my read was that clinton ( bill ) won because he was socially liberal but much more to the right on economic policy. the republicans in response shifted to crazy pants economics, keeping their same white makes right social policies.
the gains of the tech boom got all swept up by some small few, that same tech revolution also gave wall st unprecedented tools to extract wealth from the rest of society.
and thus the modern democratic party was born.
this morning i heard this on npr:
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So, Mara, this brings up the issue of tensions inside the Democratic Party. Sanders himself has said he’s running against the Democratic establishment. How are these tensions kind of playing out in real time?
LIASSON: Well, I’ve been racking my brains. Who is the Democratic establishment these days?
Are they genuinely committed to the people & the movement, or is their true loyalty to the party establishment & donor class?
Any establishment VP would very likely be sent into the campaign with instructions to sabotage it (Eagleton…). And, given that assassination is a genuine threat, a VP candidate must be someone who can be trusted to continue the work if Bernie gets killed.
If the democrats don’t have a process to pick a leader, they should probably work on that.
Probably releasing people whose stories are about things that are already public (like some of Bloomberg’s well known harassing comments).
tl;dr: That kind of research is pure nonsense.
What’s the theory of human motivation that explains those answers? Half of Americans don’t vote, and 14% of Americans say they don’t vote because they don’t care about politics. So if the research is correct then 7% of American don’t care enough to vote, but do care enough to be thoughtful about their own motivations when asked why they didn’t vote. Another nearly 10% don’t have time to vote but found the time to reflect on why they didn’t vote to conclude that it really was simply because they didn’t have the time.
Who are those people?
Suppose before asking people to tell us in their own words why they didn’t vote we asked, “Would you have voted if you were paid $5,000 to do so?” If you did that then your research would show that 99% of the people who didn’t vote would have not voted because no one paid them $5,000 to vote.
There is no such thing as laziness and no such thing as not having the time anymore than there is such a thing as coldness or darkness. Motivation is a thing but there is no countervailing anti-motivation force (only motivations to do other things). Allocating time to a thing means something, but not allocating time to that thing is a non-action. If a person really didn’t vote because they had no motivation and not because they were more motivated to do something else then that person needs medical help for their catatonia; that’s not 20% of the population.
“Laziness” is an unclearly defined judgement on a set of motivations that we deem unacceptable. If a person tells you they didn’t vote because they were lazy what they mean is that they didn’t vote because watching a TV show or reading a book or getting some extra sleep seemed more important. They probably haven’t put a lot of thought into that or why that is, but even if they did they know they will be judged for saying so. If I say, “I didn’t vote because I got a new video game and I just wanted to get home and play it,” I know other people will say that was lazy and by calling myself lazy I’m disempowering their judgement of me.
So we know that people don’t vote because there is no one giving them large sums of money to do so. Unless you disagree with that you also have to accept that people don’t vote because:
They don’t think it matters who gets elected
They don’t think their vote has an impact on who gets elected; and/or
Voting requires significant effort or expense
You also have to accept that people don’t vote because:
They don’t think voting matters to their friends/family/community; and/or
Their connection to their friends/family/community is weak
You also have to accept that people don’t vote because:
They don’t see voting as a civic duty; and/or
They don’t believe strongly in civic duty
And I’m sure we could formulate a bunch of other ways of looking at human motivation that would all be equally true.
Accepting “laziness” and “just didn’t bother” as answers is basically just accepting that people who didn’t vote also didn’t think too deeply about why they didn’t vote or what would motivate them to vote, or didn’t feel like being judged by some person conducting a poll for their decision. It’s accepting “because water falls from the sky” as an answer to “why does it rain.” There’s no theory there, no move towards understanding anything.
Remember when the media turned on Donald Trump and convinced themselves that talking shit about Trump would lost Trump the election?
I’m not discounting the chance that they’ll just straight up lie and say Trump won even if Trump didn’t win. But I think the next presidential election is undoubtedly a referendum on Trump, and any of this talk about “if this candidate wins then Trump will beat them” is nonsense. Which candidate the democrats pick is going to make a .1% difference. If America elected Trump next time it’s either because America wants Trump (as defined by the American election system) or because they cheated. I don’t think it’s because of the democratic candidate.
I think it’s like how Clinton’s people were rooting for Trump to get the nomination because they thought there was “no way Trump could win”.
