People have a tendency towards "visionary" politicians, who arrive with agendas and strive to make them reality. Politicians who "flip flop" are derided, because changing your position is a sign that you never had real ideals.
But I think we have this backwards—in a representative democracy, the job of a politician is to represent the electorate! The ideal politician, then, would be an empty vessel, who was willing to move to wherever the people are.
And that's exactly who Biden is. He's always been a centrist democrat, but his "center" moves alongside his party. Biden also believes that governing is fundamentally about building coalitions, not smothering the other side.
I am worried that Republicans may simply be unwilling to make any deals, no matter how hard Biden tries or what compromises he's willing to make. But, if anyone can do it—and that's a very, very big "if"—then Biden probably can.
Do I think a boring centrist president is for the best right now to deal with this pandemic and the upcoming recession? Also yes.
But it all has to get through Congress too.
A small observation: you know when we had more political compromise? When we had less (de facto) transparency.
Agreements bargained out in a dark room, with everyone announcing the compromise and expressing support for what's agreed, are how American politics worked best.
Radical transparency poisons compromise. By which I mean, non-comprehensive but absolute transparency: everyone knows details, but no one understands the greater picture.
In a largely uneducated democratic electorate (relative to our elected officials, their staffs, and professionals, and leveled as a non-partisan charge against all parties and independents), why do we try to completely usurp our elected representatives' ability to bargain on our behalf?
We, as voters, should judge our politicians on what they do, not what they reject.
The former results in functional compromises we're not thrilled with. The latter results in ideologically pure paralysis.
More depth: https://president.upenn.edu/meet-president/Mindsets-Politica...
America's political system—as it exists right now—is fundamentally broken. Politicians have discovered that it is not in the minority party's interest to compromise, and so they don't, and nothing whatsoever gets done.
I don't blame Biden for any of this, however. But I'm extremely concerned.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that we should have a robot! Yes, leaders need to listen to experts and advisors and make thoughtful decisions. But they should also stay in tune with the electorate.
Perhaps a politician is naturally inclined towards removing regulations so that it's easier to grow a business. That's a reasonable baseline position—but if there's suddenly an up-swell of support for strong environmental regulations to combat global warming, it's completely reasonable to change your position in response to the will of the country.
If everything is going well and on track in the government, there shouldn't be any news.The president of the united states shouldn't be the center of attention.
Recent history has shown the democrats are also unwilling to make any deals... See the last Stimlus where Republicans wanted to deal for doubling what was already the Largest government expenditure in US history, and the democrats would accept nothing less than 4x that plus several poison pills that had nothing at all do with the economic stimulus that was inside the so called "hero's act"
The problem with the division we have now, is Republicans / Libertarians and to some extend even Union/Blue Dog Democrats have a VERY VERY VERY different view of what the proper role of the federal government to the new "democratic socialist" democrats that have seeming taken over the democrat party (the Bernie, Warren, AOC democrats)
When one side wants 0 new spending but will "compromise" and agree to 1.5 Trillion, and the other side will accept nothing less than 4 Trillion in new spending but a fundamental shift in all aspect of American governance, I am not sure what kind of deal can be had there
But especially given his age and how much focus there has been on suggesting (perhaps falsely) that his health isn't good, a lot more weight has been given to Harris.
Harris did poorly in the primaries and I think even her supporters should be able to see why many people find her to be an extremely undesirable pick (it's not exactly the right political climate to nominate a self-described "Top Cop", and even Biden has a fairly "law and order" voting history, compared to typical for democrats).
I know people who hate trump who claimed to have voted for him or just not voted, because they believe that electing Biden/Harris would create a substantial risk of either Harris becoming president or forcing the dems to nominate Harris in the next election (and thus excluding viable candidates that actually reflect their views)... and that for all the find wrong about Trump, he's at least substantially ineffectual.
But then COVID hit, and I’m fairly certain that having coordinated, science-based leadership in the highest levels of government would have spared us from quite a lot of suffering. So much for rooting for ineffectual.
Yeah, COVID has really emphasized for me (a recovering libertarian) how important it is to have functioning and competent government institutions (along with other social institutions).
The COVID response by the government further illiterates why libertarianism is correct.
Having an authoritarian government is not a solution to a pandemic, and it is sad that once again people are willing to sacrifice essential liberty for promised safety
Ofourse as the truism goes, you will lose both in that deal...
The cult of personality that has wrapped itself around the office of President of the United States is down right terrifying.
