19
votes
In a break with convention, the New York Times editorial board has chosen to endorse two separate Democratic candidates for president: Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren
This topic is locked. New comments can not be posted.
This is the sentence immediately preceding the article's announcment of their choice(s), and it's utter pablum.
Are they serious with this sentence?!
The only way that's true is by understanding capital-D Democratic in a very narrow way and "left" in a broad way, like considering the establishment Democratic party leadership like Pelosi as the "Democratic Left". The standard-bearer of Democratic left politics is obviously Sanders, that's why his "once labeled radical" left agenda is now "mainstream" in the party. The standard-bearer of the 'new blood' Democratic left politicians, the future of the party, is Sanders. But hey, they've gotta say whatever justifies their decision, regardless of whether it's true or significant.
If unity must include compromise and moderation with the American right-wing, then Climate Change and ecological collapse is going to devastate our planet. Given the dire circumstances of our time, and the totally bad-faith Republican Party opposition, I think unity might need to be off the cards. This is not the era of Clintons 96 welfare reform, or Bush's "No Child Left Behind". Lines need to be drawn, standards need to be enforced.
I'm generally with you, with two small points of contention. First, is regarding your remark about Sanders being the standard bearer of the Democratic left. I agree that between SAnders and Warren, Sanders is the more influential figure, but what the article says is the Warren is a standard-bearer of the democratic left, implying a broader category of people. Warren, who I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of at the moment, IS, without a doubt, one of the most prominent faces of the Democratic left, along with Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
The other point I have some disagreement with is when you say:
The American Right is not a monolith and although the Republican Party may be acting selfishly in bad faith, in any democracy, we must be willing to consider the feelings of those with opposing political beliefs (I'm referring to the American voters, not the elected officials). You can still fight uncompromisingly for climate change while compromising on other matters such as Tax Reform. Furthermore, that spirit of compromise extends to the different factions of the Democratic party and their constituents.
That's the beauty of democracy (in theory). When every side thinks they're right, you kinda gotta meet in the middle sometimes. The obvious downside is that it also involves compromising with people who are fucking wrong.
You're right, "a" is very different than "the". I should have noticed it. My point is really reduced to a quibble then.
Your second disagreement is more complicated to respond to, but I'll say something brief to say where'd I'd disagree.
Yes, but this does not require the kind of unity I think the NYT is meaning.
Hard disagree here, but I'm personally very persuaded that radical progressive income and wealth taxation is required to tackle Climate Change under a program of global Climate Justice. The USA people should not accept a Climate Change that gives tax breaks to the rich or even upper-income. A right-wing population that does give tax breaks to the rich in the context of Climate Change devastation is very possibly a population gripped by eco-fascism. I make no sense that the USA poor suffer needlessly by a crisis caused by the rich.
Yeah exactly haha, in theory. The USA is not a democracy in any sense of the word that it needs to be for this "unity" idea to work. If the USA had a government for the people, by the people, then I might reasonably trust that while I'd had vociferous disagreements with people that think angels exist I wouldn't find those same people selling their natural forestry to rich fossil-fuel capitalists.
Trying to draw an equivalence between the traditional party leadership and Elizabeth Warren is the most rank kind of historical revisionism. Sanders can't be a standard bearer of "The Left" because all his most blinkered fans seem to think "Leftism" begins and ends with a personality cult around Bernie Sanders.
Bernie's entire pitch for how he is going to accomplish anything as President revolves around a "political revolution" of people rising up to hold their legislators to account. Most politicians don't make the most toxic elements of fan bases the center-pieces of their campaign and political agenda.
This statement also kind of disingenuously ignores matters of scale and tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, the Sanders campaign wants to tout its active and engaged fan base as an organizing and campaign strength. But any time it's inconvenient for optics suddenly "All politicians have die-hard fan bases. Nothing out of the ordinary here at all!"
What's more, it's demonstrably false. Plenty of politicians don't rely on intense fan-bases. Klobuchar, for example, is actually quite boring and relies on support from pragmatists who just want a stable person who quietly gets shit done and doesn't draw too much attention to themselves.
Edit: For the record, I think Klobuchar's inability to excite people means she actually doesn't have a great shot at winning. The ideal fan-base for a politicians should be people who are engaged and active, but also generally positive, courteous, and polite.
Go watch those red hatted wingnuts in Richmond, VA right now and you'll see.
If the "rising up" we're talking about mostly involves cyberbullying other extremely online people and not on organizing communities or building power, then this is just toxicity for its own sake rather than serious politicking. Focusing all your organizing effort around political campaigning and electoralism is myopic and completely misses how power is built.
Which legislators? Which special interests? This is far too generic a statement that paints a complicated issue with too broad of a brush.
