All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[PwrdOn]

The Democrat party are good at f--king their way back into messes they f--ked out of.

The DCCC grabbed setback from the jaws of victory. I think it's time that Nancy Pelosi step down as House Leader after this fiasco. The DCCC head has already done so, but Pelosi has to take responsibility for this.

The blowout was well within reach and they screwed up big time.

Quite frankly, the last four years of Trump were the greatest gift that moderate Democrats could have gotten because it allowed them to define themselves solely in opposition to him, rather than having to actually decide what they actually stand for, something they will have to finally figure out now. And despite this silly fantasy they keep telling themselves that they are occupying some hallowed middle ground between the far left and the far right, the truth of the matter is that by constantly rejecting anything that sounds remotely radical or socialist, centrists have painted themselves into a very narrow corner where all they can do is declare their support for people in the abstract, but aren't willing to do anything substantial to help them. How can you be in favor of universal healthcare if you aren't willing to implement a system that actually ensures that everybody can access it? How can you be serious about climate change if you insisting that we need to continue supporting fracking even though we know how destructive it can be? How can you be in favor of racial justice if you want to keep in place all of the institutions that are responsible for the inequality in the first place? Fixing all of the problems the country faces requires a long term vision and a concrete plan of action, as well as the willingness to swallow some bitter pills and accept the need to make necessary sacrifices. The Democrats seem intent on telling everyone that they can just have their cake and eat it too and that everything will be just fine if we hold hands and sing kumbaya, and not only is that not going to work, but even the densest of voters can see that it's not going to work which is why they have generally not been receptive to that message.

[Steel Inquisitor]

It won't be easy because unlike HRC, none of them have the vulnerabilities that she did...she was associated with a very controversial President (Bill Clinton remember was no Obama, or for that matter Biden, he won the plurality of the popular vote, but not the majority of 50% in both 1992 and 1996), there were issues like Whitewater and so on.

Granted they are going to try, but it's not going to be the same thing.

It wasn't easy with Hillary. The GOP needed help from Russia, stealing elections in various states outright and Comey breaking the Hatch Act at the last minute and they still barely won. Bill Clinton was incredibly popular in the party, and the country, even after he left office. The shine's only come off him recently, post-Obama.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

The Democrats seem intent on telling everyone that they can just have their cake and eat it too and that everything will be just fine if we hold hands and sing kumbaya, and not only is that not going to work, but even the densest of voters can see that it's not going to work which is why they have generally not been receptive to that message.

AOC was being kind when she called frontline Democrats (i.e. Dems who won Red districts in 2018 and had to defend them) as "sitting ducks". "Headless chickens" is what I'd go for.

Apparently the DCCC allowed frontliners to campaign independently of Biden, and not speak against Trump so much. You want to know why the House didn't do as well nationally as Biden did, there's that right there. These frontliners didn't tie themselves to the main ticket and yet they wonder why the popular challenger didn't have coattails for them to ride in.

The incompetence of it all. If the Dems had their s--t together they could have gotten the House Majority and the Senate.

[GindyPosts]

AOC was being kind when she called frontline Democrats (i.e. Dems who won Red districts in 2018 and had to defend them) as "sitting ducks". "Headless chickens" is what I'd go for.

Apparently the DCCC allowed frontliners to campaign independently of Biden, and not speak against Trump so much. You want to know why the House didn't do as well nationally as Biden did, there's that right there. These frontliners didn't tie themselves to the main ticket and yet they wonder why the popular challenger didn't have coattails for them to ride in.

The incompetence of it all. If the Dems had their s--t together they could have gotten the House Majority and the Senate.

But Pelosi is never gonna leave. She wants the power just like all top politicians. The fact that she's an albatross to the party doesn't matter to her, especially given how useless she has been since taking over as house speaker.

[Mister Mets]

David Leonhart of the New York Times considers how important it was for the Democrats to nominate Joe Biden, who has outperformed candidates for the US House by 2.3 points. If Biden did one point worse across the board, current numbers suggest he'd lose Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which would be enough to give Trump a second term.

If Democrats had nominated any candidate other than Joe Biden, President Trump may well have won re-election.

