Of course it does, because you chose to interpret it the way that fit with your expectations. It certainly isn’t what I said.
If I understand him, he’s saying exactly the opposite. Establishment Dems (and I’m not crazy about that term, but I’m not sure of a less loaded one) DON’T adopt that position, because they’re not approaching things from a pure game perspective. That’s okay, but it means establishment Dems need to be careful about scolding Sanders supporters for not approaching things from a pure game perspective.
I’m not sure I agree with the point as I understand it. but only because I think that we should approach it from a game perspective to the extent that we can. There’s a tremendous unanswered question of whether Sanders can defeat Trump, and there are pretty decent arguments on both sides of that question. I think we need to be working toward answering that question.
Obviously I’m biased; I hope the answer is that Sanders is the most electable. But I’m gonna try to be open to evidence otherwise. I hope folks who loathe Sanders with the fire of a million suns will approach the question likewise.
Okay. Apologies for misunderstanding. Is LHOD’s post the correct interpretation?
Yep, although I meant it slightly more narrowly than that interpretation – I don’t disagree with him that we all should include the game theory implications in our calculus. My point was simply that it’s not a valid criticism of Sanders supporters that their calculus includes anything other than beating Trump, because as of February 8, 2020, all of our calculations include other factors. That’s why there is still more than one candidate. “Blue no matter who” is not anyone’s entire ideology, so why would it be Sanders’ supporters’?
The tricky part when it comes to Democrats and a lot of Sanders supporters is what that other stuff is. For a lot of Sanders supporters, part of their calculus is that they just aren’t Democrats. When I said “mainstream Democrat,” I might as well have said real Democrats, except that would just be loaded in the opposite direction. People whose Democratness predates Sanders and Trump running for president, let’s call them. For people who aren’t that, who have no predisposition toward voting for a Democrat, and might even have a predisposition not to (there are, or were, Republicans who prefer Sanders to Trump, after all), the expectation that they would agree that it doesn’t matter at the end of the day who gets the nomination doesn’t make as much sense as expecting, say, Warren’s supporters to grit their teeth and vote Biden. When they take that “holier-than-thou, my way or the highway” approach that septimus referred to, in my opinion, a lot of what’s happening there is that people who really are not center-inclined liberals are just adhering to what their ideology really, rationally dictates. It really is true that there are lots of people for whom Sanders as president is a good outcome, but Biden as president isn’t. And it leads to a lot of unnecessary friendly fire, I think, when those people are talked about like they are just very liberal people who are being petulant. It’s only their way or the highway in the context of a nomination where nothing else that is remotely like their way is available, not in degree but actually qualitatively. The mythical swing vote can look just like that.
That’s a different question from whether or not, as a question of moral necessity, they all ought to show up anywhere that will have them and press the button that makes Donald Trump not be president. Certainly my ideology says you gotta do that when you have the chance.
Let us consider three classes of American voter:
A - Those who will vote for the Democratic nominee no matter who he is.
B - Those who will always vote for Trump.
C - Those who will vote for Sanders if he’s the nominee but for Trump or a 3rd-party candidate if Biden is the nominee.
Obviously voters in {B} don’t have the brains of a cockroach and it’s a waste to even imagine their so-called "thinking.
But the {C} group is, in many ways, more disgusting than {B}! The voters in {C} have the sense and humanitarian values to prefer Sanders over Trump, yet somehow don’t understand that any Democrat is a million times better than Trump. What’s with these people? I can only imagine that they’re good-spirited people (unlike most other Trump supporters) but have the IQ of an imbecile. Or have a totally twisted understanding of economics, society, and American politics picked up from Yahoo blogs or such, rather than texts actually written by scholarly thinkers.
I hope Dopers are not in the {C} group. If one of you is, I suggest you stop ranting at SDMB and start a thread asking for reading recommendations. Study some intelligent texts and opinions instead of whatever it is you’re doing.
Some of the {C} group seem to be extorting Democratic voters: “We refuse to vote for Biden so Trump will be re-elected unless you give in and make Sanders the nominee.” This extortion absolutely infuriates me. I received a Warning in Elections when I wrote “F*ck off” to such an opinion from a non-Doper quoted from another website. Here in the Pit, let me write “F**k off” to any Doper that presents that view.
