Have to?
What’s your level of confidence that this “have to” event will ensue?
If some future Court decision against a Democratic law that is obviously bullshit and built atop right wing legal hackery (e.g., the hypothetical that I posited above of a 5-4 decision declaring Medicare-for-All unconstitutional) comes down in the next few years, I am exceedingly confident that the Dems will pursue a Court-packing scheme in response. Kind of like how a wild animal will lash out in self-defense when cornered.
The Democrats don’t need to fight dirty; they just need to fight for something that resonates with voters. I criticized Bernie Sanders for running an insurgent campaign, but there’s no denying that his message resonated with people, including people outside the Democratic party. I think his campaign could be the starting part for a re-branding of the Democratic party, if it can maintain a balance between identifying core principles to fight fore while knowing when to be pragmatic and compromise.
Who would you say resonated with voters more - Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump?
Keeping in mind that I said “voters” - not progressives, not the SDMB.
Regards,
Shodan
https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/bernie-sanders-favorable-rating
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/donald-trump-favorable-rating
It’s hard to say for sure, because they never faced a head-to-head matchup. But Sanders’ approval rating by the public – not conservative SDMB members – was consistently ~20 percent better than Trump’s, and even while losing his primary, got nearly the same number of primary votes as Trump.
So the data seem to indicate that people prefer Sanders to Trump, but that is no guarantee of how a head-to-head matchup in the general would have gone.
ETA: I’ll note that Clinton’s favorable rating is generally similar to Trump’s.
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinton-favorable-rating
Another possibility would be to do what Trump did to get power - pretend to care about people in low-status groups who were ignored, derided and villified by what had been the status quo in politics. People who are male, “white”, poor or (lowest of the low) all three. There are a lot of those people in the USA and for the time being they’re still allowed to vote.
Given that it’s the “left” that has been ignoring, deriding or villifying those people it would be a very tall order to make that lie convincing, but it’s another option to think about.
The fact that your candidate was beaten in a popularity contest by a burbling fool with all the charm and competence of a dead rat should tell you that you are doing it wrong. Becoming even nastier in response, up to and including murdering politcians you disagree with (as was suggested in this thread) shouldn’t help in a popularity contest. It might, but it shouldn’t.
Well, what if, indeed, Medicare-for-all *is *unconstitutional and shouldn’t pass?
I enjoyed the articles in the OP. While it may be true that procedure has been defeating policy at the ballot box Lately, in the long run policy is what will matter the most.
The answer was in the articles, but it isn’t, I don’t think, sinking to the GOP’s level of dishonesty and chicanery. The answer is in the motive of the Flight 93 election Trump supporter radicals: they fear that to not support the GOP candidate over someone qualified to run a government is to admit that conservativism is wrong.
Well no shit. If you have to run on “climate change is a hoax”, conservativism is plainly wrong. If you have to run on “tax cuts pay for themselves”, and then fake bribe the voters with tax cuts that aren’t even for them, conservativism is wrong. If you have to run on “Let’s re-nuclearize Iran because everything the opposition touches is bad, no need to discuss the details, merits or consequences”, conservativism is wrong.
People on the right are insecure about conservativism being wrong because, no shit, it is. The better strategy for the Dems will be to appropriate what works about conservative ideology and destroy them on their bullshit. Don’t let them position themselves as the only people who care about their families just because they scream about it all the time. Don’t let them own religious freedom, just present the non-bullshit, not bigoted version. Don’t let them get away with the lie a poster upthead posted, that Dems don’t care about poor white men. There is lip service followed by screwing them, what the GOP offers, and then there are things like safeguarding social security, reducing the debt, ensuring good education so that people can actually get good jobs instead of waiting for the fantasy of the return of coal jobs.
There are so many ways the Dems are superior in terms of what they will actually Do. The GOP is mostly built on marketing. Don’t become the GOP.
Now, the suggestion of dividing California into 3 States is on the ballot there already, but that isn’t a Dem thing, that is a California thing. Don’t let people be fooled otherwise, if you can get through to the knuckleheads at all that is.
Suppose the Dems do attempt to pack the court, could the current court somehow find it unconstitutional?
