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Can they find a candidate that satisfies both progressives and centrists ? You can laugh but Clintons voting record was pretty fucking liberal (Iraq war being her biggest blunder in congress)

Won't happen, but Warren would be the closest bet.

Vlad, agreed this prolly won't happen for Democrats....and I don't have a name in mind that has the clout to do it, yet.

Disagree on your Elizabeth Warren take. Overall, her appeal is limited to a small segment of voters.
 
I'd be really excited about Warren if she wasn't such a poor public speaker. I feel she kind of rambles a bit or comes across too much of a grandma. Not that we have have a great example of public speaking in the White House, but I'd worry about her in debate formats.

Sexism plays a part as men screaming at each other is good theater and politics. Women raising their voices to men???

I like Booker, but the Bernie side has already cast him as establishment
 
I never liked the idea that Booker was being "groomed." Not a fan of this whole notion of pedigree... lacks the experience but in 8 years we will make sure he has it because he fits the bill sort of idea.

Then again, the Democratic Party is seriously lacking young potential candidates.
 
Yes please, we need another candidate that caters to the lowest common denominator.

but isn't the job of the government to serve as many citizens as possible and improve their lives? I know it's a bit utilitarian answer and i kinda hate being utilitarian but i feel like that's the best answer i can give.
 
also, i may be in the "Bernie side" but I don't hate Cory Booker as much as possible; though hyping Booker might give some impression that Democrats haven't learned anything from the past mistakes. especially some "liberal" pundits would loudly say those things and (some) people would eat it up.

again, i want to be as rational as possible despite of my ideological bias and i think he's a capable politician. but i don't think he's the best person in Democrats now.
 
but isn't the job of the government to serve as many citizens as possible and improve their lives? I know it's a bit utilitarian answer and i kinda hate being utilitarian but i feel like that's the best answer i can give.

It's a decent answer and it should be like this but it's like saying the police force exist to protect and to serve.
 
but isn't the job of the government to serve as many citizens as possible and improve their lives? I know it's a bit utilitarian answer and i kinda hate being utilitarian but i feel like that's the best answer i can give.


Yes, but by that definition everyone running for office should be a populist.

But you can see the problem, can't you? Or do you want another Trump?
 
Yes, but by that definition everyone running for office should be a populist.

But you can see the problem, can't you? Or do you want another Trump?

right, i know, i realized that what people "want" or "like" is different from what actually benefits people.
 
This just in....
Trump's approval rating has dropped down to the same number (thereabouts) as Nixon before the Watergate Hearings in the summer of 1973. Still, his minions support him.
 
i found this very helpful.

How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals


A generation ago, “neoliberalism” was the chosen label of a handful of moderately liberal opinion journalists, centered around Charles Peters, then-editor of the Washington Monthly. Some neoliberals started calling traditional liberals “paleoliberals.” The magazine most closely associated with traditional liberal thinking was The American Prospect, which gave me my first job out of college.

When I started there, I asked one of the editors, Paul Starr, about the still-roiling schism between the neos and the paleos. (I never felt comfortable with either label.) Starr told me he disdained the term because it was “an attempt to win an argument by using an epithet.” What he meant — and I think he was right — was that “paleoliberal” was not a self-identification any of its adherents used, but a term of disparagement. The neolibs were claiming to own the future and consigning their adversaries to the past.

The neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s has faded into memory, as its adherents failed to settle on a coherent set of principles other than a general posture of counterintuitive skepticism. (Peters’s new ideological manifesto, We Do Our Part, only mentions neoliberalism once.) But the term has been used to mean different things at different times, and it has returned to American political discourse with a vengeance. Then, as now, it is an attempt to win an argument with an epithet. Only this time, it is neoliberal that is the term of abuse.

