Why should’t Bernie and his supporters, who want changes like $15 minimum wage, threaten to not vote for Hillary unless she agrees to support what they want? That’s not extortion, that’s how a democratic voting system should work.
No, it’s extortion. It’s a corruption of the vote. But aside from that, it won’t work anyway, for a series of reasons detailed previously.
It’s amazing that so many people seem to think this. Leave aside the ethics of it: how can you not see what a fail it is when it comes to game theory? If every liberal/left faction threatens to bolt unless their exact platform is adopted, how do you deal with the fact that some of their platforms might conflict with each other? And while it’s not so much a concern this year, how do you expect then to defeat the Republicans when they are united (as they were in the past few presidential elections)?
The Canadian Election of 2011 nicely illustrates how progressives who can’t compromise with each other are a boon to the right. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was detested by everyone from the center to the far left. His party only received 39.6% of the popular vote, but translated this into a solid majority of 54% of seats in Parliament. The three left-of-center parties (NDP, Liberal, and Green) combined for 56.3% of the popular vote, but collectively only won 45% of the seats.
As a result, Canadians had to suffer under the leadership of the right wing Harper for nearly a decade (nine years and nine months, to be exact). Harper’s Conservatives did not face the same problem, because the party was the result of the merger of two previous right wing parties that had inefficiently split votes before that.
Moral of the story: if things on both the right and left are fractious, you may or may not get away with being uncompromising. But if the right gets its shit together as they did in Canada, and the various factions on the left continue to insist they cannot brook any compromise, the right is guaranteed to win even if they are significantly outnumbered. And that is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The real problem is that what progressives most want: an end to wealth inequality and getting big money out of politics … is diametrically opposed to what the big money donors that prop up the Democratic centrists want, which is more of both. So the Democratic Party is an intractable problem for progressives. ALL of the other issues are insignificant next to these. There won’t be any sugaring progressives off with promises of defending a woman’s right to choose or LGBT rights or any of that stuff, because they’re much less important to progressives than the other.
One argument that MIGHT have been effective for the centrists would be that a centrist President might nominate a Supreme Court justice that is sympathetic to progressive economic policies and thus keep the court balanced. But President Obama sort of threw a wrench in that one when he nominated Merrick Garland, a corporate water carrier on the bench who’ll do nothing to oppose the oligarchs.
So, why should we vote for Hillary?
I’m not going to waste time and effort begging you to. Go and play in the irrelevant Green Party sandbox, if it makes you feel pure and righteous. I’m all out of fucks to give on that question.
Very seriously do or don’t.
If you see no meaningful difference between the position the country and the world is in with a President Trump or Cruz vs a President Clinton then you should not bother voting for the office, or should vote for someone else out of some perceived principle that you possess.
I strongly suspect we will win without you. And we cannot win as a tent that only allows those who pass your ideological purity test to enter. If Obama’s progress and progressiveness and Supreme nominations and overall performance have been such weak sauce to you that you might as well have had Romney or McCain, then, yes, you might be better off in another party more to your liking. Bye.
Agreed. I thought your position (talking to Evil Captor here) was Bernie >> Hillary >> Trump/Cruz, but you thought that there were benefits to continuing to support Bernie even if he’s not the nominee. If instead your position is Bernie >> Hillary = Trump/Cruz, well, that’s a different conversation.
And I agree, Hillary is much much weaker than Bernie on issues of wealth inequality and the influence of money in politics. And I agree that that’s a huge issue, certainly one of the most important issues, possibly THE most important issue.
But it’s not the only issue. So if you end up with two candidates who both fail on that issue (and I haven’t really researched the positions of Hillary vs Trump/Cruz on that issue, so I can’t tell you whether I think it’s C vs D or D vs F or F vs F----), why not actually pay attention to their other positions?
But after that, if you truly honestly think that a Hillary presidency, and what that means for supreme court nominees, vetos, etc, etc, etc, is no better than a Trump/Cruz presidency, well, I think you’re extraordinarily and stunningly wrong, but hey, that’s why it’s a democracy.
(And it’s worth pointing out that as a generally progressive person, I think there are areas in which Hillary > Bernie.)
Tea Partiers also oppose Citizens United. And frankly, I’m not convinced that Democratic centrists love the status quo either. Hell, I’m not even sure that this is the #1 progressive concern: it’s not like Common Cause receives a lot of hard left support. If progressives were as focused on this issue as you appear to imply, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig would have received a lot more support in the primary.
There are lots of Republicans who feel that they need to ad-bomb their opposition if they want to stay in power. Plenty of Democrats think they could do fine in another environment.
