I dunno, maybe both.
Oh yes. We’re absolutely on the same page here. The answer to the problem isn’t to humour these trogs and it’s certainly not to only put forward the most unchallenging, milquetoasty, bland candidates that won’t ever lead some petty little minds to do petty little things “because we can’t afford to lose a single vote !!! not this year !” (it’s always a crisis this year, black emancipation will have to wait, right MLK ? Next time, for sure). For one thing fuck these people, for another that’s a betrayal of all women/jews/gays/etc in the group. If they just can’t deal with Living In A Society they can vote for the Lions Eating Peoples’ Faces Party or lead it to power instead, which is its own richly deserved, self-inflicted punishment.
But then that’s also true of any and all political calculations of the “oooh, I like X’s ideas but I’m afraid if they’re our candidate it might not play well in District 9 so I support Y who’s more electable” variety. Fuck that nonsense - you don’t know, and you shouldn’t care. Democracy doesn’t run on beating the other guy, and it certainly doesn’t run on your amateur hour game theorizing how the next guy over grasps the prisoner’s dilemma. It runs on setting up a body politic that’d be a representative microcosm of the larger whole, as accurately as possible. If you don’t vote for the ideas you think are correct and best, who the hell will, and why would you expect them to be discussed at all ?
(note du traducteur : in this post the author implicitly deems single-winner representative democracy fucked on the merits. Obviously.)
The point I seem to be making poorly, is that like some True Berniebers, there are people in the Democratic tent who would withhold their vote due to personal biases, rather than vote for the larger cause they ostensibly support. Like that gay-hating twat who would not have voted for Buttegieg when she learned he was gay. Nevermind the fact that she was for him and his policies up until the very moment that she learned he played for the other team. So sure. Republicans are worse. But mote, eye, beam…however the fuck that goes.
… especially those fan bois who wear hoods or nazi armbands.
Yes Reich can be, and often is. Never mind that McConnell, and all the rest of the Party Of Fucking Russian Stooges And Traitors decided when Obama was elected, that they would fight EVERYthing no matter what.
No, I accept NO blame for Trump. I didn’t vote for him. I hated him LONG before this — I knew all about that crooked lying cowardly dog fucker from way back. I grew up in NY and lived there a long enough time to know what that orange piece of shit was.
So Reich can take his “both sides are to blame” or his “Dems are to blame” shit and choke on it.
I’m all for voting your conscience, but if your conscience doesn’t factor in what’ll happen if the other guy you’re not voting for wins, then your conscience has a blind spot the size of the republican party.
It’s not that I think that you should all fall in line and start cheering in support for whichever generic whitebread dem stumbles into the nomination. I’m just saying that even if you’re not cheering, you can boo - and booing by voting for some doomed third party candidate is exactly the same as not booing.
Too often, “vote your conscience” means “treat voting like a magical ritual by which you confer your sacred blessing on a champion, and then feel pleased that you’ve done all you can to protect the kingdom.” It’s a fairy-tale approach.
“Voting your conscience” should mean “consider carefully what impact you can have on the world by voting, and cast your vote such as to have the maximum positive impact.” That may mean voting for a real turd, because voting for the turd means that the flaming shitmonster doesn’t gain office.
Absolutely your conscience should guide you. But if your conscience is unconcerned with the real-world effects of your actions, I think your conscience is a self-involved nitwit.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes…
Holy shit. I’ve tried over and over and over again to express this idea, and Solnit comes along and says it perfectly in 8 words. Thank you!
In fairness to Bernie and in contrast to my derision towards the toxic Bernie Bros, I have to say that he did very well at the town hall in NH just now. I’ve always agreed with his policies, even those that seem unrealistic in today’s America. I continue to appreciate his contribution to the national conversation about progressive issues. America would do well to have him as POTUS.
But for every one of those people there is at least one person who really doesn’t like Trump but decides that despite all of the flaws of the Trump administration at least its better than living in Venezuela. Now this is a lie, and Bernie can counter it by saying that while he is indeed a socialist, he’s a Democratic socialist, which really isn’t the same thing, and differs in its philosophy by … (yawn). Meanwhile Trump will be running ads showing starving people handing over fat stacks of bills to buy a single roll of toilet paper.
Another thought about the Bernie’s liabilities. Its an established fact that Putin’s trolls also engaged in a campaign to promote him in the primary against Clinton. Should Sanders become the nominee, I can imagine that Guiliani’s anti-corruption investigation with the help of the Zelenski government will manage to uncover a complete verifiable detailed accounting of exactly how this was done names, dates everything. An account so detailed that one might even think it was leaked by the mastermind himself. There is of course no mention of any activities related to Trump given that he was exonerated. But this new evidence will forcing the Justice department under a very reluctant Barr to launch an immediate investigation into Sanders and his campaign for the good of the nation.
Obama wanted a public option, which is about as close to M4A as we’ve come. He didn’t have the votes. He could have insisted and screamed about wanting a public option, but again…he didn’t have the votes. So we got Obamacare instead, and while it’s not perfect, it’s had for more positive impact on the lives of millions of people than screaming about - and not getting - a public option would have had.
Ironically, that achievement is also what cost him and his party control of congress. And the real reason that a lot of Bernie-crats don’t acknowledge - but I recall clearly - is that a lot of the people who supported Obama two years earlier couldn’t be fucked to get off their asses and vote in 2010. And then had the audacity to argue that he was a disappointment.
I think Bernie Sanders supporters will at some point be confronted with reality, and the reality is that their ideas aren’t nearly as popular as they think. And the megaphone in their pulpit isn’t nearly as loud as they imagine it to be.
Both of y’all: cite?