How is he doing that exactly? From what I see, the government is still in the hands of aspiring fascists.
When they spend 5x more of their energy tweeting abuse at supporters of other candidates who are factionally aligned with their own candidate than the other side maybe?
a.) I already pointed out why I think your assertion about "every" politician having an intolerable base of supporters is wrong.
b.) You just painted ALL non-Bernie politicians as bought by some nebulous group of "special interests."
The key difference is their focus is on an actual positional orientation around values and policy and approach. It's not just devotion to Amy Klobuchar and the lazy assertion that anyone not named Klobuchar is, by definition, a socialist crazypants. The Bernie fan focus is on Bernie, the personality. Values and policy don't matter, because they claim anyone who isn't Bernie is "basically a Republican," including some of the leftmost Senators in the chamber and intellectual leaders of progressive policy. Approach doesn't matter because the approach being advocated (people spontaneously rising up to make change) has no empirical support for being possible. If it did, we'd have been doing it already!
Okay, but how do you plan to fix it? The healthcare system is complicated and has a lot of people involved in it. What's the plan to decide how it should be changed and how do we push that plan through in a way that addresses the needs of not just the recipients of care, but the people providing the care and all the facilities and institutions that train and support those people? All these interesting questions get brushed aside by saying "elect Bernie and get a revolution that will make it all happen" but that's not actually advocating for anything concrete to improve peoples' lives. You're not organizing around anything but Bernie. What happens when Bernie is gone? What do you organize around then? The next guy with a crotchety old grandpa affect? What is actually being changed?
Now the "revolution" argument might be easier to take seriously if there was actually some empirical support for it happening. You don't strictly have to be President to have an outside popular movement spring up to push an agenda. Sanders could have been doing this all along from the Senate or even as a private citizen, but it hasn't been happening at the level we need. So what makes you think just making him President will suddenly create the kind of sweeping popular tidal wave we would need to whip centrist Democrats and Republicans if it can't even consolidate him more than 30% to 40% of the Democratic Party in a primary?
Insofar as there were popular movements taking off, they didn't really offshoot from the 2016 Sanders campaign so much as rally around other independent groups. When the Republicans were trying to pass a bill to gut the consumer protections, coverage for pre-existing conditions, and ability to stay on parents' insurance until 26 it wasn't the Bernie Sanders folks who led the charge on screaming it down. It was mostly the types of suburban wine mom organizers that these same "Left twitter slactivists" spent the past two weeks tweeting snake emojis at.
In other words, when people's healthcare was actually being threatened and policy changes were about to go into effect that would lead to even more people dying, the Sanders brigade was either out to lunch or more focused on carping about all the reasons the ACA was bad and trying to sell a false narrative that it produced no material improvements to anyone's lives rather than actually doing anything for the people under threat. This is why it's a toxic fan base. That's not building a movement to achieve anything concrete, it just a cult of personality that will dissolve as soon as the cult leader is no longer relevant. Any organizing base it might have had is just going to get scooped up by whichever grifter of a rhetoritician happens to come around. There is no lasting movement or power base here the way the campaign keeps suggesting there is.
Okay, first off. This is some straight up bad faith arguing. Since Trump has been in office, we have seen multiple protests and demonstrations protesting his policies.
Are you really going to insinuate that all of Sander's supporters are only into cyberbullying? The organizations that make up his endorsements include:
Their activities include a 1,000 person protest to establish a Green New Deal committee and a November 2018 sit-in which eventually led to the reinstatement of the Committee on the Climate Climate. They also were a force for trying to get a Climate Change debate, which was eventually vetoed by the DNC chair.
While this organization was formed from the ashes of Sanders's 2016 campaign, and has had some internal struggles, it has local branches across 100+ local groups, and is aimed at supporting progressives running in local races and taking on leadership positions in local Democratic parties. At the end of 2018, the house had just as many moderate democrats as they did progressives, a boost from previous years. That's not to say Our Revolution is the decider in these elections, but they are a piece of the larger progressive agenda.
Surely you can't say that all these oroganizations, unions, celebrities, mayors, state legislators, DNC party officials, business leaders, current and former US representatives, international heads of states, and all the other people are cyberbullying for their agenda?
Who are these Bernie supporters that you are talking about?
Maybe the appeal for Sanders could be the approach for trying something new? Getting young people (who overwhelmingly support Sanders) into politics so they have more of a say in the policy decisions that impact them is a revolution. Getting working class Americans back into the Democratic on economic principles is a political revolution. Getting the discussion to ideas like universal healthcare is a revolution. The entire point of Sanders's campaign and appeal is his ability to bring more people, who are extremely energized and willing to donate to his campaign and others (as many of his supporters did in the 2016 Senate races) Which is why his donor list was one the most coveted pieces from his campaign.
