posted
New York might not be to blame. There's still the matter of some 100k-150k of voters who were purged from the polls. From Brooklyn. Sanders home town.
Oh well. Politics as usual I guess. No ever said the Clintons couldn't play hardball.
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Whelp, here we are. Down to the inevitable versus the inevitable everyone really hoped was one big joke.
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Bernie was I believe just about mathematically eliminated a few weeks back; he'd have to win with something like 80% of the vote consistently after losing New York.
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Yeah, he's technically been out of it for about a month, now; there was no realistic way for him to grab the nom since New York.
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Eh, in the darkest depths of my heart I'm still hoping for an indictment so that the DNC HAS to accept Sanders.
That's not going to happen though, both because there's probably not enough to prosecute on, and because HRC falls into the "Too Big to Jail" category.
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He wasn't eliminated weeks ago, no matter how much Clinton and her cronies were pushing that idea.
The super delegates don't vote until the convention. They could have, at any time, switched their votes to Sanders for literally any reason. It wasn't until yesterday that Clinton won enough delegates to actually claim the nomination, no matter what.
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There is no chance that the superdelegates would have done that, even if Clinton were arrested for beating a man to death with baseball cleats.
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quote:Originally posted by Heisenberg: He wasn't eliminated weeks ago, no matter how much Clinton and her cronies were pushing that idea.
The super delegates don't vote until the convention. They could have, at any time, switched their votes to Sanders for literally any reason. It wasn't until yesterday that Clinton won enough delegates to actually claim the nomination, no matter what.
It's extremely difficult to take this seriously.
For one thing, Hillary is winning by the popular vote handly, the superdelegates switching their vote would be the sort of anti-democratic thing Bernie and his supporters were complaining about earlier (i.e them stealing the thing from a possible Sanders victory).
That and with the other post, what ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Why listen to what are basically Republican talking points? The FBI has yet to conclude their investigation.
It's basically just obviously salty.
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Well, yeah, I'm salty. I'm certainly not going to be happy with a frigging Republican-lite when there was a chance for an actual progressive. I know the superdelegates weren't going to change short of something crazy happening, but the word mathematically implies that she had won on the same level as two plus two equals four, and that just wasn't the case.
I realise that she's innocent until proven guilty, I know that there PROBABLY isn't anything that she could be convicted over. All I was saying in that other post was that if I had a genie in my back pocket, one of my wishes would be Clinton getting indicted so that we could have Sanders.
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Basically, I'm never going to be happy with an establishment politician again, which Clinton is from top to bottom. I will also never support someone who takes money from Wall Street firms. I don't care if they're literally Jesus Christ.
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quote:I'm certainly not going to be happy with a frigging Republican-lite when there was a chance for an actual progressive.
SHE IS NOT A REPUBLICAN, SHE IS A DEMOCRAT.
^^ THIS, is why I can't take the majority of Berniebro's I see online on the internet seriously. You basically see her as bad as electing a Republican when compared to virtually any Republican that was running you could name the difference in policy is like night and day.
-She would fight for more rights for women and LBGT people. -She IS despite rhetoric to the contrary likely to do more to regulate the banks; and certainly 100% would not abolish entire regulatory bodies like virtually any Republican candidate would Day 1. -She will not start a war with Iran. -She's not going to pass laws based entirely on scripture or moralism. -She is not going to appoint a right winger to the Supreme Court. <---- THIS IS THE IMPORTANT THING. -She is not going to throw the PPACA into the trash bin, her own healthcare proposals back in the 90's were more progressive, and thus I think she is likely to fight for improvements to the PPACA. -Additionally we can rest assured that she won't roll back the clock on the remainder of the New Deal like any Republican would.
She would basically be a third term for Obama, and Obama has generally despite plenty of reasons to criticize some of his actions and policies, done an amazing job as President.
There is no rational basis for equating Hillary to being a "Republican lite" she is most definitely not a Blue Dog, by any metric that matters she was actually and factually one of the most liberal members of the Senate; her voting record is 90+% the same as Bernie Sanders.
