Hillary didn't lose because she's a woman, she lost because she's a condescending crook.
- A Washington State alternate for Sanders who voted for Clinton in the general
[0]: In fact I found this latter accusation so offensive that I considered going full rogue and voting Trump.
And when people revolt, you double down. As if you wanted Trump to get his second term.
Your social circle may be made up of extremists who won't tolerate diversity of opinion, but there are many, many centrists in this country and if this election does mark the end of the "centrist" Democrat, it may mark the beginning of Republican rule.
It's the same thing that has been happening in Britain, where the Labour party as lead by Corbyn is miles behind the Conservatives (who in turn have made blunder after blunder).
Not saying I agree with that at all but thats what I see in a large circle of leftist, northern middle-age/class people.
Corbyn is a disaster and has no new ideas - he's not even a reliable Brexitsceptic. His only advantage is being free of the taint of Blairite compromise. But who else is there? Possibly Tom Watson. Someone really needs to come up with a good answer to the question "what is the point of the Labour party?" other than "not being the Tory party".
(Don't blame me, I'm voting SNP, who give exactly the kind of reliable centrist technocracy that's extremely popular with actual voters.)
This is not true at all, at least for anyone who counts when there isn't going to be a vote. The media and the entire consultocracy have rallied around the Blair generation even harder, and still have the bizarre fantasy that a David Miliband could ride in and save Labour. It's the same fantasist thinking that thought Clinton was a shoo-in and Brexit could never happen. Labour has no future as a moderate Tory party because the Tory party is currently a moderate Tory party. Labour already has no future in Scotland, and should ally with the SNP; that the Blairites can't see that Labour's last election in Scotland was lost because Dugdale was outperformed on every level by both Sturgeon and Davidson shows that they're living in a fantasy world.
Centrist Labour have openly declared scorched-earth war on the left of the party, and out of some misplaced sense of civility or ideal of compromise in governance, Corbyn won't do the same. He needs to use the power while he has it, and if the attempt is a failure, clear out and allow the centrists to do their unstained-Tory-governement-in-waiting thing until the next financial crash.
Corbyn's ideas are fine; from my (absurdly distant) perspective, what the Labour party needs are old ideas, not new ones. The bulk of the PLP seem to think that their only job is to listen to Tory proposals for cuts, counter-propose the same cuts, but only 2/3rds of them, scream that the Tories are heartless over and over again, and then abstain on the final vote. Corbyn is the only one offering any proposals that aren't slightly modified Tory ones. The problem is that Britain has one of the worst media environments in the Anglosphere outside of Australia, precisely zero mainstream outlets can manage to quote an entire sentence from him verbatim, and think that Bill Clinton telling lobbyists that he's a shabby "maddest person in the room" is an important news story. There shouldn't be secret PLP enemies lists to be "discovered." He should have proxies that are reading these lists to every outlet that will listen, every day.
No voters are looking for centrist technocrats other than the highly-paid professional service workers who the centrist technocrats are drawn from. Voters are looking for change from the neoliberal consensus. Labour and The Conservatives are completely weak, and in total disarray. Wait until your own racist reality tv-show host shows up, with a fistful of protectionism and an explicit platform to completely reverse austerity, steeped in racism and a hint of social conservatism. Britain is gagging for it - Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson - is Lord Sugar available?
Sorry about the babbling, but it just annoys me that people don't see that it's the left being marginalized by the media, not Corbyn in particular. Anyone who came from the left would have their mannerisms ruthlessly battered by the British press, and content-free constant accusations of "unelectability" and "uselessness." Eventually, a demagogue will come who will completely dominate the press through naked aggression, evocations of a better, purer time in the past, and, likely enough, an large ownership stake in the media itself. Then, we'll learn the lesson yet again that we should have learned from Western dabbling in the Middle East: once you've helped an oligarchy to eliminate all of the tolerant, secular opposition in a country, all you have left are the maniacs.
