I’ve been pondering the possible long term outcomes of Sanders winning the nomination and have come up with a hypothetical. The question is do you think a Sanders victory under this scenario is worth it.
Let’s say you have a crystal ball that shows you two outcomes for this fall. In one scenario Biden wins the nomination and loses to Trump in the general election. 2022 is a blue wave including a Democratic senate. 2024, while not a guaranteed victory, looks like a good year for Democrats as well. The downside, of course, is four more years of Trump.
The alternative scenario is Sanders winning the nomination. In this scenario Sanders beats Trump in the fall. 2022 is a red wave, just like 1994 and 2010. The senate stays red despite the map being favorable to Democrats. In 2024 a Republican along the lines of Mitt Romney or John Kasich wins the election. 2026 is a small blue victory. 2028 brings the re-election of Romney / Kasich / whoever. 2030 is a blue wave. It’s not until 2032 that we’re looking at the opportunity for another Democratic president. On the other hand there would be no more Trump.
Obviously these are not the only two options, but if they were, which would you go for?
There is a huge assumption here that oppositional propaganda will always be effective. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would have been like if Hillary would have won, the messaging from the right wing would be some crazy shit right now. Would congress still be red, no blue wave in 2018?
At some point people have to wake up and realize they are being lied to. I am hoping we have passed that point with enough people, but the fact that the red base stays at a rock solid 42% in favor of Trump is worrying.
To stop fighting the hypothetical for a second, I think 4 years of Sanders and then a pull back to moderate Republican policy wouldn’t be so bad. You gotta remember their propaganda machine is gonna fight just as hard against a moderate Dem like Biden or Hillary as against Sanders. They don’t have a medium setting. So you can’t assume anything farther down the road would be impacted by the degree of the leftward shift in the Democratic Party. A more unifying voice might have better hope for long term change, but the propaganda will still be equally fierce, so hope for actual unity is faint.
Personally, get Trump out. Sort out the rest of it later, its not an existential issue.
Trump charging around the world order with no comprehension of anything beyond what the news anchor of the day said, has a much, much greater damage potential than a decade of “normal” republicans. The latter is mostly going to do damage internal to the US.
Get Trump out, take the 8 years of a moderate Republican. What we need right now is a return to normalcy. (Although Bernie is the Democrat who is the least likely to deliver “normalcy” if elected.)
Either Bernie won’t be able to get anything done, in which case no rocking of the boat, or maybe we get single-payer healthcare, which is a win-win. What’s not to like about this scenario.
Four more years of trump, especially if the last 2 years have a blue senate, aren’t going to be bad.
I’m more worried about Trump stacking the appellate and supreme court at this point, and a democratic senate could (in theory) block that. However IRL who knows if the dems would capitulate and just appoint Trumps nominees.
I do not see ANY (currently) non-Trumper Republicans taking on the role of the “moderate” Republican. Not successfully anyway. Can you name one? They’ve all been marginalized completely. Romney committed political suicide with his impeachment vote. Kasich? Yeah right.
That’s my thought too- a moderate Democrat or Republican is fine- they may be wrong, but they’re wrong within normal parameters, to paraphrase PJ O’Rourke.
Trump is definitely well outside normal parameters of wrong, and in a lot of ways, so is Bernie.
I mean, someone in the Mitt Romney or John Kasich mold on the Republican side, or the Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg on the Democrat side isn’t going to be exciting or really galvanize either side into any sort of frenzied action, but that’s the point. I’m of the opinion that at this point, we really need a President who’ll set a good, Presidential example- dignified, statesman(or woman)-like, etc… and who will confine themselves to Presidential matters and not tweet about everything in a political fashion.
I also suspect we’ll probably keep the same Senate/House party split, which will mean that getting any meaningful legislation will be difficult, so having a moderate President focused on restoring the dignity and gravitas of the office would be just fine.
The last 2 republican presidents have destroyed Americas reputation, cut taxes on the rich and appointed a ton of judges on the federal level.
A moderate GOP president would do the same thing. Also even if we have a moderate GOP president, the GOP will still be declaring all out war on democracy anyway. Just because we have president Kasich doesnt change the fact that the GOP is going to be pushing for gerrymandering, abusing the census, voter suppression, etc.