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quote:-She IS despite rhetoric to the contrary likely to do more to regulate the banks; and certainly 100% would not abolish entire regulatory bodies like virtually any Republican candidate would Day 1. -She will not start a war with Iran. -Additionally we can rest assured that she won't roll back the clock on the remainder of the New Deal like any Republican would.
These specific assertions are ones I find questionable, based on her record.
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What about her record makes her likely to be less liberal than Obama was?
What evidence is there that she would go remotely as far as Republicans who actively campaign on rolling back the New Deal, considering her own platform and website expresses a desire to preserve them?
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quote:What about her record makes her likely to be less liberal than Obama was?
She and her husband pretty much defined neoliberalism, which is liberal in the sense that neoconservatives are conservative.
quote: What evidence is there that she would go remotely as far as Republicans who actively campaign on rolling back the New Deal, considering her own platform and website expresses a desire to preserve them?
She was instrumental in dismantling effective welfare, was one of the loudest advocates of the Pacific trade deal, and has been stumping for deregulated stock markets since literally before she ever held any sort of office.
She's to the right of Richard Nixon on almost every issue.
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quote: She and her husband pretty much defined neoliberalism, which is liberal in the sense that neoconservatives are conservative.
Neoliberalism has its own set of issues and evils but it isn't the stark neoreactionism of the GOP. Also how much of the modern Third Way Democratic movement was a result of the factual political setting the Reagan administration placed America in? Now we have the 99% Movement, Occupy, BLM, and well, Sanders' own candidacy and the success of populism in the Republican primary has shown that Americans are more willing to entertain government sponsored solutions to inequality, and that trickle down economics have failed. Hillary is a politician, from her platform, voting record and rhetoric I think its likely she wants to improve things as much as possible; the third way was about constructing a broad coalition that can get into office to do that under the post-Reagan environment; now we have the post-Obama environment and I think we'll see substantial policies being advanced to that effect (whether the House will budge...).
Like Obama spent years trying to reach a compromise the GOP and the Dems could both live with and learned there just isn't much to deal with when it comes to the Republican house that's held hostage by their base and clearly has some level of contempt for them now; based on what we can glimpse from his routine at the previous WHCD's, but Hillary? She despises them. I don't see her actively courting them the same way Obama did, and will probably be more willing to push for broader progressive changes at least because of spite.
Also Hillary has a much deeper working relationship with Senate Dems, Obama didn't have that and contributed to the difficulties in the passing the PPACA. There's a lot of benefits from a progressive standpoint from a Hillary administration and I don't see where the doom and gloom comes from when you consider the context.
Shes not Bernie fine I get that, but she's certainly a candidate any long time Democratic voter can live with short of Biden.
quote: She's to the right of Richard Nixon on almost every issue.
Nixon got the EPA passed, I'm fine with Nixon.
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My sister likes Sanders even more then I do, and dislike Clinton a whole lot. Can we also refer to her disparagingly as a "bro?" The term is ridiculous, made up to infer that anyone supporting Sanders over Clinton is doing so because they're sexist.
Ya'll can bite into that low fat shit sandwich and talk about how great it is, because hey, low fat! I'm going to pass, thanks. Clinton is not a progressive and barely qualifies for the term liberal. I'm certainly not going to support Trump. I'm just also not going to support Clinton. If she wants to earn the votes of people who feel like I do, then she should probably start addressing the issues that we care about, and remove her lips from Wall Street's ass.
I'm done with the idiotic lesser of two evils approach. The class war started decades ago, it's just only the rich have been landing blows, and most of the other side doesn't even know that it's going on.
I'll support progressives. No one else.
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that puts you in the uncomfortable position of that the single most harm that can possibly be done to progressive positions in the united states for the next 40 years or so would be done if the republicans took the presidency. it would be immediate and long-lasting.
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Seriously Heisenberg can talk about sandwiches or try to imply he's taking the idealist principled approach and whatever but the fact of the matter is whoever is the next President of the United States is in a position to choose up to three Supreme Court replacements; and as we've seen POTUS and the Executive branch can still do a huge amount of good from their position in the face of an obstructionist Congress; in the face of the literal saturday morning captain planet-esque cartoon villainy that is the GOP in it's current form, it is to knowingly enable great evil to occur to millions of Americans by allowing Trump or any Republican to win the WH.