And the term neoliberal doesn’t mean a faction of liberals. It now refers to liberals generally, and it is applied by their left-wing critics. The word is now ubiquitous, popping up in almost any socialist polemic against the Democratic Party or the center-left. Obama’s presidency? It was “the last gasp of neoliberalism.” Why did Hillary Clinton lose? It was her neoliberalism. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz? Neoliberals both.

The Baffler’s Chris Lehmann dismisses an Atlantic story on the Democrats, which touts Elizabeth Warren as a model for the party’s future, as just more neoliberal tripe. “In the world of neoliberal consensus, it’s a simple taken-for-granted axiom that senators — the lead fundraisers and media figures in both major parties — call the shots, and should be entrusted with charting an electoral comeback,” writes Lehmann. “All the reliable notes of arm’s-length cultural puzzlement are struck soundly here, from the putative identity-politics-class-politics divide on the left to the neoliberal wonk class’s painfully absent common touch.” Obviously, the authentic way to demonstrate a common touch is to throw around the term neoliberal as frequently as possible. Try it if you ever need to strike up a conversation with some strangers in a bowling alley in Toledo.

Neoliberalism is held to be the source of all the ills suffered by the Democratic Party and progressive politics over four decades, up to and (especially) including the rise of Donald Trump. The “neoliberal” accusation is a synecdoche for the American left’s renewed offensive against the center-left and a touchstone in the struggle to define progressivism after Barack Obama.

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The ubiquitous epithet is intended to separate its target — liberals — from the values they claim to espouse. By relabeling self-identified liberals as “neoliberals,” their critics on the left accuse them of betraying the historic liberal cause.

Indeed, the appearance of the “neoliberal” epithet in a polemic almost axiomatically implies a broader historical critique that has been repeated many, many times.

Its basic claim is that, from the New Deal through the Great Society, the Democratic Party espoused a set of values defined by, or at the very least consistent with, social democracy or socialism. Then, starting in the 1970s, a coterie of neoliberal elites hijacked the party and redirected its course toward a brand of social liberalism targeted to elites and hostile to the interests of the poor and the working class.

The first and most obvious problem with this version of history is that there is little reason to believe the Democratic Party has actually moved right on economic issues. The most commonly used measure of party ideology, developed by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, has tracked the positions of the two parties’ elected members over decades. Here is how they have evolved on issues of the government’s role in the economy:

Image

This chart indicates that Democrats have not moved right since the New Deal era at all. Indeed, the party has moved somewhat to the left, largely because its conservative Southern wing has disappeared.

Now, the Poole-Rosenthal measure does not end the discussion. No metric can perfectly measure something as inherently abstract as a public philosophy. One obvious limit of this measure is its value over long periods of time, when issue sets change in ways that make comparisons difficult. The Poole-Rosenthal graph has special difficulty comparing the Democratic Party before and after the New Deal. But it does raise the question of why the Democrats’ supposed U-turn away from social democracy does not appear anywhere in the data.

Any remotely close look at the historical record, as opposed to a romanticized memory of uncompromised populists of yore, yields the same conclusion as the numbers. The idea that the Democratic Party used to stand for undiluted economic populism in its New Deal heyday is characteristic of the nostalgia to which the party faithful are prone — no present-day politician can ever live up to the imagined greatness of the statesmen of past.

In reality, the Democratic Party had essentially the same fraught relationship with the left during its supposed golden New Deal era that it does today. The left dismissed the Great Society as “corporate liberalism,” a phrase that connoted in the 1960s almost exactly what “neoliberalism” does today. The distrust ran both ways. Lyndon Johnson supported domestic budget cuts after the disastrous 1966 midterm elections, to the disappointment of liberals who already loathed the Vietnam War. “What’s the difference between a cannibal and a liberal?” Johnson joked during his presidency. “A cannibal doesn’t eat his friends.”

