13
votes
(The Danger of) Obama Nostalgia - "The Enemy Within"
Link information
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- Title
- The Enemy Within | Harper's Magazine
- Authors
- John R. MacArthur, Garret Keizer, Rohini Mohan, Micah Hauser, Jenn Alandy Trahan, Dan Baum
- Published
- Jul 11 2018
- Word count
- 920 words
I'll posit that the cult of personality around Bernie Sanders is equally unproductive, and would not desire to see him lead a third party or run for President of the U.S. again. He's an elderly demagogic curmudgeon who's decent at critique, but not particularly effective at writing usable legislation, and not especially good at building bridges of solidarity to unions, women, African-Americans, or other political interest groups.
While he stands for some of the nostalgic ideals of New Deal society, he's not a particularly good socialist, even on healthcare - "Medicare for All" is a great slogan, but it still leaves intact a private healthcare system that's just going to beggar public insurance.
Frankly, the entrenched gerontocrats of both the Republican and Democratic parties are in their death throes, and the new generations, for better or worse, are already deeply aware of the internal corruption. The current problem is that the right-leaning activist younger pols are helping themselves to the money by any means necessary, using the historical corruption of the machine Democrats as an excuse, and want more systemic corruption that benefits them rather than less.
A cult around anyone is not a positive thing, this should go without saying. My main point was that I don't really care with who or how it happens, but having a third party that is strong enough to shake things up enough that there is no longer the idiotic 50% split on issues down party lines in the Congress and Senate is the most important thing that could happen. I nowhere went into details about Sanders' qualifications or lack thereof. Just having a minimum of three parties would fundamentally shift the dynamic such that there would at least be the potential for elected representatives to vote based on individual issues rather than splitting everything into this black and white binary set of categories.
My apologies - I wasn't responding entirely to you, but to the long-running themes of "if it hadn't been for that corrupt Democratic party and the evil, non-Green-Lantern Obama and Clinton, we would have had real change in this country" that the article expresses, which are also dog-whistles for purblind Sanders supporters.
Otherwise, I don't know that multi-party coalition politics is any less vulnerable to corruption (see Israel, France, England, Mexico...), especially in the U.S., where the number of federal representatives is so few with respect to the voting population, and where the Senate is an additional brake on democratic impetus to change anything. What I see with more parties is the potential for interminable gridlock and even more avenues for de facto bribes to infiltrate the system as the public contributions are split further.
First past the post naturally gravitates towards two parties, even in places like the UK were there are multiple "viable" parties two of them end up massively overshadowing the rest.
I'm not a huge Bernie fan but he seems to be the best candidate at the moment, who else would you like to see the dems run in 2020?
Aside from wishing Elizabeth Warren was 10 years younger, I wouldn't mind seeing Sherrod Brown run.
He's a more effective progressive than Sanders, and has certain amount of clarity about poverty, labor organizing, foreign policy, climate, healthcare. I have some misgivings on the civil rights and liberties front, given a couple of anti-terrorist legislation votes, and he's a trade protectionist.
Nonetheless, Brown is comparatively young but with plenty of experience and a clear agenda.
He's a generally well-rounded public servant who hasn't yet fallen prey to a major scandal. That's a major achievement given how much the Kochs have spent to defeat him.
Unfortunately, there's not a deep Democratic bench right now - I don't think there's a single sitting governor I'd want to see in the running, and borrowing from the Senate for candidates is a bad idea since that body is electorally biased in favor of Republicans.
I wouldn't turn up my nose at Kamala Harris, though she's likely just as authoritarian and pro-corporate as the Booker/Holder/Biden crowd. Geography matters, and left-wing California candidates don't do well in general elections.
Bernie is way too far left. A far more centrist Democrat would have a much better chance of getting elected. We have current leadership that's swung pretty far right -- they're currently attempting to stack the Supreme Court with people who actively desire the repeal of Roe v. Wade. In a country so divided, choosing a candidate who's at the extreme opposite of who currently holds power is a recipe for six more years of Trump.
I completely disagree, a centrist democrat would just result in 2016 all over again–populism is going to be necessary if dems are going to have enough turnout to win.
