Is there anything about Biden that you actually admire?

Politics & Elections
202

Fair enough.

I don’t want a democracy in which 1/4 of the electorate gets to make all the rules. Not even if it’s my 1/4. I also don’t want a democracy in which 1/4 of the electorate basically has no voice in government. Honestly, I’m not sure if the electorate as a whole has a meaningful voice in federal politics. Dissatisfaction with US politics is hardly limited to the far left or far right. “I will vote for Biden because he is the lesser of the two evils that this system holds me hostage to” is hardly a shining endorsement of our electoral system.

To be sure: the electoral changes I would like to see would give more voice to both the far left and the far right. But it would shift power away from the elites and to the commoners.

Heh, I harbor no illusion that yelling on message boards is anything more than enjoyable, challenging escapism. It’s a social video game of sorts. It’s certainly no agent for political change. But the SDMB IS a good sounding board for whacky ideas that won’t really get discussed much anywhere else that I know of. I run in leftist circles in real life, but there’s not much ideological dissent there. Preaching to the choir isn’t a particularly worthwhile use of my time, but having my ideas challenged by rational, constructive dissent here IS – the same kind of dissent you’ll rarely if ever find on Facebook or Reddit, say. The sort of “civilized discourse” that the elites refer to in the good old days… I don’t see that anywhere else in society anymore, except here. The rest of society seems to be headed towards a civil war, while here we’re still living in the comforts of the 90s and talking about it all in a cool, detached way. It’s not particularly useful, but it is enjoyable.

You know, part of the structural problem – this silencing of all but the two major parties – is the whole reason I don’t trust either of them to begin with. Politics isn’t a game to me, for better or worse. I vote my values. Where a mainline candidate endorses them, they’ll get my vote. Where they don’t, they won’t. It’s been that way since I was old enough to vote, and will probably continue to vote that way until I die, not because I have a spiteful agenda against Biden, but because that’s the sort of democracy I want. The sort of democracy that any country deserves, one where their leaders actually reflect the values and needs of their constituents.

Long before I even knew who Sanders was, I had these same resentments. I harbor them still, even as Sanders is no longer relevant. Because those same structural problems ARE still relevant, and if Biden doesn’t work on them, the next Trump WILL come, and he will be even worse.

203

There are two distinct things here:

  1. The question of whether a democratic society should veer towards the left, right, or center

  2. Whether that question can even be meaningfully asked and experimented on within the federal government

Trump has shown it CAN veer hard-right, resulting in an unmitigated dogshit government and 150,000 dead Americans. What we don’t know is whether the Democratic Party would allow it to go any further left, and if it did, whether the outcome would be more successful.

But long before that question can be asked and answered, the reality is that if American politics can only ever teeter between center-right and far-right (by the standards of the developed, civilized world), America is doomed, and probably will take out large swaths of humanity with it. Hence my desire for revolutionary electoral reform… even if the sort of populist leftism I want doesn’t win, it allows more room for experimentation and change.

204

No politics isn’t a game nor is it a purely philosophical exercise. Who is elected next year will have real world consequences for real world people. You can’t take the purest of motives and ideals to your oncologist in exchange for cancer treatment.

So you want a radical change in the system and won’t accept anything less, complaining that we can’t wait for an incremental approach and so must tear the whole system down now. How do you expect that to work exactly and on what time frame? What are the policies you want enacted and how will revolution further those ideas. Without knowing you, but based on what I’m hearing I expect the sort of things you want are

  • Universal health care
  • Strong safety net
  • Reduction of inequality
  • Adressing of climate change
  • Advancement of civil rights
  • etc.

All of these require a strong federal government and rule of law in order for them to be achieved. Burning down the house and rebuilding from the ground up isn’t going to bring these ideals closer it is going to push them off indefinitely. Can you name one instance in history where going from democracy->dictatorship->revolution that didn’t end up with people being worse off than when they started?

Saying that if we make things bad enough the people will rise up and cast of the shackles of oppression to make things a liberal utopia is as naive as saying that if we get rid of Saddam Hussein the people will great us as liberators and transform into a flourishing democracy. All of the participants of the Arab spring thought just the way you did, which of those do you want the US to emulate?

205

It’s because your position doesn’t seem to make much sense. This all came about because you liked Kanye before he became all relgious. But there there is nothingf in Kanye’s poiotions that he is anti-abortion (as you took pains to show where Biden’s “mental illness” was acceptable to you). In addition Kanye has always been pro-LGBTQ (he immediate accepted Caitlyn Jenner’s transition and got the rest of the Kardiasians on board from all reports) and nothing seems to indicate that he’s planning on going back to that.

I would posit that Biden is far more serious about his faith than Kanye (and definitely more than Trump). And that Biden’s faith guides his policy positions far more than Kanye or Trump as well.

