@jbarro ...that he has no mandate for any of the things he proposes to do. Who cares who wins in 2020 if temperature is up 3 degrees C. /12— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 17, 2016
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