I don't think it's his ideological positions that put him in the untouchable place for me (I agree with most of his policy proposals in teh abstract). It's his leadership style of all-or-nothing combined with a lack of detail when it comes to how to implement any of his policy priorities. The rigidness that refuses to recognize the value of compromise, that is ignorant to its own blindspots when it comes to minorities, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable populations that would be impacted by his policy proposals but seem to be more of an afterthought than people that are being brought along. His leadership style makes him a leader for the middle class and students who will likely join the middle and upper classes, which is ironic given his branding as caring most of all about economic issues.
Edit: simply put, I don't trust him to remember the concerns of the most vulnerable people that would be impacted by his policy priorities. I think he does not handle criticism well (much like my most hated president even still: Woodrow Wilson), and I think he needs to address criticism in order to address the needs of the most vulnerable rather than to just be focused on the broad strokes policies alone.
I'm not sure if you understand Medicare for All if you think that private insurance would still exist in that system?
He said private healthcare, not private insurance.
You have to chip away at what you want, not expect perfectionism. Obama and Bernie aren't perfect, they were pointed in the direction of wanting what's best for our country, and that's refreshing.
The article is interesting in that it speaks to the potentially dangerous nostalgia for the Obama presidency, which in many people's minds (in my own experience) is ascending to some kind of 'Golden Age.' The article is useful in pointing out that Obama was deeply entrenched in the current status quo Democrat/Republican Party system which I personally hold is the first thing that needs to go if any change will actually happen in this country - the establishment of these parties is opposed to both Bernie Sanders / Trump type campaigns because they are outside this sort of power they have set themselves up with over the years.
So that is a question I'd like to pose in response: if the two-party system were to break, what would have to happen, how would that play out? If the divide in "Democrat" voters splits into two camps enough to split the party, would the Republican party follow suit? Obviously an argument is that if the D's split in two the R's would just dominate, but I think its a break that is worth the temporary damage in order to get away from the two party system. Something has to give in that sense. Binaries never work.
Honestly, I think we’re seeing how this hypothesis plays out right now. We saw what happened with an ideological split in the Democratic Party, namely a significant drop in voter turnout as well as disaffection. I feel like we are in the “temporary damage” phase right now and it’s pretty bad, I.e. more internment camps for kids, looking to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens, trade wars, etc. etc. and I’m sure it can and will get worse before it gets better.
How the accelerationist hypothesis ends, I guess we’ll see in a few months.
I think any split would come from the left, Republicans just fall in line too easily. Basically all the vocal anti-Trump republicans ended up endorsing him, and now many of them openly support him and pretend that they always have. The (real) left on the other hand is angry, angry at the perceived rigging of the primary process (not going to get into an argument on the truth of that), angry at the Clinton campaign for losing what should have been a Regan-style landslide, and angry at the party for not putting up any real resistance to the Trump administration. If the DNC ends up nominating another Clinton-style candidate I could see the party fracturing in 2020, perhaps with defections to the DSA.
I think you'd see a realignment of voters into the new parties - the true left and Democratic base would finally get representation, the Democrats would shift right and collect a bunch of republicans who are fed up with the insanity in their party, and the Republican party would become the party of alt-right extremists and I wouldn't be surprised if they die off in the next 20 years. Unfortunately that puts us back where we started.
I think the only real change that could be had is to push for some sort of national ranked choice voting or we are always pushed back into two party duopoly.
Honestly you can use past as prologue to know that is exactly how it will play out. There have been several periods in our history where we had more than two parties (even a period when we had just one) and more than two major candidates for President and we keep coming back down to two.It seems our system as is it is now has an equilibrium of two parties. Without a substantial change, like ranked voting, we will definitely end up where we are.The use of the past to claim absolute certainty about what will happen in the future falls victim to David Hume's Turkey Problem. Simply put, the turkey believes with greater and greater certainty over the course of its life that the person who feeds it will continue to feed it the next day. But then Thanksgiving comes around, or some other festival ...
That’s a fair critique.
Maybe I’m limited by my knowledge, but I can’t remember a Parliamentary body that wasn’t largely dominated by more than two parties.
I mean, look at Spain right now. The two biggest parties collectively have 55% of the total seats, which means that 45% of the seats are split between other parties [next biggest is Podemos at 13%, which is a new coalition formed by the sudden rise of a party a few years ago which in some ways reminds one of the recent win of Ocasio-Cortez in NY, aka younger (supposedly) more progressive people getting involved in politics].
Wow. Just googled the Cortes Generales and that is a really good example of a coalition government held by minority parties.
I’m not sure how that would play out for Presidential elections, but yeah. I guess it’s totally possible, and I was ignorant of that.