Elections 2018

As a BB liberal myself, I’d say that economically we’re somewhat further to the left than what passes for North American liberalism today: closer to the FDR/New Deal/Keynesian liberals than the neoliberal-lite Third-Way types that the DNC establishment and the MSM usually present as liberals. On social issues a liberal position is a more clear-cut one, and I doubt that the typical BB liberal’s position on them differs much from any given member of the DNC establishment.

For example, most BB liberals would prefer proper single-payer-universal to Obamacare (AKA Romneycare), and would have preferred a new version of Glass-Steagall over Dodd-Frank after the 2008 crash. We’re not progressives, but we are closer to the UK’s “old” Labour party or to Canadian Liberals than we are to the American Democratic Party, mainly because we haven’t accepted neoliberalism as the default economic philosophy and aren’t constantly looking to compromise with its demands.

Of course, the American right characterises anyone who identifies as liberal as raging Stalinists, but their moronic opinion isn’t what we’re discussing here.

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I agree with most of what you’re saying… except on voter suppression. This has been an ongoing campaign by the GOP to suppress minority vote, and they got a huge boost from a couple of key supreme court decisions. It helps explain why even though we’ve recently had a black president, black voters are still relatively demoralized. The GOP really fears an American where they’re not the majority and their more than willing to throw democracy under the bus if they can preserve the white power structure.

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I feel you are painting a very broad brush stroke here about who the BB contributors and BBS folks are and what they feel about our current political climate with this statement:

Reading articles on BoingBoing, which I think is a relatively accurate microcosm of North American liberalism (albeit one that skews a bit left) you get the impression that people think this is a board game

I certainly do not see our electoral system as a board game nor do I have have some child like mentality of Mueller will save me because Trump broke the rules. And I do not see that from any of the regular posters and contributors to the BBS…specifically in this thread. Not one person has said that or even suggested that view point as far as I can tell. By all means post the specific examples of the whining hand-wringing you are alluding too.

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From what I’ve seen, most liberals on BB agree with Masha Gessen that institutions will not save us from an autocrat and that the fight right now in that regard is about preserving the institutions of liberal democracy themselves in the face of constant attack from the GOP.

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I think that while still fairly broad is a more accurate reflection of the majority. Agreed.

The consistent message from posters here is “vote. That will affect change”.

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2016 will, assuming the country survives the consequences, be studied for generations to figure out what happened and how it happened. My thought is that there were a significant number of what should have been tiny factors that all broke just right for Il Douche. The election turned on a fraction of 1% of the vote in a few usually blue states. All of the small influences mentioned above added up to a tiny change. In this instance though, that tiny influence was sufficient to change the outcome. Hard to see that happening again, especially since we (leftys) are acutely aware of the possibility of a repeat. And, hopefully, the fact that the white supremacists in DC have been largely unmasked will provide enough motivation to get voters to the polls. It needs to be if our country is to be saved.

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Sometimes I wonder if among the tiny factors were just how formative professional wrestling was for men who in 2016 were in their mid thirties (my cohort) as well as stories about con men with a heart of gold overthrowing the machine

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You are a couple of decades younger than me. I am kinda glad I missed that particular cultural abortion.

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I was mainly asking the more flip commenter, but I admit I prefer your considered response.

If you’re talking about the commentariat, I’d say that your assessment is about how it averages out, with some outliers dragging the whole thing a bit more left than it would be otherwise.

Contributors are mainly what I referred to, again on average. And it’s a microcosm, which is the word doing the lifting here. Some more Bernieish elements mixed with more establishment tendencies. Doctorow is the most radical. What it replicates more generally however, is a lot of fairly affluent leftism with longing gazes towards something more radical. But overall, sentiments expressed here are pretty anodyne. You’ll never see BB touch Palestine with a ten foot poll, for instance–unless they have to, to maintain relevance in a news cycle. To some extent it’s reflected in the news sources they like to pull from. And let’s not overstate my implication: This blog is not fundamentally skeptical of institutions or that it relies on for reporting or to take action. Whether they’re “leftist enough” is a matter of taste, I’m not sure what that would mean for even myself, and I’m not super picky. Mostly it’s part of a larger impotent response to the current electoral paradigm.

I don’t know that I disagree. Unless you’re saying the Democrats were taken aback by the extent of it and didn’t see it coming. My argument is that they should have seen the extent of it coming and shored up their efforts where it would have made a difference. Not that it didn’t make a difference. The effects of Russian interference is where I expressed more skepticism.

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For starters, there’s no small number of galaxy-brain expatriates from other countries here on Boing Boing, sharing their hot takes about how real progressives govern their European ethnostates that have populations smaller than LA county.

