{"id":35213,"date":"2022-02-02T17:10:55","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T23:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=35213"},"modified":"2022-02-02T17:10:55","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T23:10:55","slug":"you-really-think-so","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2022\/02\/02\/you-really-think-so\/","title":{"rendered":"You Really Think So?"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than a year ago, Eitan Hersh published<\/a> this in The Atlantic<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

In the aggregate, the political right is making donations more strategically than the political left. As political scientists have long described, conservative funders such as Charles Koch have spent decades planning for the long term. They have invested in the next generation of state and municipal politicians and organizers across the country. They invest in state legislative lobbying. Understanding the political value of local church groups and gun clubs, they don\u2019t see grassroots organizing as parochial and beneath them. They see it as key to durable control of government. Meanwhile, the biggest and most notable spenders on the Democratic side include Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who sometimes invest in worthwhile long-term grassroots strategies, but who will be best remembered for together spending nearly $1.5 billion on their own long-shot presidential bids: short-term, top-down, and vain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And for all their planning and money, what did they get? Long-time readers know the names: Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, Cawthorn, Gohmert, Nunes, Risch, McConnell, Kennedy, and dozens of others. At the Federal and State levels, the far-right conservative donors have discovered that the brethren they funded are a bunch of fourth-raters who think winning a seat was the goal.<\/p>\n

And then ring the bell and let their inner-nuts loose.<\/p>\n

And so Hersh, or at least his political scientists, should be embarrassed. Winning is merely a stepping stone; the goal is effective and wise governance. The right advocated for absolutist gun rights and now hide out on luxury yachts when the fear of being picked off takes them, they participate in ludicrous lies and hypocrisy about SCOTUS<\/strong>, they believe their broken abortion logic should be inflicted on everyone, and then there’s the 30,000 lies of the former President!<\/p>\n

This is not wise investing, is it?<\/p>\n

Not that he’s wrong about “rage-donating,” a description of Democratic fund donation “strategy”, which was fun to read. It reminds me that a lot of Americans have thoroughly ingested the philosophy of the private sector, where virtually everything can be bought and sold. Sadly for the Democrats who gave money to long-shot candidates in incredible volume, It Just Doesn’t Work That Way when it comes to voting.<\/p>\n

But to suggest that the fact that the conservatives often control the legislatures due to wise investments is to ignore the part that gerrymandering and many other morally dubious strategies have played in the drama of American politics, and, worse yet, to fail to understand the nature of victory. Putting the current pack of half-wits in charge of the legislatures of the nation isn’t victory for the Republicans.<\/p>\n

It’s disaster, for the nation and the Republicans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More than a year ago, Eitan Hersh published this in The Atlantic: In the aggregate, the political right is making donations more strategically than the political left. As political scientists have long described, conservative funders such as Charles Koch have spent decades planning for the long term. They have invested \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35214,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35213\/revisions\/35214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}