It certainly wouldn’t seem to legitimately be so, but could they rationalize it somehow? Could they just say “because we said so”?
Why do you think that, though? There’s a growing belief among political science that policy actually doesn’t matter, or at least not nearly as much as one might expect.
If norm-breaking becomes the norm, how do you break norms anymore?
It’s not a lie. Biological group identity and advocacy in the pusuit of authoritarianism is deeply engrained in the “left” and the party couldn’t stop it even if they wanted to.
True…and that’s less bad than what the other side is offering them.
I’m what used to be called a liberal when I was younger. Equality, tolerance, diversity, freedom, all that sort of stuff. I won’t use the term any more because contempory “liberalism” is the opposite of all those things. Nowadays I find more common ground on the “right” of the political spectrum and with conservatives. Which is sad for me, because I don’t have much common ground with them. The main problem I have in elections is finding a candidate I can bear to vote for. Here in the UK I have the Liberal Democrats, who I can see as the least bad option, but they have no chance of winning anything much unless we ditch first past the post and have some form of more directly representative voting. The lib dems usually come second, which is currently completely useless.
I can’t pretend to understand your assertion, no offense. Do you mean purely in terms of winning elections? Because we don’t live in some fantasy world.
Party X’s policy is to enslave black people. Party Y says all citizens should have equal rights. Isn’t there a difference?
Party X’s policy is to rack up debts until the public is on the hook for $1 trillion a year in debt payments. Party Y promotes a long term debt reduction plan. No difference?
Party X plans to nuke Tehran and occupy Iran. Party Y teams with the rest of the world to disarm them. Same diff?
Party X intends to trash our alliances to promote the interests of Russia. Party Y seeks to maintain our priveledged position in the world. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other?
From what planet is this notion of yours?
I just don’t believe you. But so what? I certainly don’t know everything. Can you provide a cite?
Uh… this world.
Christopher Achen
Well, people aren’t very good at attributing the implications of the decisions that are made by policymakers to those policymakers. In order to do this efficiently, they’d have to have a pretty canny understanding of how the behavior of any particular elected official or party contributes to the good or bad outcomes they experience. And they’re not very good at that. They’d have to take a long view of the effects of policy, and they’re not very good at that. So they make these retrospective judgments, but in a kind of haphazard way that doesn’t seem to promote accountability in the way that political scientists would like to think it does.
Sean Illing
So you found no evidence to suggest that voters understand cause and effect in any coherent way?
Christopher Achen
Again, we’re saying, yeah, the world is immensely complicated, so to say that one has a good understanding of cause and effect in this domain would really be asking quite a lot of people. Certainly, economists don’t agree about the impact of economic policies on the well-being of individuals or groups. And so what we do in the book in order to try and get around those difficulties is to focus on some cases where it seems pretty clear that the incumbent politicians ought not to be paying for people’s bad fortunes and find that even those cases, there seems to be a pretty systematic pattern of punishment.
Intuitively, it makes sense. Clinton was running, basically, on “Hey, I’m more of the last guy you liked”. Her predecessor was really popular, the economy was doing as well as it had in the last decade, and in terms of proposed policy details, she was miles ahead of Trump, who not so much “didn’t run on policy” as “considered actual policymaking a complete waste of time”. And she lost. Hard.
Perhaps the most telling moment of the election: Clinton goes out to coal country, says, “We’re gonna find ways to help you all get back to work, even if we can’t bring back coal” and then proposes concrete policies to help them, Trump goes out there and offers the impossible promise of bringing back coal jobs with no specifics, and the former gets crucified by a quote mine while the latter gets feted.
Then, after Trump’s win, he proceeded to slash the Appalacian Regional Commission. How many people in coal country do you think know about that? How many still care a year later, despite the fact that it’s really quite impactful on their region? His popularity in the region sure hasn’t been hurt much by it. And compared to some of the issues being raised, that’s an incredibly obvious and direct signal! What effect does Trump’s aggressive enforcement of border control have on the economy? Has anyone calculated it? If it turns out the answer is “this is really bad for the economy but the economy is so good it doesn’t really make that big of a difference at the moment”, do you think republicans will care? Do you think the people who use Fox news as a main source of information will even hear about the study? Republican think tanks will almost certainly put out studies that show the opposite. And even if they’re completely full of shit, the average voter just doesn’t have the head for complex investigations of economics. God knows I don’t.
