Of course, larger macro economic forces make Trump's economic promises very hard to carry out. But his shortlist of candidates for cabinet and other major roles also cast doubts whether his administration will even end up trying.
The progressive wing of the democratic party now has more leverage within that party. Furthermore, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/business/economy/can-trump... does paint one of the nicest images of Trump voters, implying the Rust Belt voters who most dramatically swung republican vs 2012 and 2008 voted Trump in on a Sandernist mandate.
So 2020 could be interesting, but man waiting through 4 more years of gridlock will suck. If it weren't for supreme court I'd love to strike a bargin of "4 years your stuff, 4 years ours", so we'd actually run a good policy experiment.
Gridlock? I was thinking that by controlling the house, the senate, and the presidency, the Republicans are going to be able to push through all the legislation they want.
Combine that with new Supreme Court justices (and probably one or two more in the next four years) and Trump could effect more change than any President has in a long time.
Yeah that's the thing. They ought to be on their own, but if the democrats return the favor (and I do also feel we were way too nice in 2008) and filibusterer everything, Congress will still have a hard time doing anything.
Democrats don't filibuster republicans. Republicans filibuster democrats. They didn't do jack to stop NCLB or the Patriot Act or either of the war authorizations under Bush.
I think we need a post mortem in the Democratic Party.
Look I supported Hilary but there were so many things that went wrong. Let's talk about the fact that we suppressed our own vote. Emails came out that the party wanted Hilary to win at all costs enough to sabotage Sanders. Well that sort of thing doesn't help anyone, because a candidate not picked by the people will loose. Trump may have been someone that the party despised but he won the vote, they did not push him out. There are so many other things that we did wrong, why wasn't Elizabeth Warren in this? I know because the party wanted Hilary to win it.
There are many other things that can go into this post mortem. I've come to grips with the fact that we lost and I'm looking ahead at what we can do next time.
Hillary won a majority of the popular votes in the primary as well as the majority of pledged delegates (i.e. not just superdelegates). I don't think I understand how that counts as 'suppressing' your vote. Mind expanding on that a bit?
Things Hillary and her campaign did during the primaries:
- Rigging the primary/caucus schedule so that all the states favoring Hillary would be the first to vote.
- Rigged the debate schedule by purposely scheduling them at odd times when no one would by watching so that Bernie couldn't get his message out.
- Cheated in the debates by receiving the questions in advance, and was given extra time by the moderators.
- Got the media to censor all virtually all coverage of Bernie. E.g. on the days when he had big primary wins, the media covered the speeches of every other candidate except him.
- Illegally disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters in New York and Arizona alone by removing them from the voter roles, or else removing their party affiliation. Disenfranchised millions more around the country by, e.g., forcing California voters to vote provisional and then just throwing out their ballots without counting them.
- Circumvented campaign finance laws by having donors send money to the state parties, but then requiring the state parties to send all of that money to her campaign. All while trashing Bernie for not raising money for the down ticket races.
That's very similar to the playbook used against Ron Paul in 2008. That's one of the reasons that the Trump strategy was so interesting.
Ron Paul focused on concepts, history, logical points and got a huge following because of it as well as a lot of money raised. He sparked a lot of the Libertarian movement that we see today...but he was largely blacked out by the media and especially Fox News. They even edited him out of debate rebroadcasts.
Trump on the other hand played to the media shock free press. He'd garner national attention as the media took opportunity after opportunity to shame him...and it worked. He got tons of free press because the media focused on shaming opportunity and sound bites while candidates with good points get ignored. It's an absolute reflection of how our media works.
It really is a reflection of how our media values things, shocking content gets airtime, reasonable well formed opinions get minimal airtime.
What Ron Paul did inside the republican party, whereby his supporters ran the party at the state level in many states was incredible, they really knew how to make a run of it!
I'd say the vote was suppressed, but that is mainly due to how hard it is in the US to vote. You need to be registered to vote months in advance, depending where you live you likely need to show up to a polling place and wait for hours in line on a particular day during work hours, etc.
All this means that of the 220 million eligible voters, only 120 million actually voted this election, whereas for Obama in 2008, 130 million people voted (nearly all of that 10 million going to Obama). If Hillary had had a stronger ground game, or pulled in the Bernie call canvasers, she could have turned those 10 million out to the polls.
The sad thing is, after Bernie's loss, many of the people I met in West Michigan did not turn out to vote, or if they did they did not vote for Hillary. I know at least 15 of the people I met did not vote, and another 5 voted for another candidate.
"The drop in turnout was uneven. On average, turnout was unchanged in states that voted for Trump, while it fell by an average of 2.3 percentage points in states that voted for Clinton."
I might be misinterpreting this, but wouldn't that quote imply the opposite? If the states that voted for Clinton had fewer voters than before but she still won, the seems to me like that means that the people who did vote were Democrats, not those who didn't
> Emails came out that the party wanted Hilary to win at all costs enough to sabotage Sanders.
Can you link to the emails that show this? I keep hearing it, but the closest I've found are a few trash talking employees that were slapped down and told to stay out of it.
It sounds like you're genuinely interested in correcting mistakes made by the democratic party.
To that end as an outsider looking in, it seems to me that the biggest problem the democratic party has right now is the ability to openly discuss ideas in a rational manner free from the chains of political correctness and its inherent biases.
If the left could openly discuss the relationship between islam and terrorism, the negative impacts of certain equal opportunity laws on the minorities they are trying to benefit, the conflict between gender pronoun legislation and free speech, etc. then the party itself would be on big path for improvement.
Note: Your statements were about the Democratic Party so I gave you my opinion on it. The Republican Party is replete with its own flaws, but thats not the topic here. IMO I think most of the left/right dichotomy is a poor political model which leads to group think over rational contemplation of specific issues.
EDIT: I understand a libertarian or non-conforming opinion is not popular on HN or in liberal circles, hence the down votes. The irony here and specifically with my statement above is that we should uphold debate and argument over exclusion and political correctness to "let the good ideas win in free debate" and the only counter is to downvote and silence. Disagreement is great but it leads to Trump if you batle with intimidation tactics and silencing instead of actual argument. This is the biggest problem currently with many on the left and so I stand by my statement.
The idea (which is now becoming law in some places such as Canada [1]) is that some people do not identify as male and female but rather as something inbetween. So if you refer to them using the words 'he' or 'she' then that is an act of violence against them. The laws enacted then fine you if you refuse to use whatever pronoun they prefer in place of 'he' or 'she'. [2] Some examples are ze,them, zer, etc.
You might want to address your concerns to the party that just screwed up badly in the election, not "the left". The Democratic Party has spent the last few decades moving away from left-wing politics, with Clinton supporting a more mixed set of political views.
Blaming "the left" for recent(-ish) problems in government isn't accurate when there hasn't been a lot of representation of the actual left in a while. That may be changing with Bernie and other recent support for liberal and progressive positions, but the current party is still very centrist.
Definitely, there are a ton of libertarians here, to the point that my prior comments in threads like this would fluctuate up & down by 5 to 10 points for a few hours after posting. Was quite fun to watch!
I agree. I'm annoyed the Dems seem to think they are okay if they just stay the course. Here's the scorecard:
The Republicans will control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, have the chance to appoint at least one and probably several Supreme Court justices, run 68 out of 99 state legislative houses, and hold 31 gubernatorial seats.
Sounds like to me the Dems are in deep trouble and they need to wake up. Good points above.
Sorry but I think you are missing the point. Most of the time when people say they are doing objective analysis on islam or minorities what they actually do is just say a bunch of racist stuff. And then they complain that the people saying that they are being hateful and racist are censoring their right to free speech.
Well, first Islam is a religion which has nothing to do with race. So if someone is criticizing Islam because perhaps it has some bad ideas how can that be racist? Are the societal critics of fundamentalist Christianity racists when they assert the moral badness of stoning gays to death or that a "womans place is in the home"?
To that end as an outsider looking in, it seems to me that the biggest problem the democratic party has right now is the ability to openly discuss ideas in a rational manner free from the chains of political correctness and its inherent biases.
What you are proposing has already been tried in my home country of Denmark. It doesn't work, because it legitimizes the rhetoric of the extreme right, which strengthens them, and makes people who were sympathetic to the left apathic. It also doesn't move any voters who were already sympathetic to these ideas, because why would they vote for the a watered down version of the same platform?
Care to back that up with any data, links, etc? It seems like you are saying that the freedom to speak about and openly discuss problems is not the most effective way for a society to learn about, discuss, and solve its own problems, but that by explicity silencing anything not conforming to vague and malleable rules of "political correctness" a more optimal or equi-optimal system can be achieved.