It’s impossible to know for sure, of course. But Biden won the states that decided the election narrowly — by two percentage points or less in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, current vote counts suggest. And there is good reason to believe other Democrats might have lost these states. Consider:

Nationwide, Biden is faring about 2.4 percentage points better than the average Democratic nominee for House seats, according to an estimate by Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics.

In several swing states — including Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina — Biden also did better than the Democratic nominees for Senate. (Arizona is an exception.)

In Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, the Democrats nominated a Bernie Sanders-style candidate — Kara Eastman, who backs “Medicare for all” and was endorsed by progressive groups like the Justice Democrats — for a House seat. She lost her race by almost five percentage points, while Biden won the district by almost seven points.

These election results are consistent with polls from over the past year that showed Biden faring better against Trump than other Democrats in hypothetical matchups.

Why does this matter? For the past four years, Trump has dominated American politics. At times, he has seemed to possess magical political powers, winning the presidency despite rejecting the usual rules of politics and maintaining a roughly steady approval rating even as he was impeached and presided over a terrible pandemic.

In the end, though, Trump didn’t have magical powers. He instead became only the fourth elected president in the past century to lose re-election, after Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. That’s the good news for Democrats.

But there is also a large dose of bad news for Democrats. Despite Trump’s defeat, the Republican Party has retained its popularity in much of the country. A small but crucial segment of Americans chose to vote for both Mr. Biden and Republican congressional candidates.

This combination means that neither party has an obvious path forward. Democrats are almost certainly fooling themselves if they conclude that America has turned into a left-leaning country that’s ready to get rid of private health insurance, defund the police, abolish immigration enforcement and vote out Republicans because they are filling the courts with anti-abortion judges. Many working-class voters — white, Hispanic, Black and Asian-American — disagree with progressive activists on several of those issues.

There was a decent point that Biden was able to appeal to two crucial constituencies. He could outperform the left-wing candidates (Warren, Sanders) among moderates, and outperform the other moderate candidates (Buttigieg, Klobuchar) among African Americans.

[AnakinFlair]

Trump once again fires someone on Twitter - Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

Looks like Trump is doing a series of revenge firings. Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI director Christopher A. Wray are likely next, as well as Anthony Fauci.

I don't think Trump will fire Barr- he just directed the Justice Department to begin investigating the systematic, rampant voter fraud.... that no one can prove actually happened.

And in response to that, the man in charge of investigating voter fraud just resigned in protest.

[InformationGeek]

Well this sounds troubling.

Trump administration just gave Congress formal notification for a massive arms transfer to the United Arab Emirates: 50 F-35s, 18 MQ-9 Reapers with munitions; a $10 billion munitions package including thousands of Mk 82 dumb bombs, guided bombs, missiles & more, per source

[Kaitou D. Kid]

That's quite harsh.

It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s harsh, but whether or not it’s true (and it is).

I think you need to explain that to the LGBTQ community who haven't forgotten that Joe Biden, practising Catholic, was the first high office politician who openly came out for gay marriage and equality, doing that at a time when Obama was himself quite cautious about it. Besides political figures far to the left of Biden have done worse and had worse policies.

This isn’t a surprise to anyone. The main difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the former will opposite bigotry in the long run because bigotry goes against the capitalist principle that we are all interchangeable cogs in the machine. The point that economists make about racism and homophobia not being market-efficient for the rich is correct. That is why, in time, we can expect the lesser-evil/pro-status quo party to come out more and more in favor of equality for any issues related to identity. This isn’t entirely meaningless – it’s one of the reasons it’s smart to vote for the lesser evil – but it’s hardly “proof” of them not being political enemies. We can use that same logic to argue that wealthy whites in the 1800’s weren’t enemies to black workers just because they (correctly) concluded that the market become a more efficient means of exploiting those workers than through slavery.

Also, what do you mean that “I need to explain this” to the LGTBQ community? See, this is another pet peeve I have with a lot of internet liberals. You guys seem to be under the impression that it’s only straight white men that take issue with the Democrats, or that only straight white men get fixated on economic issues. The reality is that dissatisfaction of both parties is widespread across all identity groups and often for the same reasons, especially if you’re a Millennial. I don’t think you are doing this intentionally, but you are contributing to essentialist narratives and being an apologist for some very powerful people when you make moralistic statements like that.