Like, imagine just how much hell the Federal government can make individual peoples lives under Trump? Imagine if every single obsolete moralist law on the books were suddenly selectively enforced at the Federal level and not just the State level? The GOP holds the House and Senate and with all three branches nothing stops them from rolling back the clock as far as the Judicial branch lets them.
quote: Can we also refer to her disparagingly as a "bro?"
Yeah? It's a disparaging term for people who take their Bernie Sanders worship to Mao Tse-tung Cult of Personality level of veneration to the point that they are just not seeing reality and are irrational*. Maybe technically that is what "Bernout" is for, but they seem interchangeable to me.
Bernie lost, and remember as a Canadian Bernie is more in line with my values and I wish he did better but at the same time nothing about Hillary's record makes me unable to also live with her as POTUS if I were an American voter.
quote: Clinton is not a progressive and barely qualifies for the term liberal.
Like this speaks to the mountainous levels of salt you mined up there from your national park salt reserves because this is frankly factually not true. Water is wet levels of fact; this isn't a matter of opinion, check any reputable source and Hillary is by her record was one of the most liberal members of the US Senate, she is absolutely a progressive.
Here's a ready quote from HuffPo:
quote: But Clinton’s responsibility for her husband’s agenda isn’t always self-evident, because, as first lady, she had less ability to dissent than other advisers. A better indicator of her instincts is probably her subsequent record as a senator from New York. According to those same DW-NOMINATE ratings, Clinton was the chamber’s 11th most-liberal member during her tenure. It’s a crude statistic, but it suggests strongly that she was not just progressive relative to the Senate. It suggests that she was also progressive relative to members of her own party.
quote: If she wants to earn the votes of people who feel like I do, then she should probably start addressing the issues that we care about, and remove her lips from Wall Street's ass.
The majority of people who think like you do also statistically do not vote in the general. So why should they work hard for your vote?
*I wonder if I caused anyone to spontaneously combust from the irony.
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To further illustrate why it's just irrational like I can't believe I missed this:
quote: if I had a genie in my back pocket, one of my wishes would be Clinton getting indicted so that we could have Sanders.
"Even though I know she is probably innocent I would still jail my political opponent so I can have my preferred candidate on the ballot."
Irony called, they want their democracy and rule of law back.
Like here's a good post from Something Awful about the metaargument of emailghazi by poster McAlister:
quote: This is primarily a meta-argument about how the email scandal accusations are framed.
quote: It's very likely that the state dept had no mechanism for delivering classified email to smartphones and the only option would be unclassified email.
When Colin Powell stepped up in 2004 the state department didn't have email at all. He used a private mail account through dial up on his personal laptop in his office to do all his emailing in part to show other people how awesome email is and make the case for adopting it.
In his autobiography he talks with pride about successfully making the case to get funding that allowed him to purchase 44,000 internet capable computers so that every person at state could have one:
quote: What I did when I entered the State Department, I found an antiquated system that had to be modernized and modernized quickly.
So we put in place new systems, bought 44,000 computers and put a new Internet capable computer on every single desk in every embassy, every office in the State Department. And then I connected it with software.
But in order to change the culture, to change the brainware, as I call it, I started using it in order to get everybody to use it, so we could be a 21st century institution and not a 19th century.
It's a rather important bit of perspective to realize that when Clinton stepped up in 2008 email was still a rather new thing at State ( it takes awhile to get funding and install 44,000 computers ) and that prior to its adoption all the business done on email was done on private accounts out of band. For example, Powell's demo email account only connected with staff who also had private email accounts since the .gov email system didn't exist yet. People who frame this as if the state department IT was run like a James Bond movie are misinformed. Deliberately so since talking up the maturity/security of their IT allows detractors to make Clinton's actions look more significant/subversive.
