Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/the-cesar-sayoc-vote.html
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Vicious. Paillot doesn’t spare the “moderate centrist” Dem on any count. As it should be.
Given the discussions here in recent days about guillotine images and metaphors for white privilege, I suppose it’s only going to be a matter of time before someone shows up here to express grave concern about articles like this endangering the support of white Boomer establishment Dems who just want a return to neoliberal-lite normalcy.
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Let’s hope he can sway them, because those people seem to be the majority of American voters these days.
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Electability means - winning the damn election. If he wins the primaries - he’s electable. Jeez - there hasn’t been one vote cast yet & people are trying to say who’s electable. I know - it’s not about who can win - it’s about who else someone wants to win.
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The parody argument she is making is the exact opposite of the only demographic argument people were able to make against Bernie in 2016. Until very recently, even posters here on BBS were still crowing about “Bernie Bros”; that half a percent of idiots who would have voted for any man over any woman and weren’t yet swayed by trump.
Warren has secured my backing with her rapid-fire release of practical policy solutions, but the truth of the matter is that we wouldn’t even be having the majority of the conversations that are happening on the debate stage if it weren’t for Bernie’s 2016 campaign.
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To be fair, we had actual BernieBros like cowicide showing up here in disproportionate numbers (apparently, that long-banned user still occasionally harasses Cory on Twitter). But yeah, those brocialists are a tiny and loud-mouthed misogynist minority of Sanders supporters. The vast majority of people backing Bernie (including Bernie himself) will happily move to supporting Warren as circumstances dictate.
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Which I think is also true of trump voters. There is a deep thread of misogyny that simply wouldn’t allow them to vote for Hillary no matter what (also true of many, many potential dem voters) but the full on racist, MAGA hate set is quite small in relation to the actual voting population, though proportionally larger on the GOP side. The truth is most voters weren’t swayed by hatred as much as they were by propaganda and cult of personality. If a population spends the majority of their time engrossed in rubbish media, they are going to carry its messaging whether they believe they are or not. Fahrenheit 451 was, in my opinion, the most accurate depiction of a dystopian future because its society wasn’t founded on fascist governmental overreach or hideous technology run amok, but the banal, daily acquiescence of the population.
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“depraved weirdos whose prefrontal cortexes have been cooked at high temperatures while trying to negotiate the complex emotion of empathy?”
Not that it matters, but I’m sure any Trumper who reads that will have no idea what the hell any of it means.
Shoulda stuck to “get a brain, morans.”
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Sadly, it occured in every major campaign in 2016. Clinton had her own counterparts to the BernieBros, who would immediately call you a “misogynist” if you dared to question her neoliberal-lite economic policies or her warhawk positions.
If there’s any lesson to be learned from 2016, it’s that these personality cultists of all stripes are better left ignored (or, around here, Ignored. Or Flagged.)
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That’s a lot of words to say “No, I’m not too extreme, it’s the fault of centrists who aren’t like me!”
Ranked Choice Voting would solve many of these problems. It is already used in many American cities, and Maine has adopted it statewide. It is gaining momentum in other states. It lets you put on your ballot not just your first choice like today, but also your second, third, etc. If no one gets a majority in the count of first choices, the last place candidate’s votes are then counted toward their second choice, and so on until some candidate has an actual majority (>50%), not just a plurality, of the votes.
In the current system, a third candidate spoiler can be just popular enough to draw votes away from the otherwise most popular candidate, causing a less popular candidate to win. This method eliminates that possibility. So you could vote for Bernie or Warren as your first choice and Biden as your second choice and not have to worry about gaming the system to make sure you don’t lose in the end. If it had been used in the 2016 election, Jill Stein’s votes would have gone to Hillary as a second choice (probably) when it was clear Stein wouldn’t win, and the Stein votes would not have been “lost”.
The areas that have started using Ranked Choice Voting love it, because it is more fair and makes more people happy with the result.
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Agreed. This is probably the only practical way to mute the anti-democratic effects of the Electoral College (that plus proportional division of EC state votes). It’s also the only way we are going to see parliamentary-style party diversity. If a candidate isn’t yoked to the chain of one of two super-parties with entrenched interests, coalition parties and independent parties can actually begin to make an impact. Bernie, Warren and Yang (et al) have proved how powerful grassroots fundraising can be compared to traditional bribery which makes this even more feasible.
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John Kerry and Mitt Romney are what happens when you focus on ‘electability’. Barack Obama is what happens when you focus on exciting your voters.
And there are a large number of Trump voters who were torn between Trump and Bernie in 2016. I don’t think anyone else running now can say that.
(For the record, I would slightly prefer Elizabeth Warren, but I understand not everyone is enormously excited by policy wonks.)
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“completely hateable assholes, who want what’s worst for everyone?”
By all means, let’s start the blame Bernie for everything game. WTF!
And let’s not forget her surrogates like Gloria-farking-Steinem saying that young women only voted for Sanders because his campaign is “where the men are” or Albright saying there was “a special place in hell” for anyone with a vagina who didn’t vote for Clinton. Vote with your genitals, not your brain.
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All true, but to be clear the purpose of this discussion isn’t to re-litigate 2016. Bernie had his crappy surrogates, and obviously Il Douche did as well. The point is to sideline the personality cultists, whether they’re BernieBros or the “moderate centrists” this McSweeney’s piece is parodying.
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Just like how they all supported Hillary in the 2016 election. /s
The “Bernie Bros.”, at least in my opinion, were vastly overstated as an actual problem. I really do believe that the “problem” was more that the Clinton supporters who jumped at the few who were unhinged - and then the army of Russian trolley bots who swept in and made it vastly worse that reality was.
For all the “help” Russia gave Trump - it would be wise for the country to remember that they spent just as much time and energy trying to divide the Democrat voter base - and may have even bank rolled Jill Stien’s campaign just to split the vote - along with fanning both sides of the racial divide.
And we ate it up like we were hungry for it.
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Only a quarter of the eligible voters voted for him, and many did so because they always vote along party lines. They are not a majority, just a loud minority of VOTERS, much less the entire public.
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Correct. Fuck the middle - work like hell to bring out those who have given up and don’t vote anymore, or have never voted - this is a much vaster field to sow.
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