Again, sorry. The idea of ranting like this to a SNP voter is silly:) Just needed to get it out.
edit: There was 50x the coverage of a later retracted non-story about whether Corbyn could get a seat on a train than Chilcot, which had come and gone in maybe two weeks (after all of the wait.) Colin Powell was pretty happy about the priorities of the British media. Why would you relitigate some old pointless war anyway?
John Stewart even made fun of this particular attack 6 years ago (http://www.cc.com/video-clips/m0pvy5/the-daily-show-with-jon...), and our principle easily extends to all the other accusations the Left thinks are still effective in their "fight".
McCain: 60 million votes; Romney: 60 million votes; Trump: 60 million votes.
Obama: 72 million votes; Obama 2: 66 million votes; Clinton: 60 million votes.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
But he ran strongly to the right of the GOPe on:
Immigration
The Muslim subset of that
Globalism
The Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA)
Political Correctness
Related, respect for the Mainstream Media (we'll know he's really serious if he takes the advice to abolish the White House Press Corps).
Need more? I'm sure I can come up with more. But you're 100% right that "everybody is fucking tired of ... the Clintons", and after having them "live rent free in my brain" for 24 years (!!!) I'm profoundly glad Trump put them in the ash heap of history. Except I have expect Master Level Troll Obama (something he has in common with Trump) to not pardon them, to not "end our long national nightmare" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Gerald_Ford)WR... to them.
Seriously, me and mine are prepared for one and continuously upping our preparations (note, those hold as well for many/most disasters), but we don't see specifics on the horizon, didn't even WRT to Hillary labeling us as irredeemable. What would be the Fort Sumter? Which, I'll note, happened over 3 months after the state succeeded.
Since I don't see any prospects for "try[ing] to bring things back together somewhere in the middle" after what my side perceives as an unrelenting and pretty much ever increasing assault from the Left for over a century (the Progressives, not to mention our latest reaction of God-Emperor Ascendant, excuse me, President Elect Trump (!!)), I'm really hoping for some sort of middle option.
But really, what choice do the Democrats have but to go as far into the kaleidescope of identity as then can go? The DNC has been totally disgraced as a sham. Its a puppet establishment in the pocket of Wall street and the Corporate Globalists just as much as the Bush Neo-cons were.
There is nothing left of the Democratic party for the working class. They threw the European Americas overboard as 'irredeemable deplorable'. And they think the melting pot and Integration are Racist oppressive ideas of the Patriarchy. The idea that America should have one national language is Racist. The idea that people need legal citizenship in order to vote and collect services is literally Hitler level oppression.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
As bad as the problems are for the Republicans there nothing compared with what is happening to the Democrats.
The Dems CRASHED already. We lost everything. We barely have any states. We do not even make a sizable minority party in the House. We don't have the Senate.
This is the result of years of trying to meddle in with "identity" politics that the GOP are good at. But that's not what the Dems should be doing.
Get back to the populist roots that defined the Party for many years. Get back into that and get back the rural and urban and young voters and we can finally move forward.
Maybe they were once good at it, but I just don't see that as of, say, 2008 and on. See, for example, my one line description of the Alt Right as "People on the right who respond to being called racist with 'We Don't Care'". At least at the national level, the GOPe(stablishment) is either not playing that game, or playing it well. Which is one reason Trump won, and the down ticket races resulted in your cited crashing.
Me, I'm surprised how the Republicans ran the tables statewide in Missouri, defeating a Carnahan and installing a weasel with no moral courage as Governor. And this is a catastrophic change from 2012, when they won Governor, the Senate race, AG, Secretary of State, and Treasurer, that is, every state-wide race but President and Lieutenant Governor. Although we also elected supermajorities to the statehouse, with the governor ending up having the most veto overrides in state history (then again, he didn't play well with the legislature).
We're also not betting that Claire McCaskill will be able to pick her opponent in 2018. I'm not yet willing to say we've turned Red from Purple, but it doesn't look at all good this year.
