Many of us see no significant difference between Hillary and those mega-wealthy conservatives who are bludgeoning her campaign. She’s not a progressive, and defeating her wouldn’t be a blow to the progressive agenda.
We progressive Democrats must decide between winning this election, or moving the party in the right direction. It’s a hard choice for me personally, and in the end I’ll probably vote for her out of sheer momentum. But I also have a lot of sympathy for any progressive who votes against her in protest.
We have Obamacare because of Hillarycare. For just one example.
Thank you. 
That is a staggering admission.
If the progressive agenda is to secure power for its own sake, then I can see that. If it’s to actually help people by protecting their access to healthcare, their right to marry as they choose, a tax structure not designed to hollow out entitlement programs, etc., then it certainly would be.
Are you talking about defeating her in the primary or in the general? Because if you think that Hilary losing the general to Trump wouldn’t be a massive blow to the progressive agenda, I’m telling you that you’re wrong. The next president may well have a chance to have a massive influence of the composition of the Supreme Court. At the very least the president will choose between a liberal-leaning court and a conservative-leaning court. If you want the Republicans to be making that choice, by all means, work to defeat Hillary. See how that turns out for the progressive agenda.
Seriously, is there a progressive in all of America who looks back on the 2000 election and things that it was a good thing for the progressive agenda that Gore lost to Bush? Because they’re facing a very similar choice in this election.
That’s not the choice you face. That makes zero sense. Helping to tank this election will not lead mainstream Democrats like me (who, you will notice, outnumber your faction) to meekly hand over the keys to the party. You can keep trying to win a majority for your preferred candidates in future cycles, but blowing up Hillary’s chances will only make that tougher, by alienating the very people you need to woo.
Anyone who seriously thinks Trump and Clinton are even roughly interchangeable is probably not amenable to persuasion, not by this point.
So Trump wins (and almost ipso facto both the House and the Senate remain GOP). You’re willing to give up SSM, Obamacare (complete rollback, preexisting conditions, no subsidies, everything), get us further involved in a bunch of foreign conflicts, AND lose the USSC for the next 20-30 years. Unless you’re in your 20s now, you won’t live to see the US get back to where it is NOW as a progressive nation, let alone move farther along the path. Hillary’s by no means perfect, but do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
We also have Obamacare because of Jim Webb. I guess that means Webb should be the nominee.
Slacker, I have bad news for you, about Hillary Clinton.
Mosier,
I am going to assume for the sake of discussion that you are not just whooshing …
Do you believe in democracy or tyranny of a minority?
You do, I think, appreciate that the results of the primary demonstrate that most Democrats and most who have voted in the Democratic primaries and caucuses (including lots of those who are not Democrats) want Clinton, that your desires are not those of the majority of the party.
And that the top priority items on your agenda, even if agreed with by some others, are minimally not the top items for a majority of other Americans. The group that you call “progressive Democrats” (a group that you’d exclude many mere impure liberals from) cannot win even the nomination without being part of a coalition that includes more than itself.
So what to do? You are in car with a bunch of others who want to travel in the same general direction that you do but maybe not as far or maybe frustrate you because they want to stop off and see the world’s largest ball of string, just 10 miles out of the way. Someone else has been elected to drive.
You can try to grab the wheel and try to crash the car, believing that such moves the car in the right direction somehow. Unlikely an option that gets the others in the car to want to share transportation with you
You can stay in the car, help with gas money, make some allies, compromise on what music gets played, and try to get enough of the others in the car to agree to skip the stupid world’s largest ball of string and maybe plan on going a little farther than they thought they had wanted to go. Maybe you can convince them maybe not, but meanwhile you are moving in the direction you wanted to go (Dang, you know just because the sign says 55 doesn’t mean we can’t go 60 or maybe even 65! Pedal to the metal already! Really? The scenic route? Yeah all the others in the car want that route.)
Or you can get out of the car and find other transportation.
I am fine with either of the second two and would try to insist on the third if you tried the first.
Wow, this board has gone deep into Bernie Derangement Syndrome lately, hasn’t it?
foolsguinea,
Please expound.
Is it deranged to think that characterizing Clinton basically being crooked and passive aggressively supporting the actions of those who throw chairs, yell obscenities at children, and make death threats including against officials grandkids, (these energized supporters need to be welcomed into the party) may increase the chance of a Trump win and minimally hurt the chances for as much of a win downticket? Clinton is so strong against Trump that there is no concern about that?
Or is it deranged to think Clinton will likely win against Trump so therefore any attack against her is fair game in order to convince the superdelegates to overrule the will of the people and save the party?
Or is it deranged to believe that Team Sanders intends on finishing up with a strong negative push on Clinton trying to harm her as best as they can with no concern about the consequences? Surely they wouldn’t do that. You’d have to be deranged to think they would.
In which of those ways are some of us (and I do assume I am included) deranged?
Bernie Derangement Syndrome: The irrational belief that one is entitled to a major political party nomination despite a deficit of nearly 300 delegates and three million primary votes. Usually accompanied by outbursts of sanctimony, delusions of persecution, messianism/grandiosity, unruly hair, and finger-wagging.
