Let's keep sneering at "Bernie bros", it worked so well last time.

The BBQ Pit
401

I admire your unbridled optimism.

Is it your fundamental understanding and belief, that a conservative like Urbanredneck can be trusted to cast his vote for Bernie in order to get UHC? You really really believe that in your heart of hearts? That he, and others like him, will cast a vote for Bernie but not any of the other hopefuls who will, at the bare minimum, improve the ACA and move the country closer to UHC.

Pass me what you’re smoking. Because while it may not change reality, it might provide me with a period of respite from it.

402

What does that even mean, do I “trust” him? Do you think that I funneled Russian monies to him to get him to post that or something?

“Here is a concrete example of one such person for the 2020 election, as a further example of the real world thing that obviously exists that I’ve been describing in the abstract,” I helpfully volunteered in case me just talking about it wasn’t clear.

“Pass me what you’re smoking,” he responded, in typical, imitable, and oh so delightful, don’t get me wrong, fashion.

403

It’s not about trust – this stuff about electability is a guess. But there’s just as much reason to believe that Bernie is the most electable candidate as anyone else. If it’s true that lots of Bernie supporters won’t vote for another Democrat, that sucks if another Democrat is nominated, but it’s actually an argument in favor of Bernie (shitty as that decision making is by those non-Democrat-supporting Bernie supporters). If that’s the case, then Bernie would be making a lot of non-D voters into D-voters on election day.

That’s not the only piece of data – there are also GE polls that show Bernie doing well, both nationally and in various important states (along with reach states like TX, IIRC).

I’m far from certain, but right now I think there’s a good case that Bernie has the best chance to win. Not anything close to an overwhelming case, but no one else has that either.

But this isn’t something we can know with much more than guess-level confidence at this time. My instincts, and the conventional wisdom, told me there was no way Trump could win in 2016, and that Hillary was the Dem’s best shot. Obviously the first part was false, and I think the 2nd part was too, though we’ll never know for sure (though a Bernie-led blue wave would be pretty strong evidence). I’m embracing the uncertainty. Until Nate Silver says with any confidence and with a whole lot of data behind him that one candidate or the other is more likely to win the general, then all of this is a guess. Go with who you feel has the best combination of policies you like and chance to win. For me, that’s Bernie by a mile right now.

404

I don’t think you put him up to anything. It’s my position that Democrats/progressives can’t rely on conservatives to defeat Trump. I welcome and celebrate any recovering Republican vote that is cast for the Dem nominee, whoever that may be. But I’m troubled by the naive trust of those who so vehemently opposed the last administration and its policies then voted for the current administration and its policies, and now claim that they’ll vote for the most progressive of Dem policies BUT ONLY IF the correct Dem candidate is nominated.

Sorry. Color me a skeptic.

405

As I’ve said before, I support virtually all of Bernie’s policies. Big fan. If he is nominated, I will be delighted. Much more so than I would be delighted about Bloomberg or Klobuchar, for example.

But while this thread has “Bernie” in the title and OP, I think the conversation has been about those who are dyed in the wool Bernie supporters who have intimated, or came right out and said, they would not vote for any other candidate that isn’t Bernie. A conservative like **Urbanredneck **is essentially saying the same thing. A Bernie supporter, like Jimmy Chitwood, and you to some extent, are saying… ‘See? This is why Bernie should be our man!’ And I’m saying, absolutely. He will be mine. If nominated. If not, I have no doubt you’ll support any other Dem. I assume bets are off on Urban’s support. Ditto on the “Bernie or Bust” crew. Jury seems to be still out on Jimmy’s decision. Or am I wrong about that?

The long and short of it is this: I’m not overjoyed at the prospect of having to depend on fickle as fuck allies. It’s been my experience in life that it never goes well.

406

Yes. If it’s true that Sanders supporters will defect, there is that argument, which was earlier in this thread called extortion.

