US Politics XIX: Just an Echo Chamber Living In Your Heads

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DaveC said:
"the democrats should not nominate the candidate that they largely prefer, that they have the most favourable opinion of, and who aligns with their values most closely and instead choose someone who panders to non-political centrists" is a spectacularly hot take.
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While I'm far more left than the D centrists, I don't necessarily see it as pandering. Some people are legitimately in the centre, and want a candidate to reflect those views. No different than the rest of us.
 
Apparently the debate was great for Warren. She’s moved into 2nd place in CA.

She hopefully has several more septuagenarian white men on her kill list.
 
you know that thing that upsets the Sanders people where other people point out all the similarities and parallels between Sanders and Trump?

now there's this:

U.S. officials have told Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest, according to people familiar with the matter.

President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also been informed about the Russian assistance to the Vermont senator, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken. U.S. prosecutors found a Russian effort in 2016 to use social media to boost Sanders campaign against Hillary Clinton, part of a broader effort to hurt Clinton, sow dissension in the American electorate and ultimately help elect Donald Trump.

“I don’t care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president,” Sanders said in a statement to The Washington Post. “My message to Putin is clear: stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.

“In 2016, Russia used internet propaganda to sow division in our country, and my understanding is that they are doing it again in 2020. Some of the ugly stuff on the internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters.”

A spokesperson for the Sanders campaign declined to comment on the briefing by U.S. officials on Russia’s attempts to help the Sanders campaign. .

Sanders’s opponents have blamed some of his most vocal online supporters for injecting toxic rhetoric into the primaries. At a Democratic candidates debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Sanders indirectly blamed Russia, saying it was possible malign actors were trying to manipulate social media to inflame divisions among Democrats.

“All of us remember 2016, and what we remember is efforts by Russians and others to try to interfere in our elections and divide us up,” Sanders said. “I’m not saying that’s happening, but it would not shock me.”

Also this week, a senior U.S. intelligence official said that Russia had “developed a preference” for Trump in the 2020 campaign — an assessment that infuriated the president. Trump lambasted his acting intelligence director, Joseph Maguire, and DNI staff for sharing that information with lawmakers, believing that Democrats would use it to hurt Trump in the election.

Despite Trump’s skepticism of Russian efforts to damage American democracy, officials in his administration have repeatedly warned that Russia has ongoing plans to interfere in U.S. elections and foster divisions among Americans, part of a strategic goal to undermine U.S. standing in the world. Some analysts believe that the Kremlin’s goal is to cause the maximum disruption within the United States, and it throws the support of its hackers and trolls behind candidates based on that goal, not any particular affinity for the persons running.

After Sanders’s remarks at the debate, some social media analysts were skeptical of the notion that Russians were already masquerading as the candidate’s supporters.

“We have seen no evidence in open sources during this election cycle that an online community of Sanders supporters, known as Bernie bros, were catalyzed by what Sanders suggested could be ‘Russian interference,’” said Graham Brookie, director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, which tracks disinformation on social media sites. “Any candidate or public official casually introducing the possibility of Russian influence without providing any evidence or context creates a specter of interference that makes responding to real interference harder.”

It now appears, however, that Sanders may have had a reason to suspect Russia was again injecting itself into the U.S. electoral process, repeating some of what occurred in 2016.

In a February 2018 indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three companies that were alleged to have orchestrated the social media scheme, prosecutors alleged that the group “engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
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Was just going to post that.

Few theories

Russia + GOP see Bernie as the easiest win (cue the national polls that mean nothing!)

Russia wouldn’t really fear a Sanders Presidency since he’s a bit of the same isolationist that Trump claimed to be. Bernie has also voted against Magnitsky Act
 
So Russia is both responsible for his supporters acting out and helping his campaign?

Convenient.
 
lmao at you guys falling all over yourselves with excitement to post that here instantly. :rolleyes:

anyone claiming that this is anything at all like what trump did can take that notion and shove it unless they can produce videos of sanders at his rallies openly exhorting a foreign nation to hack the RNC and/or another campaign. it's not sanders' fault that the white house and congress did literally nothing over the last four years to prevent the russians from interfering again.
 
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oh look, sanders has acknowledged and denounced any russian interference or assistance almost immediately after the news broke.