But again that doesn't mean Biden is the enemy. The whole discourse about us trying to understand Trump supporters and so on, that's false and dangerous. But we absolutely should understand the points of view in the left of center. Social Democrats and others should understand liberals, like Bernie and AOC absolutely do. You can do that without thinking of them as the enemy and so on.

Is it? Do you think most of these people are born like that or that they become like that through their environment? We know that only a small percentage of humans are born psychopaths and narcissists. Simply saying “these people are bad” does not address how millions across the country (we are talking 1 in 4 or 5 Americans) come to hold these beliefs. You say we should do what Bernie and AOC do, but they’ve both made the same point I just did on multiple occasions.

It's precisely because the Obama years were so good, they ended up with Trump. Again Trump voters are white supremacists who could not countenance the success, achievements, and legacy of the first black President. Pure and simple.

These things are never pure and simple. There is no “pure and simple” when you are talking about geopolitical events that involve literally millions and millions of people, a lot of them who don’t even know each other or have the same culture. “Pure and simple” exists at the local level (I can, for example, go on all day about what a horrible human being my racist neighbor is), but when trying to understand a phenomenon like the election of Trump and how to respond? Utter nonsense – worse than nonsense, it’s straight-up dangerous because you are blaming systemic problems on individuals and being an apologist in the process.

And that right there is the core problem with a lot of liberals, or at least liberals you come across on the internet – you guys want to go around saying you’re liberal and against Trump, but also engage in lazy generalizations about Americans and don’t want to do any homework into understanding history or the materialist conditions that give rise to someone like Trump (let alone have a conversation on it). The go-to for you guys is always that 1 in 4 Americans are just stupid/racist, in spite of the fact that racism by itself explains nothing. Seriously…what does “Americans are racist, end of story” actually explain? America has always been racist. The question then becomes why no Far-Right candidate was elected in the Great Depression when unions were strong, or in the 1960s when income inequality was low. The second we ask that question, we are now in policy territory and absolutely have to talk about neoliberalism and the lack of a left-alternative to Trump. This is why we need a materialist understanding of these things combined with a basic level of empathy. It’s not about “being nice”, it’s about the need to be smart and strategic at combating these issues.

Serious question: What is the difference between your view and the way Conservatives view Middle-Easterners? Conservatives think all Islamic terrorism can be summed up to entire geopolitical sections of the Middle-East simply being a monolith of bigoted brown men and that any discussion of systemic issues is Lefties making excuses for their actions. You're implying entire geopolitical sections of America can be summed up to Americans being a monolith of bigoted white men and that any discussion of systemic issues is Lefties making excuses for their actions. Please explain why the latter way of looking at the world is any less cartoonish than the first.

Obamacare had multiple sources, the most obvious is the program passed in MA when Mitt Romney was governor. That law was passed by Democrats in MA Legislature. Romney signed it because the Dems had majorities to override veto. In fact Romney vetoed 8 provisions, and the Dems overturned 6 of those vetoes. Because of the association with Romney a lot of people think Obamacare was a Republican plan but that's not exactly the case. Healthcare is a long dream in US Politics and has been approved across the spectrum and factions. FDR announced health care as a policy in his last newsreel and had he not passed away, maybe it would have happened in the '40s. LBJ wanted to make it happen too.

I wasn’t talking about Romneycare. The idea of Obamacare came from the Heritage Foundation, which was initially a right-wing alternative to Medicare-For-All. Nixon and Bob Dole have suggested similar healthcare plans before.

In the Clinton years, HRC was very interested in it and wanted to put a health program that was subsequently to the left of what ACA became but the GOP stopped that. The point is that Healthcare was extremely difficult to pass, and as unambitious and quaint as the ACA is compared to what FDR/LBJ and even Nixon had in mind, leave alone the NHS in England, it was still a great achievement in legislation. If a man like Lyndon B. Johnson, a schoolyard bully by nature, couldn't get it done. If someone like Nixon couldn't get it done, then I don't know how you can judge Obama so low for actually being the guy who did get it done.