The US COVID response doesn't illustrate that any more than Soviet elections [1] illustrated that voting is a sham, which is to say it doesn't illustrate it at all. A particular bad implementation, especially one that was arguably sabotaged, doesn't disprove a concept. A laissez faire response to an epidemic is a bad one, and the US response has been pretty close to that in many areas.
Also Do you believe COVID concerns should out weigh all other things including Economics, and even other health conditions (for example people stopped getting screenings for almost all other health conditions during this time. Cardiologists have come out extremely worried about the drop off in their health segments)
Finally Do you believe all rights can be suspended provided the executive of the government declares a state of emergency? What if any limits on this declaration should there be or this the declaration the sole purview of the executive
> Finally Do you believe all rights can be suspended provided the executive of the government declares a state of emergency? What if any limits on this declaration should there be or this the declaration the sole purview of the executive
Of course not, but you're engaging in over-the-top all-or-nothing hyperbole, even if you don't realize it, so your question isn't reasonable.
Libertarianism seems far more reasonable than it actually is when you mainly compare it to straw men.
I don't disagree, but I also see how its easy to see how other voters don't agree: E.g. look at the performance of other nations. You can make comparisons where the US doesn't look bad (or even looks good) depending on what comparisons you make and what time windows you choose.
Similarly, if you emphasize the importance of the errors of science-driven bodies, the amount of flip-flopping in expert advice (e.g. over masks), or the specific state responses in states that have local administrations more like what we would have hoped for, you could make an argument that it would not have made that much difference. Maybe not a correct argument, but at least one where reasonable and informed people could have a debate over it.
There is a lot of noise in pandemic impact, a lot of noise in how people perceive pandemic impact, and there hasn't been much time to reach robust scientific conclusions on the impact of different policies. I wouldn't argue that differences between policies aren't real, but just that they're (currently) easily spun or discounted.
There is, also, I think a good argument to be made to cautious about science based leadership in general. The tremendous power of science is that it gives you the power to defy tradition, popular will, and even common sense and make the world dramatically better, because its predictions were right. But when science is wrong, it can also be used to defy reason and common sense and bring tremendously bad results. E.g. there has been more than one genocide carried out in the name of "science". Rejecting science is not the answer, but nor is blindly following whatever is passing for science in your civilization at any moment. :)
Keeping in mind that Biden hasn't been a senator since 2009, during his time in the senate he was dead center among senate Democrats in terms of liberal/conservative votes cast (i.e. both more liberal and more conservative than 50% of his fellow Democratic senators): https://voteview.com/person/14101/joseph-robinette-biden-jr . Of course as noted this was over a decade ago, and what passed for centrist back then might not today.
In case you're wondering how this metric pans out for the most recent Senate: https://voteview.com/congress/senate/115/text , which (according to this metric) lists the four most liberal senators (as shown by their senate votes) as, in order, Warren, Harris, Booker, and Sanders.
You can compare the financial reports on their website: https://www.state.gov/plans-performance-budget/agency-financ... and https://2009-2017.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/perfrpt/index.htm
Kamala is very progressive in a way that's a huge liability in the general, but because she's a prosecutor she doesn't get as much credit as she should in the primary. And I think in that sense it can be a liability.
Biden is a stopgap, he was what was required to get rid of Trump, which was job #1, a P1 if you will. A "progressive bubble" or other media-created marketing phrase is not a factor, it's a pure transaction: Trump has to go. People rose to the occasion this time.
> You cannot imagine someone actually liking Biden without being soft in the head
This isn't a fair interpretation of what they were saying, nor realistic. People are going to lament that a big part of Biden's support was functional, in order to get Trump out, but people complain about unchangeable things all the time. It's not significant.
For him to be a "stopgap" at all must imply that some Democrats today see him as the best end-game option, and we just need to "convince" them to be even more progressive
Because the electoral college distorts what "someone better" means. Democrats picked someone more popular than Trump in 2016 and lost. Biden's home state is the swing state of Pennsylvania. Home state advantage is generally fairly minor, but in this case the margins are so close that it might have actually made the difference (obviously we'll have to wait for the final count, which we won't have for days).
> In fact, Mr. Obama would probably have won the Electoral College even if the popular vote had slightly favored Mitt Romney.
> If all states had shifted toward Mr. Romney by 5.3 percentage points, Mr. Obama would still have won Colorado and therefore the Electoral College — despite losing the national popular vote by 1.5 points.