My question here is genuine, it doesn't follow immediately for me that what you say is true and seems counterintuitive to my knowledge base, so I would welcome any data backing up your statements (I can read Danish too, if that helps).
>If the left could openly discuss the relationship between islam and terrorism, the negative impacts of certain equal opportunity laws on the minorities they are trying to benefit, the conflict between gender pronoun legislation and free speech, etc. then the party itself would be on big path for improvement.
I disagree strongly. The problem is not that the Democratic Party says the "wrong" thing about minor cultural issues. The problem is that it fills its propaganda output up with minor cultural issues at all.
The party platform this year had a lot of positions in it that were good for the country: rebuild infrastructure, improve the health-care system, cheap to free higher education, better vocational education, etc. The Clinton campaign mostly did not actually run on those issues at all; it ran on "our opponent is a very mean, irresponsible, and socially unjust person". Why? Because those progressive positions in the platform were Sanders' positions, not Clinton's.
The Democratic Party needs to make one major change to be relevant again: care about the working class. Run on bread-and-butter issues of material well-being, not on which words people use on Twitter! But that can't happen until the Clintonist cancer is excised from the party.
You make valid points. Still, what happens when someone brings up some of the most important issues of the moment i.e. Black Lives Matters or Islamic Terrorism? Surely, the Democratic Party should not refuse to listen or engage at all?
Those are not the most important issues of the moment to anyone but white fanatics. The idea that one of the most important issues is black people marching, and that it it is on a par with Islamic terrorism (although the chances of even that affecting any particular citizen in any way are infinitesimal) is absurd.
Bridges are falling apart, health care costs are rising out of control, with the loss of the manufacturing sector there are no jobs for people who haven't gone to college, the country is out of its mind on oxycodone, and you're worried about black people walking. Unbelievably elitist attitude.
Why are you criticizing a straw man, getting upset at him, and then calling him me?
If you read my comment I never said those issues where the most important issues of the moment. I never said that black people marching is equivalent to islamic terrorism. I never even said I was worried about black people walking. Then you say I have an elitist attitude when you didn't even take the time to hear what I had to say. I think that attitude is rather elitist.
It's elitist because a huge amount of people in the Democratic party are upper class white people. They are not working class and they are not minorities. And yet they still care about the issues very much. But, it's hard for them to know which issues to focus on since none of them actually personally affect them. So when they focus on racism, instead of the basics like jobs, it is a bit elitist.
I think a better answer to your original question is that, of course, if a democratic candidate is asked specifically about something like black lives matter or lgbt rights, they should talk about how they support the cause and what policies they are pushing that will help out. But, they should primarily stick with the the basic issues of security (financial security, national security). That is what the working class wants to hear about, and that is who the Democrats need to win back.
People who are more concerned with black lives matter or lgbt rights are going to vote Democrat no matter what, so it's not like we're going to lose those votes.
Ok, so I'm actually gonna have to kinda-sorta agree with pessimizer here.
Black people are 13% of the population. They are not all poor, and only mostly under attack by the police. They certainly don't all agree with BLM, even if I personally do. This means BLM represents, generously, a good deal less than 10% of the population.
As to "Islamic terrorism", well, what Islamic terrorism? The most mature thing we can do is to admit that Islamic terorrism is mostly a European problem rather than an American one, and that homegrown mass shooters are a much larger problem, one which can easily be addressed by ameliorating or solving many of our other absolutely dreadful social problems.
So when you put BLM and Islamic terror together, how much of the population have you got in your coalition? 10%? Let's throw in LGBT for another ten. The most outspokenly neoliberal-feminist women. Uhhhh, maybe another 15? Millenials? How many millenials are there?
Except that your coalition strength in this "movement of movement" strategy is constantly being undermined by your own embrace of neoliberalism. Remember the whole #NotHereForTheBoys debacle? Feminists, LGBT people, black people, and Middle Eastern human-rights activists all need food to eat and a roof over their head, and neoliberalism keeps pushing the Professional Achievement Waterline necessary to have that basic standard of living higher and higher. You can't go around shaming people for supporting Bread and Peace and expect to have a coalition left. "I'm a queer black survivor, and I'm starting at Goldman Sachs next year!" is the most morally dishonest and repulsive platform I've ever seen, but it's exactly what Hillary ran on.
A workers' movement, on the other hand, represents that lovely fabled percentage we heard about in 2011: 99% of the population.
You want to see a Democratic Party that can work? It was called the Rent is Too Damned High Party.
Your very framing of the subject as "political correctness" is already passing judgment. Why is what you believe to be "political correctness" considered exclusion while your categorization of those opinions as mere political correctness isn't?
For what it's worth, I believe that all the subjects you brought up, while far from perfect (and sometimes exaggerated, usually among a very small, extremely young minority), are far better studied and discussed in earnest among those you'd call liberals (the vast majority of people who actually study Islam and terrorism, public policy and minority, history etc., are liberals), then among libertarians. You can find serious academic discussion of most of those subjects, and the reason conservatives/libertarians don't think it exists is merely because they lack the will to actually deep dive and study the subject, instead expressing opinions based on gut feeling or a piece of data they've seen on some blog. When they are criticized, they try to invalidate that criticism (that often stems from actually caring about and studying the subject for more than 30 minutes) by calling it silencing.
The only subject that isn't discussed in earnest, which you didn't mention, and unlike those subjects you mentioned has probably had a real impact on the election result, is neolibearal capitalism.
I'm curious; how do you think that "discussing the relationship between Islam and terrorism" can e.g. solve the problem of ISIS? To many of us, this kind of insistence is aimed solely at making it okay to discriminate against people based solely on their religious faith.
Generaly, without going into great detail, in the same way being allowed to criticize the relationship between Christianity and the oppression of women, justification for slavery, anti-gay actions, etc. Has led to much more moderate and tolerable interpretations of Christianity over the past several hundred years.
But there are certainly lots of more moderate interpretations of Islam than ISIS, so I still don't see the connection.
I know of at least one church where members were advised to pray for a Trump victory in hopes that he would appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn decisions like Roe v Wade, Lawrence v Texas, United States v Windsor and Obergefell v Hodges. Apparently, years of criticism have done nothing to eliminate the less moderate and tolerant interpretations of Christianity.
EDIT: to clarify slightly, the existence of more moderate interpretations of a given religion does not also mean that the more extreme interpretations will go away.
True. And now I suppose I will go into slightly more detail :) First though, I never suggested that discussing the issue would solve the problem of ISIS just to be clear. Discussion is the first step down a very long road. However, I do think debate and criticism will contribute to a diminishing of such ideology in the world.
So, would you agree it would be better for one or a few churches to pray for removal of Roe v Wade than hundreds or thousands of Churches?
If so then you must surely agree that one or a few dozen extreme interpretations is still better than several hundreds or thousands as is the case with the various terrorists groups of which ISIS is one.
So the question of importance is not how to eliminate extreme interpretations in a world we know is imperfect, but how to minimize that number knowing we can never fully eliminate it.
Now, there are several ways to achieve our goal. One way, that is also backed up by some of the experts and leading activists in this field such as Maajid Nawaz, John Azumah, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi to name a few - which I would highly recommend those interested in reading - is that which I suggest i.e. open debate and discussion and a fostering of secularization within Islam by interacting with its leaders and its community and criticizing the ideas, not the people, where they are bad. And doing all of this in an open and honest, non-vehement manner, but still discussing and criticizing nonetheless.
Now, there are likely other factors that play a role in Islamic terrorism besides extreme interpretation of religious texts such as socio-economic status, educational level, community values, etc. which may or may not play a role in extremism and we should openly discuss these as well.
Non-Christians criticizing the relationship between Christianity and the oppression of women, justification for slavery, anti-gay actions, etc, had absolutely no effect on whether Christians did or didn't continue those things.
Nothing would make me happier than if the Democratic party was able to capture my vote in the next general.
In order to do that, they're going to need to start making some serious changes:
1. Become the party of free speech. What is happening on college campuses is not something I will ever support. No safe spaces, no shouting down someone who doesnt define racism as "prejudice plus power". The regressive left is killing your party.
2. Stop supporting foreign policies that are as bad as the neocons. We don't need to export democracy to Libya, Syria, Yemen, Egypt... We don't need to engage ourselves in civil wars in other countries. We are not the world police. Follow the money for this election and it is painfully obvious that HRC was the candidate for the military industrial complex as much as she was for transgender bathrooms.
3. Stop pushing for foreign trade deals that further depress domestic wages. HRC stopped supporting TPP because Bernie and Trump were against it. If we get wage growth, entitlement expansion isn't necessary to capture the electorate and left candidates will be able to advance all the LGBT social reforms they want without scaring the moderate right away with tax increases.
