Yeah, I don’t know, $15 federal minimum wage is a pretty good platform, and it’s the platform Democrats ran on. They ran on it, and lost, and instead of doing what you say people would do–recognize and trust the progressive intentions of the group of people who want to give you benefits paid for by higher taxes on rich people, all I’m hearing from you is that they needed to build a time machine and put that plank in the platform sixteen years ago. Compare this platform to the Democratic platform of any other year, and you’ll see the one thing; that the Democrats of 2016 were further left than any year prior, reflecting the politics of the people who now make up the party. You can make as many post hoc rationalisations as you want about how that platform wasn’t “real”, and that’s why you engaged in egregious false equivalency in the 2016 election, but the fact remains:
Conclusion: by dismissing a “lesser evil” electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.
It’s unlikely the Democratic Party is going to willingly change with respect to policies. It’s going to be an individual effort of local, state, and federal campaigns that tip the balance of power out of the hands of the corporate wing of the party. Of course, that means that folks like Steyer and Cloobeck might take their money and go home to sulk but in the long run I think it’ll improve the chances of there being a proper opposition party to the current state of things. But this won’t happen overnight, though. I expect there to be a big fight over the next two (at least) elections on these matters. Too many people have interests in keeping the Democratic Party corporate friendly since it makes financing dead simple (and of course it keeps their consulting firms flush with cash). Once it becomes impossible for them to get consulting contracts that’s when the party shifts in a major way since they’ll just be proper mercenaries and work for the Republicans.
First off I really apologize for the absolutely massive wall of text I’m subjecting you to here. I’ve tried to keep the paragraphs mostly self-contained or at least clear in how they should connect to each-other. I kinda just started writing and didn’t stop…
Yes, and I said as much. I’ll accept their platform, I don’t trust the democratic establishment to pull it off. Others in this thread have said as much too: give me whatever platform you want, run on only gays can serve in the military, run on tax the top 1% at 100% of their income, no loopholes, no lower capital gains tax and use the money to buy everyone a pony, do whatever crazy thing you want in the platform, but unless I have a reason to think that the democratic establishment wants to implement that platform then I’m going to assume that the not-marketing platform is the same as the one that all of those people in the democratic establishment implement when they’re normally voted in. I’d put the time machine at 8 years ago though: the first Obama campaign, the rhetoric, all that was spot on, they surged into the White House, they surged into Congress (not filibuster proof, but that’s the only problem.)
Did the legislation to back it up come through? Performance in elections since makes me think no. Credit where it’s due on the policies though, filibuster didn’t help. Good rhetoric, not many visible hard fights for what was campaigned on. Lots of executive orders which get wiped with the next administration, lots of behind the scenes stuff like refusing to mount defenses of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Here’s a thing that always seems to get missed when people tut about how those Democrats just always forget that midterms exist and so the Republicans take it back in the midterms: the Republicans get voted in in midterms. They’ve somehow discovered the secret to convincing people to vote in them, there must be a reason that voters aren’t excited enough to vote in midterms. We’ll see if the party realizes this this year.
Dems had the data years ago: they knew America was getting more diverse, they knew it was getting younger, they knew, I assume, that those younger, more diverse people were tacking far to the left of the party platform. Like, farther than young people normally do. Like, a third of 18-24s saying that socialism is preferable to capitalism by the time 2016 rolls around with a jump to 41% when you cut down to likely voters farther. That doesn’t come out of nowhere. Not sure if 2007 was too early for that last one, but the point is that they should have been figuring that the party would need to move left as soon as these things became apparent. That might have even been a way to gaspmotivate people to vote in the midterms, which aren’t as exciting!
For 2016 they moved the platform left, they did not necessarily move the party establishment left, make sense? For that they needed visible, prominent new people because a reasonable response to “we’ve now moved the party platform to the left, where it should be” is “if you really want to implement this platform, why didn’t you implement it when you were all in power 8 years ago? Why didn’t you even actually push for it 8 years ago?”