When Joe Biden said, "This is a big f--king deal" he was quite right. Obama fulfilled one of FDR's dreams.

HRC stopped being in favor of a public option after she started taking money from the health insurance companies, and the reason LBJ never managed to pass it is because American unions at the time weren’t putting pressure on anyone to pass it. American unions at the time were putting pressure on their employers to grant healthcare to their members, while Canadian unions were putting pressure on the government to grant healthcare to everyone. It’s one of the reasons why Canada got universal healthcare in the 60s and the US didn’t. I don’t think that’s applicable now. If anything, it’s only more the reason to put pressure on Biden to pass Medicare-For-All.

I don't think treating Biden as an enemy is fair, accurate, useful.

Just remember that the real bad guys are not the Democrats. Obama's Presidency didn't have a crisis that saw 230,000 people dead in 8 months, most of them poor, from minority communities. In fact when this is over, Trump's body count would have exceeded the numbers of Obama's entire drone campaign and his entire Presidency.

How is this an argument for why Democrats aren’t bad guys? Trump’s handling of COVID was exceptionally bad even by Establishment standards. Are Bloomberg and most of Wall Street “good guys” now because they would technically be better than Trump?

What do the Democrats have to do to qualify as bad guys? Would them, say, working to sabotage the populist candidate of the Democratic Primaries for two elections in a row count as sufficient evidence that they’re not just imperfect friends?

Absolutely agreed on this. Grassroots can't end with 2020 Election.

And I am for that. Push Biden to the left, support progressives and so on.

Awesome. So then why are you going around arguing with people making this exact point?

[Revolutionary_Jack]

David Leonhart of the New York Times considers how important it was for the Democrats to nominate Joe Biden, who has outperformed candidates for the US House by 2.3 points. If Biden did one point worse across the board, current numbers suggest he'd lose Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which would be enough to give Trump a second term.



There was a decent point that Biden was able to appeal to two crucial constituencies. He could outperform the left-wing candidates (Warren, Sanders) among moderates, and outperform the other moderate candidates (Buttigieg, Klobuchar) among African Americans.

Allan Lichtman's 13 Keys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ke...he_White_House) suggests that any candidate other than Biden would have won against Trump this year. Per his model, which measures the party as a whole, only one of the keys "Uncharismatic challenger" directly concerns the challenger. His model is that elections are about governance rather than candidacy and what's on the ballot is the incumbent's record not the challenger's.

Uncharismatic challenger was one of the keys Trump had since Lichtman didn't think Biden was charismatic. If a charismatic Dem had come in, that would have lowered Trump's odds a bit but he still lost the other keys. So if the Dems fielded Bernie Sanders in 2020, he would have won against Trump too...whether the House and Senate seats would be the same who knows.

[cgh]

Australian take on the US debacle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ9__8UJSc4

[Mister Mets]

Allan Lichtman's 13 Keys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ke...he_White_House) suggests that any candidate other than Biden would have won against Trump this year. Per his model, which measures the party as a whole, only one of the keys "Uncharismatic challenger" directly concerns the challenger. His model is that elections are about governance rather than candidacy and what's on the ballot is the incumbent's record not the challenger's.

Uncharismatic challenger was one of the keys Trump had since Lichtman didn't think Biden was charismatic. If a charismatic Dem had come in, that would have lowered Trump's odds a bit but he still lost the other keys. So if the Dems fielded Bernie Sanders in 2020, he would have won against Trump too...whether the House and Senate seats would be the same who knows.

Do we have any evidence of statewide candidates affiliated with Bernie & company either outperforming Biden, or boosting his numbers in a tangible way?

As for Lichtman's keys, we do have to take some of this stuff with a grain of salt, since there are outside factors.

One of the keys is whether there's a significant primary challenge against the incumbent. There wasn't one against Trump, but how much of that was institutional pressure because the establishment he might otherwise face a primary challenge. It could be that they prevented the symptom, but that the underlying problems still existed.

