To expand on my last post: The current moral panic over the sexual morality of politicians (and other prominent individuals) may be a signal where mass public opinion is sending the message that our next group of elected leaders will be, from a personality standpoint, anti-Trumps.
How do you know a campaign with the theme “Don’t Be A Chump”, featuring dumbass shaming with commercials starring prominent academics and intellectual thought leaders wouldn’t work?
Seems like a plan.
Was it Mark Twain who first said
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes
? Anyway, this is the big political advantage of the GOP. Free to grind out the most loathsome and blatant lies, their exaggerated and inflammatory rhetoric will always surpass a party which embraces science and truth: science leads to long words and equivocations. Do we want both parties to be dominated by corrupt liars? In olden times, we relied on statesmen and journalists to call attention to politician’s lies, but not any more. Anderson Cooper does a good job but low attention-span voters will have changed channels before he’s even introduced his guests. Rachel Maddow only preaches to the converted. No, I’m afraid we’ve turned the country over to Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers. Enjoy.
Yes, the Democrats are dominated by urban elites, rather than the underemployed. I wanted to cry when I saw Democrat elites focus on Bernie Sanders’ acceptance of hunting rifles in Vermont, rather than focus on GOP kleptocracy. Did these idiots even want to win the election?
It would be pleasant to see the Democratic Party move towards sanity. But I’m not sure it will do much good — the suckers, chumps, marks and rubes will still just vote for whomever Sean Hannity tells them to.
Yes.
Repubs are a coalition of rich guys who want a lot more money and don’t give a shit about ideology one way or another, and not-rich guys who care mostly about ideology and are willing to give up money.
See Ditker, H. in post 14. He mentioned 6 things, only one of which is about money.
But that’s basically an assumption on your part of the outcomes of D policies.
There are fewer chumps, rubes, and suckers than you think. A vast majority are trying to accomplish what they believe is best for them a best for the country. Look back at threads about “voting against their best interests” - they are usually assuming values and priorities for people who are voting. However, their priorities and values may be different from yours. This is the point being made above by others - try to understand where they are coming from and why.
In all serious, though, let’s assume for the sake of argument that these “rubes” or “chumps” are basically in an abusive relationship with Republican politicians. That’s a relationship that has grown over time, and the rubes and chumps are likely comfortable with it if they’re not leaving that relationship voluntarily. The idea that someone new can barge in, be abusive in basically the same way and expect to win hearts and minds doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Better to try and show them what a non-abusive relationship can be like, and hope for the best. It’s not guaranteed to work, but the other method is almost certainly guaranteed to fail.
Is it just me or are people unaware that the term rube is a pejorative based upon where someone lives? If people use that term and think it’s OK, if people claiming to be democrat or liberal feel that it’s oh just fine to use these terms to describe people that are prejudicial and discriminatory based upon where they live then you deserve whatever shitty political representation comes your way. And I don’t even feel bad for you. I’ve always been a liberal person and supported liberal causes but the fact that noone seems to care about discriminating against people in this way blows my mind. I never heard Joe Biden use the term rube, I never heard Al Gore say anything approaching this, Bernie Sanders no way. The problem isn’t the politicians, it’s the narrow minded prejudicial people they have to cater to.
Liberalism as I used to understand it and support was against discriminating against people, and used reason not prejudice to guide their values.
But rubes don’t know what the word means, so no harm no foul.
Try2B Comprehensive
Always Remember :
When dealing with the GOP, attack Politicians, Trump, the Bills, or the Big Money Backers.
Never attack a (potentially flip-able) voter.
WOO the Voter.
They are the victims of this GOP swindle.
Replace that word with the n word and see how that sounds. That is what many people who may be inclined to vote for democrats are hearing if they do not live in a big city.
Speaking this way should and does have the effect of making policy take a back seat to rhetoric. People say rural voters are voting against their own interests, but I think most reasonable people, when forced between a choices of one side that may not offer the best policies for them vs. another side that is associated with people who blatantly prejudicial towards them then I think the choice is not that hard.
In other words what rural people are hearing is “those nwords don’t know what’s good for them.”
I find the rhetoric loathsome and the people who use it ignorant.
But that’s just me.
As a suggestion for an answer to the OP’s question, I say the Dems should promise coal mining jobs that never materialize. That one works every time.
Utah’s national monuments were that big an issue to you in the election, or is this just one of the few “accomplishments” that one could actually point to in retrospect?
From a while ago but:
The Democrats are already doing this to a certain extent with Schumer and Pelosi’s “Better Deal” agenda which also includes some promising planks (for example) on anti-monopolism and it seems to have triggered some of the “right” hardcore “Hillary or the Highway” Clintonites and similar types, so they can’t be all wrong. However, the platform is probably not comprehensive or ambitious enough as of yet.
By God, Sir, that is brilliant.
I can’t say I’m motivated by “liberalism”- I consider myself a pragmatist and only registered as a D last year in order to vote in the primaries. I consider all the candidates in every election but honestly, having a math and science education, I find I can never support the Rs.
I don’t intend to discriminate. I think you are touching on something big here though- there is a split between urban and rural people. It would be helpful if this division could be seen as simply a facet of diversity and not turned into a partisan, one-against-the-other kind of conflict.