"all the similarities and parallels between sanders and trump", indeed.
 
DaveC said:
lmao at you guys falling all over yourselves with excitement to post that here instantly. :rolleyes:

anyone claiming that this is anything at all like what trump did can take that notion and shove it unless they can produce videos of sanders at his rallies openly exhorting a foreign nation to hack the RNC and/or another campaign. it's not sanders' fault that the white house and congress did literally nothing over the last four years to prevent the russians from interfering again.
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No, this is more excuse making. It was well reported that Russian/Eastern European troll farms were posting pro-Bernie and anti-Hillary posts. Even setting up fake Sanders websites and creating division in the party.
The fact that Sanders won't confront or admit this and his supporters can't realized that they were gaslighted last time around. It is very Trump-like.

Remember Trump said - it may have been a 300 pound guy in his bedroom doing it.

Sanders just said on stage - 99.9% of his supports are wonderful. There may be a few that are using hateful threatening rhetoric.

No Bernie. It's not a FEW. It's thousands and thousands. But wouldn't want you to actually do anything about it to stop their actions or bring it to people's attention. That could hurt your chances of winning.
 
DaveC said:
lmao at you guys falling all over yourselves with excitement to post that here instantly. :rolleyes:

anyone claiming that this is anything at all like what trump did can take that notion and shove it unless they can produce videos of sanders at his rallies openly exhorting a foreign nation to hack the RNC and/or another campaign. it's not sanders' fault that the white house and congress did literally nothing over the last four years to prevent the russians from interfering again.
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No, but it is true that Russia sees a candidate Sanders as the best thing for their national interests.

Their interests being a 2nd term for Trump.
 
DaveC said:
oh look, sanders has acknowledged and denounced any russian interference or assistance almost immediately after the news broke.

"all the similarities and parallels between sanders and trump", indeed.
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Trump also denounced it. Said that he doesn't want any part of it. He's the toughest on Russia... It doesn't matter. The supporters don't know they are being played by fake accounts. Bernie knows no matter what he says it won't change. So yeah. Courage I guess.
 
womanfish said:
No, this is more excuse making. It was well reported that Russian/Eastern European troll farms were posting pro-Bernie and anti-Hillary posts. Even setting up fake Sanders websites and creating division in the party.
The fact that Sanders won't confront or admit this and his supporters can't realized that they were gaslighted last time around. It is very Trump-like.

Remember Trump said - it may have been a 300 pound guy in his bedroom doing it.

Sanders just said on stage - 99.9% of his supports are wonderful. There may be a few that are using hateful threatening rhetoric.

No Bernie. It's not a FEW. It's thousands and thousands. But wouldn't want you to actually do anything about it to stop their actions or bring it to people's attention. That could hurt your chances of winning.
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what specific actions do you think that bernie sanders could realistically have taken in the previous four years or could do now that would actually "stop their actions", if it really is "thousands and thousands" of his supporters and russian trolls "using hateful threatening rhetoric"?

Irvine511 said:
No, but it is true that Russia sees a candidate Sanders as the best thing for their national interests.

Their interests being a 2nd term for Trump.
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right because if joe biden or elizabeth warren were the clear frontrunner for the nomination, the russians totally wouldn't be interfering in their campaigns.

their goal is to undermine and weaken american democracy, they don't particularly care who actually wins. the russians are far more interested in making it a 2000-style close outcome where the ultimate results are questionable and possibly illegitimate, than they are in giving donald trump a landslide win.
 
womanfish said:
Trump also denounced it. Said that he doesn't want any part of it. He's the toughest on Russia... It doesn't matter. The supporters don't know they are being played by fake accounts. Bernie knows no matter what he says it won't change. So yeah. Courage I guess.
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trump pretended like it wasn't happening, but if it was then they should totally hack the DNC wink wink nudge nudge. after the election he stood on stage and told the world that his own intelligence community was full of shit and that russia didn't do anything and it was all a big hoax made up by sore losers.

that's a VERY far cry from "Unlike Donald Trump, I do not consider Vladimir Putin a good friend. He is an autocratic thug who is attempting to destroy democracy and crush dissent in Russia,” Sanders said of the Russian president.

“Let’s be clear, the Russians want to undermine American democracy by dividing us up and, unlike the current president, I stand firmly against their efforts, and any other foreign power that wants to interfere in our election.”