Quite right. Amazing that foolsguinea would even introduce such a term, intending the opposite meaning, at a time like this.
DSeid, very nice analogy/parable.
Objectively, her voting record in the Senate was to the left of the center-most Democrat. She’s a pragmatist, but tended to push the Bill Clinton admin in a somewhat leftish direction.
Bernie Sanders is from the tail end of the distribution. I liked the guy a week ago, but it would be extraordinary if such a fringe candidate attained the Presidency. And OBTW, if he did, he would still have to deal with a Congress that… had just lost its most extreme member.
Sanders would have to be an idiot if he told his supporters to vote against Hillary in November. And frankly he isn’t one: he’s nothing like Ralph Nader. I mean c’mon, President HRC would sign basically anything that Bernie sponsors that lands on her desk (with the possible exception of certain foreign policy stuff). The challenge would be to get it to pass the House and Senate.
Yes, yes, we need a larger progressive caucus. But more than that we have to flip Republican seats.
There were a lot of responses to my post, so I picked the most thorough one to respond to. I apologize in advance for missing some of the points other posters made.
Thanks, because I’m not.
You’ve poisoned the well pretty badly with this question. The only response I can give is that my sympathy for Bernie supporters who are willing to stay home rather than vote for Hillary absolutely does not imply support for a minority tyranny, as you suggest.
Not necessarily. Votes can coalesce behind a candidate for lots of reasons other than people actually preferring that candidate. For example, Republicans who would rather face Hillary in the general election may vote for her over Bernie (which according to poll results, may be a pretty smart move). Another example is that some Democrats don’t prefer one candidate over the other, but vote for the candidate who is ahead in the delegate count, in hopes of ending the primary as early as possible to give more time for the general campaign (which is why the superdelegate issue is kind of a big deal, and the start of the “foul!” calls from Bernie supporters).
Even worse is the issue of the DNC clearly favoring one candidate above the other, bending their own rules to support that candidate, and even actively campaigning against one of their own candidates and diverting donations clearly meant to support the opposition candidate. Bernie supporters got emails from the DNC, from addresses like “supportbernie”, with pictures of Bernie’s face on them, which solicited donations that ended up in the RNC stop-Bernie-at-all-costs fund. When people are very reasonably upset by this, we get responses like what foolsguinea and Nonsuch wrote just above this, which make light of these complaints and patronize the people voicing them.
Also not true, if you look at national polls which mostly showed Bernie more favorable against Republican candidates than Hillary is. They both would win (except Hillary who wasn’t polling ahead of Kasich), but Bernie wins more.
I think the group I call progressives are a much bigger block of votes than we’re represented by. You’re acting like Hillary doesn’t need our support to win, which is probably not true. You need us as much as we need you, and you can’t promise us nothing, and ridicule us, and downplay our influence, and deny us a seat at the table, and then expect us to go along with you by saying “look at that other guy. He’s even worse! You don’t want to be the guy who got him elected, do you? If he’s elected, it’s your fault!”
No, sorry, but it’s not our fault if Hillary loses. It’s yours, for not offering anything on the issues we care about, which are mostly 1. too much control of the goverment by big business and wall street, and 2. too much corruption and the “insider” mentality in government. Hillary represents exactly what we hate the most about the government, and by putting her up you can’t possibly be surprised that the people who care about those particular issues will feel left out.
The whole point of Bernie’s campaign is that some people are starting to have doubts that the Democratic party wants to go the same general direction we do. We’re starting to wonder if any elected Democrat anywhere will refuse to socialize risks and privatize profits, as Obama has done. The point is, the Democratic party pays lip service to progressives, while driving in the same general direction as Republicans.
There’s another option, which is “completely withdraw from the process in despair and stop participating,” which is what progressive have no good reason not to do. Nobody represents us, and they really never have. Democrats and Republicans want to snipe about religion and gay marriage and legalizing drugs and who exactly has to pay for health care and who we should invade and why and how we’re allowed to kill terrorists, but on the issues we actually care about you’re in absolute lockstep with each other. We’ve recently had 16 years worth of Democrats in the white house who have presided over great booming economic growth, while at the same time the typical American worker’s income has either stagnated or declined in real terms (depending on which way you measure it). In this way, B. Clinton and Obama and H. Clinton are all indistinguishable from each other.
I’m not at the point of trying to get out of your car yet, but I’m close. We’re disaffected voters, and the response from Democrats shouldn’t be “well just stop being disaffected then.”
It should be noted that again and again, people have told reporters they wanted Hillary to be the nominee, but voted Bernie as a way to sort of “attaboy” him and express approval of his message. So it’s wrongheaded to say that Hillary only benefited from her frontrunner status.
As for the rest, follow your conscience. But telling us we are taking the party completely in the wrong direction is not going to get you anywhere. It only reinforces a sense that there is no pleasing you, other than letting you completely run the party. And we’re not going to do that. GL
I think you know better. But then,you still think the Republican alternative is coming out any day now, so there’s that.