CA Governor Jerry Brown endorses Clinton in advance of June 7th primary

boing
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Sure, to a socialist, everyone looks conservative. In the realm of of American politics, Hillary Clinton is a liberal and actual Socialism (not social welfare) is a fringe extreme left-wing ideology.

That review btw, is hilarious in its bias. I mean, how can you take anything this says seriously when it includes such fallacious arguments as:

Even her feminist claims have been undermined by polls showing women prefer Sanders.

or this hilarious gem:

He does remind us of Clinton’s admiration for Israeli prime minister Netanyahu

Hillary Clinton has disliked Netanyahu for three decades. She once went on a 45 minutes tirade against him. While he was in the room. On camera. She once hugged Yas­ser Arafat’s wife after she accused Israel of poisoning Palestinians in front of him.

Frankly, it is a testament her commitment to diplomacy that she can still engage with the man.

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That’s nice. Unfortunately, like so many people who have cited that study over the past two years, you decided to read the sensationalized clickbait title rather than the actual paper.

If you had read the paper like I did nearly two years ago, you would have noticed that at no point did the political scientists use the terms oligarchy or plutocracy or even insinuate it. Why? Because influence by organized special interests including wealthy individuals, unions and business consortiums doesn’t magically change our form of government into a completely different form.

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You’d be hard pressed to find a respectable political scientist who claims anything more than we’re slowly inching towards becoming like an oligarchy. The media turns that into hyperbolic clickbait articles titled like We’re An Oligarchy! which is what you find when you search.

Though in the case of Jimmy Carter, he really did just engage in hyperbole himself.

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If you have a solid argument as to why the United States is an oligarchy rather than a representative democracy, I’d love to hear it. I’m sure it would make for an extremely entertaining bit of political science.

I quoted it mostly for the lying bullshit about taxes and the (implied) power of small businesses. That was comical.

But as to oligarchy-or-representational-democracy, it’s a separate continuum for each axis. The US is both, less than 100% oligarchy, less than 100% social-democratic-republic (those three things really need to go together). It’s not strictly an inverse relationship, either.

We have elites who own markets, employ corrupt officials and corrupt media to get what they want well out of proportion to their voting power, whether through explicit corruption, personal quid-pro-quos, or the same within media. The oligarchic ratio of control has been ascending well past the social-democratic-republican, if only through oligarchical war of attrition against the social-democratic-republican institutions in favor of their own oligarchies.

I actually use this argument against people who go off about how we don’t have any democracy. But in this election we have one thieving oligarch, one oligarchical employee… and a social-democratic-republican who has been shoved aside by the tools of oligarchic control at every moment of the campaign. Imagine how your apologia makes my eyes roll.

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Despising someone politically or on principle isn’t (necessarily) the same thing as despising them personally. I know people whose politics I disagree with very very strongly but we’re still friendly, until we get really hammered. Even (especially?) then we’d run into a burning building for each other.

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This was linked here like yesterday. Do keep up.

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Oh hey, that’s me!

Eh, probably some, yeah. But I wouldn’t expect the polls to budge all that much. And if you want to talk favorability you chose the wrong figure to bring up, because there’s 28 points between them! (+10 for Sanders, -18 for Clinton.) You have to be really cynical to think that a difference that huge is nothing more than media conditioning and political dirty tricks.

It is still too early to freak out about Democratic unity. The convention is probably going to go fine (have you noticed how most of the people writing stories about what a mess the convention is going to be are Republicans?). If it doesn’t, we’ll talk then.

And you’re right, I don’t want to discourage my allies. I don’t see them as ignorant.

Ugh I should just skip this paragraph. False left/right equivalencies are big this year.

[quote]What’s the point of creating a movement to replace the elites if that movement is dominated by nonsense?
[/quote]

Political movements are messy. I’ve never heard Sanders himself talk nonsense, and that is enough for me.

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If you had read the paper like I did nearly two years ago, you would have noticed that at no point did the political scientists use the terms oligarchy or plutocracy or even insinuate it. Why? Because influence by organized special interests including wealthy individuals, unions and business consortiums doesn’t magically change our form of government into a completely different form.

Cute the way you threw unions in there.

And the paper does indeed insinuate it. To demonstrate as the paper does that the political influence of those who seek to better the lot of most Americans is far, far outweighed by that of those who seek further power and profit for the pathological wealth hoarders is to demonstrate that while we don’t live in what technically qualifies as a plutocracy, it’s close enough to one that the term fits far better than does “representative democracy.”

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Balanced in that weird stupid sense that there are “always two sides” of equal credibility. As opposed to, y’know… more true.

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Too true. Reality has a leftist bias.

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That, more than anything, will cause the Dems to lose the general by a landslide unless Hillary is indicated so they can put up Bernie or Biden. There is a chance they might be able to pressure her to drop out over ‘health concerns’ to save face with a cozy pardon from Obama, but only if she’s able to see reason and give up her turn.

I despise the Republican party, but I’ve come to like Trump. His anti-TPP stance speaks to me, but I know on some emotional level, I’m able to look past his flaws because Hillary is just such a bad option, I’d be willing to take practically anyone over her as long as they could throw a few bones to the people with a few good policy stances. Anti-TPP, pro-nuclear, H1B visa reform… Trump’s got a few gems hidden in that bluster. Bring on the hate for supporting Trump! I’ve learned to let it energize me.