HRC won the popular vote this time, but a lot of the GOP turnout effort was half assed because they never thought Trump would pull it off. Reorient the party towards blue collar, or keep doing the same old same old and lose. This election cost you the Supreme Court. You really don't have any choice other than to move to the middle.
I agree that the "free college" issue was not laid out clearly enough. In reality, many countries offer free public education at the college level, it's not a ridiculous proposition. It's a worthy cause as long as the programs being subsidized lead to more capable and, eventually, more affluent American work force that would boost the economy.
Ideally, Bernie's platform would offset the cost of some free higher education by closing corporate tax loopholes, releasing non-violent drug offenders from tax-funded prisons and jails, and significantly reducing military spending.
also think about it like this... when automation comes in and takes away just about every job, and only engineers, scientists, doctors, developers are left-- and only maybe 25-30% of the populace can find work at all -- who's going to pay ANY taxes when nobody earns any income? -- The more people that go to college, get HIGHER paying jobs, leave poverty, and end up paying taxes contributes more to the economy than not letting them go to college, and instead making them reliant on welfare for life.
There's a fair amount of states who voted for Sanders and Trump: idaho, montana, north dakota, wisconsin, west virginia, oklahoma, kansas, nebraska - lots of these states were close races in the general, it's not hard to think that sanders would have won there since he was actually trying to address their core issue of middle class jobs. And it shows that at least the democrats in those states preferred Sanders to Clinton.
The states that voted for Sanders and Clinton: washington, oregon, colorado, minnesota, lots of new england states - basically all the guaranteed blue states no matter who the candidate is.
We're not arguing here. Election is over. All I can say is that I would not vote for Bernie.
I think:
- Primary voting is suggestive of turnout, but when you've got a candidate that people are voting against out of hate, it is hard to infer true support. So, I don't know if Bernie would have won.
- I heard (unconfirmed) that 9% of registered democrats voted for Trump. Such a weird section that, again, it is hard to infer support.
> If the left could openly discuss the relationship between islam and terrorism, the negative impacts of certain equal opportunity laws on the minorities they are trying to benefit, the conflict between gender pronoun legislation and free speech, etc. then the party itself would be on big path for improvement.
That any of this made a difference is the fantasy of a right that got 60 million votes this election, 60 million votes in the last, and 60 million in the one before that. Democrats lost because they hitched their wagon to megadonors and didn't deliver on their promises to working people. They lost their own base, one that gave 72 million votes to a black man with a Arabic/Kenyan name who openly and aggressively advocated for the opposite of what you think (white) people crave.
This election was not a victory for /pol/, it was yet another rejection of Clinton. Not only did Trump get fewer votes than Clinton, I think he got fewer votes that Romney and McCain, too.
I don't think that any group in America is really ready to discuss things in a rational way that is beholden to evidence. Ron Paul was talking a long time ago about how Islamic violence should be framed as blowback -- side effects for decades or epochs of outside disruption.
The GOP party body (whether you're looking only at media chatter or popular chatter) will not be able to coldly discuss factors to Islamic terrorism. In fact, I think you'll find that less than 1% of constituents of the GOP body have read any truly cold account on terrorism, probably found only in Maryland among young students aspiring to learn the poise and prose of a Washington analyst.
Jokes aside, the internal values of the GOP prevent anyone from speaking ill of the military, and that's why the populous GOP response to Islamic political violence is more military, and a more imperialistic view of how spoils of Iraq should go to the winners. Are we even allowed to suggest that Islamic terrorism may be political terrorism, and not just religious terrorism? Maybe it's because the armed forces employs so many people, and people aren't ready for a discussion of what life outside the military means, especially now as Uber managed an automated delivery of beer by truck.
Also, don't you find that as soon as you read for even a few hours on any subject matter, that you've already surpassed much of the nation in effort spent for comprehension? A lot of people have hot talk about the military, Christianity, welfare, terrorism, and immigration. But they're not willing to do the serious work for any one of these subjects. Try to find a Christian who even finds Christianity that fascinating.
The problem is not more rational talk on these things. The problem is not better honest intellectual discussions. The problem is that people honestly don't give a shit about most things political. They want to have strong emotions, and they don't care to look for facts or models.
That's why your parents voting behaviors is the single best (or 2nd best) predictor for your voting behavior, and that's why voting behavior remains predictable lifelong. It's not like the voters are watching the debates and going to the noisy person next to them, "Shhh! I need to hear more debate facts so I can decide how to vote!"
> The problem is not more rational talk on these things. The problem is not better honest intellectual discussions. The problem is that people honestly don't give a shit about most things political. They want to have strong emotions, and they don't care to look for facts or models.
This is so true. I wish it was feasible to only allow educated people to vote =) Most people are just too stupid or lazy to truly understand what they're voting for.
>EDIT: I understand a libertarian or non-conforming opinion is not popular on HN or in liberal circles, hence the down votes.
Nah. I'm downvoting you because you are complaining about downvotes in the reddit passive aggressive way that is specifically forbidden in the guidelines.
Well, I disagree with you but appreciate that you took the time to give the reason for your downvote. I always try to do the same as well b/c I think if everyone did that we would never have a need for such EDITS as the one I made above.
Ironically, I will take advantage of the annoying reddit tradition of announcing I've upvoted you despite your downvotes. I totally agree with his post, but whining about and rationalizing downvotes is petty and off-topic. Especially since it has the most points in the sub-thread.
The super delegates should have jumped ship when the mail server came out and the potential for federal indictment. It was inexcusable and absolutely terrible judgement on her part; she was a federal employee people go to prison for that. Thing was she had been campaigning for so long, she closed the door on Biden and some other options. i think sanders is authentic and means what he says, I have a difficult time seeing him win the presidency though. It's easy to second guess but a competitor that is proudly "socialist" plays really well with what trump won with.
Some of it comes back to Bill, the leadership in the party were afraid to look elsewhere, and they knew she'd had this server and what have you. The bush dynasty and the Clinton were both vanquished this year, maybe that should be a strong lesson. Udall lost in Colorado in 2014 too.
I just wander if any body noticed that Trump is a mixed of Democratic and Republic but disguised as a Republican? His policies have a lot of overlap over Bernie's. That's a reason he harvested so many Democratic party supporters. Those supporters could vote for Bernie if he was a candidate.
On the other hand, Hilary's close relation to Wall street, hawkish altitude towards war, strong ideology of regime change made her seems more like a Republican. That also leads some republican vote for her, but not many.
Are voters along with Hilary and Bernie fooled by the strategy of a smart guy(i.e.Trump) who disguised as a Republican? Note: With a habit of tit for tat, Trump never attack Bernie while Bernie was strongly against Trump.
I like and respect Bernie Sanders a lot, but I can't help but feel that he's deliberately interpreting Trump's victory in a way that vindicates his own beliefs.
I somehow manage to be both amused and disgusted as I watch the media contort itself trying to explain Trump supporters as idiot racist protest voters. Their heads simply cannot contain the idea that many of his ideas have legitimate affirmative support among a near-majority of clear minded individuals.
Occam's razor is helpful here; people voted for Trump because they supported Trump. As a country we kind of have to get over that.
Large parts of the country want to take a dramatically different direction on economic issues from immigration to trade policy, and they voted for the candidate that represented their wishes.
For the record, I think both candidates were catastrophes waiting to happen (albeit in different ways). I voted libertarian.
There is substantial evidence that a lot of people voted for Trump because they did not like Clinton. If Clinton was a popular candidate I don't see a path to Trump winning, but she was a historically unpopular candidate, only Trump had a less favorable approval rating of any other presidential candidates since approval rating has been measured.
Is there any evidence that Sanders gained so much support for the same reason, that people didn't like Clinton?
At the beginning of the race, I assumed Sanders would be like the "RON PAUL 2008" campaign, with a small but vocal group of supporters. I did not think a self-described socialist would be viable in a general election. (Remember how Obama was called a "soshulist"?)
Suppose DNC didn't pick the favorite, and there was a mainstream alternative to Clinton with a favorable approval rating (e.g. Biden). Would Sanders still have garnered this much support?
Had Sanders been the nominee, I would have voted for him: not for his leftist stances but because he seemed like he could be trusted with not running the country into the ground. I stayed home this election.
Bernie Sanders currently has the highest approval rating of any member of congress. He's by all rights the most popular member of the entire American government. People respect him from the left and right. I know many republicans who would vote for him. I all green party votes would've gone to Bernie (Jill said herself if he won the green party wouldn't throw a candidate in the race).
