Buttigieg chooses to respond to the rise of fascism by advocating for the conversion of an already hyper-militaristic society into Starship Fucking Troopers. Genius.
Hey, Mayor Pete, young people don’t want a second term for Biff because they’re trying to avoid his setting up a mandatory service programme or a draft. Try giving them something to vote for.
To be fair, his plan revolves around making purely volunteer service a popular option for high school grads; his various “corps” are offshoots of the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps and aren’t mandatory service. Not really militaristic in the slightest. More about building houses and helping improve the land and water.
The thing that makes it sound slightly less than voluntary is this line:
When people apply for jobs etc, “the first question is where did you serve and what did you learn?”
The kinds of jobs where they ask that “first question” won’t be the ones you get with a degree from an elite college and/or with family connections. They will be entry-level bigcorp service industry and manufacturing jobs (that will be in increasingly short supply) that are already the only option for young people with a HS degree or less. Those folks don’t need a Dem candidate promising yet another barrier to entry.
I have no problem with voluntary government programmes that provide training and work experience. I’m all for the Green New Deal, for example. But as with the original New Deal programmes, it shouldn’t even be implied, as Buttigieg did (perhaps inadvertently), that if you can’t answer that first question in the affirmative then you have no real chance at a job.
If he dumps that clumsy line, which no young person wants to hear, he’ll make his national service programmes more attractive.
Federal service was technically voluntary in Heinlein’s world, too.
Agreed; I can see what he’s trying to do (harken back to Kennedy-era volunteerism days) and that’s great, but no young person wants to be told it’s their duty to serve their country, or even have that hinted at. When he started his campaign, he had a solid PR crew working for him, but they’ve really muddied things. People want to vote for positive stuff like hope and change and progress. Not to be told there should be more barriers.
it was; however, the only way one could qualify to be a voter.
But how is he going to pay for it?!?
Ahhh. That felt good.
SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP
but srsly the Peace Corps is only for college grads & guys like PB are only talking to the “middle class”
it’s a throwaway line for olds who think young people are lazy, not an actual plan
Pete’s on a real roll here.
The amazing thing is that you can do big systemic change without being a transphobe. Only class reductionists and TERFs seem to have a problem with this.
This reminds me of a “riddle” that was on the Cosby show:
A man and his kid are in a car accident. The man dies on the scene and the kid is rushed to the hospital. The doctor who is called in to respond says, “I can’t operate on this person, this is my son.” Since the child’s father is dead, how is this possible?
In the 1980s, it was so ingrained in many people’s heads that doctors were men that they might honestly not immediately be able to answer this. People who argue that we ought to keep using trans-exclusionary language are the people who heard that “riddle” and said, “Yeah but most doctors are men so it’s only reasonable to assume that a doctor is a man.”
Chuck’s whole thread here about Biden is worth the read, but the BSG thing in this post really stuck out at me. Thinking back to that very first episode of the series (“33”), it really was just an endless, fatiguing death march, and that sums up the past 3 years better than I think anything else really could.
I do kind of disagree with him when he says Trump is immune to controversy though. His polls drop every time he spends any amount of time in the news having to play defense because he’s extremely, extremely bad at it (because he’s a bully, and bullies are terrible at defense). Of course, I don’t think Biden is the guy who’s going to be capable of putting Trump back on his heels through the general, either.
except not, right? …cuz, just, no…right? No Hil…no
No.
Anyone who wanted to run as a Democrat in 2020 is already running. If Clinton had wanted to run, she’d be in already, would have been from the start. Only an abject idiot would jump in at this point, and whatever else you feel about Hillary Clinton, she is not an abject idiot.
Given this is the Gaurdian, it’s a case about drawing clicks from panicky leftists, but otherwise isn’t any different from all the right-wingers who have been predicting that Clinton would join the race any minute now, or pre-emptively running against her because they have a stable audience who hates her.
The British press have always had trouble understanding American politics, a problem made worse by the fact that British journalists think they are experts on the US (and on everyone else).
Clinton isn’t going to run, and whatever the “Democratic establishment” is (certainly not the handful of donors the NYT describes) it has neither the desire nor the power to add new candidates at this time.
I see ads for Tom Steyer on TV every day and I still have no clue who the fuck he is
