Maybe I am just telling myself what I want the believe but I am kind of optimistic by nature so I’m prone to that kind of error. The thing is, when I see that people were much more positive about the future of the country before the presidential campaign began in earnest, I reach a different conclusion from Nancy LeTourneau and Steven Holmes.
Rather than thinking that people are getting more downhearted because they’re absorbing negative messages from Bernie Sanders and the eleventy billion Republican candidates, I think they are becoming pessimistic because they’re realizing that we’re going to have to replace the current president with another Bush or another Clinton or a racist clown or some unpopular governor who seems half out of his mind.
Frankly, one reason I think Sanders is moving up in the polls is that a lot of people could live with him as president, but I think deep down most people know that a Brooklyn-born 74 year-old Jewish socialist from Vermont is not going to prevail over all this madness and become the next occupant of the White House. Still, Sanders offers a slender reed of hope in what is an otherwise thoroughly demoralizing set of prospects.
What am I saying?
Well, gas prices are down, employment is up, housing prices are up, but the public mood is going south. Maybe you buy that everything is going to hell and people suddenly noticed (just coincidentally) right when the campaign kicked off. Obviously, we have our problems, but the timing suggests that people don’t like their choices.
I think if Obama were permitted to run for a third term, people would be feeling a lot better about the future.
Maybe the candidates are fomenting some of this discontent, but it’s less by people agreeing with them than it is by them listening to the stupid shit that they have to say.
I think you’ve got this kind of backwards, at least in part.
For me, Obama’s been as good as we can expect by most measures. Yet if there’s one thing his years in office wasn’t, it’s transformational. I know why. And I know that the same sanctimonious idiot who answers every comment here with ‘a truly progressive president would ensure that gummybears rode rainbows to paradise’ will say–shockingly!–the same thing to this, as if that’s an clever argument. But even the most transformative elements of this administration–Obamacare, saving the country from Complete Economic Meltdown–just feel too small to address any of our real problems.
Basically, my feeling is, this is as good as it gets. So yay! Except it’s not nearly good enough. So boo. And I could focus on the first part of that until the president campaign heated up. But now I’m increasingly bummed.
When I want to get pessimistic I think about climate change. The mess in Washington is nothing compared to that.
After all, it’s not at all difficult to say what would restore some vestige of a functioning national government, and it’s not really about who’s in the White House. As long as the Republicans control either house of Congress, Washington is paralyzed. If the Democrats controlled Congress, they would at the very least be doing some legislating. So we would at least have a chance.
We know this because it’s preciesly what happened in California. Only now we find that a chance isn’t good enough, because our heavily Democratic state legislature still can’t bring itself to do anything meaningful about climate change.
Not that one bill is the end of the story, but it’s still discouraging.
I get pessimistic when I think of how the a-hats in Washington sat on their duffs watching their buddies at the top rake it in while the rest of the country struggled due to our Congress complete lack of any coherent fiscal policy. That and Climate Change show what total failure this set of so-called leaders are. Trump’s popularity should be no surprise to anyone with eyes.
Hard to see how this administration hasn’t been transformational.
Look at access to health care.
Look at the wars we didn’t get into in the Middle East and former Soviet Union.
Look at gay rights.
Look at what it’s done to the Republican Party.
Transformational is generally considered to be a dramatic course change. Not tinkering around the edges with what previously existed; not that that isn’t perfectly acceptable, optimal and laudable at certain points in time.
Access to health insurance was an expansion/modification to the pre-existing Medicaid program plus the conservative proposal of government subsidies for health insurance (both pieces were inherent in what came to be known as Romneycare).
Wars — have you taken a look at Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Ukraine lately? The USG was most definitely involved in all of them.
LBGT rights — the LBGT community won this through their own efforts in the courts and court of public opinion with a modest assist from a handful of politicians. Not obstructing those efforts is better than doing the opposite — but to give Obama, Clinton, etal. credit for this is nuts.
After the 2008 election, Democrats controlled Congress. 2010, lost the House. 2014 lost the Senate. If Democrats continue doing this well in taking down the GOP, the power of the GOP might get larger and more entrenched.
I can certainly understand why predictions of the GOP’s demise might seem pretty naive right now, but I do think the demographic argument carries a lot of weight. No one forced them to permanently alienate Latinos, and that really is catastrophic as a strategy beyond the next couple of election cycles.
So I expect that the Republicans will succumb to their own bigotry before too long. The real question I have is how much of the rest of the country they’re going to take down with them.
It’s a bit too early to see how the Republican demographic death spiral pans out, as I can see a couple of scenarios in which they permanently or temporarily delay perdition, much like the 1976-1980 Democratic Party.
But I will say right now that, ironically, the lopsidedness of conservative strength in non-Presidential elections is making the problem worse. If the Republicans in 2014 had somehow done poorly but retained their majority, they’d for certain have done immigration reform and wouldn’t be talking about shutting down the government over Planned Parenthood.
It’s a perfect storm for them; made worse by their own frantic damage control and baked-in opportunism. I’m beginning to see the whole GOP circus as largely one massive long con; much more about grifting than ideology.
I mean, shutting down the government over Planned Parenthood? We couldn’t pay them to do something so infernally damaging to their own prospects. The gerrymander of 2010 did nothing more than create a resentful troop of flying monkeys whom don’t care a fig for the Chamber of Commerce. Obama’s legacy, it seems.
My only concern is if Trump pivots on minority citizens and credibly invites them into his revival tent. Then all bets are off. Otherwise the GOP is going the way of Skylab.
I have the opposite concern. Trump isn’t going to pivot on minority citizens, at least not credibly. If he does it in the primary, he immediately loses any chance of winning because that’s the main thing keeping him afloat. Without immigration and with his other positions, he’s… politically a left-of-center Republican who’s an enormous blowhard and gaffe machine and has never won political office. What’s more, Romney tried such a strategy in 2012 and it didn’t work for him even though his racial revanchism was a lot less intense than Trump’s.
My worry is actually the opposite: that Trump doubles down on his relative economic leftism and white aggrievement politics and forces the Democratic Party to start playing defense in states they never even considered before like Pennsylvania and Minnesota. It’s another reason why I’m very worried if the Democratic Party decides to run with Clinton and she trots out the whole social liberalism + economic centrism rulebook.
