The mainstream has been drifting right since, oh I don't know, the seventies or so!
I wonder how much of this comes down to the current supremacy of identity politics over economic politics, and a general disinclination to get into the nitty-gritty of foreign policy.
What is especially fascinating is that economic grievances are now couched heavily in the language of identity politics. Until recently we seemed to treat the current incarnation of identity politics as a phenomenon of the left, but what 2016 has shown us is that it is more effective at mass mobilisation in the hands of the right. The explanation for that is pretty simple though, since the right-wing and fascistic formulation relies on that easy political trick of fearmongering.
Turns out Ian really has got banned, from the whole forum for a week. I don't get why he got banned from the rest of the place and not just FYM.
And even then, deep still keeps avoiding a ban.
He seems to try to make a show of being non-partisan, a show that is poorly scripted and entirely see-through, especially in the way he fell for the Crooked Hillary narrative while caring little for Trump's multitudinous flaws.
I'm honestly irked by people who are self-conscious "non-partisans" or "swing voters". I don't direct this at people whose ideology really does place them between two major parties, or whose vote has shifted over time, but those people who essentially declare there is no ideological continuity from one vote to another because they just wait for one candidate to impress them (read as: sell them the most pork). I have no respect for that. Hold a position, stand by it, and modify it as necessary.
Have to love the centrist liberal, boasting about how 'moderate' they are and how left/right are 'two sides of the same coin', when they themselves are perpetually drifting to the right. We have PLENTY of them on this site.
There would need to be a destruction of the American political system in order for positive developments to emerge, much more so than in other countries of a nominally liberal democratic nature. They're both so deeply entrenched but, I wouldn't mind seeing the destruction of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
I also think that as the years go by the more that the Democrats truly disgust me. Fair enough, the Republicans are more incomprehensibly vile, but we already have known this.
On foreign policy alone, most Americans here are so far to the right it's ludicrous. Wallowing in a kind of implicit exceptionalism and right to intervene anywhere, anytime. Which wouldn't perhaps be so obnoxious if not so clueless and disastrous. Moral panics about Russia notwithstanding, I see little likely difference under whatever US administration, on that front.
As for identity politics, it's got its place I suppose, but it is also a very neat divide-and-rule tool in the right/wrong hands. See for ex. Hillary's rhetoric about how reining in Wall Street wouldn't fix racism or whatever. No duh, but it might affect some of the underlying structural issues.
The Trump campaign certainly did a surprisingly effective end-run around the Democrats on that front. But if people won't talk about class, or even accept that it's really a thing, then it's going to be about perceived identity. I doubt a lot of the hardcore Trump vote (a subset of the GOP vote) really think Trump is going to do anything for them; they just want revenge.
I don't really believe that anyone who is really paying attention in America, or in Australia, is a 'swinging voter'. They say they are, but I don't buy it in most cases. And if they really have no ideological continuity, what the fuck is the matter with them?
Politics?
It's gonna happen with people like me, Kieran, and Vlad around.
On the discussion of the two main US parties, I am hoping that this is the last gasp of the Republicans - the sort of victory that actually shows up division when they try to govern. My optimistic long-term view is that there will be serious discord within Congress between Trumpers and Never-Trumpers, between moderates and Tea Partiers, etc., and that even if they paper over those cracks for four years, the inevitable loss to Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/Kanye West/Crooked Hillary in 2020 will lead to a reckoning.
But the Democrats themselves are far too much of a broad church to be sustainable long-term. On the one hand you have those willing to accept a neoliberal "consensus" who are Democrat more because they find Republican religiosity and racism repellent than anything else. They are America's equivalent of the Turnbull Liberals or of John Key's besties. Then you have a young pro-Bernie crowd who don't have a problem with social democracy-lite, a large but potentially fickle vote from various minority groups mainly there because of Republican racism/white nationalism rather than any loyalty to the left (and who need to be courted for ongoing ideological allegiance), and everybody on the mid to hard left not willing to flee in a system without preferential voting. How do you keep together those groups? In the long run you don't.
There will be another repositioning of American politics - but whether that is a shift in the parties, as has happened in all the major post-Civil War realignments, or the emergence of new parties, is hard to say. My money is that it will remain within the D/R system, because the DNC and RNC possess resources far beyond that of a new party. More preferable to take control of one of those, or at least exert a guiding influence, than build from the ground up. But maybe that's the overly conventional political game-player in me, and times are changing fast.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: now is a very good lesson in historical contingency. Predictions have never looked less certain, so take this mindset back to 1860 or 1920 or whenever you want and you lose your preconceptions that events were inevitable or predestined.
I don't mind a generalized discussion, but to talk about US politics right now is bleh.
Let's talk about far left progressivism and Abraham Lincoln.
I have stuff to say. My hand is damn near broken after constructing furniture for a good 10 hours straight last night. My new apartment is aight.
Yes, predictions have never looked less certain. I trust myself on fundamentals of what I consider right and wrong, but as to actual prediction? I'd be filing for bankruptcy by now if I were a betting type. Though if I were a betting type, I'd say the Trump presidency turns into the Pence presidency sometime in the next four years.
I start see to the neoliberal consensus, or whatever name you want to tack on it to persuade someone of what you're trying to convey, as like a big ice rink, the kind that people skate on. And it's cracking up. Neither actual fascism or strongman-populism or new social democracy or any other thing is inevitable. It's just really dangerous right now.
If the Republicans lost the ethno-nationalism and made a convincing play at being a rainbow whatever, they'd be really dangerous. That's my opinion. But they just can't seem to manage it.
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That ethno-nationalism seems far too ingrained into their sense of being.
But they've always had a foothold in the Latino demographic through the Cuban community and in the long term I expect that to grow, not contract as so many of the demographic determinists think. Tone down the ethno-nationalism just enough to unite over other policies and they're in. I struggle to imagine them regaining the African-American vote without some whopping big transformation though.
Up until let's say 2014, it seemed fairly easy to predict the general direction of politics, if not the precise events. There were certain unspoken rules and commonplace conventions that were rarely breached, and even those who "should not" have won functioned within the same universe. Dubya was an idiot, but he was an idiot firmly within the system. The rules are obviously changing now, and it's easy to diagnose the problems but so what if you struggle to anticipate where to go. And it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the left is unsure what to do and lacks a sense of common purpose. What are we fighting for now?
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I would say that there is next to no common purpose where the left, however defined, is concerned. This is what I mean about the centre-left blowing it, particularly in the wake of what should have been an epochal discrediting of business as usual with the financial crisis of 2008 onwards. If there is a vacuum, it will be filled.
Consider: by all rights, the Rudd Government should still be in power right now, having smoothly transitioned at some point to Gillard or Shorten or whoever. Of course it turned out that Rudd was personally dysfunctional, and it further turned out that his power base in his own party was a mile wide and an inch deep. But we didn't know that at the time.