Learned helplessness, strategic victimhood and … the Democrats

Hi Daniel,

I think I’m having a hard time drawing practical conclusions from this series, which is a fault in me rather than in your essays (which are thought-provoking and seem very true). So I wonder if I could ask you to focus on one question. What I want most out of my government is an expanded commitment to the social-insurance state: universal health insurance, a real pension, long-term-care insurance, etc.

So if you were in my shoes, starting this very day, what would you do to maximize the chances of achieving these goals?

Cheers,
Steve

>The “Ect, ect, ect” bit there could have been a much longer list, but even at that length it seems implausible on the face of it.

It’s “etc”. From the Latin “et cetera”, which means “and the rest”.

Sounds like what a number of leftish Lib Dem voters (rightly) hacked off with Labour were telling themselves before the last election. How’d that work out for them?

First past the post systems mean that there is literally NO chance of influencing the behavior of the less-evil party merely by “failing to reward” it. (One can do so only by working to gain influence within it. And the example of the far right and the Republicans suggests that a certain amount of intransigence can actually be put to effective use in that effort, much moreso than remaining intransigent on the outside.) The best one can hope to do, unless we find a way to get rid of these undemocratic voting systems in the countries that are saddled with them, is to constrain the less evil party from crossing over to become the more evil party. Until someone can demonstrate to me that the Dems are in danger of becoming more evil than the Republicans, I would say that to that extent voting is effective.

Assumes existence of a spine not in evidence, Daniel.

Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts did get on the court, and lower courts got packed with equivalent right-wing ideologues. The Bush admin did eviscerate many regulatory agencies and shift the priorities of others away from their nominal function. Claims that Romney wouldn’t be able to achieve the same (or more) requires more than just a flat denial.

Democrats in Congress were so muscularly obstructionist during the 8 years of George W. Bush that the bozo hardly got anything he wanted.

Assumes existence of a spine not in evidence, Daniel.

In fact Duncan Black (Atrios) has repeatedly skewered statements by supposedly-Red Ed which demonstrate precisely the lack thereof (and/or of a clue). From a distance I can see no evidence that he’s meaningfully different from Gordon Brown, any more than Obama was from Hillary Clinton.

Christian, I see that lack of spine as incentive for two things:

1) Doing what is necessary to prevent Romney and the Republicans from regaining control of the executive in 2013.
2) Supporting Democratic candidates at all levels who show evidence of having a spine and evolving the party in a better direction over time.

As I said somewhere else recently, if someone has a plausible plan in which allowing Republicans to sweep into office will eventually lead to a better world, I’m all ears. But it seems to me that the effect of the principled rejection of “lesser-evildom” will most likely be that we are stuck with the greater evil.

And to DarrenG’s list @14 I would add 3) Understanding that this effort has to end at the Presidential level, not start there. Parties are rebuilt from the bottom up.

Obama’s whole strategy was based around abandoning all other priorities such as carbon tax, an effective stimulus bill, half his nominations, most of the financial sector reforms and so forth, all to concentrate on passing health care. And he only got about half of that – the version passed was something he’d specifically camapigned against as not being anything like radical enough.

Obama was for cap and trade, not a carbon tax. Pelosi got America’s first cap and trade bill passed in June 2009. It went nowhere in the Senate. All this happened before health care really got started. Getting the Senate (with its rural overrepresentation) to pass a climate bill is going to take a generation, and when it happens it’ll suck and we’ll all be mad about it.

The health care bill that passed was pretty much exactly what Obama (and Clinton and Edwards) campaigned on, except we didn’t get public option, and Obama said he was against the insurance mandate. To me the mandate was always bargaining chip. I’m fine with it. The public option loss is too bad, but as a version 1.0 product it’s not bad.

What’s Labour’s excuse? You guys don’t have all the insane veto points in your system. You don’t have some asshole Senator from Nebraska who can hold up everything, right?

/me does a heavy-lidded smirk

I’m black, so I’m fortunately without such illusions that Daniel seems to entertain.

As to the the confusion that seems to be erupting…

Take this essay by TNCoates: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/no-one-left-to-race-bait/262622/

Read through it, and inverse the reasoning. In other words, the benefit of being white in terms of state and elite vision is being eroded. Instead, it is preferred that democracy and voting have absolutely no impact on policy rather than society as a whole increasingly participating in politics and policy.

Don’t believe me? Can you stop some fly-by-night energy company from fracking up your water supply? It used to be that the system polluted on the basis of environmental racism. Can you stop your kids from being penured by gatekeepers to “middle classhood”? Or prevent your home from being taken in some thoroughly illegal ways, and shot and killed if you defended your stuff?

You know, technically, we’re seeing this happen all over the world, except Nordic countries and African countries too poor and fast growing to be that affected.

This is some real pre WWI shit going on, globally. Revolution, or an attempt at one, seems to be ever more invevitable.

Arab Spring isn’t over yet, I think, and in some further future, it won’t be called Arab Spring.

I love the “lack spine” analysis. It brings to bear all we’ve learned about class, politics, hegemony,economics, and history and then tosses that into the trash to seize on to some cable TV gibberish.

This may startle some here but:the rich and powerful are … rich and powerful! It’s a lot easier for a determined executive to give favors out to highly influential members of the power elite than to, e.g.take money from highly influential members of the power elite and pay for schools. No serious liberal/left reforms in US or any other history have come in the absence of strong popular movements – which are conspicuous by their absence in the USA right now with one exception.

Furthermore, the US Republicans are a highly organized and disciplined party that has a large organized activist base of racists and evangelicals and benefits from a lot of funding from the rich and powerful. So the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth enforce party discipline. The Democrats, on the other hand, are an ungainly coalition with disparate agendas and they have nothing like the national tightly organized policing organizations that shape the GOP. This is not rocket science, yet US progressives seem unable to understand the simplest dynamics of how the system works. C. Wright Mills? Ring a bell? So expecting e.g. the Democratic Senate to filibuster as effectively as the Republican Senate indicates a total unfamiliarity with the American political system.

Sheesh.

rootless_e @25:

Totally agree. The problem with the Democrats isn’t that they’re spineless. It’s that they are not the mirror opposite of the Republicans, for all the reasons you suggest.

Nonetheless, in the short-run, the sane billionaires of the Democratic Party are significantly less bad than the insane billionaires of the GOP. And, yes, the unwillingness of the Democratic Party to be as obstructionist as the GOP is a crucial part of this equation.

The OP is entirely correct that, in the long run, this creates a ratchet effect to the right, even when the Democrats win. The problem is that short-run GOP victories do nothing to end this ratcheting….indeed they simply speed it up.

This is all very convincing, if you reduce the Obama administration to the ACA and a lot of hand-waving, and further presume that a Republican president would just vanish into the ether upon inauguration.

These political threads quickly go off into ridiculous name-calling so let me get my two cents in here before this one explodes too. I had a comment in the last thread that got stuck in moderation. I will repeat my point, because I think it is central.

Basically the point is that elections are not the end of the process. They are only a step in it. It is necessary to keep the pressure on, after an election, in order to move things forward.

Therefore, voting for the lesser of two evils is the way to go, if you are committed to changing the system.

I bring forward as my evidence: The Democrats might have gone along in 2005 with Dubya’s initiative to “reform” Social Security by privatisation (or partial privatization). After all, the Democratic Party had already stated publicly since the Clinton Administration that it was in favor of “reform”, a pernicious hold-over from the Reaganoid gibberish. And they might have joined the Republicans in doing so, if a large bunch of people who had recently been given voice by the bloggysphere, had NOT said, “Wait a minute, this is not a good direction for the party to go in.” That message got through.

It is demonstrably better to vote for the lesser of two evils if you have input into it afterward. And the Democrats are listening, largely because they do NOT have a rigidified ideology like the Repubs. The Dems are the “anything goes” part, they are looking for ideas. They don’t have their ideas prearranged. One party is healthy, if a bit slow. But the other party is currently pathological.

Now I am not under any illusions. After the election, if the Dems do well, they may still try to “reform” Social Security in a budget deal because Obama fancies himself a compromiser in the great American tradition. So there is another argument, soon to come. But you have to wonder whether the left will have the brains to make the argument successfully. They want perfection NOW. The healthcare reform is a “failure”? Why? Because you can’t see far enough to understand that it heads right into a single-payer system, in almost any event short of repeal?

Look at what the actual stakes are. The future is going to have a huge welfare state, predistributional and redistributional. It should be paid for out of current revenues. The correct design of it is going to require people to recognize this fact.

This is the current status of things, yet it is not widely understood or accepted.

The Dems are a little further along on this than the Republicans are, but they still have some road to travel. The Dems still pay a lot of lip service to the need for smaller government, the need for individual initiative — but the rhetoric isn’t really applicable, in every case case.

They might start by explaining that the tax money is not “lost”, it goes right back into the private economy of goods and services and jobs, in sectors where there is a need to expand: e.g. elderly healthcare, and helping as well the ancillary sectors such as construction and retailing. If lower capital gains taxes resulted in gambling on mortgage derivatives and a bubble in house prices, then there is no downside to re-hiking capital gains taxes a little to help cover a social demand. Meanwhile there is low overhead: “big government” is big spending, but it is not necessarily “big bureaucracy”, and it ought to be possible to structure the programs to minimize moral hazard (a good example of this again is Social Security).

I don’t know enough about Britain to speak accurately. But in the U.S., I think the public conversation about domestic policy is going to proceed along lines like these, in the near future. The Democratic Party is better positioned. They have less hare-brained nonsense obstructing the discussion. We are not quite there, yet. But voting against your own best future advantage, strategically and tactically, makes no sense.

“What’s Labour’s excuse? You guys don’t have all the insane veto points in your system. You don’t have some asshole Senator from Nebraska who can hold up everything, right?”

Fewer veto points means the next guys can repeal everything you did. Which means that if you want to achieve anything, you have to pass popular laws, and get re-elected, and you can’t blame that one crazy Senator for all your problems. Socialism isn’t popular. Some form of “third way” was (and still is). I don’t think Labour need an excuse for anything.

Besides, the talk of veto points and asshole Senators and billionaires is mostly excuse-making. The US tortures and bombs and so on because that’s what the median voter wants.

Daniel, you’re assuming that the Democratic Party is coherent. The part of the Party that represents what we’d think of as even a left wing is rather small. At least it’s bigger than it used to be, proportionally, as blue dogs got defeated, but there’s still roughly 10 or so Democratic senators that would have little trouble voting for reprehensible Republican bills, especially for services rendered or future considerations. So, for each kind of proportion of the Senate, Dems need about five to ten more seats than they superficially need.

Moreover, you’ve expressed some attachment to process and procedure that Republican party members plainly don’t feel, since at least Bush vs. Gore. Romney can get his agenda because they will change or ignore the rules to pass it. From Gang of 14 event that plainly refutes your thesis, to Plan D shenanigans, etc, etc…

Again nuh uh. There is no precedent for anything, until it is done for the first time. Supreme Court nominees require approval and no feasible scenario has the Democrats without a viable blocking minority. If you’re arguing that they are not willing to use that blocking power to defend abortion rights you need to own that.

If no precedent is required I could point out that when the Republicans next control the House, Senate and Presidency they can just get rid of the filibuster. If Romney wins then it’ll mean the Republicans have kept the House and may well have flipped the Senate. Given how obstructionist they’ve been this time they could choose to eliminate the filibuster to avoid retaliation from the Democrats.

Another: “There is no precedent – none – for Congress rejecting serial nominees for the SCOTUS”

Daniel: “Again nuh uh. There is no precedent for anything, until it is done for the first time. ”

And we’re supposed to hang our hopes on that analysis?

Daniel you are embarrassing yourself here. You obviously are very unfamiliar with the American political system.

Actually, there is some precedent for serially rejecting SCOTUS nominees. Nixon had two in a row rejected when he first became President in 1969: Clement Haynesworth and Harrold Carswell. Nixon then nominated Harry Blackmun, who the Senate confirmed. So it worked out quite nicely for Democratic Senators. Though it should be noted that both parties were quite different then than now. And Nixon (and the Senate) had every reason to think Blackmun would be more conservative than he turned out to be (he was sort of Souter-like in that way).

The other (semi-)example is under Reagan: in 1987, the Senate rejected Robert Bork, and Reagan nominated Douglas Ginsburg, who ended up withdrawing his name when it was revealed that he had smoked marijuana (!). Reagan then nominated Anthony Kennedy, who while now Harry Blackmun was also certainly no Robert Bork (I know nothing of Ginsburg’s jurisprudence). In this case, I think, Kennedy was less of a surprise than Blackmun (or, later Souter). But, again, the two parties are quite different from what they were a quarter century ago.

