I was thinking before I read this thread that most Hillary supporters seem to have more of a problem with Sanders supporters than Sanders himself.
Still, reading some of the posts here have given voice to some of my own misgivings about Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters, including and especially how it reminds me of Trump. Yeah, yeah, what I call Sanders supporters’ naivete (especially the ones on social media), they call my cynicism and willingness to sacrifice people and principles out of laziness, but I just don’t see Sanders accomplishing anything other than MAYBE introducing his ideas and positions to a larger audience. I certainly don’t think he’s going to be President, even if he could be an effective President, which I don’t think he would be.
You understand that these 2 remarks are pretty much at odds with one another, right?
Anyhoo,
FYI: SDMB posters are not “Most Democratic voters.”
To the extent that American lefties like Scandinavia, it’s not oriented especially towards the 1970s. Nice rhetorical flourish though.
I agree that Sanders’ points about campaign finance and Citizen’s United are a draw.
For myself, I’d like to see the US in the best 40% of the OECD ranking tables. I’d like us to have top marks on ease of starting a business, transparency (lower corruption), infant mortality, life expectancy, health care efficiency, etc. Generally speaking, that would point us in a more socialist direction, though I’d appreciate technocratic implementation. Don’t get me wrong: we do well on a lot of the rankings. I’d like my country to do better though and I believe that I would feel that way regardless of my place of birth.
I don’t think too much about Clinton’s vs. Bernie’s policies frankly. Their vastly different electability is show stopper for me. Hillary’s outstanding qualifications and strong work ethic also play a role. I can see voting for Bernie for reasons related to the Overton Window though. I haven’t really parsed their 2 plans on their merits though, as other considerations have made that unnecessary.
Yeah, so? Ooh, you caught us. We’re so busted. :rolleyes:
Problem for you is, you can’t make hay with that unless you can pin it on a major Democratic official or at least a strategist. That’s the nice thing about being slyly strategic: your most perspicacious opponents will know exactly where you really stand, but we retain enough deniability that you can’t make the charge stick.
As I noted in the other thread, this is wrong. I agree with all your other points though.
I do want a fucking revolution. Just not a redistributivist one. I don’t regard socialism as very revolutionary and I regard it as reductionistically simplistic.
There are no revolutionaries running for the office whose revolution I wish to participate in. Therefore I want a competent manager, a policy geek who loves banging out solutions and negotiating agreeements.
I’m guessing Sanders has also co-sponsored bills and amendments, though I can’t find the numbers right now. But just saying that each only has 3 laws passed with their names on them is incomplete information.
Well, her supporters are also saying a bunch of stuff in this very thread. Do you not agree with what’s being said? I don’t see anyone criticizing him for being Jewish or male.
Democrats? Not really. Some really are moderate (by U.S. standards). Me personally? Of course. Not the 1970 part, but the rest. Social democracy is pretty much the pinnacle right now. It’s the exact moderate position between the two extremes and seeks to give us the benefits of both.
And, since you brought up Scandinavia, it also produces the happiest people, which is kinda the moral imperative.
What I don’t get is why people have a problem with this.
Oh, and Hillary supporters call (some of) Bernie’s supporters racist and sexist, and blame that on him not kicking them out. There’s a reason the BernieBro meme caught on: it pretty much describes Redditors, who Sanders is heavily courting.
While I thought the rest of the post was silly (for it’s "AH HA"ness and its conflating the farther left leaning SDMB posters with the entire Democratic party), I think this is fair. Scandinavia in the 1970s was at its most… social democracy, if you will. Since then they have done quite a bit of deregulating and liberalizing the economy (its still more socialized than other countries, but not nearly to the extent it was in the 70s).
Belsham stated that any libertarian state would need to redistribute wealth gained during the previous government to ensure no person had an upper hand due to government influence
Anarchist. I want a cautious conservative radical who will start some experimental communication and decision-making structures aimed at finding out, methodically and scientifically, what the most democratic and egalitarian participatory design can actually work. I want one who will take some incremental steps towards taking decision-making authority out of the hands of a few elected or appointed people and transferring it to the people at large — perhaps by retaining our existing election-based leaders as the issue-debaters but gradually folding in some general-pop referendum consultation as far as the actual voting process goes, and also opening the proposal-making process to a wider range of citizen-based initiatives. I want to see some funded experiments in cooperative labor and materials sharing based on decentralized networks later on down the pike, making use of the best of those above-mentioned communication and decision-making structures, to see about replacing the entire specific reciprocity system (the market economy, the money system, competition) with a sharing and cooperating general reciprocity system, to play with it, to see where and how it might work, for whom, and for what.
I don’t want any sudden lurching changes that result in the lights going out, store-window bashing and looting, mob rule led by least-common-denominator demagogues (but hell, we’ve lurched towards THAT one within our existing structure).
But I’m tired of “leaders”. And I’m tired of a vision of democracy that can’t think of any more democratic direction we can go aside from looking for yet more marginalized outgroups that have been subjected to categorical oppression or categorical left-out-itude and trying to ameliorate those unfairnesses. The latter is a good goal but it’s not the only direction in which democratic and egalitarian progress can be made.
I’m totally unimpressed with band-aid approaches to the market economy. “Let’s compete and let’s reward the victors in the competition, but oh wait let’s redistribute the results so that the losers starve a little less and are deprived a little less and aren’t quite so totally rendered incapable of competing in the next round”. Fuck that shit. The problem isn’t a too excessive reward to the victors, the problem is that we’re still playing cutthroat competition despite a species-wide surplus and plentitude sufficient for us all. (The socialists realize the latter but are oblivious to the stupidity of continuing to play the competition game in the first place).
It’s probably not ok for reasons that adaher mentioned, but I just do not think a good record as a senator is necessary for becoming our country’s top executive. Obama and Kennedy did not get much accomplish in the Senate and they were both good presidents.
Sounds like communes. They have been tried, off and on, for a couple centuries. I’m not putting them down. Some were good places to live in. The most long-lasting tend to have a religious glue. Do you know much about the Hutterites?:
And kibbutzim in Israel, which were not usually religious but more out of the socialist tradition. But it after early success the movement faded only experiencing some resurgence with some elements of differential pay and a professional management structure being introduced.
I take many of these criticisms seriously. I think Bernie will have a very hard time once inaugurated. I am worried about it.
But I remember a lot of outsiders, including several state governors with almost no Washington experience, running for President, acting like utter amateurs, and muddling through. Mrs Clinton’s husband was one of them.
I’m not sure the ostensible experts and grownups are that much more worth listening to than the outsider hippies. We’ve had at least one economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (A. Goolsbee) who thought adjustable rate mortgages with balloon payments were just fine. And he wants to talk trash about Jerry Friedman? The Ivy League elites are blinded to the problems of the poor by their own aristocratic biases, and can no longer expect to be trusted.
A vote for Bernie is a vote for where the party of the left in our two-party system needs to be. It’s a wake-up call. It’s not a vote for a smooth ride, but an intentional provocation, and I am OK with that.
I don’t know if there any actual trustworthy grownups. But I don’t think Hillary is actually any more one than Bernie. She’s just more elitist.
I suspect the main reason they call his supporters racist & sexist because that is a standard fallback of the Clinton faction: to demonize the alternatives as racist, sexist bigots. They use it on Republicans, and on old-school white New Deal populists, and they probably believe it when they say it.
Thomas or William? I don’t know the Belshams, where do I start?
Anyway, yes, that would be “equality of opportunity.” Good point.
I think that Bernie, with his egalitarian populism & his ideas for massive subsidies to universities, is more in line with you than Hillary is.