So your comment seemed to be reflex to Kanye’s conversion wthout any real analysis. You seemingly just wanted to bash his being religious. Or perhaps you realized how nuts it was to double down on the outsider by going from Trump to Kanye.

206

This is a gross mischaracterisation of Sander’s position. A more accurate one would go like this:

There’s a store which has three-quarters of its lights gone out. The ones left are all flickering. There are some sections of the store which are completely dark and present a serious occupational and safety hazard.

Trump is the guy who wants to build a bonfire in the middle of the store. Sanders wants to replace all the lights with environmentally friendly modern LED lights, just like the ones that other store has been using for years. Biden is the one saying, “We don’t need to do anything at all about the lights. They’ve served us just fine for the last fifty years.”

207

And I feel this is an inaccurate representation of Biden.

Biden’s not somebody who would let three quarters of the lights burn out. He’s the guy who would have replaced light bulbs as they burned out and kept the store well lit.

Sanders is the guy who would want to replace the entire lighting system with a new system. So he would let the light bulbs burn out and not replace any of them until the store was so dark that nobody can see and then say the store needs to pay for a complete replacement. Sanders and his supporters are people who want a crisis to occur in order to create the justification for their radical solutions. They don’t want somebody like Biden to keep things going; they want everything to crash to the ground.

I worry about the Sanders supporters who would rather see Trump making America’s problems worse than see Biden making America’s problem better.

208

This seems pretty admirable:

Summary: he’s putting together a huge foreign policy task force that seems to be pushing a completely different direction for our influence abroad, largely undoing most of Trump’s idiocy, and switching to be more about trade than military might. The video goes into details based on who have been shown to be part of it.

209

Not really sure how you can look at 150,000 dead Americans, think that it’s fine to restore the circumstances that started all this 4 years ago, and then call me naive for thinking “incrementalism didn’t work the last two decades, it got us Trump, it’s not going to prevent the next Trump, and it’s going to be much worse next time.” I don’t understand how you think continually repeating the mistakes of the past is a fix for our social ills.

Yes, I want most on that list (which rational non sociopath wouldn’t?), but by far the most urgent is climate change. The other stuff can wait for incrementalism, perhaps.

As for revolutions, most of the developed world got to where they were through them. I don’t think it’s particularly in that order you described. Sometimes it takes several attempts. Sometimes they fail. Not that it’s my first choice, but even a failed America with less industrial output would also be a way to slow down climate change. The alternative, a global war with a fascist USA against a fascist China, with Russia and the EU caught in the middle, suddenly seems all too possible again, especially with climate change exacerbating climate refugeeism and the resulting ultranationalism. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending it’ll all be all right if we just take it slow doesn’t make it so.

Realistically, I do not agree with your assessment that the future is incrementalism or revolution. I think it’s more “fucked if we do, fucked if we don’t”. The time for incrementalism was the 90s and 2000s. The GOP prevented that, and it’s now it’s too late, leaving us with a 1% chance of success if we do, and a 0% chance if we don’t. Terrible odds either way, but that’s what we get for decades of civic complacency. We’re reaping what we sowed. And the longer we wait, the worse it’ll get. I’m glad Biden is finally taking it seriously. I doubt it’s enough, but it’s a big attempt for which deserves some kudos. And a lot of crossed fingers.

Maybe you missed the context, but that whole thing is due to a July 12th post from another poster (Czarcasm?) saying that Kanye opposes abortion. If that is wrong, yes, all of this would seem nonsensical. I should double check…

Hmm. It doesn’t look like he’s actually anti abortion. He made some emotional comments relating his own feelings about abortion, then offered pregnant women a million bucks to keep their kids, and then walked it all back when he sobered up a few days later, or so it seems. Kanye West Tells Rally He and Kim Kardashian Considered Aborting Child

Honestly, that doesn’t strike me as religious extremism. And apparently I just took what that other poster said at face value, not having done much research on Kanye myself. I was wrong, and I am sorry, and I should’ve been more careful. Sorry, Kanye, for misjudging you based on hearsay. I think his honesty and subsequent apology actually makes me respect him more.

210

My god, it’s like we have no national memory at all. Clinton got us Bush. “Hope and change” got us Trump. Sanders didn’t create the crises. The two parties did. We inherited them, and Sanders offered workable solutions. For that matter, even Trump peddled solutions. Hillary just pretended like there weren’t problems. Biden, less so this time, thankfully.

Nobody wanted these crises, except maybe opportunistic neo Nazis or Republican elites hell bent on a divide and conquer situation against Americans. And maybe Putin. But here we are, because we kept pretending everything would be fine. They haven’t been fine for decades, they got dramatically worse these last four, even more so this year, and the future is as bleak as we’ve ever seen it. Even with the best leadership possible, we stand hardly any chance of coming out of the other side of this whole. Biden is bandaid at best. The cancers are still there and steadily getting worse.