So no, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear that they couldn’t have won running the campaign they did. Actually not even the benefit of hindsight, because I and several others were on here quite early in the primaries saying that if they ran Hillary, they faced a very real possibility of losing. There were favorability polls done, if I recall, which said that the particular matchup we got was the only matchup which could go either way, Hillary against any other Republican was a loss. Yes, it’s unfair that she’d had a smear campaign against her that’d been going on for 25 years, yes a lot of the dislike for her going way back was of the sexist variety, I heard plenty of it from my family. But deserved or undeserved, she had the reputation she had. She. Should. Not. Have. Been. Allowed. To. Run. With. That. That’s what the whole superdelegate system is for after all, isn’t it? To prevent a candidate who scores well among the kinds of people that vote in democratic primaries but who the public at large has problems with, like, say, a 25 year long smear campaign, from getting to be at the top of the ticket?
So no, with the campaign they had in 2016 they couldn’t have won. With the party they had they couldn’t have won because it was the kind of party that put on the campaign they had. Winning the election would have taken longer term planning than that, but isn’t that why parties aren’t dissolved after every election?
The Hillary Clinton platform was nearly unreadable by its sheer titanic size, with line items to appeal to nearly every identity and special interest group known to man, but I persevered. (Mostly because @d_r made me feel somewhat ashamed of myself for not doing so, back when we were arguing about Trump’s inevitable win prior to the election.)
And I was fundamentally unimpressed, at the end; compared to “Make America Great Again” it was a complete fiasco of a platform. I remember it now as a laundry list of microissues, posturing, and unimplementable dreams, not a real agenda.
Testify! You can’t say that enough times! The media’s fascination with the Trump circus (and I include BoingBoing in this remonstrance, which pisses some folks off) allowed him to spend pennies to his opponents’ dollars and still get far, far more coverage. It’s a huge part of how he won.
Um, in case it’s not clear, I didn’t vote for Trump, and certainly would not, regardless which party he was pretending to represent!
Hey, I hear you. But let’s not forget that a big reason the media is in business is to make money. This means selling papers to or getting clicks from people who made the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo celebrities. I wish the American voter were more educated/discerning, but he’s not. He wants bread and circuses, and is willing to pay for the circuses. On some level, I can’t really criticize the media for wanting to make a buck. I only wish they weren’t such obvious whores.
Democrats had a supermajority for seven months: from June 2009, when Norm Coleman lost his recount bid, to February 2010, when Scott Brown took Ted Kennedy’s seat. In that span of time, they negotiated and passed a sweeping reform of US medical care, something that I’m pretty sure none of you would be willing to give up at this point. Far be it from me to call into question Ms. Lynch’s political expertise, but I HIGHLY FUCKING DOUBT there was lot of time to negotiate every progressive agenda item with Joe Lieberman, the dude who was rejected by the Democratic party and represented the 60th vote of this supermajority.
I love the front-loading of grievance against Democrats, who don’t face great odds in a mid-term election, not due to their actual positions, but because voters are almost certainly going to treat this mid-term like every other mid-term, and just not show up.
But why can’t people be bothered to show up? Republicans show up. Is there just something inherent in the psyche of those who vote democrat that makes them shut down whenever the idea of voting in a midterm comes up? I offered a suggestion in the post above: take on a progressive agenda and stick to your guns, show people that you’re really, seriously trying to implement that agenda without fundamentally compromising that agenda. Put up legislation even if you know it’ll only squeak past if that because that legislation needs to be on the national discussion table. Why? Because it builds trust. It builds the idea that the people you voted in are fighting for why you voted them in and fighting hard.
Old people show up, because old people have more free time, and have more concrete assets to lose, which also contributes to becoming more conservative as they age. Another factor in this is that in a presidential year, you basically get 16 months of coverage, while mid-term elections get virtually no coverage in terms of races, and what coverage they get is always framed around the sitting president.
The idea that you can tie mid-term turnout to any ideological positioning is undermined by the fact that the ideological terrain has changed a lot over the past 100 years, but mid-term turnout has stayed very constant, from the late 19th century to today.