Losing the upper Midwest produces an EC disadvantage for Democrats, but that’s not an impediment to a traditional progressive candidate in the Sanders mold.
Moreover, the EC gives an average of a few point advantage one way or the other. It’s not enough for a “much more progressive” candidate. You can see this by looking at the House popular vote, which is proportional (and not affected by gerrymandering). Republicans regularly win the House popular vote: https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/chat-...
Indeed, which is why one would hope that solutions for moving beyond this creaky, janky system would be embraced in a bipartisan fashion. Sadly, the approach that is furthest along in that regard, the NPVIC (which I have issues with, but is still better than the current system) has so far only been enacted exclusively by states that Biden carried this year. Regardless of the fact that the electoral college does not inherently benefit the Republican party in the long term, the events of the past 20 years have sufficed to make them adamantly against any reform here.
If next election they're up against an attempt for Trump to get back in, then yes, you could expect a large progressive turnout for a Biden re-election. But if he's against a more moderate republican, I don't think you'll see the turnout that happened this year repeat, which may turn out to be a problem for his supporters.
"Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term. While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital. According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president. “If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.” The adviser argued that public acknowledgment of that reality could help Biden mollify younger voters, especially on the left, who are unexcited by his candidacy and fear that his nomination would serve as an eight-year roadblock to the next generation of Democrats."
It seems the best we can hope for is a president who doesn't try to fire CDC experts and who doesn't appoint far right judges.
How can you claim that when Biden was one of the least left leaning democratic candidates?
If by "someone better" you mean more progressive, then you're exactly right: you need to convince a portion of the moderate majority to be more progressive. That is a difficult & long term process.
divisive within the Party, but not among the constituency.
I think you're right that some aspects of more progressive policies are not divisive for the country: I think most people would agree that everyone should have healthcare. I think most people would agree that everyone should have access to education. I'm not sure I even look at those sorts of things as "progressive". The progressive part is how those things are structured and how they are paid for.
As I think about it further, I think there's also a possibility that a majority of Democrats do believe in progressive policies on things like this, but when selecting a candidate they opted for one someone not as progressive because they didn't think the progressive one had as much chance of getting elected. Their calculation, perhaps a bit cynical, was that the less progressive person that gets elected can do more than the very progressive candidate that loses.
I agree establishment leadership is skeptical of more progressive policies, probably not for philosophical reasons but for a more cynical calculations that support isn't good for their political prospects.
Unfortunately, now that the election is over I also don't think it will be easy to get anything done. The GOP is not going to want to give Democrats an early "win", and will likely pivot to their "but the deficit!" talking points now that they're out of office. I think things will need to get much much worse before a compromise is possible.
"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
"I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years"
"We don’t want to just close police departments"
"People like me who want to abolish prisons and police"
take for example angela davis, the most prominent prison abolitionist today. she says in this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3q_qV5mHg0) that there currently isn't a model of a prison-free society, only hints here and there.
and if you're using a broad enough notion of divisiveness, then anything is divisive, including tan suits and dijon mustard. so divisiveness as you're using the term is not a property of the relation between the constituency and the political object (policy/slogan/etc.), but it's instead a tool that social engineers can use to create antagonism between populations.
for example, abortion appears to be an extremely divisive issue because of the way the issue has been socially engineered, but if you look at the data, a large majority of americans agree on the vast majority of abortion cases. it's the edge cases and disagreements on the rationale for/against abortion that are used to create the appareance of divisiveness.
Then I guess the abolitionists failed because slavery still exists.
So yeah, who ever wins party primaries is the candidate the parties base wants. Obviously, distorted by money, but still.
For GOP/Independents who voted Biden, his #1 quality was also that he was moderate and a close second was that he was not divisive.
A bit nitpicky, but I think it's important: "people" cannot be really considered responsible for the win. If just 1.5 voters every hundred had flipped side, Trump would have won. At this point, with the results so close, who wins the elections is basically a coin toss- which arguably isn't a terrible thing in democracy, as it means that the parties compete fiercely and almost optimally for votes. But still in the end the outcome of these elections seems due mostly to chance.
Bernie maintained a slight chance up until the outbreak of covid where he suspended his campaign specifically out of concern for spreading the disease.
It's amazing that in a world where we can all be connected that actual result was we all chose to connect with people who think just like us.
