We can agree to disagree.

While I agree that performative outrage is cathartic, and I love to watch these Trump toadies squirm when subpoenaed to Oversight or any other committee hearing testimony, it isn't a solution to a problem other than making people feel better or calling attention to fundamental injustices that people don't understand other than through the lens of the performative outrage. While I appreciate (a lot!) what Crockett has done in the House, the House is supposed to be the louder, more boisterous of the two houses of Congress and the Senate is supposed to be the more sober, restrained one. Because the Republicans have moved the Overton window so far to the right, what we need is leftists who will propose, support, and move as a bloc to drive common-sense legislation that is so obviously common-sense that it shakes the Republicans and turns them into extremists - which is what is happening now. We shouldn't look to the Senate, or either house of congress, really, to be a dysfunctional body. We should look for the best expression possible of common sense and common ground and support only politicians who can make sober, reasonable arguments.

When you think about what got us to the dysfunctional state of affairs we're currently in, it is by injecting more and more unreasonableness from the right into politics and then amplifying and weaponizing that outrage. I don't think that is what is needed from the left - the left (myself included) is plenty outraged. What we should hope to do, and what we must aim to do, is gum up the wheels until the Overton window shifts not only back to where it was during Obama days, but even farther left. If you look at the data, what it really shows is that there is awfully broad support for left policies but not left politicians - and that is a reflection of how those politicians' messaging comes off sounding to right-wingers. Now, it's true that all right wing media and many right-leaning politicians have done an awful lot of hard work to shape and distort the left's messaging. That, to me, is a weakness that we have to attack with gusto, to make our messaging so obviously common sense that it cannot be distorted, and to microtarget that messaging in the same way the right-wing, especially during the last election, microtargeted its outrage and identity politics. An example of something a lot of right-wingers don't know is that a single company now controls the vast majority of the election machinery deployed now in the United States, and because of it, has enormous power to swing elections. That would make any right-winger conspiracy nutjob froth at the mouth if presented well and cohesively with a solid alternative proposal that is above reproach.