And finally… electing Sanders won’t give us campaign finance reform anyway. To do that would require a lot of heavy lifting - the Presidential campaign is a sideshow in comparison.
Given the preceding, I’m guessing that your stance is mostly tribal. Oh well.
No the real problem is that Bernie progressives are binary. They vote for Clinton in 1992 then don’t vote in 1994 and then leave Clinton to deal with a Republican congress and possibly a republican president after 1996. Then they vote for nothing burger Nader in 2000 knowing he has no chance to win and we end up with George W. Bush. They vote again in mass numbers and help give Obama a stimulus and the push for health care reform but then sit it out again in 2010 and in comes the Tea Party. They sit out elections or vote for ‘protest’ candidates because the tooth fairy didn’t magically deliver the goods.
That’s the problem with Bernie progressives. They either don’t vote or vote for candidates who have no chance in hell at winning instead of supporting the people who actually are in a position to help them out, at least to the extent possible at a given point in time.
Won’t happen.
I’ve got two more words: President Cruz.
Could happen. Would be as destructive as a President Trump, and in some ways, a lot more.
You were told to back away from the insults.
This is a Warning that you are over the line for ignoring Mod instructions and insulting other posters.
[ /Moderating ]
If Bernie is "extorting’ then what are the senate republicans doing? It seems much more anti-social, machievellian, and unconstitutional to me.
You got it in one.
As I said in my reply to your PM, I’m at a loss to understand where you found an insult in that post.
Well here’s the thing. All Hillary and the Dems need to do to keep the progressives in the Democratic pastures is cut a deal with Bernie. Problem is, there would have to be teeth in the deal, no one is gonna take the centrists’ words on faith because they’ve been real dicks about power sharing over the last couple of decades, selling out progressive values at every turn. Something like making Lawrence Lessig head of the Federal Elections Commission, or Elizabeth Warren head of the Treasury Department (if she’d even have the job). Create a really formidable progressive cabinet to push things in a progressive direction … which is the direction most Democrats are going in anyway.
If it doesn’t happen in 2016, it WiLL happen in 2020 … that, or Democrats will be out of power then.
You think the progressive wing is going to defeat Hillary Clinton’s reelection bid if she doesn’t play ball sufficiently? I’m sorry, but I would characterize that as a pipe dream.
A more realistic goal would be to aim for a good compromise candidate in 2020. Someone like the current Secretary of Labor who is clearly a progressive but doesn’t have a radical communist past and is also not a white male.
The same way anyone else can be. If you couldn’t, then people could just make up any ethic they want. Bricker also likes to try and argue that ethics are above reproach, but they aren’t.
To give an absurd example rather than a real one: someone says it’s wrong to step on a crack in the sidewalk because it will cause your mother back pain. Someone could do a test, showing no correlation. That ethic would thus be proven factually incorrect.
An agreement may be implied, but it still is something that both parties have to be aware of. You cannot tell someone else that they have agreed to something when they believe they haven’t. An agreement requires that both parties say that an agreement exists. They must be aware of the expectations of the other before the agreement can be made.
If either party expected loyalty, than they wouldn’t have open primaries, which specifically encourage those who don’t agree to vote. They would put something on the primary ballot to let people know that they are promising to vote for the party in the election. They’d have to let them know their expectations. And, thus, by voting, you’d be saying you agree.
Far from there being some sort of tacit agreement, the evidence points the other way. The parties do not expect the loyalty of primary voters. That’s why SlackerInc is being treated so weirdly for demanding it.
What’s more, your ethic leads to a problem. Imagine that both parties have a Trump. You could have joined a party and tried to vote against him. But, because of your ethic, you did not. Others follow your lead, even though they also would have voted against Trump. And, because of this, both Trumps win their nominations.
Your ethic has just resulted in making sure you don’t have anyone you can vote for in the general that has a chance of winning, and means bad things for the U.S. When you could have voted against one of the Trumps and maybe led to him not being the nominee.
So, not only is your ethic counterfactual, it leads to a worse outcome. Both of these are valid reasons to challenge an ethic.
BigT, if the fact that you can come up with a thought experiment that produces a perverse outcome from a voting system invalidates it, then we have to throw them all out.
Only in the party’s present formation, which is not immutable. If it is possible for the GOP to evolve from the Party of Abraham Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis, which it has done, then it is not impossible for the Democratic Party to evolve from the Party of Milton Friedman into the Party of Eugene Debs.
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President Trump.
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If we want to transform the DP we need to do it from the inside. Third-party runs won’t do it. Sitting out elections won’t do it. Voting for Republicans really won’t do it. Primarying Dems from the left might do it, but that’s always risky.