But there’s also this way of looking at it: if it’s true that Sanders supporters who didn’t vote Clinton cost Clinton that election, then Sanders would have won that election. Sanders was, therefore, a better candidate. Unless, that is, Clinton voters would have defected because of their own politics, but I have it on good authority from this thread that this is not an issue. The invective against Sanders supporters is implicitly based upon logic that says that Sanders voters + loyal Democrats is a winner.

407

Okay, I don’t have any disagreement with that. I’ll just say that, in this specific slice of the discussion, the choice is between solid Dem voters plus fickle folks with weird politics who like Bernie, or solid Dem voters plus a different sort of fickle folks (i.e. supposed moderates who hate hints of socialism, and “never Trump” Republicans, etc.). Right now we don’t know and probably can’t know which group is larger, but either way, we’re hoping for some group of fickle non-solid-Dem voters to come out and vote for the Democrat.

408

After 11 pages, 542 posts, of back and forth I cannot for the life of me understand why the OP’s simple request to please just stop disparaging Bernie supporters is so fucking difficult for some of you.
There’s plenty of good reasons to do that. Read the 542 posts - they express it much better than I can. And pretty much 0 reasons to keep doing it.

409

The optimist in me hopes that we have more in common with Bernie supporters than recovering Republican voters. So I would like to hear more encouraging sentiment from our comrades on the left that they will vote blue, even if it’s not their favorite shade of blue. Because let’s face it, only a fraction of the liberal/progressive/D-classic voters will end with their favorite shade of blue. For the rest, the struggle will go on.

410

Maybe my reading comprehension needs work, but all I’ve seen in this thread is exactly that ‘encouraging sentiment’ from the Bernie supporters. All I’ve seen is that, yes, they will hold their nose and vote blue if they must. Even the OP has stated such.

But I’ll tell you, the sneering and disparaging of ‘Bernie Bros’ is obnoxious. Even the doubting of their intentions is obnoxious. I supported Bernie in 2016 and held my nose to vote for Clinton. She would have been the same old, same old but light years better than the orangewhatsis. I’m seriously starting to consider that perhaps the USA needs a kick in the ass, and 4 more years of the orangewhatsis might accomplish that- as in ‘it has to get really really awful before the electorate wakes up’. But I’m lucky, I don’t live there anymore. I do get to vote though. I guess that makes me a ‘Bernie Bro’

411

Perhaps MY reading comprehension needs work too. But what I’m kind of hearing you say is: ‘Perhaps another 4 years of Trump will teach you all a lesson to vote for the most left leaning candidate in the Democratic field.’ :dubious:

If so, is there no lesson to be learned in all this for the “Bernie Bros”?

Oh, and I’m a fellow Canadian living in the US. I don’t need an education on the benefits of “a more just society”. You’d be preaching to the choir with respect to socialized healthcare for all, etc.

412

Was I sneering in 2016? I remember it more as smiling paternally at their childlike innocence and fundamental non-understanding of real politik, with a touch of nostalgia for the days of Gene McCarthy, when we thought that the Democratic Party fucked him over, and we were damned if we (the collective “we” because I was fourteen) would vote for the party’s candidate. That’s how the USA got Nixon.

And, to an extent, that’s how the hardcore Bernie Bros gave us Trump. It was cute for a while in 2016, but it’s deadly serious now. We cannot afford to lose any votes to petty, childish tantrums. A new voter in 2016 was eighteen, and is twenty-two now. When I was twenty-two I was married and a college graduate. Nixon still beat McGovern, but I could hold my head high, knowing that I had done nothing to make that possible.

Does America need a kick in the pants? Absolutely, but a handful of Sanders fans holding back their votes if he is not the nominee will not provide it. It will just be noise while the biggest noisemaker takes another victory lap.

413

I’m not impressed by your synopsis. Would it be better than what we currently have? Probably, maybe, depends on the specifics. Is it a conservative health care plan? Yes.