Eh, no, half weren't irredeemable fit only for liquidation, half were judged capable of being reeducated.
That's important to the extend fewer people believed they belonged in the irredeemable camp, those of us who did got "crawl over broken glass" motivated to vote against Hillary.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
Disrespect for both documents long precedes the identity politics that now condemn them, so I'm not sure it's a new thing so much as a new excuse.
I don't think there's any bringing back that center, at least for the foreseeable future. It takes only one side polarizing things enough (for the purposes of my point, it doesn't matter which side you think did it), to where both sides view those in the middle who claim to belong to their side as traitors.
You think identity politics are imaginary to the various minorities (of all descriptions) who just want equal footing and the ability to not deal with race and gender every day of their lives?
In other words, if I say 'The law enforcement and legal systems of the United States treat African Americans very differently than white Americans, and this needs to be changed.' - is that recognizing a problem that needs attention, or am I engaging in irrelevant, invalid 'identity politics'?
Having said that, if you want to tackle the problem of discrimination separately (e.g. because you believe you can solve more quickly and easily than the economic inequality problem), then the tactics currently used (i.e. feminism - complaining, protesting, self-victimisation, and shaming reasonable conter-arguments) are the wrong way to go about it.
Lets for a moment consider a similar, yet different problem. Rape. Men are statistically more likely to rape women than women are (feminists are happy to point that out). I don't think it's correct to villify men as a group for that, but I do think it's reasonable for women to be extra cautious when interacting with men (e.g. it may be a better idea if a drunk woman asks a female friend to take her home, than a male friend, or to cross the street to avoid strange men at night). Nothing personal, just statistics - and oponents can scream "sexism" as loud as they want, but you can't put a price on personal safety (of course, feminists won't scream "sexism" in this istance, because it's fashionable to shame men).
Same with blacks and crime. Blacks statistically commit more crime, so it's not unreasonable to be more afraid of or cautious with blacks than with whites (or asians). Sure, it could be plain racism (pre-judice), but it could also simply be pattern-matching based on statistics (post-judice). And even if you consider those instincts to be wrong, it's hard to fight against them, after all they've been keeping us alive for thousands of years!
If you nevertheless want to fight those instincts, I guess the best way is more information, and emphasizing that people should be treated as individuals, not as a group. Unfortunately, feminism/social justice/identity politics isn't very good at either. In particular, if you attack (verbally or physically), shame, fire, riot against those whose opinion you want to change, I can't imagine you'll achieve much.
Anyhow, that's my thinking, although I fully accept it's wrong/there's more to it - here in the EU, I'm quite a bit removed from racial issues...
When it comes to the disemploying and physical violence, I assure you that you'll indeed accomplish a lot, just not anything you want. The verbal abuse of course doesn't help, either, and has helped to harden attitudes prior to this period where disemployment and physical violence are rising to the fore.
I do not know the best way to convey this to poor whites. It certainly presents a difficult task to tell someone who has struggles with life, or has overcome almost unsurmountable obstacles, that they have it easier than others. But some have given it a try:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/gina-crosley-corcoran/2014/01/expl...
Also there's nothing bigoted about folks working to make sure women get the same wages as men, or to break the cycle of poverty black folks in Chicago's south side are stuck in. Those are problems plain and simple, and they need to be solved.
Yes, there could be other discrimination (e.g. there probably is some discrimination against women achieving high management positions) (although it's really hard to measure) - I agree that's a problem and needs to be solved, but it doesn't appear to me that the public discourse revolves around it (it usually ends at the "70 cents to the dollar" myth), and I think the current tactics are actually counter-productive (e.g. they're making men afraid of working with women, lest they say something inappropriate or wear the wrong t-shirt).
Consider a resource A. All humans should have equal access to this resource, but because of various social, cultural, economic and historical factors, minority groups B and C have less access to A than the rest of humankind. I don't think there is anything wrong with targeting those specific groups to help them engineer better access to resource A.