The idea that the challenger is only worth one key is hard to measure. It could be based on the assumption that a candidate will meet a basic threshold for quality that isn't necessarily the case should a party nominate a 79 year old socialist who had a major heart attack last year. Elizabeth Warren's numbers in her own elections were lower than those of Obama in 2012, and equivalent to those in 2018, except Klobuchar was in a purple state, so that could very well some kind of general election effect.

* Edit- Lichtman's keys were also initially supposed to predict the winner of the popular vote, which is about as useful as determining which team will score the most points in the world series.

It's worth noting that Trump lost by two keys, when he needed to do about one percent better.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

This isn’t a surprise to anyone. The main difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the former will opposite bigotry in the long run because bigotry goes against the capitalist principle that we are all interchangeable cogs in the machine.

It's absolutely not true that bigotry as a principle inherently goes against capitalist principles. Capitalism in fact thrives on bigotry. Anti-Racism and Anti-Bigotry were core parts of the radical movement in American history. Such things as Affirmative Action and the cries against representation, and the campaigning for African-Americans persecuted by systemic racism were taken up by the Communist Party USA in the '30s and '40s at a time when big business and others were being oppressive and repressive. CPUSA were the ones who laid the foundations for the Civil Rights Movement since they went down the South during the Depression and organized the African-American community, overwhelmingly the most progressive force in American politics in the last 60 years. It wasn't capitalism doing that. Nor was capitalism itself responsible for driving the Union against slavery during the Civil War. The South was largely plantation and agrarian in economy but it did have factories and industrial centers, and those factories and industrial centers were run entirely by slave labor. I mean the entire Confederacy is a refutation of the idea that capitalism ended slavery. When the Constitution was written, some liberals did expect that slavery would inevitably end in the South but then the importance of the South in the global cotton markets delayed that "inevitability" down the road.

The point that economists make about racism and homophobia not being market-efficient for the rich is correct.

Up to a certain point it's not market-efficient, but after that it's useful. The capitalist always wants its rival capitalists to be far more woke than it is itself. At the same time internally they feed on making their workforce vulnerable, disposable, and replacable, and find fresh inequalities to draw value from. And yes I did take a class on Marx in college and I have in fact read Das Kapital. Marx never once said that capitalism was entirely down to class. He said that capitalism brought other forms and other systems of government into contact with it, and nurtured inequalities even when it created some equality and relief in other places.

We can use that same logic to argue that wealthy whites in the 1800’s weren’t enemies to black workers just because they (correctly) concluded that the market become a more efficient means of exploiting those workers than through slavery.

You need to ask yourself why Marx was an open fanboy of Lincoln, and openly backed the Union side during the Civil War and always in glowing positive terms.

Also, what do you mean that “I need to explain this” to the LGTBQ community?

Considering that the SCOTUS has teased about reversing the landmark Obergefell decision and that LGBTQ stand to lose significantly, I should think you should be a little compassionate. Biden played a major part in changing the national conversation on gay rights towards equality. You can't take that from him.

See, this is another pet peeve I have with a lot of internet liberals.

Cards on the table, in American context, liberal means left-wing. In Europe it means centrist. But understand that on the whole I would consider myself a Social Democrat who thinks Thomas Piketty's global wealth tax is the way to go. America is the land of "Positive Liberty" a concept codified by Abraham Lincoln himself after all.

At the end of the day, I don't want to waste my energy fighting moderates rather than fighting Republicans. That was the overwhelming choice made by the most progressive voices this election.

I don’t think you are doing this intentionally, but you are contributing to essentialist narratives and being an apologist for some very powerful people when you make moralistic statements like that.

I am not a perfect person, and perhaps I am wrong and mistaken. I certainly don't mean to be dismissive or ignorant of what you say. Let me say you make a lot of good points and by and large I do agree with you. I hope I don't come across as holier than thou or anything when I say that.

Do you think most of these people are born like that or that they become like that through their environment? We know that only a small percentage of humans are born psychopaths and narcissists.

You don't have to be a psychopath or a narcissist to be a racist or white supremacist.

The question then becomes why no Far-Right candidate was elected in the Great Depression when unions were strong, or in the 1960s when income inequality was low.