Consider, for a moment, the roots of the ACA. When Democrats were talking about a single payer health care system back in the early 90s, the republicans proposed a market-based alternative that would keep the insurance companies intact and even prop them up. It came from the heritage think tank as a republican alternative to bringing us in line with the rest of the developed world.

The Republicans managed to throw away even that level of reform so that nothing was done, but that was originally a conservative proposal to block real health reform to bring us in line with the rest of the world with a half-assed reform that kept the insurance companies in the way, fucking us over.

By 2010, our failing health system in desperate need of some sort of reform, the democrats proposed their version of that heritage foundation plan, thinking that it might be palatable to republicans, given it was their own plan. But the overton window had shifted in the meantime. The republicans went so far right that their own plan was the MOST SOCIALIST COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF HEALTH CARE EVER, and the democrats had chased them so far right that the most serious health care reform proposal they could come up with was a republican plan from the 90s.

This is a good example of how the democratic party has become more conservative chasing the republican party as they fly right as hard as they can.

Biden’s plan is just a little closer to having an ACA with a public option, which is still a half-assed solution. Most of the benefits of having a single payer health system are diminished by having a dual government/private health care system like that.

We will still have the complex, adversarial billing that requires every doctors office to keep a staff of people whose only job is to jump through the right hoops and make sure insurance companies pay what they’re supposed to pay. We still have elevated prices on medical costs across the board, because the government has limited negotiating power and is concerned about the profits of insurance and medical providers. We have an incentive for people who oppose the public side of health care to defund it and otherwise make it work poorly so that they can point to it and say “see, that part of the system doesn’t work!” - which is some of what we got with an attempt to sabotage Obamacare by eliminating risk corridor guarantees, mandatory taxes, etc. Insurance companies still get to deny treatment to people who greatly need it and hope that those people die before they can sue the insurance company to collect what they’re owed.

Biden’s plan is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic so that insurance companies can survive and profit a while longer before the whole system collapses. His plan would be considered a strange right wing plan in literally every other developed country in the world.

We have the rest of the world as a model. Creating a complex, hybrid system designed to make sure that insurance companies stay in business and keep making money is unacceptable. It minimizes the benefits of a public system and keeps a lot of the draw backs.

414

IMHO

If there is any HINT that Sanders disruptive policies will have any sort of recessionary economic effect, he will lose. I don’t think younger people fully understand just how important the value of their retirement funds and college funds is to middle and upper middle class Americans. Nobody’s going to vote for a recession, even a little one.

415

That’s only if these voters think Trump’s policies will have less of a recessionary effect. Outside of the die-hard Trump voters, I haven’t seen a lot of raging economic optimism in polling.

416

Give me a fucking break. Thinking that you’re a mature, rational adult because the right thing is always halfway between the two competing camps is, itself, an immature viewpoint. It’s lazy and it’s easy.

Oh, there are two sides of the debate? Well they probably have both have equal merit, so if I stay right in the middle, that’s what the mature and responsible adults would do. Oooh, you’re smart.

Are you a mature and rational adult by staying right in the middle of the climate change “debate”? Oh, one side thinks it’s a giant hoax and doesn’t want to do anything, and the other side realizes it’s real and wants to change to save the world. I’ll be the mature adult and take the middle position and acknowledge it’s real but let’s not do anything!

Centrists are not enlightened. Habitual centrism is just a safe position that requires no thinking that makes you feel enlightened because of fallacious assumptions that the truth is always in the middle, and let its you feel superior to anyone else because you’ve avoided becoming partisan by picking a side.

Your implication that you’re a more mature adult than I am because I picked a side and have strong views whereas you waffle between two right wing parties is bullshit. Are people who accept the science of climate change less mature adults than people who waffle on the centrist position?

You sound like you get dragged around by the overton window, staying in the middle of two parties as they both go rightward, doing exactly what those who try to move the overton window (republicans) want to happen. This does not show maturity or strength of character or thoughtfulness or anything of the sort.