That's simply not the world I see myself living in; to quote Margret Thatcher, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".
And for today's object lesson on that, see Venezuela, where those that are not pure money problems are inherent and unavoidable in the political process you're endorsing to "target a specific population". As shown by the very word target; in the case of Venezuela, replacing competent STEM types with politically reliable ones, 18,000 in the first wack, and then favoring current production over longer term investment necessary to maintain production levels.
Yes those it's unfair those 4 people take advantage of welfare, but for me, that's an acceptable cost for helping the other 8 who need it. I'm happy my tax dollars go to that.
Of course you can argue forever about whether the cost is worth the benefit, and whether basic income is better than welfare in this form and yadda yadda, but I'm trying to illustrate to you that in a system designed to help a population (I don't agree with you that women are not disadvantaged, but substitute them with any other minority group like black people), some people will inevitably abuse the system, but that's okay as long as there are enough people who benefit to justify the cost of the small number of abuses. In sum: helping a population with less access to resource A is not bigoted and, if implemented right, is a very reasonable approach.
The GOP plays with identity issues (God, Guns, Flag, etc).
The Dems need to stay away from that and get back to the populist roots and focus on the working folk. That is what made the Dems a successful party in the past.
That's all.
Sometimes, a thought percolates up from my poor rural white-boy hind-brain, that maybe instead of absorbing themselves in thinking and protesting and teeth-gnashing about these issues, they might be happier if they focused on themselves and things they can do to improve their own lot in life. If you constantly pick at a scab, it takes forever to heal.
I have to remember to not let these forbidden thoughts dribble out. Damn...
I note that, somewhat to my surprise, in what's considered to be the Purple state of my home Missouri, the Republicans ran the tables this year at the state level, and we had some very good reasons to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate this year (as I did), but he lost by twice the margin of our Senate race, where as I saw it the differences were more clear. The Carnahan dynasty also lost a statewide race.
Only thing off hand I can think that makes sense of those two results is that there was a strong anti-establishment vote, which made the Senate race that much closer. And I guess no one, or no one credible enough, see all our discussion of the decline and fall of our Lügenpresse in this topic, was able to sufficiently point out that the non-establishment Republican gubernatorial candidate was a weasel with no moral courage.
Heck, I stopped reading that part of my local paper when rather early on they endorsed Hillary for her foreign policy experience. Call it disastrously neocon, call it as I do setting a large part of the world on fire and palpably wanting to start a shooting war with Russia, the only county which can end the US in 30 minutes ... well, I'll also note the paper turned off comments for that article. It certainly didn't make any difference in my county's voting numbers.
This kind of divisive and baseless finger-pointing at moderates is what is wrong with US politics. To see it on the liberal side is both ironic and painful. For years the gop ousted moderates in its ranks as RINO's (Republican In Name Only). This approach badly damaged the party: it left them with no standing among young voters, formerly moderate McCain went hard to the right for a presidential primary and never came back to center. Senator Olympia Snowe resigned and penned a famous open letter denouncing this very ostracizing of moderate republicans. It has taken nearly a decade for the republicans to present a candidate with social policies that are not entirely at odds with the under 30 demographic. Trump may be socially distasteful, but he is is not looking to repeal gay marriage and plans to keep pot a "states issue". Imagine hearing that from a GOP candidate 4 years ago.
Now that the GOP has a winning candidate, your answer is to double-down, and call the moderates in your party "weak"? Listen, political stances are neither weak nor strong. They are opinions based in personal experience, individual ethics, and our respective priorities. There is no "right" answer here. There is no "war" being fought. This is how democracy works. The pendulum swings one way and then the other.
Comparing the result of this election to french soldiers being sent to nazi camps is perhaps the single most absurd analogy i have seen since the primaries kicked off. And that is saying a great deal given the ridiculousness we have all suffered the past 18 months. Shameful.