In a way I like having Trump as the face of the GOP. Having a more acceptable face like Kasich lets the GOP be a neofascist white nationalist party that can pretend to be civilized. Trump rips the phony mask off and exposes it for what it is.
My priority is getting Trump out of office. He’s not normal, even for a Republican.
If Trump dropped dead tomorrow and Pence became President, it would be a significant improvement. Even though I believe Pence would be a terrible President. Because Trump is worse than terrible.
The ball shows way too little information to be useful.
And, if it’s all a simple formula; the party who wins the presidency (and controls the Senate) is determined by the incumbent party and where a given election falls in the presidential election cycle, then it’s just a waiting game for both parties.
Any long-term planning for success that depends on keeping the other party out of office indefinitely is doomed to failure. Republicans will win the presidency again. Maybe not this year, or the next cycle, or the next, but eventually.
So, what’s the point of “making sure” that there isn’t a GOP president in 2024 (or even 2032)? There will be one after that. Why should I be more afraid of GOP presidency in the end of the 2020s than I should be of a GOP presidency after 2032? Why should I choose four more years of Trump now, to bump the next GOP presidency out 4 or 8 years? I don’t get the end game.
And, I frankly, I think the crystal ball scenario of consequences is made up and not worth fretting over. Treating arguments like “Warren is unelectable” or “Sanders is guaranteed doom to local/state elections” as unassailable truths is counter-productive, and I don’t think really yields any interesting conversations or insight.
We need both liberals and conservatives for our political system to work properly. Right now, we don’t have any conservatives, with the result that the Democrats are having to take on the conservative role, and we’re really bad at it. A return of real conservatives instead of Trump would definitely be a benefit.
Mentioning Romney and Kasich together like this shows how far down the rabbit-hole we’ve come. Romney is a genuine patriot and, by GOP standards, definitely a moderate, but he is FAR to the right of someone like Joe Biden(*).
Kasich seems to be a sincere good-spirited man who has moved away from the far-right on many issues, but his background is hard-core right-wing. As Governor he encouraged various obstacles to abortion (e.g. forcing pregnant women to have ultrasounds); defunded public schools; supports teaching intelligent design in public schools; opposes pro-environment measures; opposes labor unions (Ohio is a right-to-work state); supports the kindergarten thinking behind “Balanced Budget amendment”; opposed gay marriage; etc.
So Kasich may be “moderate” by the standards of the Evil cabal that has taken over the GOP, but please don’t conflate him with actual moderates.
As I wrote this, I realized how much our labels have been forced to change. Fifty years ago, on a scale where 1 is Mao Tse-Tung, 5 “moderate”, and 10 Adolf Hitler, America had a general bipartisan consensus and chose from among a 5 (“moderate”), 4 (“left-winger”) or 6 (“right-winger”). But nowadays, we sometimes are faced with the choice of a 2 or a 9; and eveyone who would have been lumped in the “sanity zone” 50 years ago including what would then be called left or right, is now called “moderate.”
At the pace that Cocaine Mitch and Cadet Bone Spurs are going, in two more years the number of vacancies across the entire system will be less than 10 and more like, “oh he retired? great, cue up the next one”. A 2022 Dem Senate won’t have anything left to stop.
We have to work with the tools at hand, so to speak. And really your comments apply to the Democratic party as well- today’s moderate Democrats are further left than they used to be as well. Both parties have sort of pulled into their own navels policy-wise, and I tend to think that’s a big part of today’s issues. There isn’t a middle anymore. In theory, the moderates of both parties should probably have more in common with each other than with the extreme wings of their own parties, but that hasn’t been the case for a while now.
I even remember a quaint diagram from a political science book from college that showed how Republicans from traditionally left-leaning states were often more liberal than Democrats from traditionally right-leaning states. So a Texas Democrat might well have a lot in common with a California Republican under that particular concept. That hasn’t been the case for a while now though.
Trump IS a moderate. Not sure if he can be called a Republican at all. He’s more of a populist independent who’s moderate.
He’s the closest thing we’ve had to an independent President since, maybe Teddy Roosevelt. The idea that Trump is a radical right-wing conservative is demonstrably untrue.