Many votes for the Libertarian party would've also gone to Bernie Sanders. Then a lot of the Trump supporters are actually bernie supporters who feel like the DNC betrayed us by sabotaging the whole thing.. There's a LOT of hate and anger in the democratic party right now.
On facebook I see a shitstorm of anger from Clinton supporters against Bernie supporters blaming US for her loss as if WE are responsible for her being a shitty politician. As if it's not HER responsibility to WIN our votes and CONVINCE us she's the best candidate. She obviously couldn't do that.
So, yes Bernie definitely had a good chance of winning. He also was polling about 10 points above Clinton against Trump in most states. He also won Michigan AND Wisconsin which Trump carried.
You say: "only Trump had a less favorable approval rating"... so how is it that the "horrible" option stole votes from the merely "bad" option? If anything, it should have been the other way around, no?
It was the same in the UK. Labour (left wing party) lost the election big time. Despite the obvious swing to the right they decided that the problem was that they were insufficiently left wing and ended up with Corbyn, who is the Bernie Sanders of the UK.
That's over simplifying a bit, "they" in this case was a flood of new party members who weren't previously involved, but could be similar.
When we talk about immigration, we're really talking about jobs. Yes, there are other aspects as well, but U.S. history is filled with conflict over new waves of immigrants encountering fierce resistance from prior waves of immigrants (see Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States", et al).
That's why Trump ultimately won, because he played to people's fears about jobs, as well as profiting from decades of manufactured hate against Clinton. I have many issues with the Clintons but when I encounter people that hate Hillary they almost explode with hate and then cite Fox News talking points (that are usually lies).
Definitely, playing to peoples fears and using that to get airtime were Trump's smartest moves.
Also, Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States" is a totally worthwhile book to read, it provides a great foundation in the history of America.
Evangelicals voted for Trump, who has kids with 3 different women and cheated on all 3, because Republican. Free-trade libertarians voted Trump, the least free-trade candidate since the 1930s, because Republican. The only #NeverTrumpers who stuck to their guns were a couple dozen foreign policy experts, who's neocon base still voted Trump, because Republican.
Maaaaaaybe 1% of the voters were people who would have otherwise not voted or voted D because they were attracted by Trump's ideas. The rest of the election swings on anti-Clinton sentiment/propaganda and her inability to counter it -- depressing her own turnout and energizing unenthusiastic Trump voters.
And this is why the Republican's keep winning. Because they keep turning out for the team regardless of who the players are. They have long realized that it is better to be in power when squabbling with each other than out in the cold pointing fingers.
They know they will get a stable base from the older generation that will turn out to the polls, and the only way to beat that is to turn a higher percentage (over 55% of eligible voters) out to the polls.
Some of which, at least, were suppressed by Republican states after the hobbling of the Voting Rights Act. Less "Hillary's big failure" and "Superb long game from the Republicans".
I share your reservations about Johnson. He's not a "real" libertarian. Indeed, the LP itself has softened the platform far too much for my taste. But he was the best option I had on the ballot, so I chose him.
>I can't help but feel that he's deliberately interpreting Trump's victory in a way that vindicates his own beliefs.
Agreed, 100%. It's just as easy to turn it around.
I do find it hard to believe that someone who wasn't a democrat before the election, and who is no longer a democrat should be asserting the direction of the democratic party.
It will be interesting to see how the DNC responds in the next election cycle - whether two years is enough time to recover or not. My take is that leadership has taken enough hits that it won't be plausible to make trump a lame duck at the midterm - not without the first two years being full of controversy.
I was going to vote Trump because I'd rather see the DNC burn for what it did to Bernie. In the end I wrote in Bernie Sanders which was my way of voting for Trump but still supporting Bernie and keeping my conscience in tact. -- My own personal echo chamber of 3k+ BErnie Sanders supporting friends that I added on Facebook I'd say maybe 35% voted for Trump as a protest vote. Another 35% voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or wrote Bernie in...
Clinton was never going to win without the full support of those who'd pledged 'Bernie or Bust' or 'Never Hillary' -- we were DIEHARD serious that we would not let our party..be controlled by Wall Street any longer. I'm one of hundreds of thousands who no longer are members of the Democratic party. I'm a registered Independent now, and will luckily in my state I can vote in the Dem. primary without being a reg. democrat (Utah).
Comrade, thanks for not actually voting Trump, but those of us whom the alt-right wants to exterminate are really not enjoying the prospect of having to mount an anti-fascist resistance with the weakest radical Left in decades.
Clinton got some 5 million votes less than Obama 2012 and 10 million less than Obama 2008. Trump got less votes than Romney 2012 but more than McCain 2008. An average performance was enough to win because Clinton wasn't able to get the Democratic Party electors to vote.
Oh wow, I understand that they are not important given how the electoral colleges work, but really don't the USA count all the votes within one day? Why is that? Seen from the outside it is very surprising.
The votes that are uncounted are largely absentee/by-mail votes, which typically must only be mailed (more precisely, postmarked) by election day. Also, smaller numbers of provisional ballots and ballots with problems that require additional review (e.g., ones that ballot counting machines reject.)
There's millions of votes still uncounted, largely in heavily-Clinton states (by the latest official report, over 4.3 million in California alone), so comparisons to final popular vote count in prior elections are rather premature.
There's also the problem of geographic polarization: more enthusiasm among Clinton voters in California or New York doesn't actually net her any more electoral seats, but she doesn't seem to have cared at all to campaign in states like Wisconsin and Michigan that ended up swinging against her.
Bernie did a much better job of calling and canvasing, none of this is rocket science though. Hillary could have done this, she had waaay more time and money to do this kind of outreach with.
I think because of the two-year crapshow that is our presidential election process that most people wouldn't welcome further calls or advertising.
I doubt there would've been much change in the results had you had the presidential election right after the primaries vs our normal election day. Trump had his narrative and people have known Hillary's for a while and definitely already an opinion of her.
I can't really fathom the idea of there having been flip-floppers or undecideds more so than the stories I've read of people who had never voted coming out of the woodwork to do so (for Trump).
Even more sad is that this entire thing was decided in a year with a 20-year low voter turnout. After so much venom spilled, and a little more than half of people decided to vote. I think that says something about both parties.
Both the RNC and DNC are screwed. Yes, the Republican candidate won (and brought a lot of senators with him), but he isn't "their man".
Both establishments put up their chosen people, and both establishments lost.
They've grown too insular, too much about the being "True Conservatives/Progressives", and less about representing people. Who are they to decide what we believe?
The democratic party really needs to start prioritizing the needs of working class Americans. Too many policies clearly benefit corporations and the rich, at the expense of workers. Obama has been a huge disappointment, he talked of hope and change but delivered more of the same. Democrats also need to prioritize the needs of America over the rest of the world. Whatever else you say about Trump, it is clear that he puts Americans first.
>Democrats also need to prioritize the needs of America over the rest of the world.
We need to say this clearly: American citizens must not be the fuel for the American empire, and this should not be considered a nationalist statement as such. Human sacrifice is just bad like that.
Just do what you say, for example, _GIVE_ your college seat to others who has a different skin color or whatever though their GPA is only 40% of yours, instead of just saying you're for AA but you took no actual meaningful action. Just _Moving_ to the neighborhood that you want to help directly and do not buy house in a conservative district then saying you're welcoming lots of section8 house nearby, that's just not good enough. Also let your employer know that you can _GIVE_ your chance to those who have a difference skin color but not as experienced as you. And _DONATE_ 20% of your after-tax income to help those in-need instead of asking the federal to print more money for food-stamps. Last but not least, just _PAY_ more premium out of your pocket so others can get a basically free-ride for medical care, etc,etc.
Just _DO_ it instead of say it, the one who benefited because your generous _actual_action_ will speak to others, so you can safely save the ideology part and let them speak for you, just DO what you want to say, instead of keeping saying it and expect others to do it for you and you feel good about saying those words.
If Democrats DO what they say, all issues will be fixed quickly.
Do you trust that donations to charity organizations do significant good? Because I'd just as likely give money to a charity as to a beggar, which is to say: no chance at all. What did they do to deserve my money, and why should I trust they'll spend it better?
As an aside, your text formatting very much distracted me from your content and left a patronising, annoying impression on me.
There are many charities with great, documented, track records. There is only one US government and it's track record of efficiently and effectively allocating resources is horrible.
I can't help thinking that the government might be better able to e.g. distribute medicaid if half (or more) of the government wasn't constantly doing everything in its power to prevent, disrupt or impede it. That's not usually a problem that charities have.
Democrats need to be like NFL coaches, who scientifically dissect losing games Monday morning.
