chaonaut

The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage’s recommendations.

For example, in 1981:

Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan’s first year in office.

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

Yeah, given how much Trump and Republicans lean on Heritage, and Trump has been talking about doing some “light” tyranny on day 1, it’s ridiculous to attempt to write off the Heritage Foundations’ plan to Christian Fascism.

Now tell us how many Heritage Foundations recommendations do the Republicans and Trump take on board! Distancing the Heritage Foundations from them rather undersells the position of one of the most influential public policy organizations particularly within conservative politics.

Which is also why they wind up filled with “small business owners” who seem to all be about making money off land they own.

Based on the numbers I’m looking at, the people who didn’t vote were the ones that were likely Republican voters. The people that stayed home were likely Republicans who did not vote for Trump. I’m all for political engagement, but I’m not sure how invested I am in making sure Trump gets all the votes he told people not to cast.

I’m not sure how intense your off year elections are, but one of mine had only a single uncontested race, so I’m not sure I’d jump to considering missing some of the offyears “abysmal”.

Overall, 70% of U.S. adult citizens who were eligible to participate in all three elections between 2018 and 2022 voted in at least one of them, with about half that share (37%) voting in all three.

-Pew Research Poll on Voter Turnout

And it looks like a significant portion of the 30% who don’t vote are white adults without a college degree who lean Republican.

Actually, the recent record turnouts should really be getting you to pay attention to how the elections are structured. It turns out, the way districts and the electoral college are organized means that where you get out the vote matters. Telling people to vote harder doesn’t make those systemic obstacles go away.

Sounds like a reason for Biden to set a whole bunch of legal precedent while he’s still president.

If you vote with the hope that it will fixes problem by itself, you won’t get very far. Voting is sort of the end of a political process, the other end starting in people building political movements. For your vote to mean something, you have to be voting with a political project. So, focus on the political projects: start building the structures that protect people first, without relying on the government’s approval. Support your communities of care and build your mutual aid networks. Don’t wait for it to be delivered from on high, get with people who also care about the things you care about and start using what you have to build what you can.