I'm not so sure a Sanders presidency with a Republican congress would have been super different. He promised to also crack down on immigration, impose tariffs, end trade deals, and pull out of Afghanistan. He is/was also very skeptical of longstanding alliances and NATO. With not power to legislate, he'd have likely done some similar things as an executive.

Would he have been as embarrassing and corrupt, probably not, but there more to an administration than all of that.

He is a great demagogue but his Congressional record indicates he is not so good at dealmaking. I think he would have been a progressive Perot that got angry a lot but those tantrums would lead to great sound bites.

Or TLDR if you're not going to get good at making sausage stop applying for positions at the sausage factory.

There are a lot of things you can do at the executive level that recent administration don't have the guts to do. Declare a medical emergency on account of COVID-19 and bam, there is a provision in the laws that allows you to expand medicare to the entire population. That alone would guarantee re-election. Free all non-violent marijuana prisoners, Forgive student debt. That alone would be a boost to the economy as a generation saddled with debt would get a reset. There are more he could do by executive order that can bypass congress. He will be attacked, but so what? The population overwhelming wants these proposals anyway.

I think you deeply underestimate the influence of the corporate media in influencing the opinions of the masses. But apparently America went through something like this right after the Civil War where everyone had an opinion on everything and all that led to was corporations amassing power for a half century.

That affects you when trying to get elected. I'd argue a strong candidate who takes no BS is something that the people are clamoring for. Trump fit that bill to an extant but he was an idiot and a bigot. He had a real opportunity to enact real change but he blew it.

Sure I would love a truth-telling candidate. But no existing party machine will accept such a candidate and even if elected no existing party will work with such a candidate.

And in the unlikely event you create a genuine third party, the current two parties will drop all their differences to destroy that party.

> TLDR if you're not going to get good at making sausage stop applying for positions at the sausage factory.

This is 100% a perfect distillation of a great criticism of Sanders from the left and on merits.

I think it's often also undersold how often he's been terribly wrong about foreign policy in the past and how he almost never walks it back.

I fear we'd just be in another JFK situation. We're only allowed so much representative government.

100%. Sanders wouldn't have made it to his own inauguration. They would have never allowed it.

Why make him a martyr when they could have done the same to him as they did to Trump?

Well, sure, they would have tried the smears employed against Trump and, more relevantly, Corbyn. In fact, forget "would have", that was actually done. [0] I'm just not sure the accusations would have seemed important to voters. Trump's myriad misdeeds have been salient to public attention for decades. "Collaboration" with Russia may have been one of a few awful actions he hadn't actually attempted over his life, which is exactly why it was emphasized. The go-to war media criticisms of Sanders, e.g. "he thinks healthcare should be provided to all, even during a pandemic!" probably wouldn't have seemed so bad to normal humans. But sure, our enemies have a certain low cunning in addition to their complete control of popular media. They could have surprised us with their choice of smears.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/the-ri...

"Supports single payer healthcare" is used against Sanders in the primary to instill fear in Democratic primary voters that he'll be too far to the left for moderates and then lose to a Republican. It wouldn't be effective, or attempted, if he was already the President.

They could easily have used the same style of attacks that were used against Trump. "Kids in cages" was the case under Obama, and Trump, and Biden, but we only heard about it under Trump.

They wouldn't have used the same issues because those are the issues you use against a Republican, but the same format works against anyone. Under Sanders there would have been huge concerns about the deficit. Any tax increase impacting the middle class would be condemned but the middle class would inherently have to pay more to have single payer healthcare, so you fight it with "tax increase bad" not "healthcare bad." Not having to pay health insurance premiums would either be ignored or condemned as a giveaway to employers.

They'd find some black families who support school vouchers to go on TV and accuse him of being a racist for supporting existing "racist public schools" and things along those lines.

The general idea is to be horrified to learn that things that have been happening for years have suddenly been discovered happening under the target administration, but choose the things related to the direction they want to move. As if the Overton window is not only not covering what they want to change, it no longer even covers the status quo, and we have to go in the opposite direction or he's literally Hitler (or, presumably, Stalin). So you burn up all their political capital just to stand still while turning the viewer against them no matter what they do. Then four years later the status quo remains intact.

Well that ruined my day... you're right of course. Putting it that way just confirms my belief that the best course is to dissolve this union. Let's chop it into about a dozen pieces. That would be better for Americans, and also for non-Americans. Raytheon would lose some business...

The smallest US state has a larger economy than some countries. Fixing it doesn't require dissolution of shared citizenship, what we need to do is stop doing so many things at the federal level.

Why do we need a huge federal military in peacetime when we have the state national guard? Why do we need federal welfare programs instead of state welfare programs? It's not an argument against having a military or having welfare programs, it's a question of where to do it. And the US federal government is the wrong place, because it's too big.

"Laboratories of democracy" are a public good, but you can't have them if Uncle Sam is sucking up the public's money and giving it to Raytheon and drug companies and whoever instead of letting the states and the people have that money to implement a diverse set of independent programs and allowing citizens to decide which they want to live under.

Most of which was caused by 20th century screwing up of the original design. US Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures, to represent the states and temper federal power. The 16th amendment, federal taxation without apportionment, provides the perverse incentive for federal spending to increase without bound because you then have the large majority of states as net recipients of federal spending which is coming from a handful of states who are outnumbered. And guess which ones they are -- you wouldn't know it by asking their representatives because given the setup, they have no incentive not to feed from the same trough even while their residents are getting fleeced.

The good news is most of the taker states are still around breakeven and many of those (like Texas) would likely support fixing this if the likes of New York and Massachusetts would take notice that doing so is strongly in their own interest. (The biggest takers are the swing states, for reasons that should be obvious, but the red and blue states outnumber the purple states -- if they'd work together.)

The thing had already gone off track in 1788. The Constitution is not compatible with democracy.

In a blessed future when we figure out a less totalitarian way to organize ourselves, Americans can still live together and trade with each other. The value of federal spending can be overstated, even for "net winners". Sure it's free money, but it's calibrated to the needs of those who hire lobbyists. No existing entitlement program is as beneficial to the population as just giving directly to individual humans would be.

Several factors that keep some Americans opposed to entitlements would no longer apply in the "laboratories of democracy" situation. No population is actually as hard-ass about deficits as some current representation claims, due to nondemocratic aspects of how such representation is currently elected. Simply redirecting the spigot of "free money" deficit spending away from armaments toward anything beneficial to humans would be a windfall. Spending on children would encourage young families to locate nearby instead of moving to the coasts, so eventually the hollowing-out middle states would see the benefits no matter their "traditional" opposition.

In fact, much of the traditional politics of both the "winners" and "losers" are simply negotiating positions that would disappear without a federal government. "Loser" states sending resources to "winner" states is the way that they "bribe" seemingly opposed representatives into accepting entitlement spending. It has much more to do with politics than with what particular areas "need" or "produce".

I'm suspicious that Bernie's heart attack was not natural, but actually the CIA's doing with something like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/45vsg1/til_c...

(He's old, so a natural heart attack is certainly plausible. But, the powers that be had means, motive and opportunity)