Daniel, a successful filibuster won’t even neccessarily protect againts the Court rolling back the 20th century. If Ginsburg retires the four conservs are guaranteed a split in any case at worst and so any bad fed circuit opinion will be the law for foreseeable future in that circuit; and that is the worst case scenario from their point of view. Then if Kennedy wobbles or retires, that’s the ball game.

It should be noted that neither Haynesworth nor Carswell was filibustered – they were rejected by a majority in the Senate. If multiple Romney Supreme Court nominees were filibustered, despite having majority support, I don’t see how there’s any way that the judicial filibuster would survive – the Republicans would definitely nuke it.

Ben A. @50:

Sorry, I should have been more clear. The last sentence (in 33) is not supposed to imply that it’s no good voting for Democrats tactically. It’s directed at people (on these threads and elsewhere) who argue it’s a moral imperative to vote for Democratic candidates, that anyone who considers not doing so on principled leftist grounds is some sort of moral monster who only cares about his or her moral purity, etc. Or even, and perhaps with less vehemence, feels the need to repeat how much good Obama has done, how he’s categorically better (or is it less evil) than Bush, Romney, etc. That’s the sort of thing I meant by “defenses of lesser-evilism”.

rootless_e @54 and 55:

Thanks for the clarification, in light of which I agree wholeheartedly with you.

Ben Alpers 09.27.12 at 11:16 pm:
‘… Voting for Democrats is no better than playing defense.’

It’s not a defense. If you want to defend what’s left of the U.S. social democratic state, you’d better be prepared to go into the streets starting on Nov. 7th, or on strike, or whatever you can think of. Last fall, the Democratic Party leadership was willing to put their great almighty sacred cow, Social Security, on the block; but OWS seemed to scare them for a little while, probably because an election year was coming up. Which demonstrates that, whoever wins the upcoming election, there will be nothing standing between the ruling class and the social democracy / Welfare state such as it is, except those who choose to make trouble; certainly not the Democratic Party leadership.

Is the Supreme Court the version of Hitler in the equivalent of Godwin’s Law for American politics threads?

myself @56:

I somehow joined rootless_e and js. into a single person. As it turns out, I agree with them both.

Posts crossed, sorry.

Daniel, this is lunacy. Obama can’t control what a Senate controlled by obstructionists (and conservative Dems like Nelson and Lieberman) passes. Hence a sub-optimal healthcare bill. In contrast, an election that goes for Romney keeps the House in Republican hands, and likely passes Senate control to the Republicans. Romney isn’t driving the agenda then; Eric Cantor and his tea party buddies are. Which means whatever crazy bullshit they want to pass (no more “Obamacare,” for instance).

Vanity voting accomplishes little of actual value, but apparently makes some people feel righteous. Good for them, but bad for women, the poor, and, by coincidence, all the foreigners to be killed by a Romney military.

We have to change people’s preferences and then make the Democratic Party follow along. Actually that won’t be too hard: the function of a politician is to want the job. But I don’t understand the illusion that voting in elections is about choosing a better world. That is rarely true. I also don’t understand why the only alternative is grassroots activism. As Wilde said about socialism, it takes too many evenings. The correct route in my opinion is to change people’s preferences, before they even get into the voting booth. And to do so on the medium at hand, which is the internet. It has already beaten one great obstacle, which is that mass media is controlled. Why is it so difficult to construct a narrative which convinces people that some functions of the welfare state are a good idea, that the taxes are immediately recycled back into the private economy, that it is restricted to needs which the market cannot manage, and so on? Preferences are exogenous. Exogenous, not only to markets.

That’s at leedsman

maybe it would be wise to revisit this argument on or near november 7, the day after 60 to 70 million morally degenerate americans vote for barack obama and twenty or thirty of you abstain or vote for lizard people or whoever. it will be just as fascinating then, i’m sure

But it could do a lot of good to strengthen the negotiating hand of politicians who wants to end drone strikes, and who needs to be able to threaten trouble if they don’t get their way.

That would be Sanders and, uh, Sanders, I believe. Sure, I’d love it if he had a large national base. He doesn’t. I’m not entirely sure how he keeps getting reelected as it is, although being from New England probably helps.

A politician who can credibly say that their base won’t tolerate compromise, is in a stronger negotiating position than one whose base is known for lesser-evilism.

Yeah, but you have to HAVE A BASE first. The hard right took over the Republican party because they had (and still have) a frightening number of foot soldiers ready to vote, work, donate, and even assassinate doctors for their agenda. Corporate money helped too, of course, but without the dittoheads they couldn’t have done it.

The hard right base is maybe 25% of the population — people substantially further left than the Democratic Party are more like 5%.

Either build mass popular support for the left-of-the-Democrats agenda or give up the expectation of seeing it implemented. It’s not going to make it into policy as long as it remains a splinter opinion in the population.

My perspective is along the lines of a party whip, in this case for the party of Not Republican. There’s a hugely important vote coming up. It’s important enough we can’t afford any abstentions, which it seems to me is the idea of not voting for Obama. Even in states that are a lock for electoral votes pushing up the popular vote helps marginalize the GOP.

To win we also need to get the largest possible turnout. Most people, even putative undecideds, have pretty much made up their minds even if they don’t admit it. The main question is whether or not they show up at the polls. I think this in particular is why this topic gets under my skin, since realistic or not it makes me worry it will depress enthusiasm and hence turnout. The Obama campaign’s main worry right now certainly is overconfidence leading to supporters staying home.

You know what? I just realized something, especially after reading Erik Loomis’ latest. It was just never any different for people in most places and time than it was for us in the here and now. It’s not different for the Syrians who would prefer As’ad to revolutionary leadership (out of ethnic cleansing and poor Sunni looting everything fears). It’s not different for the Venezuelans about to vote for their president. It’s not any different for those Greeks who decided to with with the traditional parties rather than SYRIZA or Golden Dawn in the last elections. It’s not different because the machinery of public consent is one, long, interconnected chain of various groups with varying agendas that might conflict in wildly unforeseen and undesired ways. We are dependent on, and hopeful for, the kind of “we all get together and work out a meaningful government process regardless of who wins and who loses same as the Chinese folk talking about and watching the upcoming 18th National Congress. That makes it very hard for any of us in the world to interact with the system in any other way than the least bad, in most years.

Change really only happens when the system breaks under real strains, or times are so bubbly that formerly repressed people are able to nimble their way out of oppressive legal regimes. To think otherwise, is naïveté.

JIm, you may appreciate this ad:

Shorter mclaren- Lets make it as bad as possible as soon as possible!

Shorter mclaren- I have very poor reading comprehension.

Shorter mclaren- Lets make it as bad as possible as soon as possible!

But this is not what anyone is saying. Look, I take it that almost everyone that’s part of this conversation agrees that (a) the current Democratic party is significantly right of where we (=almost everyone on here) wants it to be, and that (b) not only is this a problem, but on some issues like civil liberties and killing random brown foreigners, it’s a really fucking serious problem!

A lot of us on here are also saying that (c) knee-jerk defenses of Democrats on (b)-type problems don’t really help, because they end up having a significant ratchet effect where the discourse and the policies keep moving rightward. So we get from welfare reform to extra-judicial killings. This was, e.g., one of the key points of Farrell’s original post. Pointing this out isn’t about heightening contradictions, Communists for Goldwater, or whatever bullshit. It’s about holding that sometimes non-electoral politics might be the most fruitful place to try to start effecting meaningful change. This is not an insane belief.

But right, you (and others) are very pissed off that they won’t pull the lever for Obama. But here’s the thing: as people never tire of pointing out, we’re talking about a tiny minority. So, umm, let them! And if a tiny minority of that minority actually seriously works outside of electoral politics, esp. in favorable conditions, it might help the causes we all supposedly care about a lot more than pulling the lever for the Dem candidate for the next ten cycles.

heckblazer @79:

There’s a hugely important vote coming up. It’s important enough we can’t afford any abstentions, which it seems to me is the idea of not voting for Obama. Even in states that are a lock for electoral votes pushing up the popular vote helps marginalize the GOP.

I vote in Oklahoma. I plan to vote for Obama, in part because only he and Romney will appear on the ballot here. But my vote for Obama will contribute not a bit to his reelection, thanks to the electoral college. Nor will it marginalize the Republican Party, which is growing by leaps and bounds in my once (conservative) Democratic state. So why, in your view, would it be unconscionable for me to vote for, e.g., Jill Stein were she on the ballot here?

(Incidentally, I think it’s a fantasy that the GOP can be marginalized in very blue states by increasing the size of the popular vote for a Democratic presidential candidate. Obama captured nearly 62% of the vote in Massachusetts in 2008. A year later, Scott Brown won his Senate seat. Do you have any empirical evidence that the size of the popular vote majority for one party affects the state of the other party down the road?)

js. @88:

I actually think there are deep disagreements in this discussion about a) how much difference a Romney win would make (the OP, for example, attempts to minimize the difference); b) under what circumstances (if any) it is permissible not to vote for the Democratic candidate; and c) whether voting for the lesser evil is an unfortunate necessity, unacceptable (in the long run…or even the short run), or a frame that itself is an example of unconscionable privilege.

FWIW, as I say in various places upthread, my views are: a) a Romney win would be much worse than an Obama win; b) it’s nevertheless entirely permissible for people voting in states in which the outcome is not in question (i.e. very red or very blue states) to vote their conscience rather than vote pseudo-tactically for Obama; c) voting for the lesser evil is an unfortunate necessity in the short run, but cannot make things better; it will only makes things worse more slowly (which is, nonetheless, truly better than making them worse more quickly). Those interested in progressive change, at this point, ought to focus on non-electoral politics (though one goal of such organizing should, eventually, be real, positive electoral change).

mattski @93:

I’m happy for you that you believe that one of the candidates promises to bring you closer to the society you want to live in. But for those of us who feel that both candidates will move us further away from the society we want to live in (though one significantly more swiftly than the other), what word do you suggest as a substitute for “evil”?

People here are both exaggerating the negatives of a second obama term and underestimating the negatives of a Romney one.

Yes, yes and yes.

Ben, if only the two have a realistic chance to win then indeed (presuming there is a material difference between the two) there are two possible scenarios. One is closer and one is further from the world I’d like to live in. And you too.

…smh…

No–response to mclaren et al:

There is only so much policy space in any one direction. Once you hit the limits of those policy spaces, all of your ideologically preferred actions either promote ideologically undesirable outcomes or they undermine elite/public support for your ideology for whatever reason.

This sort of reasoning was how I could guess that Chief Justice Roberts would not, in actuality, overturn ACA. He knew we will come back to it almost instantly, for a number of pressing reasons, and when the issue is put on the table, the Supreme Court will be acknowledged as an enemy of the process and the conservatives on the courts will have a weaker hand dealing with a necessarily less complex and more comprehensive plan such as Medicare For All.

This sort of process is driving the delegitimaztion of current seated power in Europe and China–the strong desire of elites (and their methods) to cut out the need for public consent has become problematic. The present day sees both the Zhongnanhai, European elites, and the respective central banks captured in a kind of political economy zugzwang. The US elites has more options, but what is true of everyone is that political insiders have to take losses, in terms of both cash and power. This refusal to do so has had many implications, and I think there is going to be a great deal of work attaching aspects of real world evident political economy (such as rent capture) to models of sticky prices a lá G. Calvo. However, the ultimate outcome is revolution as the system finds *some* way to force losses onto some of the insiders.

In any event, you can’t actually do any kind of slippery slope to worse and worse people by choosing the lesser evil. The world is not predictable that way. If it was, we’d get a president far more Republican than Bill Clinton. Republicans have gotten worse and worse because they didn’t have to compete for a certain kind of vote, and that reachable vote was in areas (The South) where there was plenty more of it. However, nowadays, you have a Republican Party that might get a bit of a drubbing in Nov, but will get outright murdered in ’14. No more new Southern votes, and uncompetitive for existing votes they don’t already have, and said base is extremely jealous of the leadership’s affections.

Again, the world is very random walk.

Take the number of innocents who will die if Romney gets to have his wars with Iran and Syria, aided by his cadre of Bush-era cronies and unencumbered by Bush’s nominal “compassionate conservativism”.

Subtract from that the number of innocents who will die if Obama keeps being president.

On a scale of 1 to 10, that’s how big of an asshole you are, and how little of a shit you actually give about human life.

