Biden electability

wrath
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I don’t believe that and I think it’s pointless to be that cynical. You think the country is fucked no matter who wins the nomination and gets elected. Okay, and? Then what? Where can you go with that hopelessness, aside from bitterness, depression, substance abuse, and/or complete withdrawal from the world? How is that attitude useful?

Moreover, if people really adopt that attitude, then how can we ever hope to improve anything? If your answer is, “You can’t—you’re fucked,” then I suggest that your advice is useless and I urge people not to get drawn into your hopeless cynicism.

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Huh. I’d guessed from the tone of your posts that you were British, but of course the UK is in much worse shape than the US right now, so I must have been wrong.

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I am not going to argue the correctness of your position, because you might be right. We might be fucked no matter what we do. But, bear with me here, what if you are wrong? If so, that defeatist, “guess I’ll go eat worms” kind of attitude leads to not even trying to save ourselves. And that I will not do. In the words of my favorite English philosophers:

“If you’re gonna die
Die with your boots on
Gonna try?
Well, stick around
Gonna cry?
Just move along
If you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die!”

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And then there is this:

Done, fuck him.
“Nothing will fundamentally change” should end his candidacy right there.

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Agreed. Like I said in the 2020 thread, it’s the sort of accidental honesty that belies the truth lurking beneath his empty promises of reform. If nothing is going to fundamentally change for the top 1%, then nothing is going to fundamentally change (at least for the better) for the rest of us either.

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and furthermore,

I gotta say, he has done a better job sabotaging himself than any of the other candidates.

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Nevertheless, he persisted?

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No, just no. If these past decades of voting for the lesser evil have proved anything, it’s that the parties -will- continue to find worse and worse candidates if we don’t give them a reason to change. Note that the last two candidates were possibly the least popular candidates in history, and certainly in my lifetime. And for good reasons, both of them.

Personally, I will never again support any corporate candidate, Republican, Democrat, or Independent. Hillary was far too invested in Wall Street and big Pharma. Those special interests already have far too much control over our government, and I refuse to vote for anyone who will continue that trend. If the DNC wants to win elections, they -have- to stop running Republican-lite candidates, it’s just that simple (and should be blatantly obvious to anyone who cares to think about it).

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By what metric? Hillary got more votes than any white male candidate ever, and was supported by a larger proportion of the electorate than many candidates you or I could name.

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I am also frustrated by the failures and timidity of the parties. I simply disagree with your decision to vote for someone who, by definition, will never have enough support to win a general election. No matter how much either of us may want it to be otherwise, money will somehow always be part of politics. And look at the histories of 3rd parties in our country. I think you have a far better chance of having influence by supporting the major party candidate, someone even marginally closer to your views, who has a possibility of actually being elected.

If the election of Donald Trump doesn’t make that clear, nothing will convince you.

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There are 170+ declared candidates running for the Democratic nomination, and the only thing the DNC has done to favor any of them is put in debate rules that favor candidates with large numbers of small donations and discriminate against self-funded billionaires like Schultz and Bloomberg. The DNC likewise can’t keep voters from voting for their preferred candidate in the primaries. Whoever gets the nomination will get there by virtue of winning elections, primary elections.

Contrast this with the big 3rd parties, which still shun any form of popular vote in their nomination process.

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And her unpopularity was largely because of couple of decades of concentrated right-wing media campaign against her.

The idea that “parties will continue to find worse and worse candidates” is bullshit, by the way. It’s what the Republican party has been doing, because they are increasingly controlled by the crazy wingnuts of the far right. It’s not what the Democratic party has been doing, and acting like it is, is just more of the pernicious “bothsame!” bullshit that way too many American lefties love.

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I hear you. But I also read history.

Anyone with a keen eye for facts, and without a vested interest, will admit that America is an empire rapidly on the wane.

The Chinese economy has averaged 9% growth over the past 3 decades. The US by comparison continues to limp along at 2-3%.

I’m no economist but it’s clear to anyone to see that America doesn’t invest in its future. Instead it funnels all of its wealth offshore, or back to investors. It doesn’t do infrastructure at all. It refuses to invest in the education or health of its citizens. Rather it just sees the electorate as another commodity to exploit.

There is no grand plan, other than maximizing shareholder value and increasing the military budget.

None of this is sustainable. Collapse is inevitable and the American empire will crumble.

Only then will there be hope. And new beginnings.

If you want to believe that a single election cycle can make a difference, then go ahead, believe it.

But if you’re really concerned about change, then either vote radically, don’t vote, or take to the streets.

I’m not a pessimist.

I’m a parent and I have hopes and aspirations for future generations.

But I’m also a pragmatist living in a society that’s corrupt, broken and needs to rebuild itself from the ground up.

I’m not bashing America for the sake of it. I’m bashing greed, individualism, the collapse of collective values, and the inequities of a world run by corporate power structures.

These things can change. But it won’t happen overnight.

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For sure, we’re totally f*cked.

The difference is the British Empire collapsed in the middle of last century, so we’ve got little to lose.

The American empire, by contrast, has got a long way to fall yet…

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“America” and “the American empire” are not necessarily the same thing.

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(Took me a while to parse; I’m old enough that “last century” still means 19th to me :slightly_frowning_face:)

The American empire, by contrast, has got a long way to fall yet…

Cameron’s folly is about to tear down several decades of core infrastructure directly tied to everyday life. Your empire fell a long time ago but the fall after a no-deal Brexit could be even further, into food and medicine shortages that make WWII rationing look like good times.

My country has a straightforward path to recovery from our big self-inflicted folly within a few years, even if the likes of Biden wins. The long term fall from imperial hegemony is probably inevitable, but there is no concomitant prospect of fighting in the streets over turnips. Losing the top-dog position might even do us some economic good, depending on who or what succeeds us.

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There’s a very good reason for this (even if we assume the Chinese numbers are accurate, which is a very big assumption): China has started off from much lower, and they still have a lot to go to. Hence, it’s much easier for China to have high percentage growth than the USA. It could mean the US is decadent and crumbling, or that the US has a huge, mature, advanced economy where even massive absolute increases end up as relatively low relative changes.

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