This sort of imaginative pontificating is fine for cable news where glib arrogance subs in for knowledge. But this is the pit, motherfuckers, and we expect better.
What exactly do you want citations for? They’re making predictions based on pretty common knowledge. And, of course, they can’t be expected to provide a citation for something that hasn’t happened yet.
I can try to elaborate on the logic. People voting Trump or staying home instead of voting for a socialist is pretty straightforward–there still is a stigma on the word “socialist” in the United States. And it is not really amendable to facts about what “socialism” means to Bernie Sanders. It’s pure emotionalism, which is where Trump excels in his ads. Putting this together, it seems inevitable that Bernie’s self-proclaimed “socialist” moniker would be a liability–i.e. people who would vote against Trump will not vote for a socialist.
The logic about people who otherwise never vote is also pretty simple. It’s a combination of looking at which candidate has gotten the young people enthusiastic, combined with knowing they are the group least likely to vote. As such, getting them excited is a way to get them to vote.
Granted, Bernie’s not the only one with some youth support, but he seems to be the one with the best chance of actually winning the nomination.
These two statements are the fundamental dichotomy of Sanders’ electability. The pro side is that he gets (young) people excited, which tends to get out the vote, but the con side is that he declared himself to be a socialist, which has a lot of baggage in the US. In the general election, which effect would be stronger?
I genuinely don’t know.
Something many people lose sight of.
“You can’t beat something (even if it’s bullshit) with nothing.” Or as I posted around here in the past, someone Playing Not To Lose is at a disadvantage against someone Playing To Win (and so is also someone Playing to Prove a Point).
That said, however, I do not see this as fundamentally incompatible with the notion of my conscience leading to a strategic vote at the end of the day if *the remaining choices *don’t perfectly match my ideas. But I am not going to ask the others to surrender preemptively and not even try.
So yes, if I want to WIN or at least get enough seats in the legislature to get stuff done, I need to give people a motivation to get off their asses and vote FOR me. I should want the people on the fence about even showing up, to show up for me, not to remain comfortably on that fence, and we already have experience that “But, OMG, Trump!!!” was not enough. Relying on that now that we have fully experienced his clusterfuckery, the people will recoil in horror… is stupendously overestimating human nature
Even of Bernie wins and the Dems take the Senate, he still won’t implement any of his policies. He won’t get every Dem to support his policies. Many of them come from conservative states. And I can’t see Bernie compromising. And if he does, a huge chunk of his supporters will revolt.
Personally, I’m on board with most of his goals. But to move at all towards those goals, means you need centrist Democrats on board. Won’t happen with Bernie. I don’t know how Bernie’s followers can’t see this.
Some people here don’t seem to realize that the notion that one must support a party no matter what to defeat those people over there is the death spiral of democracy. The end game is Team A against Team B (what they stand for matters not) to the death.
How twisted it is, to behave as if Democracy should be people acting in the best interests of the ruling classes instead of the other way around.
It is too bad I can’t return more often to reply to everyone. This time I am practically a foil!
Thing is, Bernie is frankly the most pure candidate running. Personally I believe he is a fundamentally moral person. I think he has been paying attention during all those Senate intelligence briefings over the decades and had a sense of what the eff is going on in this world. I think a socialist is the perfect candidate to run against a fascist.
Look, the “opposition” are being molded into anti-intellectuals against their best interests. This is their vulnerability- they aren’t bringing many mental weapons to this fight, just propagandistic thought-terminating one-liners. We can arm our foot soldiers with just a few tools: ad hominem, bare assertion, appeal to authority, false attribution, tu quoque. That is probably enough right there if we encourage people to lean a bit toward intellectual bullying re: the virtues of Sanders and simultaneously how totally full of shit you guys are. A trial without witnesses? Behold, the GOP standard of evidence, in every fantastical policy!
The Trump cult is kind of empty. Also, a lot of people just need encouragement and don’t care how they get it. Some people are just gonna stay Trumpers, so leave ‘em. But bros like Bernie has don’t accrue to every Dem. If you really want the Dems to fall in line, fall in line with Bernie, and maybe slow walk the ban on fracking after the election until we have the alternative ready. Just sayin’.
Miscellania:
:(:mad: I’d Google more to help you more, but you don’t seem open-minded. Just for clarity: Do you claim that the “chained himself to black women” story is a Lie?
(BTW, the way I quote a quote is to use the ordinary Windows copy-paste.)
[quote="GreenWyvern, post:59, topic:847524"]
An exceptionally good, down-to-earth article, published a few days ago:
[Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/01/donald-trump-impeachment-trial-state-of-the-union)
by Robert Reich
[/QUOTE]
Robert Reich is a liberal hero. (I especially like him because he answers my e-mails. :) )
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[quote="Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, post:69, topic:847524"]
The chance that Sanders would get Medicare for All passed with Senate Leader McConnell is, and I checked the math, exactly down to six millionths of a percent the same as the chance that Biden would get minor efficiency tweaks to Obamacare passed with Senate Leader McConnell.
[/QUOTE]
In another thread some of us are saying that if we cannot get 50 Senators, it might be better for Trump to get re-elected. This Senate election is SO important. I hope Stacey Abrams and Oprah Winfrey decide to run. Those two women might swing 2 Senate seats right there! (Or are the deadlines passing by?)
Taking the Senate is extremely important but it's largely ignored. ***Without the Senate, it very well may be that Trump re-election is the best outcome in 2020***, with a D landslide in 2022 as Trumpism collapses.
(* - Note that, by 2024 Trump will be an incontinent laughingstock whose underlings ignore him. In 2020 however, he's still powerful enough to cause GREAT damage out of spite if he loses in November.)
And we still need a ruling on whether it complies with regulations to wish a Doper to be waterboarded. 