That too. But perhaps that’s a storm we might weather, we’ve been fighting for those voters for a while. But you are correct it seems to exhaust some of Hillary’s appeal over Obama in those precincts.
I was taking his nomination for granted in this case. He has another, bigger problem thereafter; if past performance is any indication he is not going to fund his own national presidential campaign.
“Access to health insurance was an expansion/modification to the pre-existing Medicaid program plus the conservative proposal of government subsidies for health insurance (both pieces were inherent in what came to be known as Romneycare).”
These points do not effectively argue against the Affordable Care Act’s transformational aspects. The ACA was intended to provide real access to health insurance for about 30 million people outside of Massachusetts. Approximately 17 million have gained health insurance with the ACA’s help, which has given the vast majority these Americans greater health care. The ACA’s regulations have also given all Americans with health insurance greater financial security as well by capping their total yearly out-of-pocket expenditures on health services. Finally, the unacceptably large escalations in U.S. health care costs have been arrested, which is providing crucial benefit to the Medicare trust fund and other public and private budgetary benefits.
“Wars — have you taken a look at Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Ukraine lately? The USG was most definitely involved in all of them.“
It is foolhardy to pretend that there is no difference between our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and the wars you name- huge differences in blood and treasure. And you skip right past the successful diplomacy which held powerful non-allies together with us so the Obama Administration could keep those nations on board to conclude the Iran nuclear deal. Zero credit at all- really?
“LBGT rights — the LBGT community won this through their own efforts in the courts and court of public opinion with a modest assist from a handful of politicians. Not obstructing those efforts is better than doing the opposite — but to give Obama, Clinton, etal. credit for this is nuts.“
And who nominated the Supreme Court Justices who provided almost all the votes from the majority in Oberkfell, and many of the Federal judges who found for the civil rights of same-sex couples in the cases that preceded Oberkfell? Seems like Obama and Clinton deserve almost all the credit for getting those Judges into their offices. Or putting it another way: the LGBT community, even with all its mobilizations, would still be suffering from deprivation of marriage and other historical civil rights violations if Obama had not been elected President.
“After the 2008 election, Democrats controlled Congress. 2010, lost the House. 2014 lost the Senate. If Democrats continue doing this well in taking down the GOP, the power of the GOP might get larger and more entrenched.“
This conclusion depends on ignoring the preposterous propaganda campaign against Obama and Democrats which helped lead to the 2010 electoral results, the subsequent vicious gerrymanderings of Congressional and Legislative Districts in GOP-controlled States which has secured House and State Leg majorities but are badly hurting the Party’s ability to gain votes from the parts of the American electorate which are growing, a complete avoidance of the 2012 electoral results, and an unwillingness to grapple with the Party balance of Senators who were exposed to re-election campaigns in 2014 and 2012.
Are the Republicans well-positioned to take back the White House in 2016? Will the GOP Senate caucus gain or lose seats in 2016?
Real wages are down about 5% across the bored. People have less economic security.
There has been a steady erosion of labor’s power against capital. I think people feel no one knows how to solve this. They are not wrong.
More broadly, people who are not political junkies are kind of shocked at the anger and hate. People feel very divided, and most do not like that. There is a sense that the haters control politics, and as long as they are in charge things will not get better.
They are not wrong about that either. And that is the one thing Obama was not able to change.
While sketching out the history of 20th century socialism for a teenager recently I mentioned that it peaked in the Thirties and has since declined dramatically and he interjected, “Well, it ain’t over yet.”
Thanks Bernie for socialising socialism!
I confess, I don’t know he means when he says it.
Socialism used to mean collective ownership of the means of production. This idea is largely deader than a door nail. The argument has been won: incentives are a good thing, and some inequality benefits everyone.
So what does socialism even mean? Well Bernie says he is a “Democratic Socialist”, which most people interpret to mean some form of European social democracy. But the Bernie I knew in the last 70’s, the one who supported the Trotskyitte Socialist Workers Party, would have argued that was just another form of bourgeois liberalism.
I will confess I would love to read his description of it now: I suspect it is far away from anything the writers of the Monthly Review would consider socialism.
The best description I ever heard of democratic socialism was made by Robert Kuttner. He said it required understanding capitalism as a system, and using that understanding to make changes that resulted in social justice. But his description was not of a transformative economic and political system. It was tinkering around the margins. The tinkering was important to be sure, but there was no utopia lurking at the end of it, no “New Man” would come into existence.
I don’t know what a modern form of socialism is. I don’t know that the term helps.
I certainly understand your position but collective ownership of the means of production was a principle not an actual accomplishment. And incentives are a good thing; which is probably why socialism historically has left property in private hands and the burghers sitting more-or-less comfortably.
Start from the commonwealth and work outwards; does this thing place the good of all above the few or vice versa? Seems simple enough for me. Husband the resources and regulate predation on the citizenry and maintain non-profit institutions to fairly provide education and health services. Good start? One big union. Now there’s an idea. Post office bank?
At this point, as I hinted, just rehabilitating the word seems helpful. Since we are so deep into the new Golden Age it seems a revival is worth considering. Let’s try again. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!
It may be I am just packing the kid’s head but socialism seems a pretty good idea compared to our capitalist dystopia.
There’s a lot of socialism in the US. Public transportation and roads, publicly owned utilities, and public health agencies and the VA medical facilities. While it’s gotten a very bad rap, public housing isn’t uniformly bad and can with a bit better management and a bit more money be well run — and cost less than the housing vouchers.
Wouldn’t these things be better described as the Commons. Built by all taxpayers and used by all. That is what has been diminished by fire sales to cronies.
For decades nationalization was to cornerstone of the socialist project. I don’t agree with you about collectivization not being central to the idea of socialism that existed in much of the 20th century.
The Social Democrats in Europe fought for it. It was a key part of the French Socialist manifesto for years.
Your description of socialism does not differentiate it substantially from my own definition of liberalism (the American definition, not the classical one), though within liberalism there is the critical understanding that the state can be as oppressive as the capitalist (a blind spot that doomed certain socialist projects)
In your definition it seems you are using it in a negative sense (ie to denote something other than capitalism) rather than as part of a larger consistent ideology.