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This is what some people truly believe.

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Right. What kind of a sheltered mindset does one have to exist in to blame the mountains of hatred for Mrs Clinton on Sanders supporters?

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I mean, how dare Sanders state that she supports monied interests?! Why would he call attention to her constant support of Wall Street, Wal-Mart, things that surely nobody would have known otherwise?

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I would prefer president Sanders to president Clinton.
I think both are electable vs Trump.
I will very happily vote for either over Trump, or any of the republicans.

There is a chance that Sanders is a president that America needs. However to be that president he would have to swing the house and senate, and I don’t see much evidence that he would. His lack of effort in that direction is a disappointment. Still I think this country is ripe for some actual leadership, and that an actual leader might be able to cause such a swing. He could also be a zero. Unable to swing the house or senate, unable to drag his new-found party along, unable to do much by executive action. But still I don’t think he will make actively bad policy. We won’t be bombing so much, etc.

Clinton will be a competent president. Too enamored with War and Wealth, but with some real concerns that I share. She is pretty good on acute pro-family policy (as opposed to the authoritarian religious policies republicans endorse). However even if she does swing the house and senate she will swing them to centrist corporate democrats and enact the same sorts of policies as Obama and former president Clinton. She won’t be dismantling the epa, or ending obamacare or social security. Good chance she will keep bombing somebody. People under-rate competent administration.

The best one could hope from Trump is that he be a zero. Just a chaotic mess of scandal and incompetence. A few people dying from katrina like mismanagement. The worst? Well to keep it fairly reasonable: Border crisis with mexico. 10x ICE incarcerations. Obamacare wrecked somehow. Bombing Iran. Severe recession due to some currency or budget blunder. A wackier version of the Bush2 administration. But, really, I think the chaotic mess and poor executive function is much more likely.

But, you know what?

Sanders lost.

Sanders failed to get sufficient support from African Americans. The Clintons are very popular with African Americans. Sanders did not even seem to try much, and not at all until far too late. Hillary Clinton has had her eye on that ball for decades. She simply blew him away. This was a pre-existing advantage she had, and he failed to overcome it. I certainly don’t know how he could have, it was a tough one, but he only needed a small swing in the end.

Sanders failed to get sufficient support from the party. He isn’t really a democrat. All those years he stood outside the party, being able to easily not vote in line when the party was trying to push something through? Being able to not participate in its annoying fundraising activities? That had a downside. This is it. Hillary Clinton has friends and allies all through the party. People who’s back she has had when they needed it. Sanders has far fewer. This expressed itself in the way Clinton was able to lock in super-delegates early.

My right-wing-religious relatives seem to be planning to vote for nobody (or some useless third candidate, which is the same thing under our system) basically because Trump doesn’t pay lip service to religious conservatism it seems (his policies, such as they are, are just clownish version of republican orthodoxy, so that can’t really be it).

Anyway, in the general election. If you live in california or texas and want to write in sanders or whatever, go for it. But if you are in a competitive state… We have do-it-yourself instant runoff voting in this country, you have to decide in advance if you are going to use your first or second choice, and so far we have not had a presidential election in which it was not very obvious when it was necessary to go to your second choice. But we have had one where a bunch of people screwed it up and we ended up with president Bush2 instead of Gore. And Gore was, in some ways, the president America needed.

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Not yet. And apparently, a lot of insider Dems are freaking out over the growing possibility that Mrs Clinton is going to implode, with a campaign that’s “in freefall.” If (when?) that happens, Sanders is their next best bet.

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emails huh?

They are both pretty old. Either could have a health problem and drop out tomorrow. The campaign could become irrelevant.

So, sure, reality could still intrude somehow.

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https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

© American Political Science Association 2014

“The central point that emerges from our research is
that economic elites and organized groups representing
business interests have substantial independent impacts
on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest
groups and average citizens have little or no independent
influence. Our results provide substantial support for
theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories
of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian
Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism”

I’m shocked that a regular reader from BB would try to argue against this. Secret trade negotiations are signed, whistle blowers are in jail, organized rallies are shut down by riot police, media is controlled by corporations, copyright is a tool for the elite, fracking, bail outs, etc… you can add more as you wish.

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So Sanders, and the Democrats in general, are completely lacking in the authoritarian nativism that drives Trump’s candidacy and really scares people.

But the anti-elitist sentiment that also drove Trump and Ted Cruz, I think it exists in both parties and it’s the main driving force behind Sanders.

Mostly true. Many of the policy elites are saying his policies are impractical, they’d cost more than he thinks and he’d have to raise taxes by a lot. Unfortunately that’s not really a topic you can debate on a message board unless you have years of expertise analyzing policy and then go over his policy in extreme detail. When those experts have spoken up they were largely written off as Clinton partisans.

But the main thing I was talking about was the movement. Sanders is still a fairly responsible and conventional candidate, but what about the next candidate who takes his place in 4 years? If the movement is led by people who don’t care if they’re completely wrong they might send a lot of backers to a really terrible candidate.

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Let’s look through my earlier comments and see what we find.

Lets have a look at the comparison between the 2004 and 2016 candidates positions, when run through the Political Compass test.

She looks pretty conservative to me.

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