End result, the Republicans run right, the democrats run right to catch those few non-cultist voters that the republicans “left behind” and the end result is that we grow to be a more right wing country every day.*
Now our ideal scenario is that we elect all democrats so they can enact a more right-wing policy than we had yesterday. There’s no winning case for people who do not want to be part of a right wing oligarchy in this scenario. This is exactly what has happened over the last 20-30 years.
By continuously voting for a continuously more right wing democratic party, I am consenting and creating a movement that I think is entirely negative and should not happen.
*It’s not even worth it electorally, because there are not many of those people who are willing to say “okay, republicans have gone too far, I’m out” as we see in our current situation with 40% of our country just deciding batshit crazy is fine as long as it’s not democrat. There are suprisingly few disaffected republicans to collect, and yet the democratic party is hard charging right anyway.
Ever considered that maybe you’re the wacko one? Let’s get some new voters because I think all these voters are sheeple brainwashed by corporations and big media. ‘If they just knew the truth!!!’
It is factually true that the 1996 telecom act removed restrictions that allowed how much media one corporation can own. Since then, our media sources have been bought up by 6 corporations. Over 90% of media in the US is controlled by 6 corporations. Do you think this has affected the American media landscape has changed because of this? Do you think that news sources all owned by mega-corps are interested in exposing to the American people a realistic idea about the political influence of megacorps?
It is factually true that untraceable money has been massively increased in politics with such things as the Citizens United rulings and superpacs.
It is factually true that when the interests of a few wealthy elite and the general opinion of the constituents differ, the politicians almost always go with the wishes of the wealthy elite. cite. Or if you prefer the academic source, cite
It is factually true that productivity gains and wage gains became decoupled in the late 70s to early 80s, so while the country has become increasing rich, the working class has seen almost none of the gains from this. The wealth is instead concentrated at the top, with wealth inequality are currently higher than they were even in the 1920s.
None of my claims are fringe, fanciful, or unfactual. In no way am I a conspiracy theorist. The data is plain and easy to interpret.
Were you aware at all of the media after Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada declaring that the Biden campaign was dead, that Bernie was outraising and outspending Biden and that all Bernie had to do was knock out Biden in South Carolina and the primary campaign would be over?
If the “superdelegates” were overruling the results of the primaries for ten elections in a row, then you might have a point. But that’s not what happened. If they tried that, then I would vote for someone else.
Joe Biden is losing his marbles? Well, if he is, he still has a long way to go to catch up with Trump, who shows great evidence of mental decline. Anyone can see that for themselves by comparing videos of him from 10 or so years ago, with very recent ones. His ability to consistently make coherent, complex sentences has degraded to almost non-existence at this point. On the other hand, Joe, bless his heart, has long been known and, in some ways adored, for his verbal gaffes. As long as I’ve been paying attention it has been repeatedly said of him that he was born with a silver shoe in his mouth. So where to go to chart the alleged decline?
Yes, I made that very same point several times. People will vote for Trump who is clearly incompetant and senile, but hesitate to vote for Biden. The media won’t say “Trump is crazy, yo”, they’ll say “WILL BIDEN’S DECLINING MENTAL HEALTH KEEP HIM FROM THE PRESIDENCY?!” and give Trump a pass like they always do.
Here’s the thing: Trump voters don’t care that Trump is senile. It doesn’t slow them down a bit. May even be part of what they like about him. That does not mean that democratic voters will enthusiastically vote for a guy who is also clearly in declining mental health. The “Trump is more senile than Biden!” argument will not convince anyone to switch their vote, nor will it convince the media not to be completely irresponsible in their coverage of it.
Democratic voters, on the other hand, are not cultists. They’re not going to pretend their candidate is the God-Emporer or ignore obviously declining mental health. Senile’s burgeoning senility is going to be a far, far bigger issue in the election than Trump’s full blown senility.
This is an electability argument and there is no evidence that Bernie would do better in the general election than in the primary. And he lost in the primary. Electability arguments can only be made by more centrist primary losers who can argue that they will pick up swing voters. What voters does bernie pick up in the general that he didn’t get in the primary.
