The past week has given us two examples of how being "liberal" - which is to say, left of center as opposed to farther left - is playing against a stacked deck.
The first are the NY and FL primaries. Florida pulled a Texas and aggressively gerrymandered itself to provide a few more seats for Republicans. New York Democrats tried the same, but the state supreme court ruled it unconstitutional. Both efforts at gerrymandered are "bad," and if you want to play by the Marques of Queensbury rules, you should act like the NY supreme court. But if one side is aggressively gerrymandering two huge states in FL and TX and the two largest blue states - CA and NY - are determined by neutral arbiters, you are going to struggle to win in a 50-50 environment.
The second was the decision by CNN to axe Brian Stelter. Incoming CNN chief wants CNN to be neutral between Democrats and Republicans. Prominent board member John Malone says he wants CNN to be neutral "the way it used to be." If anyone has half a brain, they would realize that the Republican party is not "the way it used to be." I mean, it still sucked, but it wasn't so aggressively post-factual as it became under Trump.
I've recently been blocking some of the Trumpier voices in Twitter, because they infuriate me by saying shit like "The documents in Mar A Lago were covered by executive privilege" or "The American people all love Trump" or "Trump is the least corrupt person to ever be president." Just bonkers, anti-factual statements that get picked up and bounced around conservative media. Treating statements like "Trump can exert executive privilege after leaving the White House" as worthy of debate is just...wrong. It's a failure of journalism.
Josh Marshall likes to say that the institutions of DC tend to lean towards the GOP, not because people in DC are conservative. They aren't. Rather it's because our institutions presume some good faith from both major parties.
In Trumpistan, that couldn't be more dangerous.
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