yeah. there was a brief period during the early Biden Administration, when Synemanchin were thwarting Build Back Better and Democrats seemed hopeless, when i toyed hopefully with the possibility of a kind of European Christian Democratic party emerging from the GOP. 1/

i have no idea whether a Hawley-style successor might to some degree of gone down that road, but in our timeline Biden pulled astonishing legislative victories out of the ashes of BBB humiliation, the successor to Trump is aggrieved Trump and nothing more than plutocratic fascism./fin

(Hawley still has his heterodoxies, even if he concedes them for a rusted nickel. I can’t believe, having lived in Florida beginning 2022, I once saw any hope of anything in DeSantis. DeSantis’ version of “Christian Democracy” would be Salem, Massachusetts.)