In the game of (American) football, there are times when a player tries to run backwards, in the hope that he can gain the space needed to make a long run. It almost always ends with a tackle for a loss. This is the political equivalent, but the truth is that touchdowns happen a few yards at a time.

heckblazer@79:

“There’s a hugely important vote coming up.”

No there isn’t. The only genuine issue in this election is whether you want Paul Ryan’s insane extremist policies in 2013, or 12 years later enacted by a Democratic president. Either way, history shows that Democratic presidents have continually enacted increasingly insane fringe right-wing policies like “ending welfare as we know it” (AKA millions of starving children living in cars) and “declaring American citizens enemy combatants and murdering them without even charging them with a crime” (Anwar Al-Awlaki) and “torturing and brutalizing anyone who publicly dissents” (LRAD military sound cannons now used against political protesters to permanently destroy their hearing) and “privatizing financial losses on Wall Street while socializing all losses” (see aftermath of 2007-8 financial crisis in which the Wall Street financial crime lords continued to receive their massive annual bonuses, while the average taxpayer gets hammered in the form of skyrocketing bank fees — meanwhile, not one of the financial criminals responsible for the 2007-8 global financial meltdown has gone to jail, but tens of thousands of Occupy protesters have gone to jail for protesting this injustice).

So the only real issue here is: do you want to end welfare and social security in 2013? Or in 2025? That’s our only choice. Because history proves that every single insane far-right proposal put forth by Republicans gets enacted by Democrats 12 years later.

Do you want Romney/Ryan to go to war with Iran in 2013? Or would you rather a Democratic president went to war with Iran in 2025?

What the [expletive deleted] is the difference?

We’re supposed to believe this is some huge issue? It’s like asking a girl whether she’d rather be raped right now, or a month from now. That’s not a choice. It’s life in hell.

” It’s important enough we can’t afford any abstentions, which it seems to me is the idea of not voting for Obama.”

No, this election isn’t important at all. It has no importance except insofar as it serves to ratify the insane far-right policies by getting Democrats to vote for a regime which will eventually enact those insane policies.

Face reality. No matter which party you vote for, you’re going to get limitless ever-accelerating growth in America’s military-prison-surveillance-torture complex. No matter which party you vote for, you’re going to get more American jobs offshored and a smaller U.S. middle class. No matter which party you vote for, you’re going to get more endless unwinnable foreign wars. No matter which party you vote for, you’re going to get more escalation in the endless unwinnable War on Drugs. No matter which party you vote for, you’re going to get more escalation in the endless unwinnable War on Copyright Infringement. No matter which party you vote for, you’re going to get more erosion of the Bill of Rights, with more Americans dragged off the street and hurled into secret prisons forever without charges, more American murdered by the government without even being accused of a crime, more criminalization of political dissent, more brutal and repressive police savagery against anyone in the bottom 20% of the income distribution, more data being gathered from every American’s emails and phone calls and tweets and bank records and cellphone tracking and buying habits and facebook postings, and that data getting shared more widely with employers and cops and college admissions committees and every other unaccountable secretive quasitotalitarian hierarchy in our society.

So your vote won’t change anything. The only choice you have is whether you scream out in rage as you’re crucified.

Write in someone like Elizabeth Warren for president instead of the good cop Barack Obama (as opposed to the bad cop Mitt Romney). The good cop works for the same people as the bad cop. The good cop and the bad cop are just two halves of a team designed to crush you and turn your life into a living hell. Reject the good cop/bad cop “choice” and put your fist through the one-way mirror in the interrogation room and shout “I REFUSE TO CONFESS BECAUSE I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG!”

“Even in states that are a lock for electoral votes pushing up the popular vote helps marginalize the GOP.”

Get a clue. America is a country in which Ayn Rand’s paeans to sociopathic narcissism and homicidal greed have outsold the Bible. Nothing is going to marginalize the GOP.

#67. My lady friend, who qualifies, has been doing campaign work for Obama and a rare local left-Democrat who got redistricted into our center-left neighborhood. I strongly endorse the latter and weakly the former (in fact, just tried but failed to talk her out of working Saturday for O to make more time for me). She qualifies, and also tells me many of the O workers are, as you might expect, black. Just as many whites are taking this election very personally, so are many non-whites. Many of those I find promoting what I consider useless leftish 3rd party voting are lilly white with a populist-conservative view of political economy. US Greens seem about as anti-government as US Libertarians, if not moreso. I wonder who they think will be collecting the Carbon Tax. Of course, the grandest ideas always have the Carbon Tax automagically appearing as a credit to all world citizens.

mattski @98:

Ben, if only the two have a realistic chance to win then indeed (presuming there is a material difference between the two) there are two possible scenarios. One is closer and one is further from the world I’d like to live in. And you too.

You’re moving the goalposts. Back at @93, you opined that…

of the two candidates in play (with a chance to win) I plan to vote for the one who would bring us closer to the society I’d like to live in, and I’m not going to vote for the one who would take us further from the society I’d like to live in.

The claim I was disagreeing with was your argument that one candidate would move us in the right direction, the other candidate would move us in the wrong direction.

On the other hand, your later claim–that so long as I believe that one of the candidates would move us in the wrong direction more slowly, I believe that one candidate will leave us closer to the way I want things than the other candidate–is a truism. And I still don’t understand why it’s inappropriate to call the candidate who makes things worse more slowly the “lesser evil.”

Incidentally, I really love it when foolish ignorant Americans cite sports analogies for politics. Aaron gives us the beloved analogy with football.

As it happens, medical science has now shown that professional football athletes suffer extreme debilitating brain damage. Anyone who plays pro football is destroying himself, leading to Alzheimers-level dementia and brain damage by his mid-thirties to early forties.

This is the perfect summation of the crazy counterproductive self-destructiveness of the Obama voters. Like pro football players, they think they’re wonderfully wise winners for playing the game, when they’re actually insuring their own debilitation and rapid descent into dementia and brain-damage induced death.

Okay, so, what? Pick up the gun? General strike?

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards”, said Max Weber, and there’s nothing in the thousands of years of history we can read to suggest he was wrong.

Forgive me for trying to be practical, but how do we get from where we are to where we want to be, while doing the best we can to take care of each other in the meantime?

Steve Williams @114:

Oh. So I must vote for a party that I’m explicitly guaranteed will make things worse (at a slower rate, though!) or else I’m guilty of pure evil, evil incarnate.

I don’t know exactly what role you’re trying to cast me in, Steve, but I’m definitely not of the view that voting for a third party makes you guilty of pure evil incarnate. My view is that in most states you should vote for whichever presidential candidate on the ballot you honestly feel is best (major or minor party). But in “battleground” states, it makes sense for progressives to vote tactically for Obama, because significantly limiting suffering on the margins in the short run is a good thing (and won’t have any negative effect on long-run outcomes, either…indeed, in the long-run in might marginally slow the ratchet effect, though it certainly won’t stop it).

Nothing you do electorally at the moment will stop the ratchet effect.

But that’s just my view (which I don’t honestly think you can fairly mix-and-match with bits and pieces of random other commentators views in order to fabricate some sort of pseudo consensus).

Actually, let me be more blunt than I was @115: however bad Obama is, Romney would be much worse. As others have said upthread, the OP totally underestimates how bad Romney would be. And the ways in which Romney is worse would have negative longterm effects, certainly in the areas of our already tattered social safety net (Romney would be worse for the ACA and for Medicare and Social Security), in regards to war and peace (Romney is much more likely to start a war with Iran), and in appointments to federal courts, including the Supreme Court. Lesser evils are less evil. And that can make a huge difference in the real world.

With all due respect, may I reiterate that the American legacy of slavery mangles nearly any international political comparison? Much of the country has become accustomed to the inexpensive effort and enterprise of the emerging Latino plurality, because having a resident underclass was never an affront to the American identity. That’s where we started.

One party has gotten partly unstuck from that tangle, and the other is using its tatters as a net. “Those people”, they say. The 47%. Not like us.

Can anyone credibly argue that the Republicans are anything but the white people’s party? And the rich people’s party? Say what you like about the party of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses trying to breathe free, but at least we’re willing to live in the future.

All this boils down to pointing out in a round about way, that the US electoral system stinks, and leaves conscientious voters stuff between a rock and a bad place. Shouldn’t the target here be the US electoral system and not the democratic party.

Haven’t read all the comments, so maybe someone already made this point.
Anyway: the doom and gloom scenario, Republicans taking over and killing everybody, it ignores the fact that refusing to vote, and/or casting a protest vote, if attempted on a large enough scale, changes the paradigm. In fact, even mass apathy changes it. There is a reason one-party systems always fabricate 99.8% turnout. Consent has to be manufactured (the Democrats perform this function); if you fail to do it, hey, it’s the writings on the wall.

This is the problem with lesser-evilism – it’s very vulnerable to strategic behaviour.

Says the left-wing blog currently working full-time as a sabotage instrument in support of libertarian conservative Conor Friedersdorf.

I see a lot of empirical weakness in this “anti-lesser than two evils” theory. First, I would argue that in his vale of tears, as the phrase that gives this blog its name, all democratic elections are an choice between which is the lesss or “two evils.” Also, contraray to the initial assertion, Obama’s campaign on health care and other issues was to the right of Hilary Clinton (hence is campaign’s rejection of the mandate that he later accepted in the bill that Congress produced). I know it has been fashionable on the Left to pooh-pooh the first major expansion of the American welfare state since 1965, but still, it is what it is. Also, Obama was well captured ideologically by the Koolz kids of Robert Rubin’s clique on economic and finanicial policy. Had they not produced the nineties boom and a balanced budget!!! I think he is somewhat disentrhalled by his experiences of the last four years, but he still seem to think a balance budget needs to be pursued as the Great White Whale of American political accomplishment. Still, although far from the Marxist cabal imagined by the Right and perhaps that some here dream to establish, this Administration is certainly as liberal as Jimmy Carter’s and has moved to the left relative to the DLC administration of Clinton. And given the nature of America and the undemocratic nature of its Constitution (the Senate, the Senate, and remember the Senate), the rural, small, white, Evangelical, and Southern (always the South) is a drag anchor back to the 18th century in American politics.
Further, it is not Democratic victories that drage the Democrats to the right, but it is the defeats. From 1972 onward, each defeat usually led to a retreat to the right as they were seen (often correctly – read Nixonland) as the American majority rejecting liberalism for variety of reasons, good and bad.

I think Daniel doesn’t understand how important healthcare reform was, how difficult it was to get through, or Obama’s tactics in connection with it. As a result he sees healthcare reform as some minor side project that Obama stuffed up, rather than the complete burning of all his political capital to overcome the most obstructionist, nihilist and miscreant right-wing opposition in history. If he were up against someone smart right now he’d be toast… and if Romney wins that healthcare reform is toast, and that’s something the importance of which I don’t think Daniel gets.

Also Daniel, your comment at 7 is hilarious. let’s reread with emphasis:

we got Ed Milliband

That’s 100 shades of win for everyone involved. Only you didn’t “get” him, he’s in opposition, and the only reason he’s going to get back into power in 2015 is because the Conservatives have fucked the country beyond everyone’s wildest dreams.

When Ed Milliband is your good outcome, you are clutching at straws.

Mao Cheng Ji 09.28.12 at 9:42 am

” Haven’t read all the comments, so maybe someone already made this point.
Anyway: the doom and gloom scenario, Republicans taking over and killing everybody, it ignores the fact that refusing to vote, and/or casting a protest vote, if attempted on a large enough scale, changes the paradigm. In fact, even mass apathy changes it. There is a reason one-party systems always fabricate 99.8% turnout. Consent has to be manufactured (the Democrats perform this function); if you fail to do it, hey, it’s the writings on the wall.”

Considering that the right works very hard at *reducing* overall turnout, I think that we can dismiss this argument without further debate.

Mclaren, you argue that “lesser-evilism” or whatever the phrase is can lead us to a very bad place, but I think it’s important to think about your scenario. There are two different situations, electorally, and I think that the tactical responses should be different:

1. There is a majority, or near-majority support for the GREATER evil. In this case, withholding support from the better candidate is insuring that evil wins.

2. There is a large majority of support from the lesser evil. In this case, it is worth challenging the less-evil party (in primary elections) to try to move it even more in the less-evil direction.

If in a hypothetical 2016 election, the Republican candidate is Paul Ryan, or someone even worse, then you need to make a serious assessment as to his likelihood of winning. If it’s small, then there is room to take some risks. If it’s considerable, then principled rejection of “lesser-evilism” will elect Paul Ryan.

