Democratic candidates won all 30 of Northern Virginia’s seats in the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday as the party was set to significantly expand its 51-49 majority in the state’s lower chamber.
As of 11 p.m., Democrats had picked up 13 seats statewide, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. With only one race undecided, the Democrats will hold at least 64 of the 100 seats, the most they have held in nearly 40 years.
That is exactly what I mean: The creeping erosion of rights and protections. Sudden change can lead to backlash by people who hate change, but slow change can dig far deeper hooks with less resistance. My pr-hope-osition is that this could work the other way too. If people aren’t ready for a full swing-around to progressive politics, maybe an iterative “slightly better” can ease them in.
Obviously, slow progress is agonising and we’d like things to get better quickly, but if it means coaxing formerly reactionary regressives out of their hole, maybe it’s a sensible approach for deep red areas.
Umm… they absolutely are. Almost every progressive policy position you can think of is supported by the majority of Americans. You’ll piss off reactionaries, but you’ll always piss off reactionaries; that’s why they’re reactionaries.
Realistically this only works one way. You can trick your average person into being the frog in the boiling pot, but the rich and powerful (aka the people you’re actually pissing off with progressive politics)? Absolutely not. They’re on to that stuff, that’s why progress always comes (or at least starts) with large movements and flashy acts of resistance; slow progress will simply fizzle into nothing or be rolled back faster than yuu can push for it. Also “you can have human rights but you have to Wait™” is always going to piss off people, who will flock to whoever promises (truthfully or not) to get them what they want now. People can tolerate incompetent leaders, but not ineffectual leaders.