I got really turned off by some of the things Bernie was going for (like voting from prison) which are pointless if you have someone like Trump in office shredding the whole country. I like Bernie as a person but we would have lost Florida by a landslide with him on the ticket.
For this moment, Biden is great, I couldn't be happier.
If anything it shows that the party rules above all.
The lesson of Trump is that we have two political parties so immune to outside challenge it took someone of his level of money, fame, and more, to beat both parties and make no mistake, be beat both.
Hence going forward, when Congress tells you they want to pass laws preventing certain monies from entering politics always understand it is to prevent anyone challenging their two party rule
Didn't Joe Biden get most of the votes in the primaries? After Super Tuesday he was leading in delegates, and once the race came down to 1-on-1 with Bernie he did even better. This tells me there is significant support for very liberal policies like those from Bernie, but the party as a whole is still much closer to the center.
And if Biden - or Harris - don't take steps to address it by 2024, someone much worse than Trump will appear.
And they may well win.
The reality is voters on both sides vote how the various media outlets tell them to vote. There's plenty of media noise, but the available narratives are carefully curated, and voters don't get to generate their own from the grassroots upwards.
This has become far more dangerous as Facebook and the various other online platforms have moved towards microprofiling and microtargetting.
This was a huge issue during the Brexit campaign, when disingenuous single-issue ads aimed at very narrow demographics with specific vulnerabilities put the result over the top.
Trump spent more on social in this election than Biden did, and the result was a good collection of surprise wins in states like Florida, and the second biggest voter turnout in US history.
If Trump had been even slightly more competent and focused and if Covid hadn't been happening this would have been a bloodbath for progressives.
I think it's a viscous feedback loop. Media outlets construct & present narratives based on what they believe will get people to tune-in/click etc., mostly a financial consideration. That content guides the audience's beliefs in the direction of the narrative. Media outlets are then locked in to that narrative, and must present content that coincides with or pushed it even further, and the cycle continues.
America has a ton of issues, but I think some democratic reforms are critically important. Voting rights are being attacked, and I don't think most people are represented well by the two party system.
That's not true.
https://i.imgur.com/EnsuC7N.jpeg
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-presidential-delegat...
The field narrowed after the results of the contests on 3/3. Biden had the lead at the end of that day and it only grew after that.
It's more likely they endorsed him out of self interest because it was clear he would win and they wanted to be considered for the VP pick or other posts. Conspiracy is much less likely and viewing it through that lens (without evidence) is more a reflection or one's beliefs than the actual events.
However, I think a majority might not have wanted a moderate. They might have wanted a progressive, but voted moderate because their priority was to get Trump out, and they believed (maybe falsely, we'll probably never know for sure) that a more progressive candidate could beat Trump. The party establishment was certainly pushing that narrative.
I viewed it much the same. I also saw it as very similar to what President Trump did with the Republican party in 2016: Tracking his registered political affiliations and statements of political belief over the years put him all over the map. And he also faced similar pushback, probably more forceful, from the Republican establishment as Bernie did from the Democrats. I think that reveals a deep division between traditional the conservative platform and everyday Republicans, or at least that everyday Republicans were deeply cynical about the desire & ability of the Republican establishment to deliver.
Again, probably a similar mechanic was underlying support for Bernie. Which means (no surprise) that a very large group of Americans are completely disillusioned with the political establishment.
The way people in the US behave resembles atheists more than they resemble any religion. Generally people don't want to defund the police, including African Americans (people want police to be more accountable and empathetic), and really no mainstream politician is very close to socialism in this country. But its just the labels that stick.
In generally I think state government solutions don't receive enough attention in policy discussions.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so let us just rename the rose and get on with it.
The party did not decide, the people clearly indicated who they wanted. They wanted the person who could win the general election. Turns out they were a lot smarter than you give them credit.
This is quite wrong. Biden crushed Bernie in the primaries.
And then there are things like the Iowa caucus where Mayor Pete decided to crown himself winner before one was officially declared (gee, sound familiar?) because the Iowa Dem party crapped the bed.
Yeah, same here, but that's because we live in progressive bubbles. Dem voters chose Biden over many other candidates that progressives preferred.
> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.
You cannot imagine someone actually liking Biden without being soft in the head. And other people cannot imagine someone liking Trump without being racist. But these assumptions prove nothing except lack of imagination.
People need to understand how heterogenous the US is...in every way. We have to regain the ability to see the world from other people's perspectives and extract the grain of truth from those perspectives.