Nor was the “corporate liberal” critique exactly wrong. Today the left holds up Medicare as a shining example of health-care policy designed by social democrats, before it was corrupted by the modern Obama-era party and its suborning of the insurance industry. In reality, powerful financial interests deeply influenced the design of Medicare. The law’s sponsors had hoped to achieve universal health insurance, but retreated from that ambitious goal in large part because insurers wanted to keep non-elderly customers. (They were happy to pawn the oldster market off on Uncle Sam.) Likewise, the law defanged opposition by the powerful American Medical Association by agreeing to fee-for-service rules that wound up massively enriching doctors and hospitals. And the creation of Medicaid as a separate program for the poor relegated them to a shabbier and more politically vulnerable category.

John F. Kennedy was a cautious trimmer whose domestic agenda included cutting the top income-tax rate 20 points. “Politically, he tended to court the opposition and ignore his friends,” wrote one columnist. “His motto might have been: no enemies to the right.” Harry Truman was “more fearful of labor and labor’s political power than of anything else,” charged one dismayed liberal. Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, who inspired a passionate mass movement on the left quite similar to today’s Bernie-or-busters, lambasted Truman as a tool of Wall Street.

The tradition of progressives flaying Democratic presidents for betraying the spirit of the New Deal goes all the way back to the New Deal itself. Even the sainted Franklin Roosevelt vacillated between expansionary fiscal policy and austerity, and between attacking corporate power and encouraging monopoly. The cause of liberalizing international trade, which left-wing critics have treated as a corporate-friendly Clinton innovation, is one Roosevelt not only supported consistently but basically invented. Roosevelt’s 1936 speech denouncing wealthy interests is widely repeated today by nostalgic progressives, but it marked a brief and rare populist turn. Mostly he strove for class balance.

Historian William Leuchtenburg describes the president’s “determination to serve as a balance wheel between management and labor … Despite the radical character of the 1934 elections, Roosevelt was still striving to hold together a coalition of all interests, and, despite rebuffs from businessmen and the conservative press, he was still seeking earnestly to hold business support.” For much of his presidency, “The New Republic raked FDR on a regular basis,” admits a collection published on the magazine’s centennial.

The Democratic Party has evolved over the last half-century, as any party does over a long period of time. But the basic ideological cast of its economic policy has not changed dramatically since the New Deal. American liberals have always had some room for markets in their program. Democrats, accordingly, have never been a left-wing, labor-dominated socialist party. (Union membership peaked in 1955, two decades before the party’s supposed neoliberal turn, and has declined steadily since.) They have mediated between business and labor, supporting expanded state power episodically rather than dogmatically. The widespread notion that “neoliberals” have captured the modern Democratic party and broken from its historic mission plays upon nostalgia for a bygone era, when the real thing was messier and more compromised than the sanitized historical memory.

Progressives are correct in their belief that something has changed for the worse in American politics. Larger forces in American life have stalled the seemingly unstoppable progressive momentum of the postwar period. Rising international competition made business owners more ruthless, civil rights spawned a 40-year white backlash against government, and anti-government extremists captured the Republican Party, destroying the bipartisan basis for progressive legislation that had once allowed Eisenhower to expand Social Security and Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

All this forced Democrats more frequently into a defensive posture. Bill Clinton tried but failed to create universal health coverage, eked out modest tax increases on the rich, and fought off the “Republican revolution” by defending Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment, crown jewels of the Great Society.

Barack Obama’s far more sweeping reforms still could not win any support from a radicalized opposition. It is seductive to attribute these frustrations to the tactical mistakes or devious betrayals of party leaders. But it is the political climate that has grown more hostile to Democratic Party economic liberalism. The party’s ideological orientation has barely changed.

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Given that the self-proclaimed neoliberal movement of the ’80s never really took hold, and has long since passed into obscurity, why have the long-standing grievances of the left against the mainstream Democratic Party attached themselves to the “neoliberal” label only recently?

“Neoliberalism” has a second meaning, unrelated to the small faction of Washington Monthly alumni. (Or, at least, the neoliberals of that generation had no awareness of it.) In the international context, “neoliberal” means capitalist, as distinguished from socialist. That meaning has rarely had much application in American politics, because liberals and conservatives both believe (to starkly differing degrees) in capitalism. If “neoliberal” simply describes a belief in some role for market forces, then it is literally true that liberals and conservatives are both “neoliberal.”