As a life-long democrat, I blame the corruption in the DNC. I base my opinion on reading DNC emails, and favoring international news sources and a few people I trust on the web. In addition to the DNC's failings, I have lost almost all faith in US news media.
I hope that something positive comes out of this. I look to the future.
Don’t think Trump, or HRC were best choices, but i’d still pick either over Sanders. Sanders presidency would’ve been a disaster to the economy. He would've made starting a business, and employing people even harder than it is now. By rising the minimum wage he would’ve ruined the lower and lower-middle class by the time he’s out of office. Not to mention that Sanders’ gripe with the 1% is more populist than anything Trump or HRC ever said. As soon as he lost to HRC, he bought a 3rd house for $600,000. He sold out to HRC after he got shafted by the DNC. He can talk about the status quo all he wants, but he’s a part of it.
Sander's policies were far from economy destroying, they were classic New Deal Democrat policies that rebuilt America in the 1930s and put millions back to work building the dams, roadways, and infrastructure that keep our society running today. Then, at the tail end of 1941 we had spent the better part of a decade rebuilding our infrastructure and were ready to join in on WW2, so we used all these dams, roadways, etc to build the arms & the Liberty Ships to transport said arms.
It’s not at all agreed upon that the New Deal helped the recovery. It’s just as much argued that it prolonged the Great Depression. It’s baffling to me that you’d state that like it’s a historical fact.
How else do you rebuild an economy that just had a huge bubble pop in one major industry, has the dust bowl going on, and has knockon effects destroying the entirety of peoples savings?
Greece tried to tighten their belt and tax their way out of it, just led to compounding double digit economic contraction.
Instead, when we have bubbles pop, we usually inject money into the economy to keep economic carnage like that at bay, and in the 1930s we created a jobs program so as to put those funds to effective use. This has worked well for the US, as compared to Greece.
You don’t need government investment to make that happen. The issue was the lack of money supply, which was solved partially by Roosevelt’s ban on owning gold, but partially by people fleeing Europe, which allowed the federal government to print more.
This has nothing to do with Sanders’ policies though. Sanders’ policies are a continuation of everything wrong with the New Deal, namely things like the minimum wage and government-supported worker unions, which prevent hiring of low-skilled workers, usually from the lower class, and make hiring overall a risky process, leading to less hires, higher unemployment, and corporations outsourcing abroad.
No ones likes Trump. Its just that people dislike Clinton more. The DNC fielded a toxic loser that everyone outside of Manhattan and LA could smell from a mile away. Look into the Clinton Foundation, they are cartoonishly corrupt and bad at hiding it. Trump made a lot of promises (like all politicians do) and will most likely come up short on all of them. Look to the future. The US will be fine, you guys have been through worse.
There are many types of diversity. Diversity of occupation, diversity of musical taste, diversity of outlook, diversity of residence, and of course varying kinds of racial and ethnic diversity. You could list thousands of kinds of diversity.
The original thinking behind the Electoral College was that geographic diversity was important. The Founding Fathers were not majoritarian, but rather they believed in placing special weight on diversity of this kind. The prevailing view was “if too many (geographically) diverse voices veto you, you can’t get elected, not even with a majority of the votes.” That view was a strange and perhaps unlikely precursor of today’s veto rights/PC approach on campus, but there you go.
Democrats now control at least one legislative house in only 17 states, and the reach of the party is shrinking dramatically. So by the 18th century standards of diversity, emphasizing geography, the Democratic coalition is remarkably non-diverse. You can see how much of Hillary Clinton’s majority came from the two states of New York and California. That also means the Republicans are not just a “Southern rump party,” as some commentators used to suggest.
If you think of education as serving a smoothing function, the less educated are in some ways considerably more diverse than the educated.
The Democratic Party today is more likely to stress the relevance of ethnic and racial diversity, if the talk is about diversity. (Gender diversity too, but that requires its own post, maybe later to come.) Non-Democrats are more likely to count other forms of diversity for more than the Democrats do. I see Democrats as somewhat concentrated in particular cities and also in particular occupations, more than Republicans are. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is another way in which Democrats are less diverse.
When it comes to views about the relevant forms of diversity, the views of non-Democrats are more diverse than the views of Democrats, I would hazard to guess. A non-Democrat is more likely to focus on something other than racial and ethnic diversity, compared to a Democrat.
Correctly or not, many Americans do not think racial and ethnic diversity is the diversity that should command so much attention. That is one place to start for understanding why so many 2012 Obama voters switched to Trump this time around, or maybe just stayed home.
A few days ago I saw figures that 29 percent of Latinos voted for Trump (possibly that number has been revised). I suspect many of those voters do not see Latino vs. non-Latino as the diversity line that interests them most strongly.
I haven’t offered any criticism of the Democratic point of view on diversity, even though you may feel that my description of it is trying to lower its status. (You are right, noting I don’t wish to defend the R. point of view, but the R view does not need as much status-lowering either.) It may well be correct to have a less diverse view of diversity. If you were to start with an argument for that view, you could cite the long history of American slavery and segregation, plus continuing racial wealth inequality, as reasons for focusing so much on one kind of diversity rather than others.
Still, when I speak with Democrats, and with Progressives in particular, they view themselves, as a kind of assumption, as the people concerned with diversity. That is a significant cognitive mistake.
When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, it was the forces of diversity — some diversities, many diversities — that won.
It was the people less concerned with diversity overall that lost. Again noting that some important notions of diversity do cut the other way, most of all racial diversity. And I do wish to stress that the presumptive argument for “diversity” simply isn’t there, although that conclusion is hard to swallow that if you have imbibed too much contemporary political rhetoric.
In fact, I view the amazing diversity of the election and the electorate as having ...
I think a lot of HN users are exhausted by the political discussions and are flagging such topics as a matter of course, especially given the HN guidelines regarding submissions on political topics. Quality of discussion likely doesn't enter into it.
I think part of the issue with Democrats vs Republicans is that the Democrats are basically gerrymandering themselves by clustering in ~10 states.
Let me explain: if you are a liberal living in a red state, it sucks. Lots of them move away, and they move to one of the bastions of liberal culture. That person's vote is now completely wasted since their state is already > 50% democrat while their original state now has 1 less person able to cast a liberal vote.
Not only is it liberals wanting to move out of their conservative hometowns, but it's also people moving to the larger cities. Many of those larger cities are in the same liberal states. And people who are willing to move to a big city for a job are probably liberal, or at least politically neutral. Another vote wasted.
So you end up with the only people who still want to live in the rural states are just naturally more inclined to vote Republican.
Compounding this problem, if a red state has a few cities that are heavily liberal, because of gerrymandering, the democrats have far less congressional representation than they should have. The republican state government sees to that.
A crazy idea is that the 50 states would be reorganized, just like congressional districts. Many of the less populated states who share similar values merged together. Like the entire bible belt / midwest could just be 2 or 3 mega states. The southeastern states could merge up and be Dixieland or whatever. Boom: less senators, less EC votes, everyone wins!
More realistically, we just have to get past the fact that each state has a minimum amount of power in our government. It should be scaled more with population, or the % that the candidate wins by should mean something (so all those wasted votes in heavily liberal states would actually count for something).
Ending gerrymandering at the congressional level would also help solve this problem. I hope we see algorithmic districts in the next 10 years.
123 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 72.7 ms ] threadThe progressive wing of the democratic party now has more leverage within that party. Furthermore, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/business/economy/can-trump... does paint one of the nicest images of Trump voters, implying the Rust Belt voters who most dramatically swung republican vs 2012 and 2008 voted Trump in on a Sandernist mandate.
So 2020 could be interesting, but man waiting through 4 more years of gridlock will suck. If it weren't for supreme court I'd love to strike a bargin of "4 years your stuff, 4 years ours", so we'd actually run a good policy experiment.
Combine that with new Supreme Court justices (and probably one or two more in the next four years) and Trump could effect more change than any President has in a long time.
The supreme court is the exception to this.
Look I supported Hilary but there were so many things that went wrong. Let's talk about the fact that we suppressed our own vote. Emails came out that the party wanted Hilary to win at all costs enough to sabotage Sanders. Well that sort of thing doesn't help anyone, because a candidate not picked by the people will loose. Trump may have been someone that the party despised but he won the vote, they did not push him out. There are so many other things that we did wrong, why wasn't Elizabeth Warren in this? I know because the party wanted Hilary to win it.
There are many other things that can go into this post mortem. I've come to grips with the fact that we lost and I'm looking ahead at what we can do next time.
- Rigging the primary/caucus schedule so that all the states favoring Hillary would be the first to vote.