Such takes involve dismissing the white supremacy built root-and-branch into US government, dismissing stuff like

as trivial ‘battlefield conditions’. In fact, these trivialities, these ‘and so on’ conditions, are determinative in nation-wide elections that come down to the geographic location of approximately 0.06% of the vote. The geographic location of these votes also happened to be places where there was concerted government effort to disenfranchise voters, we know this because each of the three determinative states passed voting restrictions or conducted large voter roll purges in the years between 2008 and 2016.

When the US was founded, the largest population difference between states was 17x. Today it is 70x, and there is no indication that the trend is reversing–by 2045, it is forecasted that 30 percent of the population will control 70 of the vote in the upper house of Congress. This, combined with The Reapportionment Act of 1929 puts increasing weight on the votes of people from certain low-pop states, a one-way ratchet towards minority rule. What ideologues of various stripes get entirely upside down is that they think that the partisanship of the Republican party is driving this metaphysical construction called the Overton Window, and that we can change our political fate by matching that ideological intensity. In fact, the partisanship of the Republicans is a result, not a cause; the US has been slowly choked by a combination of structure and demographics that encourages provincial xenophobia for at least the past 40 years, water that has slowly begun to boil.

Rather than engage in an endless intersectional pissing match over whose precise ideological appeals will activate Teh Base in the provinces, we who call ourselves leftist need to introduce electoral reforms that make those intersectional pissing matches less of a liability, and fight like hell against the attempts to trivialize, marginalize and straight-up steal the one tool we have to affect any change, the vote.

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1964, and (sort of) 1972

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Wouldn’t you have to win first?

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I would say that some didn’t - primarily the leadership of the party who have done a spectacular job putting their head in the sand when it comes to issues like voter suppression.

Entirely correct. They didn’t WANT to, I think. They’d much rather try and get the white working class voters that have been leaving the democratic party since the 70s back, but they’re not coming back.

I tend to agree. I think there was something fishy happening with the Russians, because they’ve been doing this sort of thing for years now, but the democratic party has been failing at energizing their base and sticking to the issues that they care about for a long time now, which is a much larger contributor to people either moving away from the party or just becoming apathetic.

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In my humble opinion, the Russian meddling, among other factors, was a determining factor only in so much as this particular election was set up to be strongly subject to butterfly effect type things. Between Democratic apathy and overconfidence and Republican hatred and anger, very small influences applied in the proper spots made a huge difference. Not certain that could be duplicated, but based on the success of this go round, it absolutely will be tried again.

Edited to add: Republican racism was, of course a fzctor, but my point was small nudges. The racism factor is in no way a small nudge… no, not small at all.

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no shit!

there’s that galaxy-brain wisdom we all come to BB for!

the difference is that I don’t think getting into a pissing match over whether Democrats should use class, race, or gender politics is altogether very productive, nor do I think that piss-takes from random Europeans with enormous demographic planks in their eyes are very much useful.

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Affluent leftism doesn’t want “more radical.” Liberals on BB want to maintain or slightly enhance the status quo of liberal democratic institutions that make life for liberals more pleasant. So they’ll support spending to reduce homelessness, reduce the chance of epidemics, and reduce the chance of riots resulting from inequality in a way that the Third Way Dem establishment won’t.

This is why BB stays away from Palestine: not because they support Likud’s repression but because Hamas is a violent and authoritarian organisation riddled with religious fundamentalism. You can’t expect Xeni or even Cory to cheer that lot on.

As I noted above, it’s skeptical of those institutions but also knows they have to be saved before they’re reformed.

Russian interference wasn’t the only or the primary factor in what happened, but if one credits the role of social media spreading disinformation in the 2016 election it was a significant factor.

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say what?

A couple of them, for all that they espouse progressive programmes in their own country, suddenly get very quiet when asked if immigrants should be allowed to partake of those programmes. That doesn’t make them liberal or progressive by the standards of the BB commentariat.

A competent party would have convened an emergency post-mortem meeting within a week of the 2016 general election to discuss what went wrong, would invited Sanders supporters to participate, and by late 2018 would already be floating a slate of strong candidates for 2020 and providing strong and pervasive messaging against the GOP and Il Douche. The 2018 blue wave should have been a bloody lock.

Instead they spent at least a year dithering before making minor changes to party leadership and to the nomination process and have pushed back against almost every attempt to push the party back leftward.

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You’re awful fond of that meme. I admit, I enjoy it, too.

I’m insufficiently European to accept that criticism. I’m on a thumbsy phone so I direct you to search for my post: “Assumptions about other commenters.”

I’m not sure what you mean by Dems using class, race, etc.