Another bit of misleading framing is the implication or claim that Clintons' server was set up after she was appointed SoS. In reality the Clinton family server was set up by Bill after he stepped down around 2001ish. Hillary had her blackberry hooked up to it all during the primary. Setting up a secure email server is a significant endeavor for the layman. By claiming it was done after she stepped up you make listeners suspicious and prime them to accept a devious motive. The truth that she just kept on using the setup she'd been using, otoh, flows much more naturally into Hillary's stated reason, convenience. All her shit was there and why mess with what works? You can juggle two mail boxes ok but juggling two calendars completely defeats the purpose of a calendar. Again, she used it in place of a non-classified .gov email. When she had to use the secure system she went to the secure building and handed over her wireless devices to security to get in and sit at a special secure terminal like everyone else. She hated it just like everyone else. Lastly, her own emails show her asking IT to hook up her blackberry to a .gov account and them saying they couldn't do it..
This information is also left out or actively lied about by people pushing a nefarious motives narrative since attempt to use the State system while maintaining the functionality of her system undermines their entire premise.
The last major false frame of the email scandal is the idea that criminal prosecution is something that routinely happens when people mess up with secure material. You get a lot of hyperbolic claims about how much trouble a regular Joe would be if they'd done that. Also a shit ton of quoting snippets of legal statutes and torturing the definition of the word "deliberately". If security agencies criminally prosecuted people for honest mistakes then people would never self report or cooperate with security audits for fear of jail. It is more important that breaches be promptly and honestly reported than to jail people for mistakes. They will **** you up if you deliberately sell data or deliberately post it to wiki leaks sure. But if you are operating in good faith then jail isn't a realistic outcome even if you "deliberately" took some work home with you the night you got mugged and someone stole your backpack. You didn't intend for the data to get away so that's not the right kind of "deliberately" to get anti-espionage statutes thrown at you.
A minor frame used in all three major frames is trying to make this an elitist thing. Asserting that nobody else uses personal emails when it was actually a common practice or that she is avoiding punishment others would face when in reality punishment would be the exception rather than the rule.
posted
Here's why people are disgusted. Sanders stands for everything that the Democratic party SAYS that they stand for. The things that they tell the progressive wing that they're just going to have to wait for, because the country just won't accept it yet.
And yet, in a year where the candidate opposing them was going to be Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, when they could have nominated a ham sandwich and won the presidency, they disparaged and ignored Sanders at every turn. The DNC basically coronated Clinton a year ago. As it turns out, when they had a chance to break the status quo, they revealed that all the talk about really fighting for progressive causes was just so much pandering bullshit. Bullshit directed at a portion of the base that they can safely ignore because, hey, "Welp, do you dumbasses really want a Republican instead?"
The Democratic party likes the system just the way it is, because they've benefitted just as much as the Republicans. Clinton is included in that. They have no interest in changing it.
And it's not surprising to me that the portion of the base that sees establishment politicians as all being the same haven't bothered to vote in elections with nothing but establishment politicians. They WOULD have voted for Sanders.
So at the end of the day, I prefer HRC over Trump the same way I'd prefer a beating with a baseball bat over being shot. I DO prefer her over Trump. But I refuse to support the status quo anymore. She can do it without my support.
As far as I'm concerned, she can take her $12,000 jackets and her million dollar speaking fees and her Wall Street campaign donations and shove them straight up her welfare decimating, stock market deregulating, Iraq War supporting ass.
Enjoy your shit sandwich.
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And as soon as the left wing version of the Tea Party forms, and it will, I'll be abandoning any semblance of loyalty to the Democrats.
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You're just kinda being every bad facebook meme/parody at this point in that you keep making a mountain out of a mole hill at every opportunity over every little thing.
quote: Sanders stands for everything that the Democratic party SAYS that they stand for.
This actually isn't true. Sanders almost certainly does not stand for anything the DNC has ever officially endorsed as a policy goal.
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It will. There's an entire wing of the party being blatantly ignored. How'd that work out for the Republicans?
And honestly, Blayne, I wouldn't expect you to get it. An eternal student who, if he's worked a single day in his life, probably hasn't had anything more then a part time campus job, isn't going to understand the perspective of the class of people who have had the shit end of the stick for so long that the status quo is simply unacceptable.