What I am trying to point out is that the idea of socialism has actually moved significantly to the right in ways that would have surprised a socialist in 1950.
I am not sure much of this matters. I voted for Bernie many times though I am not a socialist. As we used to say in the 80’s – Bernie can’t nationalize GM from the Mayor’s office in Burlington. But there was a project in Burlington that mattered. The socialists stopped development on the waterfront to make sure all had access and parks were built. If you go to the Lakefront in Burlington you can see it. And maybe that is all the definition of socialism you need.
With a definition of socialism as state control of production, no wonder you’re not a socialist. Communism is rigid — and includes control of production. Socialism is flexible and depends on multiple factors.
An example. Japan, England, and Germany all have UHC — conceptually socialized health care, everybody pays in and everybody gets. As a percentage of GDP, Japan’s is the lowest cost, followed by England, and Germany’s is the most expensive. Health outcomes aren’t significantly different; although post Thatcher, NHS has been depreciated. The NHS is as close to socialized medicine as any western country has today — meaning that NHS services are under state control and state budgets. Japan and Germany for the most part don’t operate the clinics and hospitals and health insurance is privatized but non-profit and allowable operating costs are strictly regulated. Those three different models are mostly optimal for the cultures and economies of those three different countries.
Japan is a mono-culture with low income inequality — naturally socialistic if you will. Medical providers take pride in delivering the best care at the lowest cost. Same with the insurers. Thus, no need for the government to operate either one,
England is somewhat more diverse, highly class based, and high income inequality. Thus, the one size fits almost all is the only way it could achieve UHC.
Germany is somewhere in between the two. Low enough diversity when the UHC system was organized and low enough income inequality that a mostly privatized system has worked well for it. The down side is that it’s pricier than England’s NHS but it avoids the penchant for citizens to complain. However, it can never achieve the value for the cost that Japan does.
Diversity in the US and high income inequality combined with a profit compulsion among providers is the grab bag of socialized (VA and Medicare/Medicaid) and privatized providers and insurers has made the US system the most expensive on earth, delivers crap or nothing to a high percentage of the population, leads unnecessary care, and bankrupts individuals. At a core/underlying level, we in this country have never embraced socialized (UHC) health care.
Some municipalities operate their water, sewer, power and garbage utilities. Socialized. Others let private, regulated companies provide these goods/services. Which city, Los Angeles or San Diego, fared better in the CA electricity crisis? Public or private power operators?
I get that countries in Europe have larger welfare states
That’s not socialism. They do not describe themselves as socialist. I spend significant time there. They would say they are capitalist countries with a more robust welfare state
There is an ideological difference between the social democrats in Europe and socialism.
Most Europeans could tell you the difference. It is a sign I think of how badly Americans understand socialism that they cannot. The French, for example, say Mitterrand seduced the socialists into liberalism.
All capitalist economies have some measure of state intervention. Capitalism is after all a state run program. Over time capitalist economies adopt some socialistic policies (eg universal health care pension systems etc. ). The existence of those features does not change the fact that most economic decisions are in private hands
Calling it “with a more robust welfare state” doesn’t mean that it isn’t socialistic. (Guess Europeans are as allergic to the word socialism as Americans, but not so allergic to the word welfare.) There’s no clear dividing line between when a state is capitalist with “a robust welfare system” and when it is more properly considered socialist. Tradition, conventions, culture all interfere with the definition. What is China today — communism with robust capitalism? It does retain more features of state economic control that is communistic rather than socialistic. OTOH, education in China is less socialistic than that in the US.
There are relatively few countries in the world today that aren’t what we call mixed economies. More socialistic than capitalist — because state regulation of any of the private sectors is socialistic. So the question isn’t socialism or capitalism, but what goods/services and to what degree is socialism implemented.
Ah, but the show’s not over yet.
BHO has been utterly transformational in one very key way: he has forced the GOP to reveal its true self to millions of moderate GOP’ers and lots of middle-of-the-roaders. And they are not liking what they’re seeing.
By adopting all of their sort-of-reasonable positions himself, he made them move even further to the right. And while we may disagree on this, I’m pretty sure he’s changing millions of minds.
These are the early crazy days. Rudy-time, if you like. But I suspect we are witnessing the collapse of movement conservatism as a meaningful political force, much as we saw the collapse of the New-Deal era democratic coalition in the late 60s. Thanks to BHO.
Also, too: As unlikely as a 76 year old Jewish socialist seems, is he really that much more unlikely than a man whose name is Barack Hussein Obama in a post-9/11 USA?
Me? I’m staying tuned for the exciting conclusion!
(On darker days, I worry that if I’m right, the reaction will be catastrophic, since historically that’s been the case whenever broadly progressive values appear to ascend. But I’m also a hopeless optimist, at least today!)
I think yo.u are possibly very correct about BHO effect on the Right. Yesterday’s rally against the Iran deal is case in point. Palin could hardly put a sentence together that made any sense in any way from start to finish. They called for war that is not going to happen and is unsupported by the majority. The whole event was moot because the president already had the votes. And the House leadership was surprised and at a loss to figure out what if anything they could actually do, let alone lead, govern or just score political points.
Then Jingal is trying to make noise by pointing out the obvious (to most Americans) that their new favorite is completely unfit and in fact too dangerous to be leader of the free world.
Their alternative reality may be catching up to them.
I suppose Obama’s administration will be viewed in context.
It’s sort of like Nixon’s administration. On the face of it, it wasn’t transformative. He largely adhered to the consensus set by the New Deal Democrats (though that was more thanks to political inertia than any ‘Nixon is more liberal than Carter/Clinton/Obama, derp’ nonsense) and his Presidency spectacularly imploded despite his complete routing of the Dems in 1972.
However, it’s viewed as transformative for two big reasons:
1.) He gave Republicans a formula for destroying the Democratic Party, meaning that they had to adapt or die. If Watergate didn’t happen then 1976 would’ve also been a disaster for the Democratic Party (and 24 straight years of conservative supremacy would’ve destroyed America) along the lines of 1972 and 1980.