I’m almost leaning toward embracing Sanders at this point, but if it’s really true that the Bernie Brats are indulging in such despicable extortion, I’m almost ready to say “F**k the whole USA. Let Trumpism rule for a century. Let’s hope the cockroaches do a better job when they rule the planet 50 million years from now.”
I’ve explained this in two previous posts. The President must bring a majority of Congress along. “Majority” means moderates must go along.
I’ve presented historical examples. It was the staunch anti-communists Nixon and Reagan who achieved detentes. It was LBJ, sometimes considered racist, who achieved Civil Rights. It will be a President Biden or Klobuchar who moves us toward single-payer healthcare, not the revolutionary whom most intelligent adult Democrats consider too leftist.
I DO decry the “Bernie Bro” who doesn’t subscribe to voting blue, no matter who. I can’t tell from the rest of the quote whether you support the sort of implicit “extortion” I denounced above.
I posted this elsewhere and it seems relevant in this thread…
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Yes, I do realize this is comparable to the very extortion I denounce! Color me childish and excitable.
So, you’re saying that Bernie Sanders is going to try to do too much too quickly, attempting too revolutionary a change in too short a time frame. And you’re saying that the opposing party is going to be too much in opposition. So an incremental approach is wiser, slowly nudging us toward the end goal. You’re saying Klobuchar and Biden would do it this way. Don’t make too many waves, don’t make a fight out of it.
And you’re saying that the Civil Rights Act is an example of the Klobuchar/Biden way?
Honestly, I color you as a particular kind of Boomer who’s going increasingly peevish in his old age. I have inlaws like you who send email screeds that are very similar.
I roll my eyes and move on, and hope I don’t do that when I’m eighty.
It doesn’t matter. The Libertarians aren’t saying, “Get lost, you’re not a libertarian anyway, you’re vermin.” Anybody can run, and if it were up to others to tell us what we are, I’d be a “liberal” because Fox says so.
Like it or not, Bernie is (arguably) leading at this point. Dems are supporting him en masse. If you don’t like purity tests, it would be the most disastrous version of one to tell Bernie, “Go pound sand. You aren’t a Dem, you’re ‘too left’ and therefore off the ballot.” He makes the tent bigger, and “diversity is our strength”, no?
The Civil Rights Act was a culmination of literally a hundred years of incremental change happening from the end of the Civil War.
More relevant to the specific legislation, in 1948 President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 to end segregation in the Armed Services. Brown vs. BOE was literally a decade before the first CRA. There was also a 1968 CRA called the Fair Housing Act. And in case you haven’t noticed the CRA was not a panacea to end discrimination and it’s still a fight that is taking place (not that you’d know it if you asked Bernie; he’s sneer about “identity politics.”)
Unless you think that Abraham Lincoln could have ushered in all of the changes that happened a century later, then you concede that incremental change is what got us there.
We probably won’t have to wait a century to change some of the things we need to change but things got a lot better under Obama than they would have under Romney or McCain and things got a lot worse under Trump than they would have under Clinton.
Climate change does require some drastic efforts but who is more likely to do that: The party that denies it exists whose senators bring snowballs onto the Senate floor to disprove climate change? Or the party that actually acknowledges it’s a problem?
You may decry the deaths of people who wait around for incremental change, but save those tears for the people who did die when Trump pulled Obamacare out from under them or the kids in cages whose families were ripped apart.
Oh, and hey, can some of you fuckers please just click this link?
Instead they’re treated like the joke they are.
Cite: https://mashable.com/2016/05/31/libertarian-national-convention-weird/
Cite: Libertarian Party Chairman Hopeful Strips on Stage — and on C-SPAN
Cite: Meet the Most Interesting Characters From the Libertarian Convention - ABC News
Fortunately Libertarianism is dumb and thanks to these antics, there’s no danger of the Libertarian Party of changing that.
I don’t think group C is really all that large in the scheme of things. Consider the SDMB. I think most here would agree that the board generally leans left. We have our Bernie supporters, including me. Yet I haven’t seen a single person on this board say that if Bernie isn’t the nominee, then they’re voting 3rd party/Trump/not at all.
