A Journey to the Center of the Blue MAGA Mind

I was procrastinating yesterday so I spent a little time on BlueSky. This post popped up (I don’t follow this person, someone re-posted it).

I’m concentrating on the last post, but left the others for context. It’s nonsense, and I made that point on BlueSky if you want to read my reply, but I’ll expand on it a bit here.

The background on this is that a number of PoliSci professors (a discipline that both isn’t science and doesn’t really understand politics) have a neat little statistical model based on easily-available voting data. The idea is that you plot how many times someone votes with Democrats to gauge their degree of “liberalness”, and vice versa about Republicans and being “conservative”.

I did this myself once upon a time, when I was just starting blogging. I built a site that calculated the median voter of each party and placed the Republican in the race on the graph. I junked the site because I didn’t think it told me much meaningful. That’s because a lot of Congressional action is on huge omnibus spending bills. The legislative achievement there is getting an amendment attached to the bill, and the final vote tells us nothing about that. As usual, Congress is very good at hiding what they do to avoid accountability.

The second point about this flawed metric of being progressive is that the most progressive / left members often vote against leadership because they don’t like the bill. The idea that Hakeem Jeffries voting for every bill that leadership wants to pass makes him more “progressive” is nonsense on stilts.

I’m picking on the silly claim that Jeffries is more progressive than AOC, but the other claim that she’s lazy because she doesn’t pass bills is dumb, too. Unless you think Schoolhouse Rock is a documentary, a Member of Congress submitting a bill has little chance it will get passed without committee action. So that’s why AOC tried to get ranking on Oversight, and instead Pelosi et. al. made sure it went to Gerry Connolly, who died of throat cancer. Then, leadership denied Jasmine Crockett, and finally elevated Robert Garcia.

Anyway, this was just another glimpse into the toxic Blue MAGA mentality. Here are some of the components of that mentality.

1. Everyone must wait their turn. I don’t think many of these folks have recovered from AOC beating some forgettable Democrat in a primary.  They sure hated the idea of a 26 year-old who never held office before trying to get the IL-09 seat.

2. A long memory for perceived slights by line jumpers. “Sunrise Kids” is a reference to the Sunrise Movement, which is a group advocating legislation to fight climate change. They allied with AOC a loooong time ago (7 years) to try to push through some climate change legislation, which didn’t work. Who remembers that shit?

3. Bucking leadership is bad. This is another sin in the Blue MAGA world. The leaders are good, they reason, just do what they want. Look at Pelosi and what she got accomplished! Nevermind that I can’t think of a single time that AOC cast a decisive vote against something leadership wanted.

4. Criticism of Democrats is bad for the party. I’ll let this post tell that tale:

   

I got a lot of that last one at Balloon-Juice, where people thought that it was still 2006 when blogs had a brief moment in the sun. I hate to break it to all of you, but blogs have little influence in the greater political ecosystem. I’m gonna guess that the reason that Democratic Party approval in polls is around the level of Iran, constipation and anal warts isn’t because of some blog posts. It’s because people are dissatisfied with “imperfect Dems,” not because of their legislation, but because they’re the captives of the donor class and rely on consultants who have them push out lumpy mashed potato messaging.

I’ll return to something useful in later posts, but god damn I’m tired of this idiocy. The worst part of it is that people like this think they’re making some kind of “checkmate, progressives” argument, when they’re just misinterpreting flawed data.