2.) He killed the New Left, the NDC’s successor that never was, in the cradle. Imagine if the Republican Party decided not to take advantage of the damage the Vietnam War was causing and didn’t deploy the Southern Strategy — the New Deal Coalition probably would’ve held up for a few more cycles and it’s impossible to tell how much the country would’ve changed. Shit, America might have single-payer health care, an Equal Rights Amendment, a Job Guarantee program.
Along those lines, what happens in 2016-2032 will determine how we view Obama’s administration. We might view him at the first Democrat who was able to wield a natural majority and halted the onward march of movement conservatism, whereupon the New Left bloomed a second time and finally implemented their agenda after 40 years of unending defeats.
On the other hand, his successor might be a fuckup and we end up losing, say, Latinos or urban whites to the Republican Party. Obama’s administration is them viewed like Wilson’s or Carter’s; a momentary blip, a last gasp for air.
Or maybe climate change leads to a nuclear war that starts out from Pakistan/Indian and he’s just viewed as one of the Emperors of the Old Era by our irradiated mutant grandchildren. Who knows.
Yet win, lose or draw the infamous coalition that elected numerous administrations slyly committed to bankrupting America for the sake of eroding entitlements is comprehensively and perhaps irrevocably dismembered. And all that seems left are shell-shocked hangers-on, troops of flying monkeys and a faintly sulphurous smell. I truly blame Obama.
Assuming that Trump isn’t out-and-out lying about his economic positions and plans to return to orthodoxy once he’s in the White House. Or he somehow gets torn down by the GOP establishment and, with the aid of a scandal/FP debacle/economic disaster manages to sneak into the White House and have a two-to-four year window of wrenching the machinery of government way rightward.
I mean, it’s not like leftists didn’t achieve some major policy victories, mostly through the judicial branch, even after McGovern went down in flames.
I know Trump is obnoxious and overbearing but I don’t think we have the faintest notion of what “orthodoxy” means to him. He’s played the nativism card, to be sure, but in Queens that’s not a reliable party identifier, if you know what I mean. Economically he veers across the spectrum.
I think that to discern Trump’s motives one needs to know the specifics of the ‘deal’ he’s promoting and I’m not quite sure we do. If he’s selling himself as president on mere trust he’s doing amazingly well. But I’m guessing he has no more idea of how to govern than the star-child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a crap-shoot.
If the Republicans, on the other hand, leveraging some black swan event, grasp the reins of executive power ever again we will have only ourselves to blame. I can imagine Cruz as mad demagogue muttering to himself and jockeying for the unforeseen misfortune that might catapult him to unlikely power. Bad craziness. We must always be alert; Nixon taught us that. Like venomous snakes, the lot of them.
I don’t necessarily consider a Democratic candidate as liberal, or more liberal, than Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton either time, Gore or Kerry, — and arguably Obama — a thoroughly demoralizing prospect.
Especially since Eugene V. Debs is still dead, and Henry Wallace isn’t looking too chipper.
The Obama Coalition right now holds the advantage in Presidential elections, but there are at least two scenarios in which the Obama Coalition can be routed by the dwindling Nixon-Reagan Coalition.
1.) A poor economy enables the Republicans. And the best way to get a poor economy is to buy centrist orthodoxy on debt and deficit hysteria. I don’t think most people realize how really fucking close we came to disaster with Bowles-Simpson. If the Tea Party didn’t bail us out Obama would be a one-term President.
I don’t have confidence in Hillary Clinton’s ability to manage the economy better. Remember, this was a woman who was praising the EU’s austerity measures back in 2009, when the Democratic Party was fighting for their life for a stimulus. On the campaign trail, she hasn’t been awful on the economy, but I’d be much more assured of her ability not to derp her way into a recession if she agitated for (still stronger) financial regulations and a stimulus package/jobs program.
2.) The other thing that can fuck the Democratic Party over in 2016-2020 is poorly-run foreign policy. The Democrats probably would not have taken the House in 2006 had Bush never gotten us into that idiotic Iraq War, and the GOP base is a lot more forgiving to FP screwups than the Democratic base. And a good rule of thumb to evaluate every war since, what, the Korean War is that every time the warhawks got their war it ended up at best not helping their long-term goals and at worst biting them in the ass.
I don’t have a thing against Machiavellianism. I do, however, hate stupid Machiavellianism. And for some reason the warhawks confuse their cynicism and toughness for savvy. Clinton was extraordinarily stupid to vote for the AUMF — because if there’s one thing that she should know by now, it’s that properly-run wars don’t help the President or candidates past the first few months and that poorly-run wars are a boat anchor.
And sad to say, it doesn’t look like Clinton has learned anything since losing her chance to become President thanks to the AUMF debacle. Arming Syrian rebels? Voting for Kyl-Lieberman? The last straw was her overly bellicose tone a couple of days ago about the Iran deal. Unless the United States gets extraordinarily lucky, I can definitely see Clinton involved in some warhawk FP debacle designed to make her look badass and dominant that slowly drains her support until she gets booted out of office. Just in time for a round of 2020 redistricting. Oh, joy.
Get the picture? Yes, in a ‘pick and mix’ way, Hillary Clinton can still be net more to the left than any of our chosen Presidential candidates in the past 50 years and still augur disaster, because her leftism isn’t concentrated in the spots that will keep her administration from imploding.
Yet it was a classical piece of triangulation which was gamed out quite carefully at the time in terms of domestic politics. This is the flaw; decades of foreign policy crafted to shave a few points off some domestic polling question.
Like you I see no sign of lessons learned on this point.
Even if we’re going to look at it from a perspective of realpolitick and winning media news cycles, it was still a stupid vote.
Clinton was not going to run in 2004. The war would’ve taken 6 years to percolate. Meaning that it would’ve been long past the point where it would’ve been politically helpful for the warmongers if the war was conducted well. And if the war wasn’t going to go well, as the DFHs had repeatedly warned, it’d be an encumbrance to anyone. ESPECIALLY people running in the Democratic Party primary.
I could understand Kerry voting for it. From a ‘fuck those fucking Iraqis, I want my slobbering VSP blowjob for being tough and manly’ perspective, there was a chance that he’d be able to catch the tail-end of that wave. Of course, Bush Sr.’s boost from the Gulf War didn’t even last 12 months, so Kerry was still stupid. But Clinton? It was lose-lose.