I'm not going to address the rest of your comment, because to be quite honest, it is full of bad faith arguments that aren't sourced, and is soaking with condescension. For your benefit, I'm going to show you where you can improve the way you comment so it isn't so aggressive:
What do you want someone to say to this? What is your intended response from a comment like this?
Why quote "revolution"? The campaign Sanders is running literally has a slogan, "Not Me, Us". The policy goals Bernie would enact is heavily and explicitly stated as depending on people to be politically energized.
Who are you exactly referring to here?
Please, cite some sources.
Edit: Disengaging from this conversation. I think I have said all that I wanted to.
It really is! The content of why the people are rising up matters.
Both white supremacists and civil rights leaders "rose up" in the 60s and 70s, and people were making the same false equivalence then, too.
This seems to be devolving into a typical quote-nitpicking war and is unlikely to make any progress. You, @NaraVara, and the other people involved should probably just recognize that you fundamentally disagree and aren't going to convince each other of anything, instead of continuing to dissect each other's posts line by line.
You'll notice that the two main examples you cited were (sometimes quite emphatically) not Sanders' main base of support. His position on guns was fairly weak in 2016 and many among the Women's March number were very much for Hillary Clinton for what I think are fairly obvious reasons. This has actually been the main take-away this election, that the most engaged activists over the past 4 years are largely on the side of Warren.
Most of the rest of the activism you're talking about came about from Unions and advocacy organizations, not Sanders himself, and it's unclear how a Sanders Presidency actually helps or intensifies that activity in any way that any other Democratic presidency wouldn't do just as well or better.
Our Revolution, for what it's worth, had deeply disappointing results in 2018. While I don't want to hold that against a fledgeling organization in its first year, it really doesn't speak to Sanders' ability to actually walk the walk when it comes to building broad-based organizing capacity. I think he gets that it's important, but I don't think he has a strong understanding about how to do it here in 2020, and his staffing his campaign with extremely online grifters, like Sirota, kind of makes that clear.
But aside from the unions, those aren't the pitch for Sanders' theory of change. His theory of change is that he can stir up engagement from vociferous, disaffected voters for sweeping change in ways that nobody else can. But there is no actual proof that this is possible, and to cover up from that we get whisper campaigns that everyone else is secretly in cahoots with corporate malefactors to sabotage him. Do you want to talk about how the Working Families Party endorsed Warren and suddenly the Sanders aligned folks picked up the pitchforks to allege, once again, that the vote was rigged?
Do you really think Unions would end up weaker under a Warren or even a Biden presidency? Do you not think any Democrat doesn't realize where their bread is buttered there? If you want to organize to foment change, the energy should be directed at the grassroots, not on electoralism at the Presidential level. When we had the DNC chair election between Tom Perez--one of the most pro-labor and effective Secretaries of Labor in our lifetimes--and Keith Ellison, Perez was tarred by the Bernie stans as a corporate stooge. I was actually an Ellison supporter, but the attacks on Perez and the intensity of the vitriol directed against him was way WAY out of line. Even Keith Ellison was embarrassed by them.
And this is the sort of thing that puts off anyone who actually works on this sort of thing. It's just so tiresome having to fend off this kind of mendacious bullshit every fucking time someone in the Bernie faction pits themselves against any other Democrat. The fact that Sanders then took those same people and hired them to run his campaign this year was the main factor in me, and many others, NOPEing the hell out of there. They will just seize on any excuse to play the victim and conclude that the DNC is corrupt and out to get them.
This is, at best, 5% of the electorate which is nothing to sneeze at when it comes to winning an election but also nowhere near enough to actually foment the kind of political revolution he's saying we need. It takes a pretty sheltered view to think this kind of progressivism actually has the numerical advantage to accomplish that kind of pressure.
And what's more, the way he does this actively alienates big swathes of, not just the moderate electorate, but even parts of the progressive activist base that disagree with his people (see the Tom Perez thing). He talks the talk about organizing and revolutionary change, but he doesn't walk the walk. If he really wants to bring back New Deal style Social Democracy, I'd expect him to dedicate himself to party building and reform. But to do that, he would have actually needed to join the party he wants to reform. The guy is just too set in his ways to make the uncomfortable choices it takes to drive the kind of change he's talking about. Even if he gets what needs to happen, he fundamentally just doesn't understand what he needs to do to make it happen.
Plenty of skillful politicians manage to have friends and influence people while still being extremely progressive.