C’mon, my full sentence was a contrary-to-fact conditional starting with “Or, it might happen in their absence.” The Democratic Party does have a process, created specifically to counter “terrible ad-hoc selection”; people don’t like it because it involves the bogeyman superdelegates,
[details=tl;dr: That kind of research is pure nonsense.]
All of the other reasons you list I accept as plausible. None of them are “because politicians are liars”, which is the reason for which I see no evidence.
That said, this Pew study asked people to name their own reason(s), so any pejoratives implicit in the reasons were applied by people to themselves.
You are right, I don’t like superdelegates, they seem like a terrible non-answer to a problem. But I think you should “c’mon” here. You suggested that the alternative to having super delegates was to have a “terrible ad-hoc” process. That’s ridiculous. The alternative is to define a different process. As far as I know the democrat process for picking a presidential candidate is pretty unique, so there are tons of other models to choose from.
If the current system leaves a “terrible ad-hoc” process if no one walks in with 50%+1 then it is a stupid system. Superdelegates are not obligated to vote as a block to ensure a majority result. They are not fit-to-purpose to prevent a non-majority result.
If you don’t think that people could be demotivated to vote because they think “politicians are all liars” then I don’t think you know people.
It was “the” alternative, a compromise crafted by a blue-ribbon committee. I’m not saying it was the best possible, and the process keeps changing, but it also isn’t so terrible: giving hundreds of people, widely spread geographically and ideologically, chosen mainly for their experience in and commitment to the Party, a small amount of extra weight in case of a stalemate, is far better than what was there before. If there are obviously better ones then they should be transmitted up the party structure or brought to the rules committee for consideration at the convention: over the last 50 years the Party has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness (if not competence) to try to fix the nominee selection system when it has failed in some way.
If you don’t think that people could be demotivated to vote because they think “politicians are all liars” then I don’t think you know people.
I just think that if someone assert that’s the main reason why people don’t vote, they should provide some evidence. That’s how good faith argument works. When I went looking in the face of that assertion all I found were studies like Pew’s, with some evidence of many other reasons not to vote, and nothing supporting the particular assertion.
I don’t think that’s how good faith argument works. If we’re going to have a meta-discussion about what arguing in good faith entails I think it should probably be in another thread. But based on this post, reproduced in it’s entirety:
I don’t think you feel that it is always necessary to lprovide evidence when making claims that evidence exists.
Sorry, but even that post of mine was a reaction to someone else’s strong assertion, so that’s where the burden of proof lies. And even so I did try to provide evidence in the form of a Pew poll.
“Burden of proof” is a concept that doesn’t exist in a good faith discussion. There is no standard to determine who wins. If someone doesn’t prove a point to your standard then don’t believe them but don’t accuse them failing to act in good faith.
Has anyone else noticed that the State where Bernie did BEST is the multicultural, diverse state that looks a lot like America?
I held my nose and voted for Hillary in 2016, friends; time for everyone to get some guts and start backing Sanders, because people DO NOT WANT that Biden-Bloomberg-Buttigeg-Klobuchar-Steyer nonsense of being told “No, your life will stay the same if I win … but vote for me, because I’m harmless? Because I’m not going to talk to you like an adult about real issues and disturb your slumber? Please?”
Warren shouldn’t be the nominee for generally being a waste; she lost my vote when she said she would have a trans teen veto the Sec of Ed. – because NO ONE TEEN SHOULD PICK THE SEC OF ED, and giving that power to any one teen (and picking that teen from one specific category of kid) for purposes of indicating one’s advancement is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
P.S. If you need a laugh, read the NYT op-ed page, as their tame caged Republicans are all offering Dems ‘advice’ on ‘What Bernie needs to do.’
All of this effort trying to frame “oligarch” as the worst possible thing you could conceivably call someone. It’s just mind-blowing how out-of-touch he is.
ETA: The replies to the tweet from Flint are helpfully reminding folks that Bloomberg spent $3 million to get Gov. Snyder get re-elected in 2014. Can’t imagine why Flint’s residents might have a problem with this asshole.
This whole subthread started because someone jumped on me for posting a video making fun of Trump. Apparently it wasn’t a properly vetted form of humor, and my post posed mortal danger to all Democratic candidates. I’ll sure know not to do that again.