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Support for the little guy, opposition to big moneyed interests, less militaristic intervention, well it's true that policies that explicitly support these things don't tend to find their way onto the Democratic platform, but it does like to paint itself-even if only by criticizing the GOP as being so awful about these things-as supporting them. But 'not as bad' isn't really support.
I can get behind a pragmatic 'Trump is too dangerous, and if your state is likely to be close you should hold your nose and vote for Clintom' argument. I can understand someone sincerely believing she's a good candidate, though I disagree. I can wholeheartedly agree she's not as bad as Trump.
But to claim that she's actually a liberal is very strange to me. She gets *called* a liberal an awful lot by, well, American republicans who politically speaking are as you know Ellison well to the right of most western representative societies. But just because she gets called a liberal doesn't mean she was one, then or now.
Hell, a liberal of the purity you're suggesting would never have been friends with a man like Donald Trump who in the past as now embodied some of the most disliked traits for liberals that exist in American culture.
As for a breakaway Democratic Party, well I'm not sure but to me it certainly seems possible. If as could happen Trump does critical damage to the GOP in November in Congress, Clinton and other centrist democrats will have much less need for the ongoing support of progressives. Which is a very similar scenario to the one which birthed the Tea Party.
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quote: But to claim that she's actually a liberal is very strange to me.
It's borne out by her voting record, 11th most liberal member of the US Senate at the time. Furthermore there's her platform, such as support for the minimum wage, women's reproductive rights, support for African American issues, and so on.
This is a matter of open record.
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quote:Originally posted by Heisenberg: And as soon as the left wing version of the Tea Party forms, and it will, I'll be abandoning any semblance of loyalty to the Democrats.
In the spirit of effective realpolitik and trying to keep liberals from cannibalizing their own progress faster than a group of college identity politics protomarxists can declare literally everything problematic, can i recommend keeping with the democratic vote while the conservatives go down a demographic toilet, then help push mainstream DNP policies leftward in a fabian fashion?
hillary is, still, very liberal for her era. it's a great thing that the left is evolving so much that SHE represents the furthermost extent of acceptable centrism to most, but I can only suggest strategizing around the realities of spoiler effects and our first past the post system.
to wit: if the tea party had been a separate voting bloc that abandoned support of the republicans, conservatism would already be flat ****ing dead all across the country. if progressives split from centrist liberals, even a goddamned joke like donald trump could take the election and poop a bunch of poopy butt garbage assholes straight into three or so seats in the supreme court, and no matter our idealism, we'd be stuck dealing with that for the rest of our lives.
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I'm wondering what are the odds of Bernie being a VP pick. If you read Game Change, you learn that Obama and Hillary hated each other's guts. That Obama nominated her as Secretary of State speaks a lot about Obama as a person, and how he can work with someone he dislikes, but respects (I assume they like each other slightly better now).
Bernie has been very careful not to attack Hillary over emails or Benghazi (it's almost like they are smears cooked up by the right or something) and he has been extremely circumspect compared to the things the other side of the aisle had to turn around out when they endorsed Trump. He's also been fairly complimentary for an opponent.
The worst thing about the Hillary vs. Bernie feud has been uncivil college aged students, which honestly, whoever got stuck with that demographic was going to have that problem. When Bernie said Hillary wasn't qualified to be president, he said it was because he didn't like her voting record.
Between Obama's example of the olive branch, and the fact that Bernie does poll better than Hillary against Trump, it's not a bad idea.
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quote:It's borne out by her voting record, 11th most liberal member of the US Senate at the time.
This is actually one of my pet peeves. People don't get that the methodology for this is always a measure of party loyalty, not ideology. The way these measurements work is usually like this: a "liberal" bill is defined as one that a lot of Democrats voted for and a lot of Republicans didn't, and vice versa. The most "liberal" members of the legislature, then, are the ones who voted most reliably on bills supported by Democrats and against bills supported by Republicans.