Someone earlier asked whether people are sneering at the idea of acting out of principle. Well I am, sort of. I think that actions should be judged by their consequences. It’s certainly possible that there could be a long-term plan to get to a better place that involves making things worse in the short run (that is, electing Republicans). But it’s also possible that making things worse in the short run will make things worse in the long run, also. That’s the way I feel about electing Republicans, or allowing them to be elected through “principled” withholding of your vote.

I’m willing to listen to someone who has a plausible long game strategy, but if someone is just voting out of moral principles, with no concern about whether it accomplishes anything other than making him feel morally superior, I have no patience with him. It seems like selfishness to me.

In terms of Hindenburg vs. Hitler, obviously it didn’t work out well, but that was for reasons that weren’t really foreseeable at the time. The Brüning government that got Hindenburg re-elected was a pretty classic “lesser evil” kind of business – it was very conservative, and pursued terrible austerity policies, and was increasingly leery of the Republic itself, but it was also clearly anti-Nazi and not illiberal in general.

Hindenburg really was the only viable alternative to Hitler winning, and it wasn’t obvious at the time that he’d throw over Brüning at the first opportunity and install an absurd ultra-reactionary government in its place, much less that he’d then appoint Hitler chancellor. Sometimes the lesser evil doesn’t end up being really less evil, but I’m not sure generalizations can be made about this.

A rejection of lesser evilism, by the way, is how Hindenburg got elected in the first place – if the Communists had been willing to support Marx in the second round of the 1925 elections, he’d have never been president at all.

Daniel,

#5

Nuh uh on anything that requires judicial or regulatory nominations, which are trivially easy to filibuster for a Congressional party that has even a modicum of spine.

Filibustering regulatory nominees does little good. First, someone is going to be in charge of the agencies regardless. What policies do youthink th eactinghead of EPA or OSHA is going to follow? Second, since the Republican goal is to have the regulatory agencies regulate as little as possible, keeping them from having a confirmed head does little to block their agenda.

#34

Supreme Court nominees require approval and no feasible scenario has the Democrats without a viable blocking minority. If you’re arguing that they are not willing to use that blocking power to defend abortion rights you need to own that.

I’m not sure what you mean by needing “to own that,” but it’s certainly true. The Democrats did not block either Roberts or Alito. The way to defend abortion rights in the Supreme Court is to have the power to nominate Justices.

Nuh uh on anything that requires judicial or regulatory nominations, which are trivially easy to filibuster for a Congressional party that has even a modicum of spine.

Well, that’s great in Bizzaro World where we can rely on Bizzaro Green Lantern Democrats who fear no evil. Unfortunately, here in the Real Goddamn World, we get the same Democrats who successfully failed to prevent so much of Bush’s agenda.

Sorry, that clearly should have read “Bizzaro Green Lantern Democrats who am fear no evil.” I apologize.

“Unfortunately, here in the Real Goddamn World, we get the same Democrats who successfully failed to prevent so much of Bush’s agenda.”

. . . this message brought to you by their campaign re-election fund.

The argument always seems to revolve around appointments to the Supreme Court. Among the most pernicious bits of the antiquated constitution is the Supreme Court. I don’t know of another system that is burdened with a Court with that much power over its constitution. France gets along very well with a Constitutional commission, which puts the stamp on laws as constitutional. End of story. It would be lovely if some Democrat politico did us a favor and started proselytizing for limited Supreme Court appointments. That is a constitutional amendment that would be extremely popular – save, admittedly, with politicians. For if the Dem militants couldn’t use the Supreme court as its ace argument, they’d have to argue about, well, what they would do and what they did. Maybe even have to justify the fact that the Dems pretty much rubber stamped Scalia back in the day, gave a majority vote to John Roberts, and chose not to make the kind of fuss they used to make (say, in Nixon’s time) about the justices.
I would love to see the Supreme court stripped of its power of being the ultimate arbitor of constitutional questions and simply made into the highest appeal court, and that would be that. It would solve one of the perennial vices in the American system.

Steve Williams: I can understand not liking the reality of the parties in American politics, but the sheer insistence on sulking about it mystifies me. Consider the Democratic Senator from Louisiana. She’s aghast at the wealth gap, is a reliable vote for protecting the safety net, voted for health care reform, and has supported key efforts to get the government to offer credit alternatives to banks. Yet she represents a state that voted 70/30 for McCain and is, in many ways, dependent on oil interests (as her constituents want). You might believe electoral politics is a fraud and your armed insurrection will overthrow the state, but if you don’t believe that and want to play electoral politics, you don’t get anywhere by whining that the rules don’t let you win easily.

Among the most pernicious bits of the antiquated constitution is the Supreme Court. I don’t know of another system that is burdened with a Court with that much power over its constitution

Germany’s constitutional court seems to be similar. Probably because it was set up under American tutelage.

Matt McIrvin on 09.28.12 at 11:27 am wins the thread:

sounded more like epistemic closure/”La la la. I CAN’T HEAR YOU” to me, but then, very likely, we come to this with different understandings of what constitutes good debate.

bad Jim 09.28.12 at 6:04 am:

‘Okay, so, what? Pick up the gun? General strike?

Forgive me for trying to be practical, but how do we get from where we are to where we want to be, while doing the best we can to take care of each other in the meantime?’

Clearly, voting will not accomplish this. The outcome of the next election will not be decided or influenced by your vote. This seems to leave local activism and organization. If what you want to do is preserve the social democratic state, then you need to make it more troublesome for the ruling class to get rid of it than to tolerate what’s left of it. At this time I don’t know of any large organizations ready to do this; if so that means you must begin with local and individual actions. If you want to establish a socialist or communist society, likewise there are no large organizations or institutions currently doing this, so you would have to find or start local cooperatives, communes, squats, etc. Either way, Weber seems to be right, although occasionally the boards break unexpectedly.

Guns do not appear necessary at this point. Although the police have been partly militarized and our civil liberties infringed and diluted here and there, there is still a lot of political space in which to act, as OWS, Wisconsin, and the Chicago teachers’ strike showed.

McLaren:
Has Obama proposed changes in immigration laws that stop targeting people from Islamic countries? Of course he hasn’t. Obama loves brutalizing immigrants…

He did take steps to prevent deportation of people in their late teens or early 20s who arrived as very young children in the company of ‘undocumented’ parents.
(Maybe someone said this already.)

@150: The CT crew is the group apparently impervious to evidence. It doesn’t appear to matter what Democrats say, what Republicans say, or what either of them do. Apparently the actual events of the Bush administration, for example, do not count evidence for what Romney could or will do. Neither do his own statements. The stated positions of Obama are not relevant, and any positive achievements that he has can either be ignored or minimized. By contrast, any faults that he has are to be taken as gospel truth.

Listening to a few of the front-pagers here is like talking to Republicans raised on a diet of talk radio and Fox News. The Naderite garbage is destroying your credibility as a group; you may wish to think about whether you want continue, or whether instead you’d prefer to have people take you seriously on other matters.

Comrades! The Revolutionary Peoples Purity Party endorses Gary Johnson and his program of getting high while children work. Down with the black guy neoliberal hegemonists!

Forty-four years ago. Those kids were a sabotage instrument that ruined Hubert Humphrey’s promised New Jerusalem. Bullshit then, bullshit now, but I still hear it every time a group of Democrats gather. Yeah, we got Nixon instead, but I suspect that was as much a result of the good things that LBJ did — the Civil Rights Act, the National Voting Rights Act, food stamps, etc. — as the bad things he did. (the effing Vietnam War, in case anyone’s forgotten.) America’s Moral Arc has always followed an erratic trajectory, and sometimes nudging it onto the right path involves more than shaking a finger at people who aren’t content to let the Very Serious People take care of things the way they always have. Which is to say, vote for Obama or don’t vote for Obama as your conscience dictates, but please, please, spare us the lectures on our moral imperatives.

The problem is that there are different degrees of party loyalty in the Democratic and Republican coalitions. The Republicans are a party: they can be whipped–and are. Party loyalty, when the chips are down, trumps ideology and policy preferences. The Democrats are a themeless pudding: a blancmange, say. When the chips are down, Republican moderates like Snowe, Collins, Brown, Murkowski, Cochran, Bond, Lugar, and Grassley have voted with their party’s leaders–even against their own policy proposals. But when the chips are down, Hagan, Johnson, Warner, Lieberman, Baucus, Webb, Nelson, McCaskill, and Carper have not–they have had to expensively negotiated into the Democratic policy line every time.

As Norman Ornstein says about the difference in party loyalty between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate:

>I think it reflects a deep cultural difference between the two parties in a host of different ways. And part of it is the Republican part. In the Republican Party, moderates and progresses were always a relatively small minority. They were there, they were significant, but they never made up more than 20, 25, 30% of the party. For the Democrats, the southern conservatives made up 50% or 40% from a very long period of time. And so there was a different sense of the importance and the power that those people had. Secondly, I do think there is simply a cultural difference. For Republicans, it’s almost more of a religion or a tribal identification than it is for Democrats.

>That is sometimes really curious to see. Watch Olympia Snow get caught up in this the way that she did.

>I worked with Olympia very closely on the campaign reform staff. She was under enormous pressure from McConnell and others. She stood fast.

>Then you fast-forward to the aftermath of the Citizens United decision. What we worked on with Olympia, when campaign finance reform was floundering over the Republicans’ insistence that if you are going to keep corporations out of the game, you need to freeze labor out too. Trying to find a common ground. So we came up with something that ended up being the Snow-Jeffords amendment–which was a way of keeping corporations and unions out of elections and communications when we are close to elections, all of that stuff. It passed the court when Sandra Day O’Connor was still there. It was the target, as much as anything in particular was, of Citizens United.

>So we get the response to Citizens United: the Disclose act. Now you can quibble with portions of that. But this is a bill that passes the House handily, and then gets to the Senate and all 59 Democrats support it. And not one Republican, including Snowe—this was her most important legislative achievement–would vote for cloture, and so it dies. We would be in a different place if that bill had passed–not radically different but different, and you will see more of this sort of coming forward. The desire not to be shunned within your own party is a part of it.

>It’s almost like you are in a religion. You look at misbehavior on the part of the leaders of that religion, and you are shocked and dismayed, but you are not leaving your religion. And you are still going to go to church: you just can’t give up something that you held in a lifelong way.

>I think Democrats are just different in that front. They don’t have the same discipline. I see even some of it outside. You get a talking point that gets distributed. Now, for example, we can’t meet anybody in or out of office who doesn’t say: “Well, what do you say about the Senate not passing a budget resolution for three years?” They picked up on a talking point. It’s a phony talking point. But it’s a talking pointit’s. It’s not like they have a phone call every morning where everybody dials in and they are given marching orders. It’s just there and they pick up on it.

>By contrast Democrats are all over the map.

>So there is a difference in culture there. But I would just add that I think Thomas was right in pointing out that given all of that, Obama’s achievement–and you know you have to give some of it to Pelosi and to Reid–at getting all 60 democrats from socialist Burney Sanders to Ben Nelson to vote for a health care bill…

>Brad DeLong: The Heritage Foundation’s healthcare bill. Romney’s healthcare plan. Something that’s significantly to the right of Olympia Snowe’s policy priorities, as demonstrated by her life up to 2008.

>Norman Ornstein: Okay. And they got socialist Barney Sanders to vote for it.

>Brad DeLong: Yes.

>Norman Ornstein: You know it’s the Heritage Foundation’s bill, but it’s also the Hatch-Grassley healthcare bill.

>Brad DeLong: Yes.

>Norman Ornstein: But the fact Pelosi got enough Democrats to support a cap-and-trade bill, even if it never went though the Senate.

>Brad DeLong: But they were not organized enough to pass a carbon tax through reconciliation in February of 2009 and then bargain back in the Senate to cap-and-trade.

>Norman Ornstein: Well, you know, let’s remember this is the Democratic Party. Will Rogers said: “I am not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” So that’s built into the culture as well. But there is a difference here. I think it’s one of the things—part of our frustrations, I could easily pick out 30 Republicans in the House who are problem solvers, and who would love to be out there working with Democrats–and in some cases they do in committee and sub-committee. Then there are bills which they contributed to, and they have been compromised before they even get to the floor, and they all vote against him. And of course the other part of this is there is no Democratic Club for Growth that says: “We are waiting for you, and if you vote in way that we don’t like, there will be millions in to knock you off in the primary.” It happens to Democrats, but nowhere near as significant and the threat is nowhere near as deep.

>Brad DeLong: So is the problem that Daily Kos and Netroots Nation are not strong enough?

>Norman Ornstein: No, we are not advocating having both parties have an ideological police…

Chris Bertram’s rule

Did I enunciate a rule to that effect? I believe I may have expressed impatience with US commenters whose remarks demonstrated a lack of basic understanding of the British political system. But for obvious reasons, British commenters are probably better informed about US politics than Americans are about the UK.