- Rigged the debate schedule by purposely scheduling them at odd times when no one would by watching so that Bernie couldn't get his message out.
- Cheated in the debates by receiving the questions in advance, and was given extra time by the moderators.
- Got the media to censor all virtually all coverage of Bernie. E.g. on the days when he had big primary wins, the media covered the speeches of every other candidate except him.
- Illegally disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters in New York and Arizona alone by removing them from the voter roles, or else removing their party affiliation. Disenfranchised millions more around the country by, e.g., forcing California voters to vote provisional and then just throwing out their ballots without counting them.
- Circumvented campaign finance laws by having donors send money to the state parties, but then requiring the state parties to send all of that money to her campaign. All while trashing Bernie for not raising money for the down ticket races.
Ron Paul focused on concepts, history, logical points and got a huge following because of it as well as a lot of money raised. He sparked a lot of the Libertarian movement that we see today...but he was largely blacked out by the media and especially Fox News. They even edited him out of debate rebroadcasts.
Trump on the other hand played to the media shock free press. He'd garner national attention as the media took opportunity after opportunity to shame him...and it worked. He got tons of free press because the media focused on shaming opportunity and sound bites while candidates with good points get ignored. It's an absolute reflection of how our media works.
What Ron Paul did inside the republican party, whereby his supporters ran the party at the state level in many states was incredible, they really knew how to make a run of it!
All this means that of the 220 million eligible voters, only 120 million actually voted this election, whereas for Obama in 2008, 130 million people voted (nearly all of that 10 million going to Obama). If Hillary had had a stronger ground game, or pulled in the Bernie call canvasers, she could have turned those 10 million out to the polls.
The sad thing is, after Bernie's loss, many of the people I met in West Michigan did not turn out to vote, or if they did they did not vote for Hillary. I know at least 15 of the people I met did not vote, and another 5 voted for another candidate.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-turnout-fell-espe...
"The drop in turnout was uneven. On average, turnout was unchanged in states that voted for Trump, while it fell by an average of 2.3 percentage points in states that voted for Clinton."
Can you link to the emails that show this? I keep hearing it, but the closest I've found are a few trash talking employees that were slapped down and told to stay out of it.
http://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-proves-primary-was-rig...
and there's lots of little nuggets like this https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/7643
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/dnc-leak-shows...
First person description of Nevada: https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/4jid77... (obviously biased ofc, but it's a source)
To that end as an outsider looking in, it seems to me that the biggest problem the democratic party has right now is the ability to openly discuss ideas in a rational manner free from the chains of political correctness and its inherent biases.
If the left could openly discuss the relationship between islam and terrorism, the negative impacts of certain equal opportunity laws on the minorities they are trying to benefit, the conflict between gender pronoun legislation and free speech, etc. then the party itself would be on big path for improvement.
Note: Your statements were about the Democratic Party so I gave you my opinion on it. The Republican Party is replete with its own flaws, but thats not the topic here. IMO I think most of the left/right dichotomy is a poor political model which leads to group think over rational contemplation of specific issues.
EDIT: I understand a libertarian or non-conforming opinion is not popular on HN or in liberal circles, hence the down votes. The irony here and specifically with my statement above is that we should uphold debate and argument over exclusion and political correctness to "let the good ideas win in free debate" and the only counter is to downvote and silence. Disagreement is great but it leads to Trump if you batle with intimidation tactics and silencing instead of actual argument. This is the biggest problem currently with many on the left and so I stand by my statement.
1. https://youtu.be/kasiov0ytEc
2. http://nypost.com/2016/05/19/city-issues-new-guidelines-on-t...
Not really, considering that we on the radical left don't even consider the Democrats left-wing at all. They're just... liberals.
You might want to address your concerns to the party that just screwed up badly in the election, not "the left". The Democratic Party has spent the last few decades moving away from left-wing politics, with Clinton supporting a more mixed set of political views.
Blaming "the left" for recent(-ish) problems in government isn't accurate when there hasn't been a lot of representation of the actual left in a while. That may be changing with Bernie and other recent support for liberal and progressive positions, but the current party is still very centrist.
The Republicans will control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, have the chance to appoint at least one and probably several Supreme Court justices, run 68 out of 99 state legislative houses, and hold 31 gubernatorial seats.
Sounds like to me the Dems are in deep trouble and they need to wake up. Good points above.
What you are proposing has already been tried in my home country of Denmark. It doesn't work, because it legitimizes the rhetoric of the extreme right, which strengthens them, and makes people who were sympathetic to the left apathic. It also doesn't move any voters who were already sympathetic to these ideas, because why would they vote for the a watered down version of the same platform?
My question here is genuine, it doesn't follow immediately for me that what you say is true and seems counterintuitive to my knowledge base, so I would welcome any data backing up your statements (I can read Danish too, if that helps).
I disagree strongly. The problem is not that the Democratic Party says the "wrong" thing about minor cultural issues. The problem is that it fills its propaganda output up with minor cultural issues at all.
The party platform this year had a lot of positions in it that were good for the country: rebuild infrastructure, improve the health-care system, cheap to free higher education, better vocational education, etc. The Clinton campaign mostly did not actually run on those issues at all; it ran on "our opponent is a very mean, irresponsible, and socially unjust person". Why? Because those progressive positions in the platform were Sanders' positions, not Clinton's.
The Democratic Party needs to make one major change to be relevant again: care about the working class. Run on bread-and-butter issues of material well-being, not on which words people use on Twitter! But that can't happen until the Clintonist cancer is excised from the party.
Bridges are falling apart, health care costs are rising out of control, with the loss of the manufacturing sector there are no jobs for people who haven't gone to college, the country is out of its mind on oxycodone, and you're worried about black people walking. Unbelievably elitist attitude.
If you read my comment I never said those issues where the most important issues of the moment. I never said that black people marching is equivalent to islamic terrorism. I never even said I was worried about black people walking. Then you say I have an elitist attitude when you didn't even take the time to hear what I had to say. I think that attitude is rather elitist.
I think a better answer to your original question is that, of course, if a democratic candidate is asked specifically about something like black lives matter or lgbt rights, they should talk about how they support the cause and what policies they are pushing that will help out. But, they should primarily stick with the the basic issues of security (financial security, national security). That is what the working class wants to hear about, and that is who the Democrats need to win back.
People who are more concerned with black lives matter or lgbt rights are going to vote Democrat no matter what, so it's not like we're going to lose those votes.
Black people are 13% of the population. They are not all poor, and only mostly under attack by the police. They certainly don't all agree with BLM, even if I personally do. This means BLM represents, generously, a good deal less than 10% of the population.
As to "Islamic terrorism", well, what Islamic terrorism? The most mature thing we can do is to admit that Islamic terorrism is mostly a European problem rather than an American one, and that homegrown mass shooters are a much larger problem, one which can easily be addressed by ameliorating or solving many of our other absolutely dreadful social problems.
So when you put BLM and Islamic terror together, how much of the population have you got in your coalition? 10%? Let's throw in LGBT for another ten. The most outspokenly neoliberal-feminist women. Uhhhh, maybe another 15? Millenials? How many millenials are there?
Except that your coalition strength in this "movement of movement" strategy is constantly being undermined by your own embrace of neoliberalism. Remember the whole #NotHereForTheBoys debacle? Feminists, LGBT people, black people, and Middle Eastern human-rights activists all need food to eat and a roof over their head, and neoliberalism keeps pushing the Professional Achievement Waterline necessary to have that basic standard of living higher and higher. You can't go around shaming people for supporting Bread and Peace and expect to have a coalition left. "I'm a queer black survivor, and I'm starting at Goldman Sachs next year!" is the most morally dishonest and repulsive platform I've ever seen, but it's exactly what Hillary ran on.
A workers' movement, on the other hand, represents that lovely fabled percentage we heard about in 2011: 99% of the population.
You want to see a Democratic Party that can work? It was called the Rent is Too Damned High Party.
For what it's worth, I believe that all the subjects you brought up, while far from perfect (and sometimes exaggerated, usually among a very small, extremely young minority), are far better studied and discussed in earnest among those you'd call liberals (the vast majority of people who actually study Islam and terrorism, public policy and minority, history etc., are liberals), then among libertarians. You can find serious academic discussion of most of those subjects, and the reason conservatives/libertarians don't think it exists is merely because they lack the will to actually deep dive and study the subject, instead expressing opinions based on gut feeling or a piece of data they've seen on some blog. When they are criticized, they try to invalidate that criticism (that often stems from actually caring about and studying the subject for more than 30 minutes) by calling it silencing.
The only subject that isn't discussed in earnest, which you didn't mention, and unlike those subjects you mentioned has probably had a real impact on the election result, is neolibearal capitalism.