But her advisors were worried she would have been on the wrong side of another slam-dunk military parade through the Middle East. Say what one will of the Gulf War it was a ‘gateway drug’ for further escalation in the region among professionals and the public.
The Gulf War was the perfect war for the centrists and the VSP media quislings. It was against a pathetic enemy who only had just enough strength not to make it look an out-and-out slaughter, (American) casualties were minimal, there was no international blowback (well, there WAS: see OBL. But lol Americans and long-term memory), and it had the decency to be concluded just in time for the 1991 summer blockbusters!
If there was ever an event in post-WW2 America that embodied victory disease, it was that one. The takeaway from that war among the GOP and Democratic etsbliashment wasn’t ‘holy shit did we get lucky, but let’s never do that again’ but ‘WOWIE ZOWIE!! 90% approval rating?? This will be an amazing political trump card!’
I think that it’s pretty telling that the two big movies about the Gulf War (Jarhead and Three Kings) weren’t even really war movies at all and made great sport of indirectly satirizing the military’s and more importantly the public’s superficiality and superciliousness towards the entire debacle. Even the parade of Vietnam movies by-and-large didn’t directly mock espirit de corps and our big, brave manly military boys.
Yes, but can’t say we weren’t warned about seeing war through the distorting lens of post-modern media narratives. There was always an antidote; we just never wanted any.
Most foreign policy everywhere is gamed out by using its effects on domestic politics.
The US has walked into a good many of its wars in the 19th century on that basis.
War is the drug a failing leader generally shoots up to strengthen his authority and legitimacy and a weak nation blows to distract from their declining power and cohesion internally.
Ironically, it never works in the long-run and often-doesn’t in the short-run. The list of nations who tried to bolster their odds with an ill-advised war but only ended up meeting the reaper a few decades early is long: the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, Imperial Japan, Austria-Hungary, the Confederacy…
If America is exceptional in anything, it’s how we blunder into so many wars (1812, American Civil War, Phillipines, Vietnam, and of course the Iraq War) and mostly emerge unscathed. How did that quote go?
God exists and he’s American, indeed.
If you had suggested one short year ago that the independent self-described socialist from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, would run a presidential campaign fuelled on earned media through the liberal heartland and just in time to be nipping at Hillary’s heels everywhere by Labor Day I would not have believed it in my wildest political imagination.
Bernie f***ing Sanders. Totally did not see that coming.
Everywhere but here, everywhere but here….
Well, I’d feel better about an Obama Presidency over a Hillary Clinton one, because he has largely avoided caveat #2 on my above list. Don’t get me wrong, he has plenty of blood on his hands as-is, but it’s not in a way that hurts the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, there’s still the issue of gridlock. Sam Wang estimated that the Democratic Party needed a generic ballot advantage of 7% to win the House. Raw demographics combined with 2012’s exit polls put us at around 6%. So unless the Republican candidate really fucked up we’d mostly be along the same path. Hope that that declining deficit doesn’t cause a surplus-induced recession.
Honestly, I’d rather try out Sanders’ playbook. He’s far from the ideal candidate, especially in terms of FP (he’s about where Obama is), and of course there’s the whole ‘bwaaah, disheveled 75-year old socialmulist Jew’ nonsense, but he’s the only candidate who is even trying to engage the white working class.
P.S.: Hillary is not going to win the White Women vote like she currently is, so she needs to come up with a better strategy.
Yet another Hillary bashing screed.
Just where in the Washington Monthly was Clinton’s name mentioned?
LeTourneau explains that the R’s are continually messaging that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. That means that the 30+% of voters and population keep getting downer and downer.
Bernie (bless his little heart) declaims about how the middle class is getting screwed. But Letourneau makes the point that most people cannot get their heads around the idea that a 74 yo Brooklynite is going effect this change. I don’t know if she’s right, but its certainly an arguable point at this time.
Of them all ONLY Hillary is trying to be upbeat. ONLY Hillary is saying what she’ll actually DO in terms that might actually have a chance. I guess that makes it all right to beat her up for it.
Since he once again pushed Sanders as a loser I wouldnt call it a HRC bashing screed. Subtle pro HRC piece.
” I think they are becoming pessimistic because they’re realizing that we’re going to have to replace the current president with another Bush or another Clinton …”
Real damn subtle.
And yet Clinton remains the only option for him as he once again hits Sanders. It’s not really his fault Clinton is poor choice.
I understand peoples’ nervousness about Sanders. We’ve been told (with a good deal of accuracy, it must be said) for the past two generations that Democrats cannot win solely by turning out their base and running on full-throated social and economic progressivism. And there is nothing in his profile besides generic honesty and outspokenness that, according to conventional wisdom anyway, appeals to the so-called ‘center-right and independent voters’.
The thing is, a lot of political commentators (and this includes most liberals) haven’t quite grasped how much things have changed since 1972. They still talk about the Democratic Party as the underdog party and cast their struggles in terms of finding anything, no matter how inconsequential, demeaning, or baroque, to appeal to the incorrigible voters of Traditional America. Hence the rather embarrassing obsession with crap like ‘if only Dukakis didn’t get into that tank, we would’ve squeaked out a win!’
The Democratic Party forms a natural majority. 2012, where we won an election with 8% unemployment and without picking up any new states, should’ve put that idea that the Democratic Party needs to appeal to anyone outside of its natural demographics to rest. What’s more, it’s the most coherent and ideologically consistent majority party the nation has ever seen. So the fact that Sanders will get endlessly ridiculed as a hunched-over socialist with bad hair who’s such a wimp that he gave BLM the microphone doesn’t fucking matter anymore, because the Democratic Party wins Presidential elections against the Nixon-Reagan Coalition if they turn out their voters and avoid scandals and bad policy.
It’s not the Democratic base that is determinative. Wave elections happen when the notion of the political divisions change. When you have a national Republican – Tea Party Republican – religious right split, the suturing being attempted in an anti-LGBT/anti-Hispanic (in the guise of immigrant)/anti-Muslim tirade attempting to hold them together.
Transformations happen in eras, not through the sole actions of a Presidency. It is clear now that the Bill Clinton Presidency was still part of the era that began with Watergate and and fall of Saigon and the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe.