Yeah, we got Nixon instead

And that made things worse. No matter how much you like to wallow in left nostalgia, it’s still the case that that made things worse. If you still can’t deal with the truth about the past you have no hope of doing so in the present.

Look, I’m much closer to you in overall political thinking than to a mainstream Democrat, but the situation is accurately described by Gepap @ 155. One can work within that reality or one can retreat into fantasy and nostalgia. Like it or not, the best thing that can happen to the American left at the current moment is for moderate-Republican Democrat Obama to run up the score and bring in a moderate Republican Democratic House majority with him. I would love for there to be something better on offer but I prefer to deal with reality.

I wish this and the related threads weren’t such a devastating demonstration of the impotence and fecklessness of the American left. It’s depressing, especially in contrast to the discipline and organization of the right, which will only be temporarily be dented by the flameout of the hapless Romney.

W. Timberman @160:
Yes, this is the problem with facile historical analogies. They often don’t work very well. Hubert Humphrey, who would have been a good (maybe even a very good) president, helped ruin his own New Jerusalem because by the time he clearly separated himself from LBJ on Vietnam, in Sept ’68 in a speech at Salt Lake City, it was too late. A real shame. Instead the U.S. got Nixon and Kissinger and their “secret plan” to end the war. We know how that worked out.
But you’re right that people should stop blaming Eugene McCarthy (or RFK for that matter) and his supporters for Humphrey’s defeat. I’m surprised you still hear this mentioned “every time a group of Democrats gather.” It was a long time ago, after all, as ‘political time’ is measured in the U.S. these days.

One can work within that reality or one can retreat into fantasy and nostalgia.

You think that the Democratic Party represents reality. Whatever it is that makes you think so, you’re welcome to it.

@166: an awful lot of us are looking at threads like this as direct evidence that British academics apparently have as little understanding of US politics as American ones do of British politics.

You think that the Democratic Party represents reality. Whatever it is that makes you think so, you’re welcome to it.

The fact that it has the support, in a good year, of the majority of voters, while ideas more congenial to you and I have the support of maybe 5%, should make anyone with a mental age greater than three think so. Holding your breath until you turn blue won’t change that.

“so he tells us he sadly and reluctantly can’t vote for someone he always detested and whose politics he opposes, only because of a drone policy, so he will protest vote for a principled candidate who is not opposed to that policy! Sincerity!”

Exactly! Also a candidate that he supported with such sincerity that he did not even know said candidates economic policy. Truly the man is a modern day Plato. We all have so much to learn. Face it. You people have been had.

MPA Victoria – When someone devotes a couple of years of their life to pushing a set of awkward and unpleasant issues that they are unlikely to get thanked for raising by any of the major factions in US politics, yes, I am that naive. Only I wouldn’t call it naive, obviously. The alternative explanation – that all of this work is a long con aimed at furthering teh awesome presidential chances of Gary Johnson (or, alternatively, at cunningly swaying liberals away from supporting Barack Obama, handing the election to Mitt Romney), I would call partisan wishful thinking.

that was to rootless

No MPAVictoria – you are being had. By yourself. I know that this is a terrible time to try and convince people about stuff that goes against their partisan biases. But the Obama administration has been responsible for some terrible, horrible, shitty things. Things that are so bad that people of good conscience genuinely might have good reason not to want to vote for him. And trying to pretend this isn’t true (unless you think that drone strikes in which multiples more children are killed than terrorist leaders, anyone who is male and above a certain age is counted as a terrorist etc are a good thing) is a form of denialism.

One reason why American liberals may be slow to embrace this sort of thinking is from the awful Bush/Gore experience. Anti-Globalists were right to despair about the choice between a “compassionate”, isolationist conservative and a neoliberal democrat who was complicit in Clinton’s foreign misadventures.

Of course, we know how that one turned out. Within weeks of getting into office, Bush’s advisors were a) planning radical tax cuts that had limited support in the polls b) looking for ways to attack Iraq and c) dismantling the EPA and other regulatory agencies. If Romney is elected, you can replace b) with: looking into an attack on Iran.
Were Romney holding a slight lead, even hardened Marxists might have a hard time arguing that they’re all the same anyway.

Obama was elected as a moderate, not a radical. Most leftists were aware that Hillary was more liberal than Obama, and made an effort to win her the 2008 nomination, but Obama has always been a charismatic middle of the road democrat. Obama is simply doing what the electorate wants, and is a small step on the road to a more liberal country rather than a great leap.

Cian: “Obama is a lot worse than his defenders here are suggesting. Education will be privatized, social security and Medicare will almost certainly be dismantled. ”

He’d better hurry up, he hasn’t done any of those things yet and he’s only got four years left. You’d think he’d have made some progress on them in his first term if they were such priorities.

“So given that, how are we to suppose that President Romney would be able to push through an agenda five times as radical…”

Who would have thought that Thatcher could be so successful? Consider that radical right has been working up to this for 30 years and has won many victories. Bush II was very successful. (Abortion by the way, is in practical terms, banned in many states.) It is not implausible at all.

You don’t understand US politics and you are forgetting the rise of fascism. Please. You are an educated man. Review some of the history and look for parallels–they are there.

He’d better hurry up, he hasn’t done any of those things yet and he’s only got four years left. You’d think he’d have made some progress on them in his first term if they were such priorities.

The first is happening. He made a good attempt at the other two (but ironically was defeated by posturing from Republicans), and has said that these are things he wants to achieve in his second term (he didn’t put it that way, but given who has been advising him, its pretty obvious what he’s planning).

Of course the idea that a Democrat would dismantle welfare is very hard for some [cough Clinton] to get their head around.

rf – connor is obviously an insincere con artist. His pose of reluctantly refusing to support President Obama due to horror at the war on terror is deeply dishonest – both because Connor opposes Obama anyways and because his critique of the “war on terror” is itself based on fiction. As for the bogus attack on liberals, it’s composed of the usual dishonest right wing invention of liberal positions. I remain opposed to the war in afghanistan and Yemen but I don’t need some hypocritical right wing creep telling me that I am therefore morally bound to protest vote for a racist supporter of child labor who doesn’t even oppose those wars – and thus increase the chances of Neocons coming back into power.

And, like most Americans, I do not buy the tendentious theory that American citizenship is a license to join a hostile military force while still enjoying judicial protection. I think Abraham Lincoln was well within his mandate to tell the army to shoot Confederates without judicial process and President Obama similarly can act against the superstitionists who brag of their war against US civilians. Since CF doesn’t seem to be able to even fucking read the 5th Amendment, I will point out again that it does not anywhere refer to citizenship status.

He’d better hurry up, he hasn’t done any of those things yet and he’s only got four years left.

Education is being steadily privatized through the increased funding of charter schools and other “reforms”. (See also: Chicago.) The reasons that Social Security is still intact are: (1) Republican intrasigence (cf. “the grand bargain”), and (2) Occupy. So yeah, Cian’s basically right.

(Before 5000 lesser-evilers jump on me, let me just note that I’m not saying that Obama and Romney are equally bad, or that there’s no point to voting for Democrats, etc.)

Education is being steadily privatized through the increased funding of charter schools and other “reforms”.

I don’t think you really know what privatisation means.

@Chris Bertram – I don’t live in France but I have similarly brown skinned friends there and I’m curious about your statement that there is no moral imperative to vote for Chirac over Le Pen. Care to say more?

(I can accept the proposal that Chirac was going to win without any leftist voters, so no imperative there – but is that your point?)

I don’t think you really know what privatisation means.

Well generally I feel that when a school is run, or owned by, a for profit company the term applies. But do feel free to enlighten me Ajay. Preferably in that delightfully patronizing tone.

Why is it so hard for “progressives” to understand that politics is about POWER, not values? In order to enact the policies you want, you need power. How does taking actions that you reasonably believe will place individuals in positions of power with values and policy ideas actively hostile to your own in almost every field of policy imaginable in any way, shape, or form empower you?

Is Obama a progressive? No. Would his administration pose fewer obstacles to progressive aims or schemes than a Romney admin? Of course it would. As a progressive, why the hell would you then think that it is irrelevant whether Romney or Obama win?

People are capable of mutliple acitons. If you think the way to go is to start organizations that can slowly build a progressive body of citizens willing to fight for the values you hold, please, go ahead , do so. But at the same time you can also act to place in power people who will make your job just a little less terribly hard.

And for those people who think that all we really need is to wait for things to get so awful, so terrible under crazy reactionaries that the people will sponteneously rise up in some form progressive revolt, realize that we live in a world of climate change and nuclear weapons. Its a very risky bet to assume that the revolution will reach us before there is no public commonwealth to revolt in the first place.

And for those people who think that all we really need is to wait for things to get so awful, so terrible under crazy reactionaries that the people will sponteneously rise up in some form progressive revolt

And why is so hard for people to see that there’s a huge difference between (1) honest criticisms of the Obama administration and the Democratic party as currently constituted, and (2) believing this fuckin’ crazy thing. Because, seriously, can you actually point to anyone who is defending the above.

202: I think when you’re talking about privatising a government service, the assumption is that you’re talking about privatising all of it, or at least a very large part of it. (I don’t think anyone would have talked about the Conservatives in the UK privatising British Steel if they had sold off a single rolling mill and kept all the rest of the company in state hands.) As far as I’m aware, this hasn’t happened to US education – most pupils are still in state schools – nor is it set to happen any time soon.

Maybe he announced it in the same speech where he said he wanted to dismantle Social Security and Medicare?

@js

That situation, of hoping things get so bad people will see just how smart progressives are, is the rational end of the program of action advocated by those who urge people to stand aside,and claim that both political parties are just the same but who at the same time fail utterly to explain how they are going to build that other movement.

There is a difference between being critical of Obama (which I am) and then deciding to say, f**k it, I don’t care if Romney gets elected.

Why would it be “wishful thinking” for liberals to believe that a conservative like Friedersdorf is attempting to do exactly what the Republicans have done?

Because he’s spent the last few years talking to anyone who’ll listen about what a stinking heap of shit the Republican party is?

But right. It’s the long con. Only when he has succeeded in swaying millions of liberals not to vote for Obama, tossing the election to Romney, will Friedersdorf reveal his true agenda, with fiendish cackle and a debonair twirl of his elegantly waxed moustache.

On the other ideological front of this dispute, as Jim Henley noted on Twitter, the unseemly enthusiasm with which many (not all) self-declared liberals have descended into an orgy of hippy-punching is sort of astonishing.

And with that, I’m out of here completely.

But for obvious reasons, British commenters are probably better informed about US politics than Americans are about the UK.

Those reasons are not particularly obvious, and in fact Daniel (for whom I ordinarily have tremendous admiration) doesn’t seem to understand American politics at all, as I and numerous others point out above.

Although I firmly believe that voting for the lesser evil is sometimes necessary (and we may find ourselves having to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016)

If Andrew Cuomo is her main primary opponent, then she’ll be the lesser evil even in the primaries. (And that pretty much exhausts the good things I have to say about her. Anyone who thinks she’s to Obama’s left has truly never been paying attention. If there’s a meaningful difference at all it’s probably that she’d be even more enthusiastic about drone strikes and worse. Even some conservatives would prefer her to Obama for precisely that reason.)

Chris Bertram 09.28.12 at 3:12 pm
” Did I enunciate a rule to that effect? I believe I may have expressed impatience with US commenters whose remarks demonstrated a lack of basic understanding of the British political system. But for obvious reasons, British commenters are probably better informed about US politics than Americans are about the UK.”

Daniel seemed to be awfully unaware of the basic tilt of the political playing field in the US. Which is doubly bad since it’s not unrelated to the tilt in UK politics (i.e., the elites are pushing downhill, so to speak).

I do wish we’d see some acknowledgement that if every single person who feels inclined to vote third party did so, they stand no chance whatsoever of changing who gets elected. Didn’t matter before 2000, didn’t matter in 2000, didn’t matter in 2004, didn’t matter in 2008, won’t matter in 2012 or 2016, etc. Frankly, I’d like to see some evidence that the sensationalist-partisan folks spend at least this many hours, or at least this many paragraphs, being vicious and angry at citizens who stayed home and didn’t go vote.

Bush stole the election through Supreme Court shenanigans. Had every single Nader voter voted for Gore, Bush would have stolen the election through Supreme Court shenanigans. There were more than enough leftover ‘controverisal’ ballots to accomplish the task.