“I don’t care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president,” Sanders said in a statement to The Washington Post. “My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do."
 
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DaveC said:
what specific actions do you think that bernie sanders could realistically have taken in the previous four years or could do now that would actually "stop their actions", if it really is "thousands and thousands" of his supporters and russian trolls "using hateful threatening rhetoric"?







right because if joe biden or elizabeth warren were the clear frontrunner for the nomination, the russians totally wouldn't be interfering in their campaigns.



their goal is to undermine and weaken american democracy, they don't particularly care who actually wins. the russians are far more interested in making it a 2000-style close outcome where the ultimate results are questionable and possibly illegitimate, than they are in giving donald trump a landslide win.
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Don’t agree. They certainly want to dismantle democracy anywhere they can, but in Trump they have an American president who will help them achieve their policy goals.
 
BEAL said:
He's stacking the field in his favor. If there actually was a deep state, they've long missed their opportunity to stop him. He's got great economic numbers, and he'll be going up against a non vetted socialist who may or may not be in good health.

WE GOT THIS!!!
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Repeating the same thing time after time doesn't make it any more true.
 
Irvine511 said:
Don’t agree. They certainly want to dismantle democracy anywhere they can, but in Trump they have an American president who will help them achieve their policy goals.
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i don't dispute that they would prefer trump over anyone else. i would love to see what the splits are on how much weight they're putting behind the trump campaign versus everyone else's.

obviously we never will know though unless someone leaks some highly classified information.
 
i do like that today jill biden skipped a campaign event because she refused to cross a carpenters' union picket line near the event site. :up: imagine a GOP candidate (or their partner) doing that.
 
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...oks-who-destroyed-our-economy-after-blankfein

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday said he welcomes "the hatred of the crooks who destroyed our economy" after former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein suggested he might vote for President Donald Trump in November if Sanders wins the Democratic nomination.

...

Blankfein said Sanders' proposed wealth tax on the ultra-rich is "just as subversive of the American character" as Trump's demonization of "groups of people who he has never met."

"I don't like that at all," Blankfein said. "I don't like assassination by categorization. I think it's un-American. I find that destructive and intemperate... At least Trump cares about the economy."

Blankfein, who has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, told FT that he is not rich, but "well-to-do."

"I can't even say 'rich,'" said the former banker. "I don't feel that way. I don't behave that way."
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Can we get this asshole up on stage with Elizabeth Warren for 5 minutes?
 
David Roth is the one writer in America over the last three years who has better than anyone captured exactly who Donald Trump is, and what exactly his place in the zeitgeist means. And he came out with an incredibly well timed piece today.

https://newrepublic.com/article/156639/bernie-sanders-no-donald-trump

Bernie Sanders Is No Donald Trump
Why Sanders's haters keep finding similarities between two politicians who could not be more different

By DAVID ROTH | February 21, 2020

As a general rule, people do not compare other people to Donald Trump as a compliment. It is plainly rude to tell another person that you see even trace amounts of Trump in them, but more to the point it is also almost always wrong. For all the try-hards on Twitter aiming to approximate his voice and the many GOP candidates wanly aping his scatterbrained hyperaggression, very few people alive are even remotely similar to Donald Trump.

Some of his more outsize and oafish peers come close, but none quite measure up. New York sports talk radio legend Mike Francesa shares Trump’s drowsy peevishness, a passion for opaque interpersonal feuds with his similarly blowsy peers, and an abiding belief that he has never been wrong, but is finally too small-time an operator. The clammy end-stage Rudolph Giuliani currently butt-dialing reporters and nodding out in cigar bars certainly fits with Trump’s careening personal sloppiness and unseemly thirst for attention, but trades Trump’s plummy savoir-faire for spittle and sozzle. WWE chieftain Vince McMahon, whose head Trump once shaved in the ring as part of a wrestling storyline, has Trump’s carnie avarice and an aesthetic sense that’s similarly stuck in 1987, but is entirely too active in his cynicism. To truly be like Donald Trump, not just in the sense of being cruel in a lazy way and ignorant in a superheated one but also being anywhere near as relentlessly aggrieved, you pretty much have to be Donald Trump. It’s a time-consuming thing, and other people have jobs.