You don't need to say anything because they're rhetorical questions meant to highlight the key problem with your position, which is that it's organizing around the wrong thing. The whole point is for you to sit and think about what kind of change you're actually trying to accomplish by embodying all your hopes into a person instead of a real movement.
If you want an example of how movement building actually managed to remake a party from the inside out, look at Grover Norquist. He didn't run a personalistic campaign to put him in charge. He teamed up with Newt Gingrich to make a bunch of Republicans sign a "Contract with America" codifying the key elements of a conservative agenda. Then he held them to that agenda, praising those who were in line with it and threatening those who weren't. One of the reasons this was effective was because Norquist was outside the system and able to pressure everyone equally. Sanders is trying to pull that by focusing the lens on himself, and it won't work because you end up doing this circular firing squad routine where you start sniping at your staunchest allies, like Warren, for not being on the same team. I shudder to think what would have happened between Sanders and Sherrod Brown if he had actually stayed in the race.
A great example of how you do this right is what AOC did with the Green New Deal. Now that's a "Contract with America" style proposal that people can jump on. But you notice a key thing about how she did it? It wasn't billed as an inseparable part of her and an election campaign. It was framed as a legislative agenda that anyone across the spectrum can be for or against. That's organizing for something instead of embodying hopes in a person, which is the key distinction between movement building for change and a destructive personality cult.
I'm hardly the first person to point out that this slogan is fundamentally at odds with the campaign's message that "Only Bernie Sanders can drive the grassroots revolution we need to make change happen." If the grassroots revolution is really what you need to make the change, you should be able to get it going regardless of who is President as long as that President isn't actively hostile to them (the way the GOP is). Running for President isn't the best move if your goal is to engage in that sort of party/movement building, and one of the key steps to engaging in that kind of party building is to actually be engaged and build alliances within the party you want to build instead of burning bridges within it and trying to set up alternative power-structures outside of it.
The spontaneous organizing by groups like Indivisible and Moms Demand Action, along with Disability Rights advocates, Planned Parenthood, etc. were the strongest voices in protecting the provisions of the ACA. I was a pretty avid Chapo Trap House listener and reader of Jacobin and Current Affairs at the time, and one of the main motivators behind me unsubscribing and walking away from all of that mess was the amount of joy they were deriving from watching Obama's legacy being picked apart rather than caring about the human cost of what was about to happen.
Not true at all. Leftism encompasses people like Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Nina Turner, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal, Mark Pocan.... Literally a whole range of people from an old white Jewish man to a young Muslim woman.
You just named Sanders' campaign staff and main endorsers, and I will bet dollars to donuts that if any of them hadn't endorsed Sanders you wouldn't be including them in your list. I notice, for example, that Ayanna Pressley isn't there despite having been talked about in the same breath as AOC, Tlaib, and Omar all along.
This doesn't really undercut my comment that "Leftism" is being presented as a personality cult around Bernie Sanders rather than an actual program of policies or values.
No, I would happily include Ayanna Pressley on that list. I was just going from memory and didn't.
I'm really not sure what your end game with this line of argument is. You could dismiss any movement this way. "Oh the Civil Rights movement was just a cult of personality around MLK, and all the other people you can name are just people who support MLK." Except the argument has even less salience about Sanders because he almost literally doesn't even have a personality.
The fact that it's called the "Civil Rights movement" and not "The MLK movement" shows you exactly how you can't dismiss any movement this way. It was organizing around a program instead of a person. There were concrete policy goals being pushed and people argued about who should lead and what to do all the time without being dismissed as "false civil rights leaders."
Funny enough, there were parts of the Civil Rights movement that were kind of a cult of personality, such as the Nation of Islam. And we can see how that didn't turn out nearly as well over the long term as the broader based, issue-oriented coalition MLK was building. And that's kind of the point of it being a movement. There are factions and various groups with different ideas about how things should go. They're all part of the same struggle and have the same end-goal, but it's just not helpful to start spreading mendacious attacks about how anyone who isn't with a figurehead is a secret traitor.
Trying to pitch anyone who runs against Bernie Sanders as being "the new Hillary Clinton" or "Republican Light" is totally unhelpful and out of line.
I don't really understand what you mean by this? Sanders doesn't have a personality?
The progressive movement.
Right, he's practically devoid of a personality. What his followers like about him is essentially a bullet point list of his policies, not the guy himself.
Fair enough, but everyone from Barack Obama to Pete Buttigieg self-identify as progressives. Are you willing to accept them in the tent?
If he's "devoid of personality" what is Larry David impersonating then? If his followers like a bullet point list of his policies rather than the guy himself, then why are 27% of them selecting Joe Biden as their second choice?. If the policies are so important, then why are the minute policy differences between him an Elizabeth Warren being magnified to imply she's a Republican lite?