It’s been twelve fuckin’ years. Stop blaming some of the victims as if they were asking for it. (You might respond, “But they were! By not voting Gore they were totally asking for it! They’re the ones at fault! If not for them, our country wouldn’t have been so awful! They got what the asked for!” In which case, fuck you. If she had just put up with the guy hitting on her at the bus stop, she wouldn’t have given that assaulter a chance! What kind of awful person gives a rapist a greater chance of success? Didn’t she know her actions could have that bad a consequence? And why did she walk?! Didn’t she know it was a dangerous part of town?! She was inviting a disaster SO MUCH WORSE than whatever she would have faced on that bus! At least the bus provided the status quo! She should have just kept her mouth shut! Now she’s gone and contributed to a rape-friendly culture! What an awful person!)

The people who were responsible for getting Bush elected were the people who supported Bush’s policies. Blaming the fucking victim: still noxious.

Barry

Daniel seemed to be awfully unaware of the basic tilt of the political playing field in the US. Which is doubly bad since it’s not unrelated to the tilt in UK politics (i.e., the elites are pushing downhill, so to speak).

He also seems to be ignoring the damage a Republican president can do even if the Dems successfully filibuster everything in sight. For starters Romney could use executive orders to massively hurt the implementation of the ACA and make horrible interim appointments to various agencies. That’s before we get to the use of reconciliation to get around Democratic filibusters on terrible budget proposals.

If your aim is to have Government do as little governing as possible then the you can get a lot of mileage out of the powers of the POTUS. Less so if you actually need to pass legislation to make things better.

Barry 132 “Considering that the right works very hard at *reducing* overall turnout, I think that we can dismiss this argument without further debate.”

You can dismiss it of course, but that doesn’t follow from the premise, and the premise itself isn’t even true. Karl Rove strategy had been based on the high turnout of The Base, and that’s probably still the game plan for Romney. Nobody ever had the goal of reducing the overall turnout, it just doesn’t make sense.

Incidentally, boycotting elections doesn’t have to be a strategy of the left; I suspect most of the wingnuts are not too happy with their party either. Republicans concentrate on cutting taxes for billionaires, and destroying the social safety net, but they never deliver on cultural issues: prayers, flag burnings, all that good stuff. Just like the Democrats concentrate on cultural issues, and ignore the rest. This could be a truly bipartisan movement, for a system of proportional representation.

Karl Rove strategy had been based on the high turnout of The Base, and that’s probably still the game plan for Romney. Nobody ever had the goal of reducing the overall turnout, it just doesn’t make sense.

That and depressing likely turnout of Democratic voters with bs voter ID laws.

@ Anarcissie #219 — Your #1 is incorrect. The Democrats had been making ominous noises about reforming Social Security since the Clinton Administration. The Reaganomics rot had proceeded quite far. Bush went with it, because he believed the Dems would come along. Why didn’t they?

@227 — Well now you are avoiding your indication of right-wingyness, but let’s go with that: you see no future in which some Mexicans could not be induced to vote for a Cuban–enough Mexicans, say, to make up a 2-point spread in thetotal vote?

I didn’t like that nose anyway.

Q. [H]ow are we to suppose that President Romney would be able to push through an agenda five times as radical, including the ultimate third-rail issue of abortion?

A.[T]he Democrats have non-existent party discipline and are unable to prevent Republican excesses

Which is why I’m voting for Obama . . .

Daniel: One can only sympathize. After all, a substantive post that starts with “. If all you care about is the gap between parties, ” and if followed on by “Nuh uh on anything that requires judicial or regulatory nominations, which are trivially easy to filibuster for a Congressional party that has even a modicum of spine.’ demonstrates such a deep understanding of political process in general and US process in particular, that it deserves more cheering than impertinent rejection.

@235 — Actually I work with Mexicans almost every day and they are fair-minded, generous, and very funny. I would imagine that Rubio’s real problem will be in getting the Republican Party to think about a unified immigration reform, a policy change that he may find himself uniquely able to force upon them, particularly if the Repubs are routed in about a month from now, and decide to look in a different direction. I don’t see how the Mexican/Cuban differences are going to last; community leaders report in Miami that the enmity is subsiding, and bridging that gap could become a major lever in favor of the GOP.

I guess this thread is dead, an someone must have pointed this out, but if the GOP gets the WH and congressional majorities, they will end the filibuster. Take it to the bank.

If I honestly thought the republicans would get rid of the filibuster I’d volunteer to go door to door for them.

Obama is to the right of virtually the entire Democratic Party electorate.

This is demonstrably a fantasy, and is typical of the active fantasy life of too many lefties.

The 1/10th of 1%, and their parasitic financial sector, are worse than rabid dogs. They won’t stop. They know no limit.

And voting for a third-party candidate is the first step in changing this! If, that is, you subscribe to the underpants gnome theory of politics.

Sigh. Luckily these people are statistically invisible in the electorate and only matter when there’s a 2000-style perfect storm, which is very rare.

Nader got over 97,000 votes in Florida. That’s almost 20 times the margin by which Bush “won” in the official count. A fraction of those votes going to Gore would have put him in the White House.

You’re responding to a claim that you’re blaming victims, by blaming victims. And you’re blaming victims painfully selectively–well over 97,000 people stayed the fuck home in Florida, and a fraction of those folks going and voting for Gore would have put him in the White House. You’re focusing on Nader voters because they were ‘asking for it’ with their behavior. Had they just kept their heads down and stayed home, you’d have no problem with them.

I am trying to say that’s a sick way of looking at the world. As recently as 2010 I tried to be sanguine and accommodating, to the point of specifically promising to you and MPAVictoria and others that I’d go along with you and vote D here in 2012. That promise will be kept.

But frankly, every conciliatory attempt I’ve made has been met with cold hostility, contempt, and anger. Misplaced hostility, misplaced contempt, misplaced anger.

You are not a fucking moral warrior. You’re a coward who takes his enemies for granted, and so chooses to turn on his friends. You’re exploiting the fact that folks like me have enough ideological common ground with you, that we feel obligated to hear you out, in trying to establish some veneer of comity. So you take advantage of that at every opportunity.

But you have no argument why it’s us (rather than nonvoters or even Republican partisans, whose behavior you take for granted) whose behavior needs to change. It’s only us who are out of line, and it’s only us who you view as not monolithic. But there’s no evidence that we are the only coalition that might budge, and for that matter, there’s no evidence that we’re budgable ourselves.

So why us? We’re around, we’re visible, we’re easier targets. It takes less energy and less thought to engage with us, and you have a better chance of getting away with insulting us and berating us with emotionally satisfying rhetoric. The only argument you have for focusing on us, rather than nonvoters or people who voted for Bush, is that you know we’re more likely to stick around the conversation, take the abuse, and maybe even let ourselves get bullied into making concessions.

It’s convenient. You have evidence we voted. You have evidence we might consider you an ally. You have evidence we have some incentive to be polite to you, and to listen to you. You’re exploiting that in order to attack us, because we’re close at hand and willing to listen to it. You’re attacking us because we’re here.

And that’s an act of moral cowardice. And it’s blaming victims–fellow people who suffer at the hands of the person whose regime they didn’t support and vocally opposed. So, fuck you. You can choose to not spend that energy anywhere else, or on anyone else, and instead choose to spend it here. I just don’t have any reason anymore to not be hostile in response. I gave folks in your camp a full decade of conciliation. Enough. Go to hell. Expect pushback until you decide to treat Nader voters, and people who with principled intent abstain from voting for a lesser evil, they way you treat every other party ‘responsible’ for Bush’s election to the presidency in 2000: by conveniently forgetting they exist whenever the contention arises.

Fact, that is.

Salient trust me the disagreement I have with you is nothing compared to the contempt and hatred with which I view republican voters/politicians/intellectuals.

Actually the admission “these people are statistically invisible in the electorate and only matter when there’s a 2000-style perfect storm” is pretty solid evidence that you in particular step in to bash these folks for the emotional satisfaction of it, not out of any strategic calculation to improve the chance’s of a Democrat winning.

And of course that’s always been true. It’s for the satisfaction of pummeling somebody who’s around to be pummeled, the kind of thing you’d use as a clarifying example in a dictionary entry for scapegoat. Everybody arguing against third-party voting or principled nonvoting knows that to be the case. (And most people know it was true even in the “perfect storm” of 2000. If Gore wins the election because he had the most votes, and then the election is stolen from him by invalidating an astonishing number of votes, it’s obviously absurd to declare that what Gore needed was more votes. But saying even that much is conceding that you have a moral right to blame your allies for the behavior of your enemies, which is a concession I’m no longer willing to make.)

trust me the disagreement I have with you is nothing compared to the contempt and hatred with which I view republican voters/politicians/intellectuals.

I trust you. I also trust that the guy who comes home and drinks and beats the shit out of his wife every evening feels hostility toward her which is nothing compared to the contempt and hatred with which he views his colleagues/competitors at work, or whatever. That’s actually a significant part of the point I’m making: the expressed contempt and hatred is disproportionate to the felt contempt and hatred, and the only reason for that is because we’re around to take it on the chin, and because you can take it for granted we’ll still be around to take it on the chin tomorrow.

People don’t usually express relief with hot hostility, Steve. Relief would be giving it a rest.

If I honestly thought the republicans would get rid of the filibuster I’d volunteer to go door to door for them.

They’ll only get rid of the filibuster under cicumstances which allow them to pass their maximalist agenda. Then they won’t need it any more.

Honestly, anyone would think from listening to some people that the Nader voters wanted Bush to win. No one anticipated how close it was going to be. No one could possibly have anticipated it.

That was a valid excuse then. There’s no excuse for condoning, and advising others to repeat, such behavior after living through 2000.

I’ll give it a rest when such people stop

Which is to say, you ain’t gonna stop bullying. Well, okay. I tried to illustrate how that bullying is misplaced, and clarify why it’s noxious. Not much else I can do at that point, beyond put up fists in defense (and be thankful that we’re only online acquaintances, because the idea of real-life me putting up fists in defense would be more hilariously adorable than provocatively menacing).

No one is making you post or read here.

Nobody’s making that hypothetical wife go home every evening, either. The point of this kind of bullying is to make people feel unwelcome/unsafe/uncomfortable with speaking up.

@ Anarcissie #249 — Well the Dems are not a unified group, on this Daniel is correct, but the fact is that Wash. D.C. as a whole has been moving toward “reform” of Social Security for about two decades, in the name of “deficit reduction” and “giving younger workers a fair break”, all of it under the Cato Leninist strategy that Bruce Webb has written about, and aided and abetted by the Democratic Party’s near-universal acceptance of theoretical Reaganomics (up until almost the present time). Social Security had not been sacrosanct; many Democrats are on record throughout the period mumbling that Social Security would have to be “dealt with.” But the tip-off is this: President Bush would never have done months of town-hall meetings, strictly aimed to whoop-up privatization, in a mid-term election year if he did not think the Democrats would be on board. Presidents just don’t waste their time that way.

On the other hand, I think Obama’s offer last summer to put Social Security on the table, in return for a Republican capitulation on tax hikes in a grand budget deal, happened because he knew they would not take it. At the present time, Republicans don’t want a debt deal on anything but their own terms, because a budget deal, of ANY sort whatsoever, does the following thing: it reduces the saliency of debt-fear in their political rhetoric, as an immediate consequence. Why? Because a budget deal, any budget deal, will reduce the future debt projections. Nobody is going to keep banging on about the debt, after the future projections have just been reduced. It would make the op-ed clowns sound like really boring imbeciles (if you weren’t there already). Consider that the Republicans really don’t have that many political issues, outside the social-conservative ones. They need a clean win on the debt to maintain the ideological purity, meaning: NO tax revenue increases.

@Bruce Wilder

Your assertion that most Democrats are to the left of Barack Obama is one made without a shred of evidence, and given the make-up of the Senate and House, its most assuredly false. I could add my own anecdotal evidence since almost everyone I know and everyone I regularly hang out with is a self-identified Democrat, and your assertion is spectacularly wrong as an attempt to describe that group as a whole.

I work in politics, so I understand very well how policy is made by those with power. if the political class is pulling the strings of the masses, it is because the masses allow it, willingly. How else can you explain a situation in which most people hate Congress as an institution but still give their own member a relatively positive grade?

The US is a democracy still, and the awfulness of the government is a direct result of the choices made by the masses. The buck stops, in the end, with the voters. People have actively wanted to be fooled, to be praised as suffering taxpayers, to believe that if they are just selfish and expect everyone else to be selfish, then everything will be better.