But then the point of making a comparison to Trump isn’t really to be correct. The point of making the comparison is making the comparison, and then letting people notice how unflattering it is. When people are described as Trumpian, it is generally just a wised-up way of saying that the people in question are coarse, extremely distasteful, and—if you’ll pardon the political science jargon—suck a lot. When, say, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign calls Bernie Sanders “the Trump of the left,” it is trying first and foremost to make a point about how rude and unseemly Sanders and his campaign are. It’s not helpful as a comparison, but it is useful, in the way that someone describing rush-hour traffic as “positively Hobbesian” is useful. It tells you more about the pretensions and anxieties and intentions of the person making the comparison than it does about the subject of the comparison itself.

That there is no valid parallel to be made between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is, in this sense, precisely the reason why that comparison has been made, in increasingly overt and desperate ways, in recent weeks. The comparison isn’t about the few things that Sanders and Trump have in common, which amount to tri-state accents abrasive enough to cut glass and the fact that both have been saying the same things over and over again for decades. Even on that last point, though, the difference between the two is both obvious and telling. Sanders has been assailing the cultural and political violence that follows economic inequality and unfettered capitalism for his entire adult life; Trump has been roughly as consistent pushing the line that various swimsuit models “were very interested” upon meeting Trump in the VIP area at the China Club during Ronald Reagan’s second term. Each holds well-attended rallies; Sanders’s are pitched at people otherwise outside politics, where Trump’s are merely styled that way. Both aspire to be elected president of the United States later this year. But the two are not the same, or similar.

This is mostly why, when Democratic consultants and campaign operatives hint at the similarities between Trump and Sanders or the rotation pundits on MSNBC do the same, or when Joe Biden describes the behavior of Sanders’s supporters (if not the candidate himself) as “Trump-like,” or when ostensibly conflicted Never Trumpers like The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin keep turning up parallels between the Democratic front-runner and the Republican president, it all feels kind of grasping and desperate and off. These are not exceptionally discerning minds, of course, but even if they remain stuck on describing the shape of what the candidates do instead of addressing what they propose, they surely can see the difference between the bloated marzipan golem who currently lords over a lawless archipelago of concentration camps for immigrants and the most reliably left-wing figure in Congress over the last three decades.

The question, then, is why they would bother to make this obviously facile and unconvincing comparison in the first place. That answer has two parts. One is that none of these people are really much good at their very important jobs. The other is that they are scared, because Sanders’s ongoing run toward the Democratic nomination suggests that a critical mass of voters has noticed as much, and is ignoring them. If there’s any real parallel to be drawn between Trump and Sanders, it’s how their respective rises have revealed the flubby redundancy of their respective parties’ establishments.

In a Republican Party built in service of the vinegary whims and furies of America’s business tyrants, Trump fits as a sort of aspirational figure—a man who has slipped the surly bonds of basic human kindness to become a rancid celestial body in his own right. He is a star not in the sense that Trump himself used the term when sharing his personal sexual-assault best practices with Billy Bush, but in a more literal one: something to be admired from afar, a navigational aid for Americans determined to sail off the edge of the earth specifically to spite everyone asking them not to.

Just on the merits, Trump’s appeal is very difficult to figure, mostly because Trump doesn’t have any merits to speak of. He’s pouty and tragicomically vain and grandiosely rageful and stupid in weird off-menu exchanges—interrupting White House staff meetings to ask Reince Priebus if “Wisconsin badgers” are “mean to people” or, to stick to Trump’s peer group, calling WWE headquarters in 2007, after McMahon’s limousine exploded as part of another WWE storyline, to ask whether “something [had] happened to Vince.” Trump is equally resentful of people who have more than him and people who have less than him, for no greater reason beyond that he thinks all of what everyone has should be his by right; it’s not that he wants to be seen as the most successful man on earth but the only successful man on earth. In his wild, vicious, all-canceling selfishness, Trump is outsize and cartoonish and incomparable.