Sorry, I just don't see how this jives with reality at all.
Jeff Sessions self-identifies as a champion of civil rights. Shall we accept him into the tent with MLK?
As it so happens, back when Pete actually was running as a progressive, I did donate to his campaign. He's long since broken with his previously progressive policy platform, of course.
Larry David is impersonating an ornery old Jerry Seinfeld in a Sanders suit. Normally it's the mainstream media arguing that Sanders has no personality--what a switcheroo this conversation is.
Frankly, I can't fathom why Joe Biden has any support at all at this point. Name recognition, perhaps.
Idk about all that, but I definitely have great respect for Sanders’s personality. He’s more committed, honest, and prescient than any of the other candidates IMO. He’s been fighting for gay rights since Warren was a republican.
I have seen multiple political threads with you devolve into pointless nit-picking. Hopefully this will not be one as well.
In this thread, Your central point against Bernie has been that his campaign and supporters bully people online. I was not aware of anything like this and trying to google about this, there was only one article I could find from a new outlet called Cafe (this article seemed more like a joke than a piece of Journalism, so I could not really take it seriously). However, there were several article put out by Bernie asking his Supporters to be civil and not harass people. Which indicates to some problem with his supporters bullying people.
(Also, I am also not an American, and not involved in your elections, but find US politics entertaining :)
With the above context, can I ask you a couple of questions?
You know, nobody calls my nit-picking "pointless" unless I start going after sacred cows. The rest of the time it's just being thorough.
Not really. My central point has been that he prioritizes rhetoric over a coherent theory for how he is going to do anything or push for change. The theory he does propose ("political revolution") is incoherent and, more importantly, doesn't actually have anything to do with the job of being President, so if it was workable he should have been doing it all along. But the few attempts he has made to do so have been anemic compared to other movements that sprang up independently of him, which kind of undercuts the argument that "only Sanders" can activate the base.
Then, to distract from this, his supporters run whisper campaigns to question the progressive bona fides of his opponents.
This is extremely surprising as this has been a narrative thread both in 2016 and now. Just search for the term "Bernie Bro" and filter out sources, like Jacobin or The Intercept, that are in the tank for Sanders. It's been a coordinated push to drag the reputations of each rising candidate through the mud one-by-one. Most recently it was Warren's turn in the barrel, but it's been a pattern through this campaign as well as back in 2016. In 2016 I cut him a lot of slack because his campaign was cobbled together from nothing.
The fact that it has happened again and he has actually hired people to his campaign staff who were known for being part of it, makes it seem like it's not just a coincidence that it's some over exuberant fans and it must come from the top.
I'll vote for Sanders and it's going to consign progressivism to the dustbin of political history for a generation. Whoever wins this election is going to be stuck holding the bag for all the shit the Trump administration has built up. They're going to inherit a tanking economy or, worse yet, have the economy tank on their watch all with an eviscerated Federal government without enough experts or career bureaucrats to navigate it.
Sanders has made it clear from how he runs his campaign that he not actually very good at political horse-trading or winning support from people outside his camp. He's going to get into office, have everything collapse on him, lack the skill or contacts or political networks to actually solve any of it because of the bridges he's burned, and he will end up discrediting everything his movement has been trying to fight for in the process, making it that much harder to actually beat centrists and neoliberals in the future.
And worst of all is the basic actuarial odds. A man of his age has a 30% chance of dying within 5 years. Sanders has already had one heart attack (that we know about) this year. It's honestly just unconscionable that he and Biden are running right now knowing how risky it is that a health scare in October (which is not at all outside the realm of possibility) could end up throwing an election to the other side.
This whole thing is just a manufactured smear. Every campaign has vocal supporters online who go negative on the other candidates. Let's not forget all those sexist "Obama boys" in 2008 who didn't like Hillary Clinton.
Completely agreed here. This economy is doomed to tank, and if it doesn't tank before the election, whichever Democrat wins is going to be stuck holding the bag, and it will be disastrous. Regardless of who the Democrat is, Republicans are going to say that socialism ruined the glorious Republican economy. In a certain sense, the best way to win is to let everything crash under Trump. Were it not for the irreparable damage to the Supreme Court, that'd almost be appealing.
How many of them appoint the big ones to be Communications Directors and Campaign Managers?
We absolutely shouldn't forget them. There's a lesson there in how Obama managed the contingent of shithead supporters that he did have who were overaggressive and off putting. One of the strengths of the Obama campaign was that they managed to keep those people reined in and prevented them from overwhelming the general positive tone that the campaign wanted to strike.