I agree with you that plutocrats rule – where we disagree is that you think the masses have been fooled and coopted, while I believe that the masses WANTED to be folled and coopted because it made their moral universe easier and played to all their selfish aspirations. You think that our problems can be solved just by “sticking it to the man” to use outdated slang, while I think we need to gain control of the narrative and convince the masses that they need to realize the selfish dreams peddled by the right are, to use outdated langauge again, just more opiates for the masses.

“Nobody’s making that hypothetical wife go home every evening, either. The point of this kind of bullying is to make people feel unwelcome/unsafe/uncomfortable with speaking up.”

So disagreeing with you is the equivalent of beating my hypothetical spouse?

—
But the WOT is not a foreign policy issue alone, and Al Awlaki is not the only US citizen affected. (If that’s your concern) No long term war exists in isolation, with no domestic manifestations. The reality is that those Americans (though this is not only applicable to the US) most affected by the WOT domestically are not the concern of mainstream leftists, for reasons I could speculate on.
—

Well you could speculate all you want, but during the last GOP administration, Blackwater militias patrolled the streets of a major city, police engaged in wholesale murder, people were arrested and sent to nameless prisons, and the Administration claimed the right to designate anyone, on US soil even, an enemy combatant outside the reach of either US law or the Geneva Conventions – or even the Torture Treaty. The claim by this administration that it can pursue military actions without judicial supervision is not even slightly similar.
There is a reason Muslim-Americans are going to vote overwhelmingly for President Obama.

It is simply crazy to call Hilary Clinton a liberal. She endorsed the Iraq war over the opposition of 99.99% of her constituents. Thank God for my representative Nydia Velasquez.

Humphrey was a hideously unpleasant red-baiter who was photographed embracing base-ball- bat-wielding segregationist Georgia Governor Lester Maddox. Ga’s the archetype of Ga’s racist businessmen.

Bleech!

What’s with you people.

rootless

Once again I’m not arguing on the basis of Romney/Obama – if I was from the US I’d vote Obama – but just pointing out the lack of concern the left shows for these issues (really it was Loomis’s nonsense that got me riled up, so I’m gonna give it up and sign out at this stage – I see that sure sign of western privilege, the Republican = facist card, has been played -)
Anyway it’s been nice talking with you rootless, all the best in the election!

“Obama is to the right of virtually the entire Democratic Party electorate.”

means, among other things, “I have never spent 1 hour canvassing for a political campaign”.

“I wonder if anyone of the blog owners would care to state why Salient isn’t getting banned for the crap he’s pulling here.”

I agree, ban all dissenters!!

Also hilarious is the “but the electorate wants their government to kill brown people, there’s nothing to be done” argument. Would the liberals making this argument here apply the same standard to, say, same-sex marriage, which was quite unpopular (and still is) with many Democratic voters? Of course they wouldn’t, and rightly so. After all it is indeed possible to move people politically, if it wasn’t what the heck are we all doing here?

Politics is not about morals it’s about power — Power to stomp on the weak!

@103
“Vibrant and possibly threatening third parties may have made the New Deal possible. But it was Democrats who actually signed the paperwork. Threatening 3rd parties aren’t on the horizon now. It took decades of economic hardening for them to become significant last time.”

uuh, so what are you saying? If it takes “decades of economic hardening for them to become significant” then that’s what it takes — we start off with a 2% protest vote this election, then 4% the next, then 8% the next.
What’s your mental model here? It worked this way in the early 20th C therefore it CANNOT work this way in the early 21st?

No-one is arguing that a 3rd party vote will result in Eugene Debs being elected. The argument is that a 3rd party vote opens up the space of allowable options and informs Washington, the media, et al that people are willing to consider possibilities that the two main parties have been unwilling to mention.

Look, this is very simple
– either the American people (or, if you prefer, the American elites) are so evil, so determined to behave a certain way, that nothing (certainly not the number of votes for 3rd party candidates) will change their minds. If this IS the case, then we have a Leninist heighten the contradictions system. They ARE going to do what they can to destroy the world, and all that’s being done by delaying this a few years is to ensure that the weapons are better. This was the point of the “democrats are republicans delayed by twelve years” post.
– OR the American people/elites are not so irredeemably evil that there is no hope. If they are not irredeemably evil, then offering up alternatives (by showing that you do NOT support EITHER the party of the upper 1% OR the party of the next 9%) is the single best thing you can do to get us out of this situation, to create a situation where future FDRs have more space in which to work.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1968/4/15/huberts-wagon-pbib-never-though-id/
Excerpt:
Humphrey’s largest power base is the South, which has been quick to recognize the surest way to stop Kennedy, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee all plan to line up behind favorite sons to hold their delegations for the Vice-President.

Beyond being a potential Kennedy-stopper, Humphrey has won Southern support with his firm stand on the war and with his frequent trips to Southern capitals in the last year. Last May, when Southern anger over the school desegregation guidelines was at its height. Humphrey visited the Southern governors to soothe their feelings. The highlight of this effort came in Georgia, where he put his arm around Lester Maddox and called him “a good Democrat.”

Humphrey the red-baiter:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vslA7TGpgdwC&pg=PA201&lpg=PA201&dq=Hubert+Humphrey+and+red+baiting&source=bl&ots=UsbBgR7HJh&sig=tm2gJbRhVvN-s7pj0Ngr962gWiQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=r_5lULiMDMfv0gG-74DoCQ&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Hubert%20Humphrey%20and%20red%20baiting&f=false

adam.smith: I wonder if anyone of the blog owners would care to state why Salient isn’t getting banned for the crap he’s pulling here

Can you produce any evidence that salient is a he?

Katherine,

Honestly, anyone would think from listening to some people that the Nader voters wanted Bush to win. No one anticipated how close it was going to be. No one could possibly have anticipated it.

Oh for Pete’s sake.

No one knew Florida was electorally important?

No one knew the outcome was likely to be close?

No one could figure out that a vote for Nader instead of Gore would help Bush?

Salient,

Had every single Nader voter voted for Gore, Bush would have stolen the election through Supreme Court shenanigans. There were more than enough leftover ‘controverisal’ ballots to accomplish the task.

As Steve LaBonne has repeatedly pointed out, this is just not true. It’s a ridiculous statement.

Look, it’s the self-appointed blog police. I had the impression another policy of CT was not to allow debate on bannings etc in the comments.

From wikipedia Hubert Humphrey article:

The national Democratic Party of 1948 was split between those who thought the federal government should actively protect civil rights for racial minorities, and those, who believed that states should be able to enforce racial segregation and infringe on the rights of non-white citizens.

At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the party platform reflected this division and contained only platitudes in favor of civil rights. The incumbent president, Harry S Truman, had already issued a detailed 10-point Civil Rights Program that called for aggressive federal action on the issue of civil rights. He, however, supported the party establishment’s platform that was a replication of the 1944 Democratic National Convention plank on civil rights.

A diverse coalition opposed this tepid platform, including anti-communist liberals like Humphrey, Paul Douglas and John Shelley, all of whom would later become known as leading progressives in the Democratic Party. These liberals proposed adding a “minority plank” to the party platform that would commit the Democratic Party to a more aggressive opposition to racial segregation.

I’m out of here. It’s one thing to have debates about Obama, Romney, F-Dorf, etc etc etc — people who are alive and can defend themselves. It’s another thing to slander the dead. To quote H. Farrell, I’m out of here.

Just for the record, I think it’s sexist to assume “he” as the default gender, all the more when the commenter in question has been (exceptionally?) careful to reveal/imply nothing either way. When I asked for evidence, I meant, of course, evidence based on the commenter’s own self-presentation, which, except in cases where we happen to know each other personally or the commenter is a known public figure, is all we have to go on.

Lee A. Arnold 09.28.12 at 7:03 pm:
‘… On the other hand, I think Obama’s offer last summer to put Social Security on the table, in return for a Republican capitulation on tax hikes in a grand budget deal, happened because he knew they would not take it. …’

But even suggesting that Social Security might be harmed, from a traditional Democratic point of view, was a kind of blasphemy. It’s cursing the god from whom your divine political energy flows.

It’s just anecdotal, but my experience among the folk is that while they consider Welfare, unemployment insurance, OSHA, regulation of banking and commerce, and so on, sort of peripheral or even objectionable, Social Security is something they bought and paid for already, and they expect the money. You don’t have to be a liberal or a progressive to feel that way. When Mr. O starts talking airily about cutting it along the lines suggested by the Catfood Commission, he’s violating the sacred social-democratic contract (see above) for no visible purpose but to make the rich richer and start more wars. This is what brought 5000 people daily to Liberty Park a year ago to see the commie hippie radicals, not because they like commie hippie radicalism, but because they were the only group still standing against the plutocracy. The Democratic Party had deserted them.

Those wanting to uphold the norms of “intellectual debate” might consider not arguing against a straw man for once.

Here’s the thing. I actually disagree with the people saying that voting for Obama would be the wrong choice. I don’t even think it’s a particularly difficult decision. Yet, a lot of these people seem actually a lot easier to engage in conversation than a lot of the lesser-evilers. If you have any interest in convincing anyone other than yourself, you might consider some new rhetorical strategies.

Since Brad Delong has already provided the famous Will Rogers quote, I won’t repeat it here.

A Romney victory would undo decades of work to gain civil rights for women, blacks, and gays. That alone is a reason to oppose it.

You’re still thinking like the USA has a parliamentary system. The way US parties more-or-less work is that they are big tents with internal factions, which form coalitions internally and sometimes across party lines. Within the factions, discipline is often intense; between the factions there are only shifting alliances. The Republicans have major far-right and Wall Street factions; the Democrats have conservative and liberal (social democratic) factions.

It doesn’t, I think, take much subtlety to see that the current governing coalition of the USA is between the Wall Street Republicans and the conservative Democrats. This is called “centrist,” but it is only the center of a political spectrum skewed far to the right.

The Democrats usually campaign social democratic; the Republicans used to campaign Wall Street. Currently, the Democrats are campaigning social democratic. The Republicans, as I imagine you know, are campaigning radical-right.

Should the Republicans win the Presidency, and keep their hold on the House, there is little doubt they would attempt to implement their hard-right program. As we have seen during the past two administrations, the Senate Democrats are dominated by Democratic conservatives. So the result of a Romney victory, and R’s holding the house, would be numerous centrist programs passing, including cuts to social programs and tax cuts for the rich. An authorization of a war on Iran would probably pass, if indeed the President needs one at all under current law. Decades of work to gain civil rights for women, blacks, and gays would be undone. And so on, and so on. I find many actions of the Obama administration repugnant, but I see every reason to believe that the acts of a Romney administration would be more so.

Now, in the very rigid US two-party system one way a vote for a third-party can count is as a signal. The major parties take those signals very seriously. So if progressives vote third party in safe elections, that communicates. But there is a need to be careful.

Here are some good reasons not to vote for Obama:

http://stpeteforpeace.org/obama.html

I’d like to associate myself with the comments of Salient, who as usual manages to stay calm and on point in the midst of the shouting.

I’d also like to make a confession: I was a Nader voter in 2000. Or rather, I intended to be a Nader voter. But, well, I just didn’t make it to the polls. I didn’t vote.

I’ve always been kind of ashamed of that. But now I’m wondering, if I meant to vote for Nader but didn’t, was that still taking a vote away from Gore? Or, if a vote for Nader is the same as a vote for Bush, then by forgetting to vote for Nader, did I actually take a vote away from Bush? In which case, when the polls closed and I was still sitting in the coffeeshop playing Go or whatever, was I actually doing my part to elect Gore? That would be a relief.

Nader was the only one talking about exorbitant consumer interest rates. For this reason he is a hero, whatever unwise position he was goaded into taking in his later years. The only sign I saw for President here in my neighborhood in 2000, was a Nader sign on a Lebanese bakery.

I stayed home on the Democratic primary in 1992, because I was so disgusted by the “centrist”, i.e., right-wing policies of Clinton and particularly Gore, a pioneer in privatization, with his “re-inventing government.” No thank you.

JW Mason @ 310 ;-) !

Well, if you want to accuse Abner Mikva or John Heilemann of antisemitism, be my guest …

They like him! If an anti-Obama protester – like the author of the reasons – was carrying a sign with the image and the headline I don’t think you could mistake the idea. I’m fine with Obama-bashing and a lot of that list (although I think voting for him is as good a thing as you can do with a presidential ballot) but there’s an outlying kookery to avoid.

@272
“Well you could speculate all you want, but during the last GOP administration, Blackwater militias patrolled the streets of a major city, police engaged in wholesale murder, people were arrested and sent to nameless prisons, and the Administration claimed the right to designate anyone, on US soil even, an enemy combatant outside the reach of either US law or the Geneva Conventions – or even the Torture Treaty. The claim by this administration that it can pursue military actions without judicial supervision is not even slightly similar.
There is a reason Muslim-Americans are going to vote overwhelmingly for President Obama.”