I could go on. How about Obamacare, which was horribly unpopular (albeit quite popular when split into its component parts) right up until republicans tried to gut it and people realized what was going on? Isn’t it interesting that despite the fact that the republican legislative agenda is about as popular as the average republican congressman, the republicans are still creeping up in the polls?
Yes, if your examples of policy are things like “nuke a foreign country” or “reinstate slavery”, you can expect policy to matter at least a little bit. But those are drastic, clear, and way outside the overton window. Remember - Bush won a re-election after invading Iraq, and his party didn’t get punished until 2006 - a response which lasted all of four years before people got really pissy at the democrats because the economy sucked - something the democrats could not have realistically done anything about.
Ha ha it’s funny because exactly that is happening and most republicans still won’t budge on their support for Trump.
I certainly agree with some of what they are saying, but the views of two scholars hardly constitutes a “world.” Event that article gives a pretty fair shake to the conventional wisdom of democracy: that there are lurches and stagnations and reactions and tos and fros, but over time, voters chart a course that is generally coherent. The shortcomings of the system, notably voters sometimes making dumb decisions, has been noted for a very long time. Just look at Winston Churchill’s quotes about voters and democracies. I’d say that view is still predominant in society, even if two learned academics have criticisms of it.
There’s a problem with intuition: it is lacking in rigor. Pretty much every political adviser ever would strongly urge against a campaign based on “I’m just like the previous politician.” Hillary Clinton didn’t do that, she ran on her own record as senator, Secretary of State, and so on… not “I’m going to keep doing what Obama did.” So, you’re way off on that fact.
Plus, she suffered an upset, but when you say she lost “hard” that seems to imply that it was a landslide. That’s factually wrong too. It was a very surprising upset, but it was not a big loss in terms of the results of the voting.
You’re comparing people’s concern about a $150 million government entity with a $30 billion industry. I agree that those voters made a terrible mistake, but it’s obvious to me that their interest is with the coal industry generally, not a Federally chartered planning commission that has its headquarters in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC.
As far as your other comments in the post that I will pass on quoting, I think its fair to characterize them as criticism of the Trump Administration that I agree with wholeheartedly. But they don’t go to the fundamental issue at stake: nobody is claiming that people vote in their perfect self interest in every election; the conventional wisdom is that over time, people chart a somewhat sloppy course toward their own policy preferences.
You may see things that way, but tens of millions of other voters may not. You can’t project that way when trying to win elections.
Because it obviously isn’t.
Any decision to the contrary would be blatant right wing judicial hackery that would (a) destroy all of SCOTUS’s institutional legitimacy (if that hasn’t already happened due to a similarly preposterous anti-ACA decision (b) lead to and justify Democratic Court-packing.
Again, there are things that could be done to avoid this. Gorsuch could resign. Democrats could impeach him. A Constitutional amendment could happen. But it just isn’t sustainable to allow the GOP’s theft to turn SCOTUS into a kangaroo court whose only purpose is to strike down Democratic laws.
Is this a fantasy wish list, or do think any of this will/could actually happen? If the latter, in what kind of timeline are you looking at? How will it be accomplished?
Are you seriously disputing that biological group identity and advocacy in the pursuit of authoritarianism is deeply engrained in the “left”?
Really? It’s pretty much the only thing the numerous factions have in common. I just don’t believe you (or anyone else) genuinely disputes it.
Admittedly, it’s not always biological group identity. There are some factions that use social class as group identity instead, but that’s not very common. Not too many bona fide communists around nowadays.
There’s no way you’re not aware of biological group identity and advocacy ideologies or that most of their followers are on the “left” politically or that they favour authoritarianism. It’s just not feasible. You’ve never heard of feminism, for example? Black Lives Matter? Biological group identity and advocacy ideologies. Mostly on the “left” politically. As for authoritarianism, that’s pretty much a requirement for imposing their ideology. Which, of course, is why they’re opposed to freedom of speech. You must have noticed the campaigning against freedom of speech. It hasn’t been subtle or local.