The current transformation begins when someone begins to say that the reason that all the bad things have happened in the past decade has been because of neoliberal economics, neoconservative foreign policy, and the era of political slash-and-burn. In short, the movemental conservative trend started in the Goldwater nomination and nurtured during the Nixon-Ford Presidencies, given birth in the Reagan years, and reaching adolescence with George W. Bush has foundered on its own puerility. The juvenile fascination with William Buckley and Ayn Rand and Lee Atwater just never matured into good policy, and the ideological presuppositions have been proven by events to have been vastly in error.
Like the LBJ Presidency and the Carter Presidency, the George W. Bush Presidency and the Obama Presidency have exposed that failure.
The GOP is attempting to identify the failure as personal — the electing of the first black President. The failure however is a failure of ideas and, more seriously, political will. Who is calling out the failure, and who is calling for a different foundation of political ideas? That is why “moderation” does not get it. “I am not and have never been a Communist.” is what the “moderation” plea is supposed to message. It doesn’t matter when slash-and-burn politics calls all of the opposition foreign muslim socialists. Just by running Bernie Sanders is calling out that suckers game just like Ronald Reagan defanged the stigma attached to “conservative” (i.e. Depresssion-causer).
Here’s the thing: social issues are king. I’m not saying that economic/FP issues don’t matter, far from it, but it’s weird to cast our gridlock in terms of generic dissatisfaction when the Democratic and Republican base have two irreconcilable worldviews that are not going to be healed even if one or both parties abandon ‘neoliberal economics, neoconservative foreign policy, and the era of political slash-and-burn’.
Because the real causes of polarization revolve around religion, gun proliferation, women’s rights, drug policy, LGBT rights, and above-all else race.
Bernie Sanders is not going to solve that. Even if he and his successors run a pitch-perfect administration with a roaring, long-term viable economy, great strides in environmental policy, and actual peace and diplomacy overseas our battles for 2016-2030 are by-and-large going to be the same as 1980-2015 as long as the Democratic Party (rightly in my opinion) refuses to unconditionally surrender to the GOP’s position on social issues.
I still support Sanders’ candidacy because I believe that he can make headway into breaking the gridlock, but it will be through appealing to disaffected whites in the urban South and Midwest with economic policy rather than some across-the-board cultural soothing. No matter which candidate we go with, though, we’re still going to have, in the best case scenario, 35-45% of the population whining about the gottdammerung of America and doing all they can to blow the edifice up. And our VSP media quislings will be happy to inflame these divisions for their corporate masters. Hence why I think that the Democratic Party should stop worrying about slash-and-burn and polarization and bipartisanship and instead give as good as they can get.
Booman: “I think deep down most people know that a Brooklyn-born 74 year-old Jewish socialist from Vermont is not going to prevail over all this madness and become the next occupant of the White House.”
I suppose what he means is that no 74-year old Jewish socialist from Vermont has ever been elected president before. We already know that. Fuck it, just support the guy and see what happens. If he starts running into serious trouble, there’s time enough. Right now, he’s doing way better than anybody ever expected.
Maybe it would wind up Biden/Sanders. Who the fuck knows at this point?
Sanders is not from Vermont, he’s from Brooklyn. Which is even worse, I suppose. Except when you consider that he got a lot of Vermonters to vote for him.
Full disclosure: Sanders is not that much older than I am, and if I’d lived literally one block past where I did live, I’d have gone to the same high school he went to (Madison HS). Maybe I just don’t get it, he seems perfectly normal to me.
I honestly don’t think Sanders fits into the one-size fits all political narratives we’ve been brought up on. Not that he’s superman, it’s just that he has a kind of appeal that has not been seen in a presidential candidate in a long time, and people hear that he’s telling the truth.
I’m always suspicious when I hear SO MANY people saying, “Personally, I love the guy, but he’s just not going to play in Peoria.” Maybe somebody can tell us how he’s actually playing in Peoria.
https://go.berniesanders.com/page/event/detail/volunteeractivityflyeringcallingwalkingetc/4jj39
I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but in mine all of a sudden people have gone hard Islamaphobic, the Christian Zionist are pumping out end-times predictions, and people who have not been political on Facebook are sharing some really stupid stuff.
But no one has passed on the Cruz shirtless tattoed pic yet, thank God.
People are pessimistic because even if they have employment they still face hard times or their kids or their parents are facing hard times. No one knows what they themselves can do to get out of their tough situation.
And Republican seniors have not yet connected with the fact that the GOP intends to go after Social Security and Medicare.
And the big downer is the thought of 14 more months of Presidential political drivel on the media and in the social media posts of their friends.
What would turn this around is if lightning struck and the GOP started governing instead of shutting down government.
Projecting your own longing for another Obama term does not mean there is that sentiment in the remainder of the country.
And progressives are getting more and more depressed over the aggressive steps that the DNC is using to tilt the process and the establishment Democrats are using to split the ABC voters so as to avoid a “soul of the party” conversation.
It is the failure to see positive change forward both from the GOP perspective (why Trump is popular) and from the progressive Democratic perspective that is fueling the pessimism as well. From the Clintonista perspective, the pessimism is the frustration of why can’t they (multiple theys in this case) realize that she is the candidate.
My own pessimism if from the Presidential-fixation of just about everybody. For all the dissatisfaction and pessimism, incumbents and charlatans are likely to come out on top.
And then there’s the fact that Rupert Murdoch just purchased National Geographic.
I agree with your thoughts here. I want to give Obama his due despite anger at him from the left. But there is an array of serious problems that need to be addressed. You can name your own.
I see Hillary gave a hawkish foreign policy speech. Maybe she wants to sew up the war crowd. But there it is: endless war. Where are the peace makers
Poverty in this country is crushing due in large part from low wages and part from just not enough jobs. Wall Street is looking for a hike in interest rates since unemployment is around five percent. But interest rates ordinarily go up to control inflation and there is none. And that five percent number is, well, a lie. The real number is around ten percent (U6). I really think people should read $2 dollars a day to get an idea of how bad this is.
And the Simpson-Bowles attack on SSMM is still out there with fools telling us we are going broke. Did I say fool? You bet.
No point to continue my rant. But health care made a dent in it but is far from satisfactory and what have we done about climate change and fossil fuel.