It is strange, though, to apply a single term to opposing combatants in America’s increasingly bitter partisan struggle. If the party that created Obamacare and the party trying to destroy it, the party of higher taxes on the rich and the party of lower, the party of tighter pollution limits and the party of allowing oil drillers to write regulations are each “neoliberal,” then neoliberalism is of limited use in describing American politics.

The sudden ubiquity of the term in American politics — at least among left-wing elites — owes itself to two new developments. First, the Bernie Sanders campaign has inspired a new movement to remake the Democratic Party as a social-democratic labor party. Left-wing activists need a label for their opponents.

Conservatives have spent decades turning “liberal” into a smear meaning “left-wing radical,” giving it limited value as a term of opprobrium. (In terms of self-identification, liberals constitute the left wing of the Democratic base, with moderates and conservatives constituting a slightly larger right wing.) In practical terms, people who think of themselves as “liberal” form the constituency the Bernie insurgents need to attract.

Second, the widely publicized influence of neoconservatives within the Bush administration changed the connotation of “neo.” Whereas the prefix had once softened the term it modified — the neoconservatives were once seen as the intellectually evolved wing of the right, in contrast to the Buchananite knuckle-draggers — by the end of Bush’s term, it became an intensifier. A neoconservative was a conservative, but an even scarier one.

And so the term neoliberal frames the political debate in a way that perfectly suits the messaging needs of left-wing critics of liberalism. The uselessness of “neoliberalism” as an analytic tool is the very thing that makes it useful as a factional messaging device for the left. The “neoliberalism” rubric implicates the Democratic Party in the rightward drift of American politics that has in reality been caused by the Republican Party’s growing radicalism. It yokes the two parties together into a capitalist Establishment, against which socialism offers the only clear alternative. Obscuring the large gulf between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, Paul Ryan and Barack Obama, is a feature of the term.

A recent New York Times op-ed by Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the Marxian journal Jacobin, lays the tactic unusually bare. Sunkara argues that the West faces three possible alternatives.

One is nationalist authoritarianism of the sort advanced by Trump, Hungary’s Jobbik Party, France’s National Front, etc. The second is Singapore, an authoritarian technocracy that he calls “the unacknowledged destination of the neoliberal center’s train.” And his third option is “avowedly socialist leaders like Mr. Sanders and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France.”

Sunkara omits from his choices any liberal mixed economy of the kind that exists in Western Europe and Scandinavia and that American liberals would like to build here. He is very clear that this final option, the one he advocates, is “not the social democracy of François Hollande, but that of the early days of the Second International.” He excludes the more moderate brand of social democracy from the menu because he believes too many people would choose it. The whole trick is to bracket the center-left together with the right as “neoliberal,” and then force progressives to choose between that and socialism.

The socialist left has an argument to make against liberalism. It reveals a certain lack of confidence in that argument when it tries to win it with an epithet.
 
Looks like the right's attempts to repeal Obamacare has fizzled out (for the time being, anyway). Speaking of which...

It really pisses me off that the Affordable Care Act was such a successful talking point for the GOP, when it was clear by their hyperbolic condemnation of the statute, as well as a complete lack of any substantive plans for solving their grievances, that they viewed the law not as a healthcare issue, but as a voting percentage (despite the ironic negative impact this stance would have on their base)... Practically every Republican candidate at a debate or in a rally would mention repealing the ACA (to the sound of thunderous applause), and that was all that really needed to be said on the matter--as if it's such an obvious blight on America, a law so burdensome that it's holding our country back from where we could be, without ever being forced to put their party's name on something that wasn't just part of some contrarian checklist... until now. They've got the presidency, the House, the Senate; there's no excuse NOT to fulfill this campaign promise. Unless, of course, they were full of shit the entire time, and now have to be held accountable for their intransigence.