I know of at least one church where members were advised to pray for a Trump victory in hopes that he would appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn decisions like Roe v Wade, Lawrence v Texas, United States v Windsor and Obergefell v Hodges. Apparently, years of criticism have done nothing to eliminate the less moderate and tolerant interpretations of Christianity.
EDIT: to clarify slightly, the existence of more moderate interpretations of a given religion does not also mean that the more extreme interpretations will go away.
So, would you agree it would be better for one or a few churches to pray for removal of Roe v Wade than hundreds or thousands of Churches?
If so then you must surely agree that one or a few dozen extreme interpretations is still better than several hundreds or thousands as is the case with the various terrorists groups of which ISIS is one.
So the question of importance is not how to eliminate extreme interpretations in a world we know is imperfect, but how to minimize that number knowing we can never fully eliminate it.
Now, there are several ways to achieve our goal. One way, that is also backed up by some of the experts and leading activists in this field such as Maajid Nawaz, John Azumah, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi to name a few - which I would highly recommend those interested in reading - is that which I suggest i.e. open debate and discussion and a fostering of secularization within Islam by interacting with its leaders and its community and criticizing the ideas, not the people, where they are bad. And doing all of this in an open and honest, non-vehement manner, but still discussing and criticizing nonetheless.
Now, there are likely other factors that play a role in Islamic terrorism besides extreme interpretation of religious texts such as socio-economic status, educational level, community values, etc. which may or may not play a role in extremism and we should openly discuss these as well.
In order to do that, they're going to need to start making some serious changes:
1. Become the party of free speech. What is happening on college campuses is not something I will ever support. No safe spaces, no shouting down someone who doesnt define racism as "prejudice plus power". The regressive left is killing your party.
2. Stop supporting foreign policies that are as bad as the neocons. We don't need to export democracy to Libya, Syria, Yemen, Egypt... We don't need to engage ourselves in civil wars in other countries. We are not the world police. Follow the money for this election and it is painfully obvious that HRC was the candidate for the military industrial complex as much as she was for transgender bathrooms.
3. Stop pushing for foreign trade deals that further depress domestic wages. HRC stopped supporting TPP because Bernie and Trump were against it. If we get wage growth, entitlement expansion isn't necessary to capture the electorate and left candidates will be able to advance all the LGBT social reforms they want without scaring the moderate right away with tax increases.
HRC won the popular vote this time, but a lot of the GOP turnout effort was half assed because they never thought Trump would pull it off. Reorient the party towards blue collar, or keep doing the same old same old and lose. This election cost you the Supreme Court. You really don't have any choice other than to move to the middle.
I actually think Bernie would have lost. Interesting thought exercise though.
Ideally, Bernie's platform would offset the cost of some free higher education by closing corporate tax loopholes, releasing non-violent drug offenders from tax-funded prisons and jails, and significantly reducing military spending.
There's a fair amount of states who voted for Sanders and Trump: idaho, montana, north dakota, wisconsin, west virginia, oklahoma, kansas, nebraska - lots of these states were close races in the general, it's not hard to think that sanders would have won there since he was actually trying to address their core issue of middle class jobs. And it shows that at least the democrats in those states preferred Sanders to Clinton.
The states that voted for Sanders and Clinton: washington, oregon, colorado, minnesota, lots of new england states - basically all the guaranteed blue states no matter who the candidate is.
I think:
- Primary voting is suggestive of turnout, but when you've got a candidate that people are voting against out of hate, it is hard to infer true support. So, I don't know if Bernie would have won.
- I heard (unconfirmed) that 9% of registered democrats voted for Trump. Such a weird section that, again, it is hard to infer support.
- It is all moot now anyways.
That any of this made a difference is the fantasy of a right that got 60 million votes this election, 60 million votes in the last, and 60 million in the one before that. Democrats lost because they hitched their wagon to megadonors and didn't deliver on their promises to working people. They lost their own base, one that gave 72 million votes to a black man with a Arabic/Kenyan name who openly and aggressively advocated for the opposite of what you think (white) people crave.
This election was not a victory for /pol/, it was yet another rejection of Clinton. Not only did Trump get fewer votes than Clinton, I think he got fewer votes that Romney and McCain, too.
The GOP party body (whether you're looking only at media chatter or popular chatter) will not be able to coldly discuss factors to Islamic terrorism. In fact, I think you'll find that less than 1% of constituents of the GOP body have read any truly cold account on terrorism, probably found only in Maryland among young students aspiring to learn the poise and prose of a Washington analyst.
Jokes aside, the internal values of the GOP prevent anyone from speaking ill of the military, and that's why the populous GOP response to Islamic political violence is more military, and a more imperialistic view of how spoils of Iraq should go to the winners. Are we even allowed to suggest that Islamic terrorism may be political terrorism, and not just religious terrorism? Maybe it's because the armed forces employs so many people, and people aren't ready for a discussion of what life outside the military means, especially now as Uber managed an automated delivery of beer by truck.
Also, don't you find that as soon as you read for even a few hours on any subject matter, that you've already surpassed much of the nation in effort spent for comprehension? A lot of people have hot talk about the military, Christianity, welfare, terrorism, and immigration. But they're not willing to do the serious work for any one of these subjects. Try to find a Christian who even finds Christianity that fascinating.
The problem is not more rational talk on these things. The problem is not better honest intellectual discussions. The problem is that people honestly don't give a shit about most things political. They want to have strong emotions, and they don't care to look for facts or models.
That's why your parents voting behaviors is the single best (or 2nd best) predictor for your voting behavior, and that's why voting behavior remains predictable lifelong. It's not like the voters are watching the debates and going to the noisy person next to them, "Shhh! I need to hear more debate facts so I can decide how to vote!"
This is so true. I wish it was feasible to only allow educated people to vote =) Most people are just too stupid or lazy to truly understand what they're voting for.
Nah. I'm downvoting you because you are complaining about downvotes in the reddit passive aggressive way that is specifically forbidden in the guidelines.
Some of it comes back to Bill, the leadership in the party were afraid to look elsewhere, and they knew she'd had this server and what have you. The bush dynasty and the Clinton were both vanquished this year, maybe that should be a strong lesson. Udall lost in Colorado in 2014 too.
Are voters along with Hilary and Bernie fooled by the strategy of a smart guy(i.e.Trump) who disguised as a Republican? Note: With a habit of tit for tat, Trump never attack Bernie while Bernie was strongly against Trump.
I somehow manage to be both amused and disgusted as I watch the media contort itself trying to explain Trump supporters as idiot racist protest voters. Their heads simply cannot contain the idea that many of his ideas have legitimate affirmative support among a near-majority of clear minded individuals.
Occam's razor is helpful here; people voted for Trump because they supported Trump. As a country we kind of have to get over that.
Large parts of the country want to take a dramatically different direction on economic issues from immigration to trade policy, and they voted for the candidate that represented their wishes.
For the record, I think both candidates were catastrophes waiting to happen (albeit in different ways). I voted libertarian.
At the beginning of the race, I assumed Sanders would be like the "RON PAUL 2008" campaign, with a small but vocal group of supporters. I did not think a self-described socialist would be viable in a general election. (Remember how Obama was called a "soshulist"?)
Suppose DNC didn't pick the favorite, and there was a mainstream alternative to Clinton with a favorable approval rating (e.g. Biden). Would Sanders still have garnered this much support?
Had Sanders been the nominee, I would have voted for him: not for his leftist stances but because he seemed like he could be trusted with not running the country into the ground. I stayed home this election.
Many votes for the Libertarian party would've also gone to Bernie Sanders. Then a lot of the Trump supporters are actually bernie supporters who feel like the DNC betrayed us by sabotaging the whole thing.. There's a LOT of hate and anger in the democratic party right now.
On facebook I see a shitstorm of anger from Clinton supporters against Bernie supporters blaming US for her loss as if WE are responsible for her being a shitty politician. As if it's not HER responsibility to WIN our votes and CONVINCE us she's the best candidate. She obviously couldn't do that.
So, yes Bernie definitely had a good chance of winning. He also was polling about 10 points above Clinton against Trump in most states. He also won Michigan AND Wisconsin which Trump carried.
That's over simplifying a bit, "they" in this case was a flood of new party members who weren't previously involved, but could be similar.
That's why Trump ultimately won, because he played to people's fears about jobs, as well as profiting from decades of manufactured hate against Clinton. I have many issues with the Clintons but when I encounter people that hate Hillary they almost explode with hate and then cite Fox News talking points (that are usually lies).
Also, Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States" is a totally worthwhile book to read, it provides a great foundation in the history of America.