It’s what Trump represents, not just in terms of wealth and power beyond any accountability but in the singular nihilism of his greed and vanity, that cements his grim aspirational appeal. Taken one shabby scam or crude graft at a time, Trump is just a dope who tells the same dumb stories over and over again. But view his self-interested scummery and defiant ignorance through the filter of worshipful regard that American culture and political media applies to rich elites, and from the perspective of venal people who wish to be similarly unencumbered by any broader responsibility, and all that proudly idiotic crudity can pass as a worldview. It’s not a coherent politics by any stretch, because Trump is fundamentally incapable of, and not much interested in, coherence. But then Trump was never selling that. His wealth and fame gave him a leg up on other GOP aspirants in the race for the 2016 nomination, but his incapacity for nuance or subtlety did the real work. Where his competitors nibbled in familiar professional shades of smarm and euphemism, Trump lumbered blithely up to deliver what Republican voters actually wanted, which turned out to be the crying-laughing emoji and brutal, racialized authoritarianism. He has never stopped doing it. Every week, Trump goes on television and writes some new swath of Americans out of the social compact, and every week experts on the various television channels agree, in tones of either concern or studied awe, about how unprecedented it all is.

It’s axiomatic that Trump himself doesn’t give a shit about any of this beyond how it gets and keeps him on television. Trump has long seen himself as the main character in American life, and his cable news network of choice now repeatedly tells him and millions of others as much. It is, let’s say, suboptimal for a nation’s mental and political health to reduce the course of human events to a series of wins for and nefarious attacks against one maudlin septuagenarian narcissist, but in terms of television storytelling it does neaten things up considerably. It is not just Fox News doing this, either. MSNBC spent the last three years selling Trump’s participation first in a murky conspiracy involving Russia and then a clownishly overt one involving Ukraine; both really were roughly as bad as they look, but thanks to the abject submissiveness of elected Republicans, and despite some righteous West Wing cosplay by elected Democrats, neither has really mattered much.

The Democrats running to replace Trump, for their part, have also mostly centered him as a maximally influential figure, explaining their deep concern about the ways in which Trump has reshaped the country. They have noted that This Is Not Who We Are and then pivoted to arguments for why they have the necessary attributes and message to get things back on track. Sanders, who speaks of bigger things and a different track in notably more strident tones, has been pulling away from the pack in something like the way that Trump separated himself in 2016, right down to a contested early result in Iowa against his most ostentatiously well-credentialed rival. Now, as then, conventional primary attacks—about Sanders being a pretender in the party or actively disloyal to it; about being too dedicated to unlikely and ambitious outcomes; about being insufficiently vetted—seem somehow only to bind his loyalists to him more closely. It says a great deal about where the Democrats are as a party that attempts to tar him as “not a Democrat” have broadly corresponded with his rise.

Trump’s nomination in 2016 reflected a collapse on the part of the institutional GOP, which ultimately had no choice but to capitulate to its voters and embrace the combination of debased servility and rank fascism that was previously allowed to remain latent in Republican political appeals. A similar transparency is fundamental to Sanders’s pitch; he pushes for the ambitious policy goals that Democrats have long claimed to want but leaves out the signature Democratic caveat that those things are of course impossible and anyway must be negotiated with an opposition that is by now quite open about not just its unwillingness to do any such thing but its belief that the Democrats are inherently illegitimate. Again, this only looks like a parallel where the candidates are concerned—Sanders deals in the universal “us,” where Trump governs by pointing to increasingly large tranches of Americans and sneering “not you.”

From the perspective of the institutional parties and their aligned media organizations, though, the parallel is cleaner. People who have made their living by defining and describing the scope and scale of the possible naturally resent being challenged on that sort of thing; party insiders, just by dint of their vantage point, do not take kindly to the sudden presence of uninvited masses. In nominating and then electing Trump, Republicans made obvious the extent to which they were no longer playing what one side persists in thinking is a gentleman’s game. The president oversees prisons with children in them and often “jokes” about remaining in office for the rest of his natural life. Only one side of that once-polite binary is even alarmed by this. It’s somehow the same one that keeps playing as if the old rules were still in effect.

It didn’t take long for virtually all Republicans to realize that, distasteful and disgraceful though he is, Trump was their best bet to win them power: Because that is all they really want, they rolled over in turn. Elite Democrats are still working their way through various stages of grief where Sanders is concerned—think of Hillary Clinton sniping that “nobody likes” Sanders or Third Way’s Matt Bennett complaining to Politico that the media “let [Sanders] get away with murder.” There is reason to believe that it might take longer for establishment Democrats to come to the same realization about Sanders that Republicans did about Trump—that this candidate, while not quite their kind, was the only person in their party that a critical mass of voters actually cared about at all, and that winning was preferable to losing. There is some reason to worry that they might never get there; Clintonist Third Way policies have remained vexingly prominent despite repeated, devastating, high-profile failures.