Being a moderate, or a centrist, between a position that’s right and one that’s wrong, or two positions that are wrong, is no virtue.

Because abandoning their leftist roots and chasing rightward after conservatives got us an environment where a President Trump could win. We would not have an environment where his win would even have been conceivable 20 or 30 years ago. It took a lot of the Republicans going looney tunes right wing and the democrats chasing them there to create this environment.

It got us to a point where we are literally the only rich country in the world that does not effectively have single payer health care, and the country that BY FAR pays the most of its money to cover the smallest amount of its citizens compared to any other rich countries. Leaves us in a place where one side acknowledges climate change but doesn’t want to do anything serious about it and the other thinks it’s a chinese/liberal/scientist hoax.

The democrats taking the leftist vote for granted and actively appealing to increasingly more right wing voters that might not be moving rightward as fast as the republicans are is actively making our country a worse place because it leads to increasingly right wing outcomes. Appealing to the likes of you has increased our wealth gap to levels unseen since right before the great depression, a broken health care system, inaction on climate change, and dozens of other examples I could list here.

417

@ SenorBeef — I appreciate your point of view, but you’re exaggerating the badness of Biden’s plan. Millions more would get free medical care than under the present ACA, and millions more would benefit from the 8.5% cap on premiums. The public option would, at least in the long term, force private insurance companies to improve their policies to compete with the public option. With further gradual changes, the U.S. would approach a system like what we want.

I understand (and even admire) the urge to move to a single-payer system more directly. But that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Even if you could get a radical plan enacted by Congress (you can’t), the plan would fail. It would be hugely disruptive. The Party of Lies and Hatred would be doing everything they could to sabotage such a system, but even without deliberate sabotage by America’s enemies, the huge tax hikes, bureaucratic snafus, misallocations of medical resources, and sudden dismantling of private health insurance would cause huge bitterness even among Democrats, appear crazily chaotic, and lead to electoral defeat of the Democrats in the aftermath.

Other than that, Bernie’s plan would be great. :rolleyes:

418

And the republicans are going to support Biden’s plan, why? When they ACA was up for debate, the democrats accepted 206 amendments from them to improve it, and they all voted against it in unison anyway.

The democrats aren’t pushing any health care reforms unless they take back the house and senate, and if they do that, why settle for the half-ass solution designed to prop up the insurance company? At that point, let’s stop being the only rich country that takes the profits of the insurance industry as their first consideration to run a health care system.

Literally 31 out of 32 got this one right, and long ago. They think we’re insane that this is even a debate.

Given that Republicans are going to stonewall Biden just as they stonewalled Obama (and the fact that Biden thinks otherwise, despite the fact that HE WAS RIGHT THERE for all of it alone makes him completely unsuitable to be president), then there’s no need to appeal to Republicans with a half-ass plan.

And if we can’t actually enact the changes either way (because either the house or senate is Republican) then we might as well move the overton window by shouting about the health care system that works for the rest of the world instead of meekly proposing reforms to our broken one.

419

I already said that there is a 99% chance that I will vote for the democratic candidate. And yet you are actively encouraging me to stay home and not vote. And yet you hope that the reasonable nature of the Bernie voters will reassure your faith in humanity and all that.

In what way you have influence - speaking directly to Bernie supporters - the only action you’ve taken is to deliberately try to discourage me from voting for the non-Bernie democrat. Not even implicitly, explicitly. You told me to stay home on voting day knowing that there’s a 99% chance I’ll vote for the democrat.

So if you succeed, and I do exactly what you say, and the democratic nominee gets one less vote - are you going to feel proud and accomplished?

Would anyone else here like to support his “stay home” stance? Rebuke it?

420

:confused: Where did my comments have anything to do with getting Republican support? The GOP will always try to sabotage; we just want to emerge with something of value at the end.

“Huge bitterness even by Democrats … crazy chaos … electoral defeat.” That’s what you’re rooting for? :confused:
(I didn’t get the “31 out of 32” reference.)