That's message discipline and it comes from hiring the right people and setting the right tone at the top. This is something which Sanders doesn't seem to understand the importance of and it's the main reason he lost control of the narrative with his own people late in the campaign season, allowing it to be taken over by Green Party grifters and doing disruptive things throughout the DNC, like booing John Lewis. That's the sort of thing that casts serious doubt on whether he has the managerial chops to handle himself if he hits the big time.
The linked TPM article just claims that the Sanders campaign and Jeff Weaver are toxic without providing examples or substantiating anything. Nothing there substantiates the "Bernie bro" narrative.
Just gonna address all your threads in one comment:
The TPM article points out that whatever toxicity is emanating from the Sanders campaign is coming from the tone established by Sanders himself and not solely due to overexuberant backers online. The entire second half of the article is laying out examples of what he's doing that's stoking these sentiments.
It's much easier to make singular decisions to appoint people or tear stuff down. It's much harder to actually build, say, a functioning healthcare system. It takes expertise and consensus building to do that that you can't just ram through.
You've got an extremely narrow and and ahistorical idea of FDR's actual route to power. If you think the trajectories of a blue-blooded political insider who worked as Woodrow Wilson's secretary are similar to Sanders I just don't know what to tell you.
By. . .not joining it? This is kind of a howler. How has a guy been "engineering a takeover of the party for 5 years" without being a part of the party, without currying any favor with the party leadership, or cultivating any support among the party base?
What has he actually been doing to build the union movement aside from vague assertions that he supports it? What's the actual vision for expanding the union membership? What are the signature fights within union organizations that he cares about and what side of them does he come down on?
How do you figure he's going to "unify progressives with the Democratic Party" when he's done nothing to get buy-in or support from the rest of the party? It sounds a lot more like the plan is to boot anyone who isn't a Sanders supporter from the Democratic Party and then assume that means you're going to get your way across the board rather than what will actually happen, which is being relegated to rump status.
If you're going to draw an equivalence between Jeff Session's civil rights record and Barack Obama's progressive record it's going to be very hard to take you seriously.
Who in the hell is saying Sanders has no personality? I have literally never heard this statement. As for your Joe Biden comment, I again don't get it. You cannot possibly imagine that 1 out of 3 Sanders supporters support Biden as a second choice just because those are the only two people they've heard of. You don't think it could possibly be because they're the two crotchety old grandpas in the race and the competition is all women, gay, or Tom Steyer possibly?
It occurs to me that a lot of Americans just, fundamentally, don't understand what the Presidency is or what politics is for.
They seem to think these people are competing to be your super-best friend who will help you move and give you a ride to the airport. They seem to think politics is about sloganeering instead of passing bills or staffing agencies.
And you can hardly blame them. The elite media and political institutions treat it this way too! Sander's own campaign is talking about how he is going to build power through organizing and creating a political pressure group. Only if that was actually a viable route to power, he should have been able to do it outside of a Presidential campaign too! Where was all this "movement building" to pass bills while he was in the Senate? Where was it to stop Kavanaugh from being put on the court? If he can only ever summon the troll army to cyberbully people on his behalf, and none of those people are Susan Collins or Mitch McConnel, what good is it?
Except Trump has demonstrated that this is a viable route to power. He has whipped the entire Republican party in line with him and gotten them to agree with ideas that would've been unthinkable in Republican politics just 4 years ago. Fiscal conservatives are now willing to spend billions of dollars on an absolute boondoggle. The bully pulpit works. See also FDR.
Trump is just an empty shell who regurgitates Fox News nonsense. This wasn't a viable route to power for him, he's just the avatar of the Fox News takeover of the party and was 30 years in the making.
If Sanders wanted to start a news media network to pickle Leftists in the same mental traps as Fox News does conservatives there might be a viable route to power, but a Presidential candidacy ain't it.
And what's more, Trump has been totally useless at actually accomplishing programmatic goals. His only successes in office have been in tearing down protections that existed before, but he hasn't been able to build or implement anything that will outlast him. It's a wholly nihilistic outlook.
How much do you know about how FDR actually got the New Deal done? He started running for President as secretary of the navy. He engineered his takeover of the party for about 6 years prior, leaning heavily on support from the (then quite strong) trade unionist movement. FDR's main successes involved unifying the socialist movement with centrist liberals to create unified Democratic Party. He was good at picking the right enemies, but his route to power is hardly the one Sanders is pursuing and the "purity test" approach of modern Leftists would definitely not jive with a guy who made common cause with segregationists and shrugged his shoulders at Japanese internment to get the New Deal through.
Most notably, FDR relied on networks of activist leaders to get buy in from the rank-and-file. It did not rely on a groundswell of popular support directly. The popular support was mediated by delegates and caucus leaders.