Again, though, the comparison is not quite that simple. Conservative politics in general and the Republican Party in particular have always been a pretty obvious grift; in his atavistic sadism and greed, Trump represents more of an apotheosis than a reckoning. The Democrats have long pretended to represent greater things, which makes Sanders’s maximalism—not for Full Communism, an accusation that Republicans have giddily blasted at even the most tremulous Democratic moderates for generations, but for a welfare state commensurate with the nation’s needs and a government as attuned to the needs of citizens as those of corporations—something more like calling a bluff. In Sanders’s run in 2020, as in his primary challenge in 2016, it is striking the extent to which establishment campaigning, which amounts to Get a Load of These Other Guys and detailed plans to competently administer something like the status quo, has struggled relative to his bolder promises to arrest and reverse a rightward drift that feels increasingly untenable. It turns out that this works even when those promises are made by a politician as stylistically limited as Sanders.

A party that wanted to win might find a way to turn those limitations into advantages. Sanders is, not for nothing, the most popular politician in the country, and one that a healthy majority of voters regard as honest and aligned with their values; Trump, in contrast, has long been and remains historically unpopular. Once Democrats stop making facile comparisons between Sanders and Trump and start drawing the many real and devastating contrasts between the two, this unpolished old socialist really could not just win the White House back but fire up a durable movement. A growing number of Democratic voters seem prepared and even eager to try this. Democratic elites may eventually come around as well, but might in a narrow sense cut against their own self-interest in doing so.

Acronym—the well-capitalized, well-connected, deliberately opaque “venture-style” outfit headlined by veteran Democratic campaign types that built the busted app that helped turn the Iowa caucuses into a tragicomic shitshow—is precisely the sort of failure that would result from a political establishment disappearing up its own metaphorical ass. Whether that organization is deliberately scammy or just a low-utility gambit executed with slapstick amateurism is, at some point, immaterial. That it does something less materially beneficial than, say, ActBlue’s campaign of directing small donations to progressive candidates in state and local races is obvious, but also a sort of category error.

An organization like Acronym exists primarily to move money from rich donors to credentialed operators claiming to deliver useful and innovative expertise, or some technological widget or service, that might lead to the election of Democrats. That organizations like this consistently fail to do that in a way that benefits anyone but themselves—and, in the case of the failed Iowa app, appear to have had no idea about even the most rudimentary aspects of what their work might entail—doesn’t really matter, at least insofar as there aren’t any real consequences for any of it. This is a business that exists both fully inside and oddly outside the churn of politics.

The result is a machine that, if viewed from a sufficiently cynical perspective, is better served by its own continued failure than any meaningful success. Donors always have more money, and the other party only ever gets worse; the decision more or less makes itself. As the rest of the culture drifts into fatalism, there’s a savage irony to the fact that there’s still plenty of money in this particular Banana Stand. That there is always money to find for endless wars and the dubiously useful services of campaign consultants, but somehow only ever less for the sorts of services that people already use and need more of, is the sort of thing that, on its face, would present any left political candidate with an appealing rhetorical running lane. Most, perhaps at the advice of their consultants and pollsters, have chosen to traffic in the familiar rhetoric of half-loaves and compromise. No high-profile candidate has hit that hole quite as hard as Sanders, or gained quite as much yardage as a result.

It is true that part of Sanders’s success has come via his ability to galvanize the members of the Democratic constituency who have been served the least effectively by the institutional Democratic establishment—those consultants and fundraisers and the party apparatchiks ruling little fiefdoms in consequence-free perpetuity. And it’s quite easy, in this context, to see why the party’s little emperors might not appreciate having attention called to their flagrant nudity. But at some point, the tactic of simply waiting for the emperor to put on some damn pants becomes untenable, especially when he insists on doing jumping jacks on television. Some establishments are easier to run against than others. Some practically cry out for it.

