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Republicans Face Angry Voters at Town Halls, Hinting at Broader Backlash
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Exactly. In order to promise to "fix the government" you need to lie to them and claim the government is broken, first. That's where liars have a leg up.
A lot of people here are developers or tech adjacent so I'll offer this strained analogy: this "the government is broken" narrative is tantamount to an intern hot off their Learning NodeJS course coming in and telling everyone that their complex production systems are trash and need to be completely rebuilt. That intern doesn't have any of the context, experience, or knowledge to make that determination and often creates conflicts within the team instead of just looking forward to the next iteration for improvement. Meanwhile, the professionals have to keep cleaning up their mess.
Elon Musk is this intern. Boebert, MTG, Tuberville, etc, are this intern. The GOP has been promoting and encouraging these interns and has since Reagan.
Can the government be improved? Absolutely. Should the interns be doing it? No.
Well, there are some broken parts of the government thst do need fixing. The courts don't have a way to enforce rulings. Laws that limit executive overreach don't have an enforcement mechanism. Too much power is concentrated in the oval office.
It is broken, but not because of spending or any of the stuff Republicans claim to be broken. It is broken because it allows for their shenanigans.
Dems could have run on fixing the actual flaws in the system that are allowing this coup, but they chose to appeal to moderates instead. In the future they could run on fixing the flaws, but would need to follow through when they have the ability.
Even if it didn't have that outward appearance, the liars would have lied to ensure that was the message.
Here's an example of this with Democrats trying to improve access to voting:
https://barr.house.gov/2021/3/rep-barr-denounces-house-democrats-h-r-1-the-election-power-grab-act
Here's Democrats trying to fix the courts:
https://www.courthousenews.com/republicans-wont-budge-as-biden-details-supreme-court-reform-plan/
Here's the Democrats trying to give people in DC access to representation:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-republicans-warn-h-r-51-is-an-unconstitutional-unworkable-democrat-power-grab/
This isn't hypothetical partisan complaining.. the past is littered with examples of Democrats attempting to do the very things that people complain they aren't doing -- with Republicans whipping up lies to feed the electorate undermining those efforts.
But the answer isn't to become liars, too.
That's the rub. The issues that the average voter thinks they're concerned about were spoon-fed to them by the liars. Which means we can either have Democrats also lie, or they can tell the truth and fix the actual problems.