That's all he wanted to do, and he was very successful in so doing. If he'd wanted to do more, perhaps he would've, but he's only interested in self-preservation. Also, the idea that none of what he's done will outlast him is very optimistic. His damage to the Supreme Court will last a generation, and his disastrous tax cuts will probably survive long hereafter since establishment Democrats generally like tax cuts too.
If your point is to note that Sanders and FDR aren't exactly the same person, then I take that point, but I'm not sure what it accomplishes or helps to clarify.
Sanders started running for President as a United States Senator.
Sanders has been engineering a takeover of the party for about 4-5 years prior
Now that trade unions are incredibly weak, he is working to bolster those once-strong organizations and is winning the endorsements from many of them....
Sanders' main success, should he win the nomination, will also be the unifying of the progressive movement and the Democratic party. The more we enumerate these supposed differences, the more similar they're starting to feel.
FDR would have been far less successful every step of the way if he had had to contend with the captured mainstream media we have today.
Those of us paying attention to the presidential candidates aren't much better, considering that we often talk about the merits of presidential candidates' plans as if they were the ones who pass the laws.
It's not at all clear to me what we should be "interviewing" for.
To be quite honest, I would rather have a guy I agree with who can't get things done versus a guy who can "get things done" but those things are all bad.
I realize that latter scenario doesn't happen often, but it's the sort of weird situation one finds themselves thinking about when Trump is President. I am often warned that the election might have a "smart" Trump who can stoke the same ur-fascist Id that Trump does, but also competently run an administration. I would MUCH rather have "dumb" Trump than that guy, but I'm also not really sure if "competent enough to effectively run a government" can inhabit the same mind as "charismatic enough to win the loyalty of insane Fox News poisoned voters." These might be mutually exclusive personality traits.
What's the value in "getting things done" if the things being done make things worse? An ineffective firefighter would be preferable to a highly competent advocate for pouring gasoline on the fire no?
It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth to see a news outlet picking sides like this. Just because no outlet is without their biases, it doesn't mean they ought to blatantly throw their weight behind one group, especially an outlet like the NYT.
But I generally don't like Op-Eds anyway.
The NYT has endorsed a candidate in every election since 1860. This isn't new for them at all, the break from convention is endorsing two candidates.
Ah, I didn't know that. Thanks. Somehow, I like that less.
This is literally what "editorial" means. a newspaper article written by or on behalf of an editor that gives an opinion on a topical issue.
I'm aware, like I said, I don't like op-eds n general.
The Editorial board and team is entirely separate from the newsroom, as with most major newspapers. I agree that having endorsements can create the perception the entire paper is biased, but in actuality the people writing these editorials are entirely separate from the ones reporting the news.
I totally get that. I still follow the NYT, but like you said, it can give the perception that the the entire paper is biased, and beyond that, it uses the long-standing reputation of the NYT to push an agenda (even ones I agree with). It's why I don't like op-eds in general.
Nitpick: editorials are written by the newspaper's editorial board, and op-eds (originally on the opposite page from the editorials) are written by outside writers and columnists. It sounds like you're saying that there shouldn't be editorials? Or do you dislike the entire opinion section?
Thanks for the clarification. I dislike the entire opinion section, but I won't say it shouldn't be there all together. Just because I don't get much value out of it, I won't say that it's worthless.
In response to this endorsement, #IEndorseBernie became a trending topic in Twitter.
I'm not super opposed to this as I don't really have thorough knowledge of these candidates' policies and am supportive of Warren since she is effectively the runner-up to Bernie in progressivism but with calmer rhetoric as her differentiator, which is pretty agreeable to from my point of view and have just skimmed through Amy's page since I have never heard of her, but I will need to say that the whole 'compromise with the other side' thing being a failure is far more likely to be a product of conservative news organizations and is probably very unlikely to work if fox news and others keep being so partisan (although this presumes that noone could ever questions their preferred news source,although the last presidency has made this not too ridiculous of a statement.) My other complaint is that Amy Klobuchar doesn't seem to be pushing the full progressive platform (although this is a complaint, not a problem, and the point of compromise is to mitigate this 'problem'), and unfortunately her numbers are in the single digits, and not because her ideas are effectively a decade ahead of the rest of us like yang. The last problem I have with Warren is that her quip involving being part native American will be played plenty on conservative pundits and the debates, and since she has identified herself as a native American once, It might be taken seriously by enough people to actually matter, although there's an example for this in every candidacy.
Alright, my attempt to gently warn people away from quoting wars yesterday obviously didn't work out, so I'm going to lock this now, since it's just turned into yet another place for the exact same political bickering as always, and has no relation to the NYT endorsement. You can private-message each other if you want to continue the arguments.