It is clear, amid the rubble Trump has made, that a bit of concentrated pressure on a sufficiently rotten bulwark can bring down the whole gilded edifice of a major political party. That pressure and that rot are what stuck us with Trump. It does not seem like too much to believe that, if enough people put their shoulder to the work, and if what is so obviously broken can consent to yield, those same forces—part gravity, part hope—might also get us out from under this wreckage. There is something deadening and bleak about the way in which pundits and campaign strategists and candidates alike center the idea of beating Trump, if only because it leans into the idiotic premise of the president as Celebrity Number One. But there is something bleaker still about those same voices countering the Sanders insurgency with abstractions about electability and a familiar learned helplessness. This principled refusal to read the damn room seems, if anything, more apt to deliver the very outcome they dread—reinforcing Trump’s wholly unearned place of maximum power in the crabbed sanctums of the American political imagination. In this respect, the more relevant analogy to draw isn’t so much between the character and temperament of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as between the Never Trump GOP establishment of 2016 and the emerging Never Sanders Democratic establishment of 2020. That isn’t a flattering comparison, either.
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Irvine511 said:
Insurance has problems, but what I object to is the idea that the only way to get single payer insurance is to nominate a candidate who runs on single payer insurance. Thinking that a maximalist approach is the best way to yield maximalist results is just flat earth thinking, and could likely inspire a backlash that results in getting nothing, or something even worse. The stridency comes off as little more than a moral flex, and assumes the worst of people who may share the same goals but disagree on tactics.
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I suppose this is simply where we disagree. I can't imagine watching what has unfolded over the last 12 years and having any faith that incrementalism is going to get us anywhere. I can't imagine thinking any plan that gives private insurance a place at the table gets us anywhere.

You can't build up to single payer healthcare. You have to just do it. It's very much like Social Security. You need to put it in place, let people experience it, and then realize how much they like it and can't imagine life without it, so that it becomes a third rail in politics to oppose it. If you just try to build up to it, it's going to topple over when it inevitably fails to help people and results in the other side winning another election. What happened with the ACA is exactly what will happen with any other healthcare plan that comes up short of what we actually need.

I don't assume the worst of people who disagree on the tactics, unless they are in positions of power. Those people know better.
 
Lives have been improved and saves by the ACA, and it would have been even more effective had it not been sabotaged by the GOP especially in red states. It’s now very popular, and it became so incrementally. It’s taken 10 years.

I can’t imaging looking at the political backlash the ACA inspired in 2010 and 2014 and not thinking it will inspire the same (and more) if it’s the major policy platform of a general election candidate. I think a “people’s eyes will open once they see” misunderstands something fairly fundamental about not only what might be called a national “character” but also what makes the US a highly unique country, in size, complexity, and personality.

I think it’s a mistake to assume that when Sanders is the nominee and there will be a blue wave resulting in increased House control and 50+ Senate seats.

If nominee Sanders loses in November, and the House swings back to the GOP and the Senate swings further right, what will happen then?

When Ginsberg dies?

When Trump makes a play for a 3rd term?
 
DaveC said:
what specific actions do you think that bernie sanders could realistically have taken in the previous four years or could do now that would actually "stop their actions", if it really is "thousands and thousands" of his supporters and russian trolls "using hateful threatening rhetoric"?.
Click to expand...

Here's the thing. The culmination of what many Sanders supporters have become, is a brew of Bernie's rhetoric and Russian bots. You have the Clinton is worse than Trump! people in 2016. I think that was borne out of a concerted Russian narrative and it took hold because Bernie supporters thought it was coming from other Bernie supporters.

But then you have the even more omnipresent - It's all rigged! the oligarchy! Everyone is against us, we have to fight for Bernie! Fuck the DNC! If the establishment tries to mess with Bernie this time, there will be hell to pay! type shit.

That I think comes from Bernie. and then I'm sure amplified by Russian bots.

Either way, the ship has sailed. And you're right, at this point there is nothing Bernie could say or do to change it. Frankenstein has been created and now it's just gonna stumble around and knock shit over.

My only hope is that if Bernie does get the nom, that you can skillfully use the Russia/Putin angle to work against Trump. But it does now make that harder since they are helping him as well. I'm sure by tomorrow Trump will have convinced 40 percent of the country that Bernie the Communist is in bed with Russia. :angry:
 
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