He shares approximately zero ideas with Romney.
Evangelicals voted for Trump, who has kids with 3 different women and cheated on all 3, because Republican. Free-trade libertarians voted Trump, the least free-trade candidate since the 1930s, because Republican. The only #NeverTrumpers who stuck to their guns were a couple dozen foreign policy experts, who's neocon base still voted Trump, because Republican.
Maaaaaaybe 1% of the voters were people who would have otherwise not voted or voted D because they were attracted by Trump's ideas. The rest of the election swings on anti-Clinton sentiment/propaganda and her inability to counter it -- depressing her own turnout and energizing unenthusiastic Trump voters.
See also The British Conservative Party.
Agreed, 100%. It's just as easy to turn it around.
I do find it hard to believe that someone who wasn't a democrat before the election, and who is no longer a democrat should be asserting the direction of the democratic party.
It will be interesting to see how the DNC responds in the next election cycle - whether two years is enough time to recover or not. My take is that leadership has taken enough hits that it won't be plausible to make trump a lame duck at the midterm - not without the first two years being full of controversy.
Clinton was never going to win without the full support of those who'd pledged 'Bernie or Bust' or 'Never Hillary' -- we were DIEHARD serious that we would not let our party..be controlled by Wall Street any longer. I'm one of hundreds of thousands who no longer are members of the Democratic party. I'm a registered Independent now, and will luckily in my state I can vote in the Dem. primary without being a reg. democrat (Utah).
Congrats, you've handed the entire country to Wall Street instead with the coming deregulation.
Check the summaries at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
and continue to look at the trends.
Seems like a lot of western states:
https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/796888708209373184 https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/796888490340454400 https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/797515793437257728
I doubt there would've been much change in the results had you had the presidential election right after the primaries vs our normal election day. Trump had his narrative and people have known Hillary's for a while and definitely already an opinion of her.
I can't really fathom the idea of there having been flip-floppers or undecideds more so than the stories I've read of people who had never voted coming out of the woodwork to do so (for Trump).
Even more sad is that this entire thing was decided in a year with a 20-year low voter turnout. After so much venom spilled, and a little more than half of people decided to vote. I think that says something about both parties.
Both establishments put up their chosen people, and both establishments lost.
They've grown too insular, too much about the being "True Conservatives/Progressives", and less about representing people. Who are they to decide what we believe?
Both Sanders and Trump attempted to "hijack" the mainstream political parties.
Trump obviously more successful (to become the party nominee).
Sanders is not a "Democrat" and Trump is not a "Republican".
We need to say this clearly: American citizens must not be the fuel for the American empire, and this should not be considered a nationalist statement as such. Human sacrifice is just bad like that.
Just do what you say, for example, _GIVE_ your college seat to others who has a different skin color or whatever though their GPA is only 40% of yours, instead of just saying you're for AA but you took no actual meaningful action. Just _Moving_ to the neighborhood that you want to help directly and do not buy house in a conservative district then saying you're welcoming lots of section8 house nearby, that's just not good enough. Also let your employer know that you can _GIVE_ your chance to those who have a difference skin color but not as experienced as you. And _DONATE_ 20% of your after-tax income to help those in-need instead of asking the federal to print more money for food-stamps. Last but not least, just _PAY_ more premium out of your pocket so others can get a basically free-ride for medical care, etc,etc.
Just _DO_ it instead of say it, the one who benefited because your generous _actual_action_ will speak to others, so you can safely save the ideology part and let them speak for you, just DO what you want to say, instead of keeping saying it and expect others to do it for you and you feel good about saying those words.
If Democrats DO what they say, all issues will be fixed quickly.
As an aside, your text formatting very much distracted me from your content and left a patronising, annoying impression on me.
As a life-long democrat, I blame the corruption in the DNC. I base my opinion on reading DNC emails, and favoring international news sources and a few people I trust on the web. In addition to the DNC's failings, I have lost almost all faith in US news media.
I hope that something positive comes out of this. I look to the future.
Greece tried to tighten their belt and tax their way out of it, just led to compounding double digit economic contraction.
Instead, when we have bubbles pop, we usually inject money into the economy to keep economic carnage like that at bay, and in the 1930s we created a jobs program so as to put those funds to effective use. This has worked well for the US, as compared to Greece.
This has nothing to do with Sanders’ policies though. Sanders’ policies are a continuation of everything wrong with the New Deal, namely things like the minimum wage and government-supported worker unions, which prevent hiring of low-skilled workers, usually from the lower class, and make hiring overall a risky process, leading to less hires, higher unemployment, and corporations outsourcing abroad.
The original thinking behind the Electoral College was that geographic diversity was important. The Founding Fathers were not majoritarian, but rather they believed in placing special weight on diversity of this kind. The prevailing view was “if too many (geographically) diverse voices veto you, you can’t get elected, not even with a majority of the votes.” That view was a strange and perhaps unlikely precursor of today’s veto rights/PC approach on campus, but there you go.
Democrats now control at least one legislative house in only 17 states, and the reach of the party is shrinking dramatically. So by the 18th century standards of diversity, emphasizing geography, the Democratic coalition is remarkably non-diverse. You can see how much of Hillary Clinton’s majority came from the two states of New York and California. That also means the Republicans are not just a “Southern rump party,” as some commentators used to suggest.
If you think of education as serving a smoothing function, the less educated are in some ways considerably more diverse than the educated.
The Democratic Party today is more likely to stress the relevance of ethnic and racial diversity, if the talk is about diversity. (Gender diversity too, but that requires its own post, maybe later to come.) Non-Democrats are more likely to count other forms of diversity for more than the Democrats do. I see Democrats as somewhat concentrated in particular cities and also in particular occupations, more than Republicans are. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is another way in which Democrats are less diverse.
When it comes to views about the relevant forms of diversity, the views of non-Democrats are more diverse than the views of Democrats, I would hazard to guess. A non-Democrat is more likely to focus on something other than racial and ethnic diversity, compared to a Democrat.
Correctly or not, many Americans do not think racial and ethnic diversity is the diversity that should command so much attention. That is one place to start for understanding why so many 2012 Obama voters switched to Trump this time around, or maybe just stayed home.
A few days ago I saw figures that 29 percent of Latinos voted for Trump (possibly that number has been revised). I suspect many of those voters do not see Latino vs. non-Latino as the diversity line that interests them most strongly.
I haven’t offered any criticism of the Democratic point of view on diversity, even though you may feel that my description of it is trying to lower its status. (You are right, noting I don’t wish to defend the R. point of view, but the R view does not need as much status-lowering either.) It may well be correct to have a less diverse view of diversity. If you were to start with an argument for that view, you could cite the long history of American slavery and segregation, plus continuing racial wealth inequality, as reasons for focusing so much on one kind of diversity rather than others.
Still, when I speak with Democrats, and with Progressives in particular, they view themselves, as a kind of assumption, as the people concerned with diversity. That is a significant cognitive mistake.
When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, it was the forces of diversity — some diversities, many diversities — that won.
It was the people less concerned with diversity overall that lost. Again noting that some important notions of diversity do cut the other way, most of all racial diversity. And I do wish to stress that the presumptive argument for “diversity” simply isn’t there, although that conclusion is hard to swallow that if you have imbibed too much contemporary political rhetoric.
In fact, I view the amazing diversity of the election and the electorate as having ...
Let me explain: if you are a liberal living in a red state, it sucks. Lots of them move away, and they move to one of the bastions of liberal culture. That person's vote is now completely wasted since their state is already > 50% democrat while their original state now has 1 less person able to cast a liberal vote.
Not only is it liberals wanting to move out of their conservative hometowns, but it's also people moving to the larger cities. Many of those larger cities are in the same liberal states. And people who are willing to move to a big city for a job are probably liberal, or at least politically neutral. Another vote wasted.
So you end up with the only people who still want to live in the rural states are just naturally more inclined to vote Republican.
Compounding this problem, if a red state has a few cities that are heavily liberal, because of gerrymandering, the democrats have far less congressional representation than they should have. The republican state government sees to that.
A crazy idea is that the 50 states would be reorganized, just like congressional districts. Many of the less populated states who share similar values merged together. Like the entire bible belt / midwest could just be 2 or 3 mega states. The southeastern states could merge up and be Dixieland or whatever. Boom: less senators, less EC votes, everyone wins!
More realistically, we just have to get past the fact that each state has a minimum amount of power in our government. It should be scaled more with population, or the % that the candidate wins by should mean something (so all those wasted votes in heavily liberal states would actually count for something).
Ending gerrymandering at the congressional level would also help solve this problem. I hope we see algorithmic districts in the next 10 years.