Sure if you start from the assumption that Bernie is more electable than Biden, you can manage to concoct a scenario in which it seems reasonable. You can imagine all of these hoards of Republican and independent voters who are just chomping at the bit to vote for Bernie but just didn’t vote for him in the primary, even in states such as North Carolina that had an open primary. Similarly I can imagine that there was a team that planted nano thermite around the pillars of the world trade center, and that the Grand Canyon was formed in 40 days by the great flood.
We get it, you have an unassailable belief that since you and your friends all love Sanders that Sanders must be the most popular candidate. So in order to avoid having your world view shattered and cognitive dissonance set it, you come up with a scenario that could allow your belief to be true, and so therefor must be true.
But please consider the following alternative. While Sanders may be the greatest president ever and single handedly make the country a egalitarian paradise, this is not the majority view. The majority of people would be more likely to vote for Biden than they are to vote for Sanders. It may be that people are more likely to vote for Trump than vote for Biden and we will have to deal with 4 more years of Trump. But that doesn’t mean that Sanders would have won. So far, all evidence points in the direction that Biden is more likely to win than Sanders, and just because your faith tells you that the opposite is true doesn’t actually mean that reality must secretly conform to your faith.
Eventually we might reach the point where a Sanders like candidate is supported more than any other candidate. I hope we do. But if we are going to get there its not going to happen by progressives staying out of the general or voting third party. The candidates pay more attention to those people who actually participate the in the election process than they do to those who don’t. If all you had to do to get a candidate to pay attention to you is not vote for them, the homeless would would have a lock on politics. The best way to stop the Democratic candidates fleeing to the center is to convince them that they can win without it. So long as they feel they are on a precipice where a single miss step can lead to calamity they aren’t going to risk anything radical.
If however they garner an easy 60% of the popular vote, and are lounging around as fat and happy incumbents with a general election in the bag, they might start looking to see what they can get away with. Maybe its safe enough to try some gun legislation that they always wanted but were too afraid to try. And if they don’t then you can always put the fear of god into them with a good hard poke from the left in the primary. But that only works if they actually fear the primary more than the general, which is why its important to make sure that they don’t have to worry about the general.
So Biden was there to reassure the moderates that Obama wouldn’t be an uppity black man? That is not how I saw it. The way I saw it was that Biden was there to reassure voters that thought Obama didn’t have enough experience.
I saw Biden as the guy who was going to be responsible for working with congress as well as the experienced Washington person who knows who to call in any situation.
No, I don’t believe that and I have not advocated that. I am experiencing no cognitive dissonance at all.
People have said, repeatedly, that since Bernie couldn’t beat Biden in a primary, then he wasn’t the better candidate with the higher chance of beating Trump. That is not a logic conclusion and I attacked that idea. You are making a lot of assumptions about my motivatons when what I’ve said is pretty well spelled out.
“Whoever wins the primary has the best chance of winning the general” may be generally true, but it is not unassailably true.
Let’s say you have Group A and Group B within a party. Group A is 55% of the group, group B is 45% of the group. Group A prefers Candidate 1. Group B prefers Candidate 2. However, all of group A will vote for candidate 2 in the event that candidate 2 is nominated. However, none of group B will vote for candidate 1 if they’re nominated.
In this scenario, candidate 1 would win the primary, but candidate 2 would be, by far, better supported and more likely to win the general election all else being equal.
I’m not saying that this is a description of the actual biden vs bernie primary. I’m using it as a hypothetical to demonstrate that “the winner of the primary is obviously the best candidate in the general” can be wrong.
The actual polls that try to measure this - Bernie vs Trump and Biden vs Trump come out pretty close to a wash. Depending on what date you pick, Bernie might be up a couple of percentage points, in others Biden. What would be your source for “all evidence points in the direction that Biden is more likely to win”?
I, personally, think that Biden is going to hurt from the long campaign and republican attacks more than Bernie. People take for granted that as soon as the republicans start calling Bernie a socialist, he’s toast. The thing is - that’s no secret. If you asked people what they associated with Bernie, “socialism” would probably be the very first thing (even though it’s wrong, and he’s wrong for marketing himself as a socialist rather than a social democrat).
Additionally, republicans have been ringing the “socialism! socialism! run for the hills!” bell for 70 years now. People are starting to see that they’re getting the shaft, and things that help them rather than the rich being called “socialism” isn’t so scary anymore. They’ve worn out the scare value of the term. People are significantly less scared of “socialism” than they were in the past.