It is past time we had a talk about the soul of the Democratic Party. This third way doesn’t work for me.
But really it was Hillary’s foreign policy statements of where she was more hawkish that her President.
Moar war depresses people. Who knew?
Why are people pessimistic?
We have arguably a president among the best over the last president who did what by far the majority of Americans wanted but had to do it largely in a most undemocratic way in face of a fact-less, illogical, unreasonable, politically-inept, know-nothing opposition.
And we have at least 2-3 “generations” who will decidedly NOT be better off than the generation before. Poorer, sicker, less-educated, more alienated.
Those generations have little to hope about. Principles the nation was built on have been so perverted by so-called patriots that they really don’t mean much.
To quote The Boss:
“Johnny works in a factory and Billy works downtown
Terry works in a rock and roll band lookin’ for that million-dollar sound
And I got a little job down in Darlington but some nights I don’t go
Some nights I go to the drive-in or some nights I stay home
I followed that dream just like those guys do way up on the screen
And I drove a Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes
And when the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my own dreams
Well now I built that Challenger by myself, but I needed money and so I sold it
I lived a secret I should’a kept to myself, but I got drunk one night and I told it
All my life I fought this fight, the fight that no man can ever win
Every day it just gets harder to live this dream I’m believing in
Thunder Road, oh baby you were so right
Thunder Road, there’s somethin’ dyin’ down on the highway tonight
I won big once and I hit the coast, oh but somehow I paid the big cost
Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits of all the other ones who lost
When the promise is broken you go on living, but it steals something from down in your soul
Like when the truth is spoken and it don’t make no difference, somethin’ in your heart turns cold
Thunder Road, for the lost lovers and all the fixed games
Thunder Road, for the tires rushing by in the rain
Thunder Road, remember what me and Billy we’d always say
Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all then threw it all away”
I’m starting to think that the definition of “American Exceptionalism” is having a country where this is true AND people believe it’s still “the greatest nation in human history.”
Do they not realize “exceptional” can be negative?
I grew up in a world where there was fresh evidence that:
— America fought and won a world war to end unspeakable horrors. It was done imperfectly and resulted in a still imperfect world but realistic alternatives weren’t obvious.
— It was a common belief that the right side won the Civil War. As a nation it had not ended perfectly and there was much bad behavior in the years since, but the majority was committed to continuing to try to correct it.
— The total tuition for a four year public university degree was roughly about what a graduate could expect in first year salary. I had friends who went to more expensive private colleges but they could expect higher salaries too. It was not an insane economically irrational choice to get a liberal arts education. Employers valued your ability to think and the value a more evolved person could bring to the organization in the long term and in leadership roles.
— I knew many Southerners for whom Southern Heritage meant mostly, “leave me alone”. They didn’t want or expect to be welcomed at Lilly white babtist mega churches, golf courses, etc. populated by the powerful or wannabe powers. They wanted to be lets alone, not with their guns and hate, but with their long hair, pot, beer, cars, and fishing reels. Jerry Jeff Walker, Kinky Freedman and Willy Nelson sung their anthems making fun of Rednecks and their mothers who raised their sons so well. The Confederate Flag meant to them to leave me alone to deal with the class bullshit I have to endure.
— Recreational drugs were seen as something that improved your life and thinking. It was not a drug industry led epidemic that enriched the few will stealing the hopes, souls and lives of much of at least one generation.
–the rich still felt some social responsibility to all, not just shareholders, and they didn’t try to buy the government.
— A president shamed the office, but the country didn’t let him get away with it.
— we fought an immoral war, but tried mightily to overcome it.
Hate to cut into your pathos, but everything on that list except for 1 and 3 sounds more like wishful thinking to me.
The New Deal Coalition was built upon rimjobs and sweet-nothings to assuage the Dixiecrats’ racial hysteria. FDR couldn’t get a fucking anti-lynching bill passed. Let’s make this clear: when FDR couldn’t get the South to agree that ritualized serial killing was an evil thing, he and his successors gave up because they needed their votes. And you know what happened as soon as the Democratic Party said ‘no more’? The party was smashed into a million pieces.
Recreational drugs were never seen as anything other than the scourge of America. You think things are bad now, you should’ve seen the hysteria over marijuana, morphine/heroin, and most pertinently alcohol from the 20s-50s.
Don’t fall for the whole ‘heritage, not hate’ bullshit. That was just a brilliant propaganda scheme from Lost Causers that didn’t go challenged by the craven North. The actions of the post-Southern Strategy south speak otherwise. Or do you have an explanation as to why Social Security was specifically constructed to exclude blacks?
The rich felt some social responsibility towards all?? Don’t make me laugh. They were quieter then, sure. Less effective, sure. But that was due to their relative political impotence rather than any increase in morals. The plutocrats fought FDR and Truman tooth-and-nail through their administrations; it’s just that they were a chihuahua and the Democratic Party was an Alaskan Husky. I can dig up a ton of quotes that had Landon and Dewey whining about the sloth of the non-rich or Eisenhower warning the Republican Party to STFU on ending Social Security.
The idea that America fought mightily to overcome an immoral war is also risible. The New Left gave it their all to stop Vietnam (assuming that’s what you’re talking about) but in the end the GOP and Democratic establishment and the ‘hard hats’ held all of the cards. And as we can see with the Gulf War and Iraq War, the people most affected by the Vietnam War haven’t learned jack shit.
You seem to have missed the parts where I said this is the U.S. “I” grew up in, it’s notable imperfections, the people I actually knew, what the majority of Americans unapologetically agreed was right, etc.
The drug culture was not driven by drug company profits. It is now. Then people such as Timothy Leary and Oliver Sacks talked about the mind improving potential of some drugs – most notably pot and acid. I took a four credit psych course for my major on drugs and human behavior that included a field trip to pick mushrooms which we then took to the prof’s house to prepare and eat and discuss.
Movies like Easy Rider portrayed two types other Southerners; guys like Jack Nicholson who just wanted to be left alone and the brill cream rednecks who shot long-hairs just because they had long hair. Burt Reynolds movies White Lightniing and Gator showed the lower class white southern culture of teen pregnancy, poverty, abuse by corrupt power, etc. Things they had in common with blacks. These people actually.existed. I met them. Jerry Jeff Walker and Willy Nelson are of that group. I’m sure they exist still but culturally they have been supplanted by open willful and proud ignorance and hate. See Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo.