I mean, there's not a whole lot to be happy about with the current ringleaders of America, but I'd be lying if I said times like these didn't bring me a little satisfaction ;p
 
"Let Obamacare fail."

Lookit all these great deals he's making for the country! The best dealmaker.
 
Yep. Fuck it, let it fail and then everyone has to figure out what to do for healthcare!!!

Can't just fix the issues with it and become the hero. We have to let the law signed by a black man crash and burn!
 
It really pisses me off that the Affordable Care Act was such a successful talking point for the GOP, when it was clear by their hyperbolic condemnation of the statute, as well as a complete lack of any substantive plans for solving their grievances, that they viewed the law not as a healthcare issue, but as a voting percentage (despite the ironic negative impact this stance would have on their base).

Agreed.

Interestingly enough, CNN has that "The Nineties" special that they started airing a couple weeks ago, and this past weekend's episode touched on Clinton's presidency and the struggles he had with healthcare reform.

And there was an old clip in there of Newt Gingrich criticizing the Democrats for using the method of "scaring old people" to try and gain votes for their healthcare reform.

I actually glared at the screen and said, "Oh, really?" out loud. I don't remember hearing Gingrich make that same complaint years later when the GOP was going around talking about how Obamacare had "death panels" and would kill your grandparents.

Even back in Bill Clinton's day, it didn't seem like the Republicans had any viable alternative to what he had proposed, and it's clear twenty-some years later, they still don't. There's been some notable changes between Bill Clinton's time and now in regards to other various policies and attitudes on other social issues, but it was depressing to see how government gridlock, GOP antagonism, and warped views on healthcare reform have barely budged.

Considering how many people were angry over the GOP's attempts to repeal Obamacare, though, and the increasingly positive view of the ACA, maybe there's reason to remain hopeful that should we get a Democratic president in 2020, we'll finally make even more inroads on that issue, though?

Unless, of course, they were full of shit the entire time, and now have to be held accountable for their intransigence.

That's exactly it. I've seen talk out there that the GOP may have been secretly hoping Hillary would win because it would let them off the hook in terms of having to actually fulfill their party's promises (and would also allow them to continue to rag on her every day), and now that they're in charge, they're panicking. Because shocker of shockers, one can't be "anti-federal government" while simultaneously running for a job in said federal government.

I mean, there's not a whole lot to be happy about with the current ringleaders of America, but I'd be lying if I said times like these didn't bring me a little satisfaction ;p

Oh, definitely. I'll join you in that small victory.

Now, if the GOP were smart, they would simply go, "Okay, so let's look at what is working with the ACA and keep that, and work with the Democrats to fix the parts of it that need fixing."

But that would require maturity, and the party actually acknowledging Obama had a good idea, and we can't have that!

As for Trump's "let it fail" comments...just shut up and focus on trying to get your Russian collusion stories straight, buddy.
 
Yes, but by that definition everyone running for office should be a populist.

But you can see the problem, can't you? Or do you want another Trump?



Angela Merkel is a populist.

Just depends upon what's popular.

Also, Trump is effectively a popular minority, given how his track record in votes looks.
 
Angela Merkel is a populist.

Just depends upon what's popular.

Also, Trump is effectively a popular minority, given how his track record in votes looks.

I always thought of Merkel as a garden variety European conservative. And I'm still not sure if I should be surprised/unsurprised that so many liberals seem to worship her.
 
i found this very helpful.

This just reads as someone who's a bit annoyed about being correctly labeled, neoliberal is just a description of a political position that he adheres to. Many just seem to take offense to it. I wouldn't take offense if you decided to label me a socialist/communist etc. in a pejorative manner.

Not shocked to find out this was written by Jonathan Chait though, a real 'ah makes perfect sense' once I clicked the link, he loves to punch left.

I think this rebuttal on Vox is worth looking at if you're interested.
 