I think this duo-endorsement should be a wake-up for the Democrats. They've hit the head on the giant nail those supporting the left-wing candidates in the Democratic party refuse to acknowledge:
Just like in 2016, Trump can play these two Democratic factions against each other. The worst possible outcome of the primary process for the democrats would be the same result as in 2016: The two top candidates for each wing of the Democrats to battle each other way after the race in all reality is over.
This leads to a very real possibility of a trump re-election, how absurd that seems even writing out.
As things stand now, the Democrats seem to have come no further in choosing a new direction for the party than they were in 2016. What a squandered opportunity.
I think the reaction among Democrats on this duo-endorsement not picking sides is pointing out the mote in another's eye while there's a beam in one's own.
There seems an active unwillingness among Democrats in recognizing that Sanders can't possibly dream to unify the two wings of the party.
There's a seemingly equally active unwillingness among Democrats in recognizing that Biden can't possibly dream to unify the two wings of the party.
Electability polls are all but useless before tear-down from the other party starts when it's closer to the big day. Trump is being attacked every day. It's first when nominated, the weakness of both Biden and Sanders will become clear. Challengers systematically over-perform in polls in a match-up against the incumbent president early in in the primaries before they start to face any real level of scrutiny. That ramps up almost exponentially later on in the race.
So you're left with everyone else in the race but Biden and Sanders. They're too tied up in defending old records and bygone years to be effective presidents. They just can't effectively whip the Democrats in either house.
Klobuchar and Warren? I don't know.
Beyond Biden and Sanders, who're your picks not just to win against an incredibly weak president, but to start to repair the damage this country and its institutions have been subjected to over the last years? Who can actually start unifying a divided country where institutions have been actively prevented from doing their jobs will because that's been a political aim?
I dont believe it's reasonable to demand someone exit a race before the total votes have been counted just because it seems likely they will lose, at least when it comes to the final candidates in a primary. It's also a tactic touted, at least in my experience, primarily by HRC supporters from 2016 who were saying it before the primary was even half way over. So frankly, in most cases, it just comes off as the person saying, "You should just compromise and side with me instead of me compromising and siding with you."
If you need to win 80%+ of votes in every remaining contest, you're there to spoil. Everyone knows there's simply a theoretical possibility of getting the nomination.
The whole spiel was "give me concessions and I'll withdraw so you don't take more damage" from Sanders for weeks. I'm being generous when I say a month and not longer.
Pretty clear we're not going to agree on this. Hope you have a good day.
Yang seems to pull in a lot of conservatives despite or maybe because UBI is a rather far-left idea.
I'm rather surprised at the apparent disinterest outside his base.
I don't think unification is possible barring some sort of external tragedy or other event that forces us to band together. The people who vote Republican and are overly concerned about the fate of white people in the country are going to continue kicking and screaming and doing whatever they can to hang onto power until either they defeat the rest of us or they're rendered politically irrelevant.
Off-topic but why would the people who like Biden dislike Bernie? They seem to support Biden based on his status as VP of Obama and name recognition (or more specifically, going back to how it was before trump), not about his policies. If Biden supporters see his policies, I don't really think they would really disagree with them unless the media deals a bad hand to Bernie.
The full explanation for why Biden supporters would dislike Sanders requires a very long detour into George Lakoff's theory of framing, and the history of anti-socialist propaganda throughout the Cold War.
Basically, there's a strong generational divide in perceptions of socialism. People who grew up during the Cold War (a/k/a Boomers) were immersed in an equation of socialism with "Evil Empire" (a/k/a Soviet, Chinese, and other nominally socialist or communist dictatorships).
The Boomers lived in a soft mixed market economy, with socialized programs like Social Security, public infrastructure, subsidized college, full employment fiscal policy, etc. that resulted from the post-Depression New Deal and Johnsonian Great Society programs, but that wasn't "socialism".
Bernie Sanders and other progressives are calling for the restoration and expansion of New Deal-era programs under the banner of "socialism" - they're successfully reframing the term back towards its original economic meaning. But the Boomer generation has a hard cognitive frame that equates socialism with intrusive, authoritarian governance, despair, poverty, loss of individuality, abolition of private property, anti-religious ideology, and other evils.
Even if Biden really was proposing identical policies to Sanders and Warren's, he'd never dare to call them socialist because that word is so negatively loaded for his generation. Under the circumstances, Joe Biden's older supporters are unlikely to support Bernie Sanders. It's part of why Elizabeth Warren characterized herself as "a capitalist to my bones" even while endorsing the same economic agenda as Sanders. She's suspect to core Sanders supporters, but rightly recognized the cognitive block and is trying to circumvent it.