211

It’s not that we wanted crises. It’s more accurate to say the crises are already here, and more are coming unless we immediately and massively correct course.

Sanders didn’t magically radicalize his base all by himself, he just gave a megaphone to people who’ve been trying to sound the alarm for decades, but nobody listened. Until Trump. If anything, Trump radicalized way more people on the left than Sanders ever could. It’s far easier to unite around a common enemy than try to rally around competing leaders on the same relative side. Even in this thread that’s largely the case.

A generation grew up seeing the disconnect between the America of their parents, one of prosperity and hope, vs the America of the future. We have no future.

In its place is a sobering sense of despair, at multiple converging crises of climate change, ecological collapse, a resurgent China, extreme wealth and power inequality, labor automation, ethnonationalism, supra-national corporate power, electoral cooptation, judicial politicization, civil rights rollbacks, a significant American Nazi movement, fisheries and forestry depletion, aquifer depletion combined with increased severity and incidence of draught on top of already difficult procurement of clean water, school violence, anti-American terrorism, domestic white terrorism, potential rollbacks to what little health-care Americans do have, another advertising/dot-com bubble, housing shortages, foreign propaganda… Sanders didn’t ask for any of that. My generation didn’t either. It was dumped on us and we’re the ones who have to clean it up, even as the people who caused those crises keep telling us they’re not problems. Uh huh.

212

The guy that’s willing to vote for Kanye is trying to school us on how we should go forward and fix all the world’s problems . . . I can’t decide if I should blow my head off or slit my throat.
CMC

213

We need to adopt the governing style of the isle of Tega, from David Eddings’s The Shining Ones:

214

Our elected officials have no outside interests. As soon as they’re elected, everything they own is sold, and the money’s put into the national treasury. I

I would leave a nation that sold off my horses I’d grown fond of, my armor, my swords, my clothes, and of course my family home.

215

According to that description they wouldn’t let you; at least, not unless you left before you were even nominated.

But yes, that passage appears to have been written by one of those people who think that money is an equivalent to everything, and that the only connection people have to their homes, their commensals, etc. is their financial value.

In any case, no, for me that won’t do for writing the amendment. – maybe a clause that you lose everything only if you screw up enough? hard to write that one well, though.

And “the tax rates are set and cannot be changed”? How did they decide how to set them in the first place, and what if the knowledge and circumstances that caused them to do so have changed?

And the government must make a profit? Pandemic, war, weather disaster, doesn’t matter, only thing that matters is the bottom line? That’s not what a government is for.

However I suspect the whole Tegan thing may be at least partly satire (I haven’t read it, though, and don’t know.)

216

Sounds like it to me - almost like Ayn Rand went back in a time machine to ancient Athens.

217

Yes, it’s nonsense from somebody who has a pretty superficial idea of what a government is. I don’t know if Eddings is serious or if he 's just making fun of a character.

Consider these two lines:

“The government has no power, Prince Sparhawk. It exists only to carry out the will of the electorate.”

“The fact that a man’s own personal fortune’s in the treasury forces him to work just as hard as he possibly can to make sure that the government prospers. Many have worked themselves to death looking after the interests of the Republic.”

Which is it? Are the rulers powerless to do anything without popular approval? Or do they have the authority to make decisions on their own?

218

Accept that you don’t necessarily have the choices you want. Understand that holding out for perfection might take any choices you have away from you in the future. As I mentioned either in this thread or another, don’t go to bed hungry because what you really want isn’t on the menu.

A better idea is to try working within the two-party framework as if we were building a multi-party coalition. Moderate progressives want control of the government, just like more staunch progressives do. This is what different factions do in other democracies.

219

And in a lot of cases, this mentality of holding out and not supporting a candidate because he couldn’t magically fix problems made the situation even worse. Not to pick on young voters, but their lack of enthusiasm in 2010 gave us 10 years of political obstruction. Obviously, the fault lies well beyond just young voters - it’s more about disillusioned voters really. But disillusioned voters who stop believing in the possibility of progress contribute to democracy’s decline and play right into the hands of authoritarians.

220

I’d add that multi-party systems don’t have it any better; only better-defined factions. Ultimately, the governance of any diverse populace will face the issue with any policy that is not universally supported.

Perfection is unachievable. Incremental steps are the only way forward. The key to a better society is to increase the rate of the steps, and not lose ground by waiting for leaps forward. Take the leaps when you can, but don’t stop stepping.

Edited to add: I see you made a similar point in your next post.

221

Very true. Proportional Representation systems have the “I don’t have to vote for the lesser of two evils” thing, but when it comes to governing, that party you voted for has to make a lot of compromises if it’s in the ruling coalition.

An example, though not a Proportional Representation, was the UK when the Liberal Democrats entered into a coalition with the Conservatives. While it brought them to the table of power, most Liberal Dems were pissed that their party compromised so much in its coalition - to the point where it felt like they threw in with an ‘evil’.