In every single case I’ve seen (if I’ve missed one I’m sure someone will point it out) the Bernie supporter said they’d vote for whoever is nominated. I’ve said repeatedly that a fresh steaming pile of dog turds gets my vote over Trump.
And don’t forget category D. Folks who will not vote for Bernie if he wins the nomination. I have no figures or sites, but I know I’ve read more than once (not here) people who have said they will not vote for him no matter what.
I think the idea of Bernie supports as some sort of petulant assholes is wildly exaggerated or mostly made up, a way for people who have the unenviable task of defending the democratic establishment to mock and misclassify their opposition. Their opposition aren’t well meaning people who genuinely want leftward change to improve the lives of the average person, they’re just a bunch of dumb obnoxious kids who don’t know how the real world work and want free everything! Maybe there are “Bernie Bros”, but people who classify any Bernie supporter as a “Bernie Bro” (like I get thrown at me on this board if I ever say anything positive about Bernie) is bullshit.
In fact, in my experience, Sanders supporters are almost always the most inclusive, kind, and positive people of all candidates’ fanbases. For example This and this are some of the biggest gatherings of Bernie supporters online, and while I’m sure there’s some toxic stuff in there, it’s generally very positive and supportive.
Really, I think the idea of Bernie Sanders supporters being given by the anti-Bernie people in this thread is somewhere between lying and ignorance. It’s hard for them to defend “yay, more weak corporate-friendly democrats that’ll let Republicans walk all over them! We need more of that!”, so instead they go into personal attacks against a characature of what they want you to believe Bernie supporters are like.
Q. How do you know if someone’s a vegan?
A. Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
That joke is bullshit, right? Plenty of vegans don’t tell you. But just enough people are loud and obnoxious about their veganism, that meat-eaters can get a really skewed understanding of vegans as a whole.
I think something similar goes on with Sanders supporters. I know a lot of them, and most of them are really chill about it, and get along well with Warren supporters, and make wry jokes about how they’re probably gonna end up voting for Biden or Bloomberg in November. They’re quiet and cool, just like most vegans.
But the asshole ones are REALLY loud, and REALLY assholish. I haven’t really encountered them much this year, having purged my FB feed in 2016, but I got called a paid Hillary Shill back then when I disagreed that Clinton had fixed the primaries and posted links to articles. It was…surprising.
I don’t agree that folks complaining about obnoxious Sanders supporters are lying. But I agree that they’re vastly overestimating the percentage over Sanders supporters who are jerks.
Which should be obvious, comparing Sanders’s overall support in the primary with the number of people supporting him shitheadedly. If even a tenth of Sanders supporters were assholes, we’d be constantly overwhelmed.
“Only 53 percent of Sanders voters say they will certainly support whoever is the Democratic nominee. This is no idle threat. In 2016, in Pennsylvania, 117,000 Sanders primary voters went for Trump in the general, and Trump won the state by 44,292 ballots. In Michigan, 48,000 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 10,704. In Wisconsin, 51,300 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 22,748. In short, Sanders voters helped elect Trump.”
Pretty damning statistics there.
“Damning” is such a funny and telling choice of words. Of course there are people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. That’s sort of the appeal of Sanders in the general, isn’t it? It’s going to be difficult to get a different result in the general election without the support of some people with the “damning” track record of not already having supported the Democratic candidate in the general election. I was under the impression that it was good if those people switched sides.
John Stamos, if you are trying to argue that LBJ in 1964 was a good example of a moderate candidate getting an important victory quietly and cooperatively, then I don’t see how you did that by talking about the alleged 100 years of incremental “progress” (which isn’t what I would call it, but that’s beside the point) that LBJ loudly and explicitly decried when he said that the US needed to get a bill done immediately and stop talking about it. If what you were trying to do was something else, then I think I need you to clarify if it’s related to the point septimus was making.
Jesus, even getting the CRA passed took several years and one dead president!
Anyway, yeah, it was a big step of incremental change. Your disagreement is noted and at odds with actual history.
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