“Maximizing shareholder value” was added to the national nomenclature in the mid 80s of Reagan. “Greed is good” was brought to us by Gordon Gecko. It was noteworthy because it was new and any argument against it seemed soft and shortsighted. Prior to that it was actually possible for business leaders to be embarrassed by their greed. They had probably been with their companies a long time and would be there a while longer. They lived in their communities and raised their families there. Yes, Eisenhower spoke truthfully and popularly against opposition about the need for SS. It didn’t seem weird. Landon and Goldwater were weird. Not so much today when a guy like Trump gets on ANY cable news loop.
The majority of Americans were right on Vietnam. You may have forgotten that Nixon, on his own to win the election, nixed the Johnson peace deal promising a “better deal”. After six more years and roughly 25K more U.S. dead I guess maybe they got it. But America spent all the years up to the first Gulf War trying to learn from the mistakes of Vietnam and continue to punish Nixon in history for his “Peace with Honor” foreign policy joke.
I’d add in my lifetime, I saw the rise of the environmental movement that today gives us cleaner air and water than for most of modern human history. Still too much to do, but very few people at one time thought the science was bunk and national effort unworthy.
Here:
Thanks!
Louis CK:
Everything is amazing and no one is happy.
Harry Reid successfully demanded 60 votes. Will McConnell throw in the towel?
If it’s procedurally settled and the deal is legally considered approved, the President could spike the ball by beginning normalization of relations even before relaxing sanctions.
That will make it easier to navigate the political shitstorm of reducing sanctions; a bunch of Republican business types will have a pig at the trough.
Normalization must occur early enough in the political process for the positive results to be visible by summer 2016.
If the American mood flips before the election, Democrats are nowhere ready to take down-ticket political advantage of it. And they still are not getting the message that being like Republicans does not save them.
And Americans are wising up to ‘fair-weather’ economic indicators bringing no tangible benefit to their household income. There are way too many institutions upstream, typically health and financial services, skimming the cream off the top. In spite of a bull equity market recently consumer spending has been flat, inventories are swollen and corporations have been borrowing money at near zero interest to pump their own stock. This is not your parents’ ‘prosperity’ and never will be.
Middle-class Americans, those remaining, are starting to realise the light on the horizon is just more economic twilight. This is what Trump understands that everyone else except Sanders seems to be missing.
I get why you are pessimistic. But my point wasn’t so much about what makes political junkies pessimistic – it was more about how the campaigns are affecting less informed voters (IOW, the vast majority of the electorate).
Nancy LeTourneau
BTW – I am not hopeful about any of the Democratic candidates – even Bernie if he could win. But as far as I’m concerned, Obama was a once-in-a-lifetime great one. So its back to politics as usual in 2017.
I don’t understand how you can think that Obama was a once-in-a-lifetime great one and a the same time, he’s leaving the party which he led for 8 years in such dire straits that you doubt any of the Democratic candidates can win.
The establishment consensus since 1980 is that the Democratic Party cannot win on issues alone. They can only win by out-charming, out-debating, and out-soundbiting the Republicans. The retrospectives on Clinton and Obama’s Presidencies, where they wouldn’t have won the general without having excellent charisma and campaigning skills, inherently limits our bench.
The GOP doesn’t put as much emphasis on likeability and charisma and whatever as the Democratic Party. Their big thing is coded appeals to the base. So it’s no wonder why 17+ candidates think that they can win despite most of them having the interpersonal skills of moldy oatmeal.
If Sanders wins in 2016 simply by pounding issues repeatedly, a lot of Democrats will start crawling out of the woodwork. Because it’s easier to succeed as a culture warrior than as a statesman and Sanders will have proved that the Nixon-Reagan nightmare of Democrats having to succeed on the little things because they suck at the big things is over.
I’m with you. The times they are a-changin’, and the Republicans, they are a-suckin’, big time.
You don’t understand?
At least two yardsticks can be used:
1)The loss of seats in Congress is almost entirely attributable to gerrymandering of districts and the disproportionate number of GOP senate seats in states with almost no population in relative terms. The fact that only perhaps 35% of Americans agree with GOP positions despite the fact that the GOP holds both chambers makes them all the more looney to keep the support they have AND impossible to actually govern with. Even so, BHO has accomplished remarkable things even if it had to be done sometimes in decidedly I democratic ways.
2) It is not the presidents first job to build the party. His/her job first is to think strategically and run the country with the best long term interests in mind. The responsibility is to the people, not the party. If a congressman can’t win his/ her district then they are not doing their first job.
Frankly, I am put off by arguments that Obama or so and so hasn’t been progressive enough or isn’t a true progressive. That sounds all to much like substance-free complaints from dudes like Limbaugh that so and so is a RINO, etc.
Oh, bollocks. That’s just rationalizations from Democratic presidential winners without the political skills to do both — personal aggrandizement egos to be POTUS.
FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ all ran as much for all Democratic candidates for Congress as they did for themselves.
I’m not sure how Obama was supposed to support the Congressional campaigns of Democrats who were begging him to stay away from their campaign rallies and whose campaigns highlighted their independence from the President.
What’s hilarious about this critique is that those Congressional Dems’ campaigns were particularly notable for running against the most progressive/liberal things the 111th Congress accomplished. You and I can agree that was fatally stupid of those ex-Congressmembers, but it is amazingly unfair to blame Obama for that.
People may not be pessimistic, they may just be pissed off that, over a YEAR before the election, the news is saturated with rancid political baloney spouted by an unusually noisy gang of idiots, clowns and hucksters. Please, go away for, say, 10 months, and come back when you (the idiots, not Boo) have something more important to talk about that the Donald’s weave.
National primary held at midsummer, 30 day campaign. Election holiday on a Monday to give a 3 day weekend, 100 day campaign no campaigning for last two days before election.
Polls open Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. All campaigning stops Friday at sundown. (Or should that be Thursday sundown?)
Friday at dawn.
Or maybe this
http://www.theonion.com/r/51295
It’s so bad, you might almost say the fact that Sanders is not getting that much attention in the media is part of his appeal.
Why are you arguing with yourself?
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