But Biden is absolutely going to get hammered in the campaign. He’s a gaffe machine and he’s losing his marbles, it’s pretty clear that it’s getting worse. Mark my words, you’re going to see an entire “creepy Joe” ad campaign. There will be wall to wall images of Joe doing that weird shit where he keeps grabbing women and smelling their hair and all that shit.
Biden is not inspiring, he’s not going to fire anyone up, he’s mentally fading, he’s not doing a good job right now when he’s got the softball of calling out Trump’s terrible leadership over Coronavirus, how is he going to do any better in 6 months?
On election day, if they hold a poll that compares Bernie vs Trump or Biden vs Trump, Bernie would’ve come out a lot better. Biden is going to fade and I have to watch, again, in fucking slow motion, as the democratic party again makes the same fucking mistake of running one of the worst possible candidates, one of the few candidates that Donald Trump can beat, and I have to lose my fucking country because they couldn’t put up a fight to one of the worst possible candidates/presidents that exist. I’m not even being pro-Bernie when I say that. Biden is a fucking horrible choice. You have an entire country to work with and Joe Biden is the best you can do? FFS.
They are so incredibly incompetant as a party that I seriously wonder sometimes if they’re designated losers, like the fucking Washington Generals, that just put on a token show to make us think we have a competitive political landscape.
To be clear, you’re saying that the progressive left always voting democrat no matter how much they ignore their progressives, or how rightward they go, will incentivize the party to eventually go leftward? In your scenario, they can completely ignore the wants of the progressives, because the progressives will vote for that no matter what. Why would they give anything to progressives?
“Get away with” - are you suggesting that mainstream corporate-friendly third way democrats secretly want to “get away with” a progressive agenda?
Ha, that’s actually a really good example of the sort of inherent failures of the right wing third way democratic party. Instead of doing the sort of things that can improve everyone’s economic lives, that would have widespread support, like measures to reduce income inequality or to improve the lives of the poor, let’s focus on the extremely divisive and likely not very impactful issue of gun control.
As with above, I don’t really agree with this logic. The only thing that’s going to convince them to go left is if they feel like they have a better chance of winning general elections by going left. By being able to take the progressive vote for granted, they do not have to actually cater to progressive policies in any way. They can foresake 5 million leftist votes to gain 1 more “moderate” vote in your scenario. And this is what has actually happened. This is why the democrats are chasing Republicans to the right.
If Sanders had won, Biden would poll better at the end. Because one guy is going to have a GOP war machine hammering at him and the other guy is going to be largely forgotten so it’s easy to say “Yeah, he seems okay” six months from now.
Biden had voters braving a pandemic to wait in line for an hour to vote and give him a 30 point win in Wisconsin. Sanders hasn’t expanded his base in four years and can’t get his voters out on a sunny day. But, sure, something something enthusiasm because Biden doesn’t have enough noise on Reddit.
That is a fair point. I suspect Biden will fall further than Bernie would fall for the reason I outlined, but you can’t really quantify that hypothetical.
I think you guys are underestimating how uninspiring Biden is currently. This lockdown was his big chance to establish himself as a leader to the American people and he sat it out. If he can’t be inspiring now, when it’s basically an ideal scenario and he’s being tossed a softball, how is he going to do it later in the campaign?
You’ve probably seen the creepy videos, but you’re going to see them hundreds of times before November. And yes, it’s incredibly stupid that our media is going to say “Biden is unelectable due to being a creep! Vote for the rapist!” mor or less, but it’ll happen. Moreover, a lot of Trump’s supporters probably think Trump’s sexual assault is the sort of macho awesome rich guy sexual assault they’d like to commit one day, whereas Biden’s supporters are not going to be as shitty and will be more appalled at his creepy Uncle Touchy stuff.
And the senile guy vs senile guy debates are not likely to help voter turnout, which is bad for democrats.
I know this is what Sanders supporters are banking on to confirm their biases but who do you think these Biden supporters are who haven’t been watching the guy for the last couple decades and don’t already have an opinion of the guy? I mean, if you pulled someone out of a crowd and said “Look! He touched shoulders! And he smelled that girl’s hair! Here it is in super slow motion with creepy music played over it!” then maybe you’d get a reaction. That ain’t the case here.