A strong union movement is probably a good answer for that. And we definitely need more union movement, and a total repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act while we are at it. Unions were absolutely a progressive force for general equality. I agree with that.

At the same time, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and others pointed out, the New Deal programs during the Depression and other social beneficiary programs of the time were passed in such a way that African-Americans were not able to benefit from it. Same with the GI Bill after World War II. The only program that ever helped African-Americans was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society but the Republicans rolled back and gutted that and used grievances about it to send Nixon to the WH and later Reagan.

At the end of the day though it's moot, Joe Biden voters on the whole included far more low-income and poorer voters than Trump voters. Remember that Trump's supporters were majority white people across classes but numerically middle-class and upper-class whites supported him far more than working class whites did. It's just that last time, Trump's slight increase in those states and lack of turnout and poor campaigning by Clinton made that decisive.

Serious question: What is the difference between your view and the way Conservatives view Middle-Easterners?

The attitudes of the latter can be understood in relation to colonialism and imperialism, which has both reactionary/conservative and radical/liberal responses to it. The attitude of American white supremacy can't be explained that way since they are America's original Imperial class.

You're implying entire geopolitical sections of America can be summed up to Americans being a monolith of bigoted white men and that any discussion of systemic issues is Lefties making excuses for their actions. Please explain why the latter way of looking at the world is any less cartoonish than the first.

1) America is culturally far more homogenous than the Middle East.
2) White American culture in rural areas is even more homogenous than the big cities.
3) Ultimately when it comes to anything we speak in generalizations. If you qualify and nail everything down, no argument can be made.

How is this an argument for why Democrats aren’t bad guys? Trump’s handling of COVID was exceptionally bad even by Establishment standards. Are Bloomberg and most of Wall Street “good guys” now because they would technically be better than Trump?

No, they're not good at all.

What do the Democrats have to do to qualify as bad guys? Would them, say, working to sabotage the populist candidate of the Democratic Primaries for two elections in a row count as sufficient evidence that they’re not just imperfect friends?

At the end of the day the African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Biden and not Bernie Sanders. I can't accept or buy that the African-American community are idiots who are easily duped by conspiracies.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Do we have any evidence of statewide candidates affiliated with Bernie & company either outperforming Biden, or boosting his numbers in a tangible way?

We have evidence of moderate Dems underperforming significantly compared to progressive ones, And we have progressive measures passed across USA, red and blue, on ballots. Election 2020 was actually pretty good for the Left
(https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/d...ection-day-dsa). A minimum wage increase in FL, a huge tax on the rich to be invested in education in AZ, marijuana legalizations across the board.

So there's good evidence to suggest that Bernie would have won against Trump in the general election. Or rather there isn't sufficient evidence to establish that Biden was existentially the only one. In practical terms, Bernie Sanders of course needed the support of the major party since only a major party candidate has a chance. A third party has no chance except as a spoiler for one or another.

As for Lichtman's keys, we do have to take some of this stuff with a grain of salt, since there are outside factors.

His record is solid. He called Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.

One of the keys is whether there's a significant primary challenge against the incumbent. There wasn't one against Trump, but how much of that was institutional pressure because the establishment he might otherwise face a primary challenge. It could be that they prevented the symptom, but that the underlying problems still existed.

A significant primary challenge would have lowered Trump the way that Edward Kennedy's primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980 significantly compromised him against Reagan.

* Edit- Lichtman's keys were also initially supposed to predict the winner of the popular vote,

Because until 2000, every winner won the popular vote, and the idea of the EC being a factor again wasn't considered a realistic possiblity and scenario in election by either party. And since 2000 he's called the EC winner.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

So its being reported that Trump now has William Barr looking into voter fraud . My one wish is once Biden gets in office he sends this guy packing and demands an investigation into Barr's dealings. If I was Biden I'd send a clear message .."William Barr you will be fired and I will push for an investigation into your dealings with this administration once i get into office. MARK IT DOWN."

[Amadeus Arkham]

Top Republicans don't actually believe the vote was subject to fraud but are pretending to for political expediency. They fear that saying Biden won will alienate Trump's base ahead of critical GA elections and cost GOP their Senate majority.