North Korea can’t even get a missle to Japan. They’re a bogeyman. They aren’t even a credible threat to South Korea and would be rolled over pretty quickly if they let off a single bomb anywhere.
China isn’t going to nuke California. We’re their primary trading partner, leaving aside the amount of nuclear weapons still pointed at old cold war does.
NK certainly aren’t a threat to the US (apart from potential terrorist action or attacks on the US occupation troops in SK), but they certainly are a threat to SK. No, they couldn’t win a war between the Koreas, but they can certainly make the South regret it.
Using emplaced, pre-targeted conventional artillery alone, the North can and will flatten the entirety of Seoul in the opening minutes of the war. And although their missile technology is early-Von Braun grade, they’re crazy enough to use their nukes as landmines to clean up any incoming invasion force.
Form a third party. If it isn’t viable, get laughed at. If it is viable, cause the Dems to lose by splitting the vote, then get called Nader Mk 2 for ever. So, try to shift the Dems internally. Then get called insurgents and told to piss off, shenanigans pulled against, etc.
It’ll be a long process. And it needs to start from the grass roots, low level positions working up. The US won’t get rid of its entrenched two party system until there’s voting reform, and neither of the two parties want that.
And before 2016 when was th least time a true insurgent candidacy won a Presidential nomination? Truly insurgent as in someone who wasn’t in the party and not supported by the party establishment coming in and winning the nomination.
Last one I can think of is AuH2O maybe (depending on your criteria). Also that seems to suggest that hijacking a party is more attainable than creating a party, which would go back to @PatRx2’s point you’d dismissed.
Based on your caveats, Theodore Roosevelt, slightly over 100 years ago. Like Sanders, he had a long track record within the established political hierarchy of his era. Uncommon != impossible. We now live in a remarkably precarious, metastable political state. Which you are fully aware of. That is why you keep bleating here about the need to accede to the inevitable. If it were still actually inevitable, you wouldn’t be desperately trying to proclaim it as such.
Oh, I’m Canadian, so not mine to build anyway, but yes, it is hard to do. It works better with a parliamentary system that allows initial baby steps. It definitely works better when party funding is regulated (as it is up here, and is not in your country).
My personal interest in this is not to feel I’m living in 1938 Poland. As long as you leave the status quo in place in the Democratic Party, I am probably going to feel that way, because asshats like Trump (or worse, Pence) are going to be in power.
You (I assume) are one person, I am one person. Neither of us is the people.
There are some people in the Democratic Party who aren’t the people either but who are going to oppose Sanders et al taking over the party. And they’ll probably win. And it’s really tiresome to act as if that is somehow surprising or crazy. That’s politics.
Roosevelt won the nomination with a third party.
That is a measure of how crazy and surprising your country’s politics have become.
Kind of missin’ the forest for the trees there. The overall point is that if you let the heartland burn, it’s going to end up hurting Cali, too.
Correct; I misread you as asking for who won the presidency (the bigger prize by far) as an insurgent. neomen is correct; the last insurgent inside a major party who obtained the nomination was Goldwater in 1964. Either of course, serves to refute the underlying fundamentals of your argument: our system is not immutable. Change occurs and it is sometimes quite radical and potentially dangerous. But, also potentially immensely beneficial.
I’m not asking anyone to accede to the inevitable. I am saying that people who admire a politician who has never been a Democrat and who has always strong disclaimed ever having been a Democrat and who has met with some pretty stiff opposition from the party establishment might do better in advancing their cause by forming a third party than by struggling within the Democratic Party. Leave the party for the same reasons Sanders never really joined it. I think it’d be healthy for the system as a whole.
But Goldwater was a figure (though perhaps a marginal one) in Republic politics of longstanding. Sanders wasn’t a member of the party he was trying to lead until he had to be to get on the ballot. Trump was nothing politically before 2015.
These played out very differently than they would have before 2016. And I think the possibilities for new parties might similarly be a lot more open than they have been.
Roosevelt won his presidential elections as a Republican. When he ran as a Bull Moose he split the GOP ticket and Woodrow Wilson and the Dems won in a landslide. In the US elections are winner-take-all - third parties based on a difference of opinions between former coalitions tend to defeat their purpose. There are other better, more effective ways to effect change than engaging in an act that has a repeating history of setting back the goals of those who try it (as with the Bull Moose party, the Dixiecrats, the Greens, et al.)
There is precedent, though:
The GOP are psychopaths and the establishment Dems are crooks. The country and the world are facing urgent existential threats, and neither party is fit for the task of responding.
So, y’all need a new party, stat. And there are only two ways to get there: either destroy the Dems from outside (as the Republicans did to the Whigs), or gut and skin the party to take it over (as the TPer’s did to the GOP).
If fascist arseholes can successfully stage a mutiny in the GOP, decent folks should be able to do the same with the Dems. Bernie based his campaign on the idea that this was possible; the establishment Dems are fighting full-throttle to prove him wrong.
Which is unsurprising, as their wealth, privilege and power are under threat. And the people involved been pre-selected by the political system to be biased heavily towards ambitious self-serving amorality.
Sanders caucuses as a Dem. He is the Chair of the Senate Democratic Outreach Committee.
I’m kind of hopeful, long-term. The Democratic platform was actually pretty good, and although Tom Perez was parachuted in to stop Ellison, he’s also pretty progressive.
Although, as I said above, I expect the 2020 candidate to be a centrist, but one with Obama style charisma and not too much baggage.
Roosevelt won his presidential elections as a Republican.
As an establishment Republican. Not as an insurgent.
Which doesn’t make him a member of the party, as he himself has pointed out pretty strongly on a number of occasions.