So how about doing something to fix that, like those old progressive ideas of either making election day a national holiday or moving it to a Saturday? Concrete things can be done to improve it.
A little addendum to my last post: I’m sure those discussions do happen, but behind closed doors. Make Lieberman say in public why he’s against the public option and explain to his constituents why he’s only backing healthcare reform if it’s a republican plan (The ACA Is practically Romney’s healthcare reform when he was governor, of which much hay was made in 2012 when he was against the ACA.) More specifically, start arguing, in public, for Real Universal Health Care. Amend the act which created medicare to immediately cover everyone. From that point you can argue it down to a timed rollout: immediately cover everyone over 50 now, then in 2 years 40, then in 2 years 30, … After that you can argue down to the ACA with a public option.
You do know that admending the constitution takes an impossible level of support. In the past 40 years the circumstances were right for had a year, because republicans have had a relatively iron grip on over 50% of political positions in the country.
And it’s not old people voting Republicans in, it’s churches which get to be both political powers and voting stations at the same time - part of the existing structure that favors the Republican Party in rural areas.
Is a constitutional amendment required, though? Obviously it would be to move it to saturday, but congress doesn’t need an amendment to make a day a holiday, as far as I know. And last time I read the constitution (granted, a year or two ago) it doesn’t prevent election day from being a national holiday. Another option is to take the Oregon route nationally: universal vote by mail.
Since you called me here, I think we need to keep clear the distinction between the HRC campaign platform and the Democratic Party Platform. The latter, while still long at 52 pages, was nevertheless a solid, positive, progressive, fairly readable document.
The problem the Democrats have is that they are a genuine big tent party in a fairly conservative country. This means that they end up following, instead of leading, on many progressive issues. I don’t see that as a genuine criticism, since it frees up the groups that do lead on these issues to push harder on the Overton window than they could if they had any hope of electoral success. Done right this leads to change that is more gradual than the specialized groups would like, but not so slow that we don’t see it happening in real time.
In my lifetime our attitudes on many issues have changed radically, mainly for the good. When I was a boy homosexuality was illegal everywhere, with a death penalty in some states. If someone 10 years older than I am was a little slow to fully embrace gay marriage, well, there was a hell of a lot of inertia and old baggage there to overcome. One thing that makes it possible to cast off old wrong ideas is being of fundamentally good character, and being bright enough to recognize, when new ideas are in conflict with the ones you’ve held for years, which ones are compatible with that good character and which ones to get rid of.
Given the nature of our political system, it is probably better overall to have someone as POTUS who has good character, the intelligence to reflect on their positions, and the willingness to adapt them when challenged with better evidence or a strong argument, than someone with whom one seems ideologically aligned but who is an inflexible idiot.
Through all the discussions in the run-up to the 2016 election I never hid the fact that I disagreed with HRC on many issues, and she was certainly not my first choice for the nomination; however, I always believed her to be thoughtful and of good character, more so on both counts than the major third party candidates and certainly more so than any of the Republicans, and Trump most of all.
The electoral college he is is baked into the constitution, and the voting laws are typically state constitutions. The voting system requires a full reversal of who is in power to accomplish (a blue for every red) and then some.
There are practical ways to help (mail in voting, free licensing, unified registration and ID, mandatory poll density, etc.) but the fundamental flaws the US has is deeply embedded in the untouchable parts of the law.
On top of that, the current laws are not why 20-30% of the voting population disappears 3 out of 4 years.
Absolutely- 95% of the anti-Hillary stuff was completely fabricated bullshit. I’m totally acknowledging that. She’s been the undeserving target of the biggest smear campaign in history. What completely baffles and enrages me is how her supporters could ever have possibly thought “but, I’m totally sure that won’t actually affect her chances”.
25 years. That’s millennials’- the largest voting demographic- ENTIRE LIVES. But, yeah- They’ll all completely change their minds about everything they’ve ever heard just as soon as they learn that she’s really really qualified.- Just like how young earth creationists give up and throw away their bibles once you just explain to them why they’re wrong.