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I just don't find the term "neoliberal" to be interesting or effective in conveying what i want to say, because it's used in totally different context to convey totally different things. in one way it represents more middle-of-the-road Democrat/liberals that "Bernie wing" hates, but in the another time it means what it traditionally meant, the economical liberalism, which is basically this free market thing that people seriously believed in 19th century.
 
It is a term that is overused in some respects, much like populism, I'll admit as much - and I try not to use it particularly often if I can help it.
 
So I'm torn on the current mess in DC.

With Trump at the helm, I don't think anything will get done. You have the GOP who are fucking idiots. Seven years they have shouted REPEAL AND REPLACE. They've fucking voted on it how many times?? And when they are in charge they can't do it. And you have a President who has no experience in politics, in law, in policy, fuck it just no experience. He makes deals, excuse me, the BEST deals.

He's been in office for just over six months and has accomplished very little. Give him his partial muslim ban, and a supreme court justice. If you want to count dismantling Obama's legacy and America's standing in the world, I'll give you that.

But maybe it's best we keep this moron in office for the full term? The reason being is if any other GOP candidate was in the office, or let's say Trump is gone and it's Pence, that would bode well for their policies becoming law right? Pence knows how to play the game. He understands Washington, and I think with Trump being so disliked by his own party (behind closed doors, off record) that they don't worry about bucking the administration. If it was an experienced politician we may have lost the ACA by now, and tax cuts would be next.

It's not looking good for tax cuts, infrastructure, the WALL, or any other promise Trump made. Granted, plenty of damage has been done and I still worry with Trump in office we are so likely to blow up another country or start another war over a tweet.

I do believe that Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia. I will also accept the investigation if it finds they did not. It just seems so likely at this point, but unless there are criminal charges against him the GOP isn't going to remove him (which still makes no sense, get your boy Pence in there)

I don't know. Just a rant and random thought to share to get my mind off all the haiku in the new album thread
 
So I'm torn on the current mess in DC.

With Trump at the helm, I don't think anything will get done. You have the GOP who are fucking idiots. Seven years they have shouted REPEAL AND REPLACE. They've fucking voted on it how many times?? And when they are in charge they can't do it. And you have a President who has no experience in politics, in law, in policy, fuck it just no experience. He makes deals, excuse me, the BEST deals.

He's been in office for just over six months and has accomplished very little. Give him his partial muslim ban, and a supreme court justice. If you want to count dismantling Obama's legacy and America's standing in the world, I'll give you that.

But maybe it's best we keep this moron in office for the full term? The reason being is if any other GOP candidate was in the office, or let's say Trump is gone and it's Pence, that would bode well for their policies becoming law right? Pence knows how to play the game. He understands Washington, and I think with Trump being so disliked by his own party (behind closed doors, off record) that they don't worry about bucking the administration. If it was an experienced politician we may have lost the ACA by now, and tax cuts would be next.

It's not looking good for tax cuts, infrastructure, the WALL, or any other promise Trump made. Granted, plenty of damage has been done and I still worry with Trump in office we are so likely to blow up another country or start another war over a tweet.

I do believe that Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia. I will also accept the investigation if it finds they did not. It just seems so likely at this point, but unless there are criminal charges against him the GOP isn't going to remove him (which still makes no sense, get your boy Pence in there)

I don't know. Just a rant and random thought to share to get my mind off all the haiku in the new album thread

I know what you're saying, but how much could Pence really change the fate of their legislative agenda? I mean, take healthcare. They don't have the votes. Some senators, if you can believe it, think the bill doesn't cut enough. One or two others, at least, correctly think it goes too far. They don't have the votes. And if you try to go all the way and please the 'doesn't cut enough' people, you lose more moderates. And if you try to make the bill better for the moderates or even, gasp, try to work with Democrats, you lose more conservatives. They don't have the votes because they cannot agree on what should be done and because some senators are afraid for their own political futures. What does Pence change?
 
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