I grew up fairly rural myself- on the border between the suburbs and the farms. I could walk across the street into undeveloped land and hunt birds, explore the creeks and so on. My gf literally grew up on a farm milking cows and shoveling shit. But now she has a PhD, and I live in a very nice but not very large city- the mountains are just a few miles away. Am I rural or urban? Kinda both. I think many people are one or the other though, and likely to misunderstand the other group. I think this is made obvious with the gun issue- a gun in NYC means something totally different than what it means out in the country. I know people who live on big acreages- they get concerned with drainage, fence repair, are interested in motorcycling and hunting, often on their own land. Their concerns are often very different than what you’d expect out of a New Yorker. Is one better than the other? I don’t really think so. But only one group has a lot of land…
But it does seem like rural areas have had more economic problems than urban areas, generally. They’re more vulnerable to a big employer folding or packing up, a big fish in a smaller pond more closely approximating The Only Game in Town in a less populated area. Are these people more vulnerable to propaganda that tells them the root of their problem is “liberals”? That the reason the jobs left is that the wealthy did not get a tax cut? (The real story is that automation is gobbling up more jobs than anything else, and will continue to do so.) If they are voting for jobs because the Rs are going to bring them back- well I’m sorry, it really looks like they got fooled. I’d call 'em rubes, but I don’t see the rural-specific aspect of the word. You really think it is as bad as the n-word? And, if conditions are only going to get worse, wouldn’t it be best to inform them that they have in fact been fooled, in no uncertain terms, rather than let them suffer the consequences of fake assistance that was only ever offered in order to give a big windfall to the wealthy?
I believe there is a moral component to authority. If a person is in a position of high authority, they should not use it to abuse the powerless for their own profit, which I think is what the GOP is doing with this tax plan. Of course my views may not fit with some people’s conceptions of how capitalism is to be applied, but me, I think it takes place in the context of a nation and that concerns other than a (high-ranking) individual’s personal profit ought to be considered.
Did you read the fist post I made in this thread?
I am not convinced.
I think the GOP electorate breaks down into more groups than “pro-racism” and suckers. A multimillionaire voting for the GOP isn’t a sucker if getting that tax cut really is a priority, for example. But many other people who were swayed by the GOP’s economic message were, IMHO.
It might help if I explained in more detail why I have this opinion. Consider Why Tax Reform Will Lead To BOOMING Economic Growth. This isn’t the end-all be-all of GOP propaganda, but I think it is representative of the line you can find coming from all the major conservative outlets. Pretty much every paragraph promotes some kind of lie, so let’s look at just the main ones.
This is your standard Laffer Curve argument. Tax rates got cut, yet revenues increased, therefore tax rates cuts Always lead to increased revenue!
The first thing to point out here is that the article I am citing is entirely devoid of context. It seems to present a world view in which tax policy is the only thing driving events (besides things like going off the gold standard). First of all, Why was the top rate 91%? Well, back when conservatives were not allergic to arithmetic, Eisenhower realized that the US really ought to pay back the enormous debts it had incurred during WWII. How was he to raise revenue for that? By raising taxes, obviously. The top rate really was 91%, and a Republican administration made it that way. Maybe Eisenhower went too far (I am not claiming the Laffer Curve is pure fiction, merely that the idea is distorted by liars who make marks out of…you know), but noone can claim that the goal of paying down that debt was not achieved. With greater government revenues under Kennedy’s policies, this continued.
In the Reagan era, the Baby Boom generation came to full maturity. Demographics drove the economic boom, not tax policy. Had things been managed more wisely, this period would not have been the dawn of the current age of ever-ballooning federal deficits. The article I’m citing pointedly does not ever mention deficits, just as it pointedly does not mention that the main economic shift during the Nixon era was not the abandonment of the gold standard but the beginning of US dependence on imported oil.
I hope this discussion does not get derailed into a discussion of the merits of the gold standard. What I am saying is that these colossal omissions are the very hallmark of GOP propaganda. They are lying by omission to people who are vulnerable to such lies, for the purpose of entrenching a false narrative in the public mind, for the purpose of the enrichment of a few at the expense of many.
The goal is not national betterment, as is was during the Kennedy or Eisenhower eras. The goal is enriching the already rich, at the expense mainly of those who actually work for a living. It is a rather un-American view if you ask me, which is why they need to resort to deception in the first place. Americans generally mean well, and you only get these kinds of problems when the vicious and powerful lead the masses astray.
This is another lie by omission. While the corporate tax rate may be nominally higher than that of other countries, the rate that American companies actually pay is far lower thanks to loopholes in the tax code, loopholes which the current proposal exacerbates rather than ameliorates. See The Secret To Getting A -45% Corporate Tax Rate:
There is more to that article, you should really read it. Point is, these are nuanced issues and the GOP presents a self-serving, simple minded explanation and then hammers that message into the minds of the vulnerable in what I consider to be a morally bereft way.
How do the Dems turn this reality into votes, and then turn those votes into policy that actually benefits the population at large? It is a sensitive subject.
Bears Ears didn’t happen until after the election, but it was surmised here locally that it was going to happen well before the official announcement. I remember talking to my state rep before and asking him what the odds were of Obama declaring another monument in Utah on his way out the door. He said “100%”. When it did happen, it angered / annoyed people in Utah. Grand Staircase-Escalante has been around long enough that much of the anger has subsided.