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It also fails to take into account anything other than, well, voting records. A Secretary of State does hardly any voting in Congress from what I hear.
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I know. My point was that a voting record in the senate, particularly when such a significant portion of a candidate's political life happened outside of the senate, might not tell the whole story.
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quote:Originally posted by theamazeeaz: I'm wondering what are the odds of Bernie being a VP pick. If you read Game Change, you learn that Obama and Hillary hated each other's guts. That Obama nominated her as Secretary of State speaks a lot about Obama as a person, and how he can work with someone he dislikes, but respects (I assume they like each other slightly better now).
Bernie has been very careful not to attack Hillary over emails or Benghazi (it's almost like they are smears cooked up by the right or something) and he has been extremely circumspect compared to the things the other side of the aisle had to turn around out when they endorsed Trump. He's also been fairly complimentary for an opponent.
The worst thing about the Hillary vs. Bernie feud has been uncivil college aged students, which honestly, whoever got stuck with that demographic was going to have that problem. When Bernie said Hillary wasn't qualified to be president, he said it was because he didn't like her voting record.
Between Obama's example of the olive branch, and the fact that Bernie does poll better than Hillary against Trump, it's not a bad idea.
Bernie is better in the Senate. The electoral map is a slam dunk and Hillary is far better off to pick that Castro brother from Texas to both groom her successor and to possibly soon turn Texas blue.
quote: People don't get that the methodology for this is always a measure of party loyalty, not ideology.
Is this the actual methodology used, and even if it were, is consistently voting for Democratic bills which tend to be fairly liberal a bad thing?
But in any case though, you realize that most of what I see about the arguments about what supposedly makes Hillary "not a true progressive" (Leftist Circular Firing Squad much?) basically comes down to ignoring her statements and platform to the contrary in favour of allusions to the centrist policies advanced during the Clinton administration that generally I'm pretty sure were still fairly progressive for the time in the post-Reagan years.
She's in favour of a higher minimum wage? That's progressive. She's in favour of unions, that's economically progressive. She's in favour of protecting reproductive rights, that's progressive. She has as Senator for New York and in general from what I've heard of, done a lot for African Americans; which is an important reason why Bernie didn't win the minority vote, because he spent too long talking about race issues as a result of economic inequality and not also as a result of institutional racism.
So this is an aspect that makes Hillary more progressive than Bernie.
That she isn't going to guillotine the bankers who led the US into the financial crisis doesn't make her Not A Liberal whatever that even means or not a progressive.
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Dude. How does not seeking actual punishment and oversight of bankers who knowingly screwed the country over-of taking their money, in fact-register as an action that has no impact on progressive/conservative?
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Let us put aside for the moment that it actually says on her website she is in favor of more regulations of Wall Street... So it isn't at all like that she "won't" or doesn't intend to.
Newton believed in Biblical Numerology, does that make him not a scientist? It just means there's a thing he isn't super good at; in the same way that as issues go it's a flaw for Hillary. I'm castigating people who are serious in saying that Hillary is a "Republican Lite" or is somehow indistinguishable to a Republican to the point of implying she has zero chops as a liberal/progressive which is just plainly not true.
Hillary is liberal, and is certainly progressive, she champions a number of issues that fall under that spectrum; Sure it may be probable that in fine American oligarchical tradition she probably won't go far in the distance to reign in Wall Street but it just feels like a bad version of the "What did the Romans ever do for us!?" Skit. "Oh Sure, Hillary supports the minimum wage, rights for trans, gays, and lesbians, for treating minorities like people, for maintaining the basic ideal that the government exists to help people, to advance environmentalism, to fight climate change, but what did she ever do to fight the Bankers!?"
I just can't see the logic in the position of because of that you can say "Therefor Hillary Clinton is not a real progressive. Q.E.F!"
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quote:Let us put aside for the moment that it actually says on her website she is in favor of more regulations of Wall Street...
Can we grant that all credit for the existence of that lip service goes to Sanders?
--------
quote:Oh Sure, Hillary supports the minimum wage, rights for trans, gays, and lesbians, for treating minorities like people, for maintaining the basic ideal that the government exists to help people, to advance environmentalism, to fight climate change...
You know what we call those positions? Reasonable, moderate ones. They're not remotely progressive; they're the bare minimum for a reasonable person.
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posted
Secretary Clinton is liberal, and progressive, when compared to Republicans. Particularly just about all of those who were in the Republican Primary.
When compared to people who spend all of their time, even in off years, on the left side of the American spectrum and who oppose all the faits accompli (fait accomplis?) of things that happen in American politics from foreign policy to social polo to economic policy, well, she ain't a liberal or a progressive.
I'm not even saying that's a terrible thing, though personally I am all of those things. But Senator Sanders is to the left of Secretary Clinton on just about everything except gun control, and god knows Clinton has been pragmatic about that. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. But progressive and liberal aren't just defined by 'not nearly as bad as Trump or recent republican congresses'.
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quote: You know what we call those positions? Reasonable, moderate ones. They're not remotely progressive; they're the bare minimum for a reasonable person.
Yeah but you live in Amerikastan.
For serious though, the fact remains that increasing the minimum wage is by definition the progressive position, compared to leaving it where it is (I would term this the minimum centrist position) and then anything less is the reactionary/conservative position. Since Conservatism in the states has defined itself as rolling back the clock and not merely defending the existing social order.
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Relative progressive to no raise at all, yes.
But telling someone who wants it raised to $20/hr that a raise to $9 means someone is a progressive probably won't be taken very seriously.
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Like, sure, Bernie is more progressive, no dispute there; saying Hillary is not a progressive just seems like you've internalized Republican propaganda to your own biases.
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Dude, you can accept that other people honestly, legitimately are skeptical of Clinton's progressive bona fides or the answer is that I have embraced republican attacks.
I'm self aware enough of my own politics to know that is a pretty silly thing to accuse me of, at least.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Secretary Clinton is liberal, and progressive, when compared to Republicans. Particularly just about all of those who were in the Republican Primary.
Nixon and even reagan were liberal and progressive when compared to republicans today
they make such a terrible yardstick of progressives, because a pattern of cyclical radicalization in their demographic twilight (and all of the ghastly and weird effects that has) has made them the functional ideological equivalent of fractional autocratic far-right parties in europe, buoyed only by methods designed to artificially bias electoral outcomes in their favor
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posted
I'm not so sure the debate is over how liberal Hillary is so much as it is about how much you believe her.
If you believe her, then you probably think she's fairly liberal. Because she's running in a fairly liberal platform. Sanders liberal? No. But pretty liberal.
If you don't believe her, and you think everything she's likely to do is simply reflective of what she did as First Lady in the 90s, you're much more likely to label her a Republican.
I know there's some overlap between them, but I feel like that's what it comes down to at the end of the day.
I'm the last person to try to defend her as some sort of liberal icon. But I do think she's about as close as we're likely to get to palatable liberalism any time soon. And I say that because I think Bernie's run was far more about a cult of personality than it was about dedication to his ideas. I think that in part because that's a big part of why Trump is so popular is simply because of who he is. It's clearly not about Trump's ideas (he doesn't have any). But the same motivation that's pushing his supporters (anti-establishment sentiment) is what's driving Sanders' campaign as well.
The other reason I think it's a cult of personality is that polls of Sanders' actual supporters show they don't really support his policies (for what concrete details of them actually exist). The vast majority of his supporters aren't willing to pay more than $1,000 in additional taxes (combined!) for "free" college and healthcare. That blows his plan right out of the water, and that's from his most friendly demographics! I know it's not universal, but on his most signature issues, his platform polls terribly.
Also I just get this feeling that remind me of Ron Paul and crowds chanting "end the fed!" when most of his followers had no idea what the Fed is or what it does. I don't think Sanders' followers are quite like that, but it has the same feeling to me. That a lot of them aren't entirely aware of what they're signing up for, but they're angry and Sanders is so genuine.
So I'm not sure how popular far left policies actually are on a mass scale. Hillary is half a loaf, but in a country that's increasingly politically gluten-free, that might be the best thing for us at the moment.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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