And during THIS administration it was established that
(a) it’s perfectly safe to engage in that behavior, you won’t get punished for it by the opposing political party (something that was NOT true pre-2009)
(b) what you WILL get punished for (and as aggressively as the US state knows how) is informing the rest of the world about exactly what that US state is doing.

I don’t see the vast gap between these two administrations that you do. Perhaps you find it comforting that this time round the guy being tortured (Bradley Manning) is a white christian, not a brown muslim? To me that looks exactly like “first they came for the muslims, and I did not speak up because I was not muslim”…

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/rebecca-solnit-liberals-leftists-explaining-things?page=1

For someone who spends all his time banging on about building movements, Erik Loomis is really, really bad at it

LFC @ 170 (Sorry about replying so far down the thread, but I’ve been away most of the day — probably a good thing, as it turned out, but I suppose I should finish what I started.)

I’m surprised you still hear this mentioned “every time a group of Democrats gather.” It was a long time ago, after all, as ‘political time’ is measured in the U.S. these days.

Well, for one thing, I’m in northern AZ, where the most ardent Democrats tend to be even older than I am. For another, stuff like this comes up these days quite often in discussions of Obama’s foreign policy, which we’re told we should shut up about in the interest of getting him re-elected, or OWS, which we’re told we should mock for not having a plan to change things, i.e., a plan to help get Obama re-elected. La plus ça change…. Steve LaBonne is atypical only in being less circumspect in his denunciations.

kudos to Salient – I respect temper flare as an explanation, it’s not like I’m immune to that.

Salient — I don’t want to take the point too far, especially since it’s off-topic (but maybe that’s a good thing at this point) — but I think there’s a difference between issues of grammar and issues created by our assumptions about whether people whose gender we have no way of knowing are male or female (or “the rest of us”).

I thought that adam.smith’s use of “he” meant that adam.smith thought “Salient” was male. That is, I assumed it was not a little glitch caused by the lack of the right kind of pronoun in English.

adam.smith framed him(?)self (“adam”? “Sebastian”) as standing up for CT’s goal of “having women among it’s commentariat,” without — in my reading — stopping to think that the commenter he(?) was attacking might be a women herself. If so…then what?

1. Don’t whitewash shitty Democratic policies.
2. Don’t suppress Democrat votes in a way that helps Republicans.

Pretty much. I’ll add that as far as I can tell there’s no disagreement on point #1; the disagreement is about whether eleven-dimensional chess theories about how throwing elections to Republicans will lead to social democrats winning Senate elections in Nebraska and Arkansas make sense. (SPOILER: they don’t, which is why the people making that argument always want to pretend that there’s disagreement on point #1.)

yeah, I messed up with the gendered pronoun & assumption, no question.
But for the “if then so what” – for me it hardly matters. It was beyond the pale regardless of Salient’s gender, they agree, apologized, end of story (at least from my side).

“1. Don’t whitewash shitty Democratic policies.
2. Don’t suppress Democrat votes in a way that helps Republicans.”

Works for me.

But on the psychology of us 2000 Nader voters, it was obviously a matter of principle among the Gore supporters to demonize us as malevolent idiots. Maybe some were. I know what I was thinking when I voted for Nader in a safe state–I wanted Gore to win, but thought that having Nader in the campaign we’d finally have someone with a chance to raise extremely important issues that are normally ignored. At the time the big issue for me was, ironically enough, the Iraqi sanctions that had caused so much damage to the Iraqi economy and killed a disputed, but large number of children. There was bipartisan agreement on sanctions, so it wasn’t an issue. I can’t fathom a progressive who wouldn’t be bothered by this. The Nader campaign, as it turns out, was the wrong way to bring out all the issues that were normally ignored, because for Democrats the issue became the evil of Nader and his voters. I didn’t anticipate that the issues the Naderites wanted to be raised would be ignored in favor of attacking the egoism of Nader and his supporters. So was I an idiot. Yeah. But malevolent? Uh, no.

I’m a lesser of two evils voter now, but the problem of people whitewashing shitty Democratic policies remains.

But even suggesting that Social Security might be harmed, from a traditional Democratic point of view, was a kind of blasphemy. It’s cursing the god from whom your divine political energy flows.
——————

That’s great. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/security/stories/oss032498.htm

And consider Moyhihan’s 1983 bipartisan “compromise” on SS, which radically increased the regressive social security tax to fund Reagan and then Bush’s deficits.

Where is this rosy hued mythology of sacred compacts coming from? It’s pure gibberish.

actually I feel that
1. Don’t whitewash shitty Democratic policies.
and a slightly altered version of 2 i.e.
2. Don’t pretend Democrats and Republicans are the same
is what drives the emotional intensity of this and similar threads.
It can’t really be about actual voting, because as dsquared rightly points out in the first thread, the chance that anyone’s vote makes the difference is basically zero.

I think team “evil” is right that a lot of progressives tend to do
1) and they’re rightly upset about this. I mean, without Glen Greenwald, basically no one on the somewhat mainstream left would be talking about drones, renditions, etc. That includes more or less progressive bloggers like Klein, Yglesias, Drum, Krugman – all of whom disagree with the policy when you ask them, but none of whom have invested any capital in denouncing it. [to be clear, the real left has talked about this the whole time, but we’re quite fringe in the US and this is the type of topic where many people assumed that if not the Democratic party, at least the progressive netroots were allies].

But then in a move that upsets team “lesser”, team “evil” goes out of their way to minimize the differences between Democrats and Republicans. That’s partly a question of perspective – obviously how far Romney and Obama are apart is a question of where you look from, it is an age old question among socialists (queue the various German history analogies in this thread), but at least I – as a moderate member of “team lesser” (i.e. I think you should vote Obama if you’re in a battleground state, but you’re certainly not obligated to if it makes you unhappy) – at times goes too far, as e.g. in dsquared’s position in this thread that Dems could just filibuster anything they don’t like.

I think those are the two real debates – how much time should a lefty spend denouncing Obama versus doing other things and how much does it matter if Romney or Obama win. The whole vote thing is a bit of a distraction in my opinion.

“kudos to Salient – I respect temper flare as an explanation, it’s not like I’m immune to that.”
Seconded.

Part of what happens is that some people confuse the tactics they prefer with moral principles. For example, you may believe that any give at all on Social Security is bad tactics, and you may even have a case, but it’s not self-evident that you’d be correct and it is certainly not the case that anyone disagreeing with you wants old people to live on catfood. In fact, what the “Catfood Commission” chairs proposed included such horrible changes in SS as increasing payouts for the lowest income workers funded by reductions in pay for the highest income recipients. Some of us don’t think that’s evil. Furthermore, what Obama offered the GOP on SS was minor cuts in the far future in exchange for concessions that would break the GOP coalition and weaken its funding base and level some wealth disparity. If you really want to save the social safety net, that appears to me to be a much better strategy than pure weak defense. But according to some here, even thinking such a thought is morally unacceptable.

Gore and Clinton have a lot to answer for — NAFTA, Reinventing Government, Welfare Reform, Alan Greenspan.

Look, can we just stipulate that Clinton, Gore, and Obama all pretty much suck? But it’s kind of like celebrating your birthday when you’re old enough that having another one isn’t the pleasantest thought- you have to consider the alternative.

Bernard Yomtov,

What? Who is arguing that a vote for Obama is “immoral”?

It cannot have escaped the notice of even the dullest knife in the drawer that the pro-Obama commenters here suffer from an exquisite self-contradiction. On the one hand, they assure us with oracular majesty that “life is a random walk” and “politics is unpredictable.” Thus we should hold our noses and vote for Obama because — the underwear gnome theory of politics! Step 1: Elect Obama; Step 2: ( … ); Step 3: A return of the rule of law and a rollback in the limitless grown of the police-military-surveillance-torture state! (As with the business plan of the underwears gnomes, there seems to be a step missing…) Life is unpredictable and anything can happen. Magic fairy dust! Everyone gets a pony!
But then, on the other hand, these same pro-Obama commenters assure us with punitive hysteria of the near future in hallucinatory detail. They bid fair to enrapture us with scenarios of the sequester process rolling back America’s out-of-control military-police-surveillance-torture state: what a joke. The reality of the sequestration legislation is that we’re in unknown territory and no one knows what will happen. Most likely, both parties will scramble to exempt the U.S. military from the sequestration cuts when they come due, leading to massive cuts in domestic and entitlement programs, but increases in U.S. military spending. No one has predicted that, but it’s much more likely to happen that this mythical fantasy of both Democrats and Republicans joining hands to sing Cumbaya while American military spending gets massively slashed. In case you hadn’t realized it, America’s military is now above the law and can never have its funding reduced; its funding can only be increased. If that means starving seniors and shutting down Medicare, that’s what will happen, and if necessary, the military whose funding has been increased will be call out to shoot down senior citizens who protest at their Medicare and SSN getting slashed to pay for those military increases.
Anyone must recognize this is a serious internal contradiction in the Obots’ argument. On the one hand the future is so unpredictable that a liberal paradise may flower unexpectedly due to unforeseen circumstances…on the other hand, the future is so clearly set in concrete that we all know the obvious results of Obama’s second term.
What the so-called “realists” on this site fail to recognize is that politics is unlike physics or mathematics. If you want to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you’re out of luck. It’s a law of nature. Build a device which depends on repealing the Second Law and you’re not going to get anywhere because such perpetual motion machines simply don’t work.
But politics depends on human behavior rather than the laws of nature, and human behavior remains by its nature highly fluid and dependent on mindset and circumstances. So in politics the “impossible” often becomes possible simply because everyone’s mindset changes.
Our current president is an example of this.
Anyone else remember how back in 2005 and 2006 everyone agreed that “America is just not ready for a black president”? Doesn’t anyone else recall the disdain with which that little-known junior Senator Barack what’s-his-name got dismissed when he decided to run for president? What chance did he have? Weird name, black, no experience, a senator — not a chance in the world he’d ever win in 2008. Back in 2005 everyone knew who the two challengers would be in November 2008: Rudy Giuliani vs. Hillary Clinton.
The plain fact of the matter is that enough people decide to go off the reservation and write in Elizabeth Warren this November, Elizabeth Warren will become president. Calling that “unrealistic” or “impossible” is as foolish and betrays as great an ignorance of the way politics really works as it was to call Obama’s presidential run in 2006 “unrealistic” or “impossible.”
Pro-Obama serenely ignore these self-contradictions because, of course, they don’t actually care about logic or observable facts: all they care about is retroactively justifying their learned helplessness so that they can look in the mirror each morning and not be disgusted by what they see.

Anyone must recognize this is a serious internal contradiction in the Obots’ argument.
—

to be sure you are correct if you just make up the “Obot” argument from whole cloth as you did.

What chance did he have? Weird name, black, no experience, a senator — not a chance in the world he’d ever win in 2008. Back in 2005 everyone knew who the two challengers would be in November 2008: Rudy Giuliani vs. Hillary Clinton.
The plain fact of the matter is that enough people decide to go off the reservation and write in Elizabeth Warren this November, Elizabeth Warren will become president
—

Actually, the plain fact is that even if Elizabeth Warren got the popular vote via write-in, she would not be president because she does not have slates of electors on the ballot. The next plain fact is there is no appreciable difference between E. Warren and Obama on foreign policy – apparently the moral litmus test (” President Obama has taken a tough, smart, and pragmatic approach to foreign policy that has not only gotten results but also repaired our image and leadership around the world. I strongly support keeping President Obama as the Commander-in-Chief. “). The next plain fact is that contrary to Progressive theories, Barack Obama did not become President by spontaneous combustion, but through a huge and brilliant organizing effort that was initially possible because of alliances within Chicago liberal business community and 4 years of exhausting effort starting from before his speech to the 2004 convention.

And the constant pretension to moral superiority of people who don’t seem to give a damn about concrete human beings is more than a little annoying.

Daryl McCollough claims: As I said somewhere else recently, if someone has a plausible plan in which allowing Republicans to sweep into office will eventually lead to a better world, I’m all ears. But it seems to me that the effect of the principled rejection of “lesser-evildom” will most likely be that we are stuck with the greater evil.

This is the kind of gross failure in logic that typifies arguments for voting for Obama this fall.
This formulation depends on two assumptions, both contrary to observed reality: 1) liberal voters can successfully keep Republicans out of office forever, as far as the eye can see, into the distant future and beyond. 2) The longer liberal voters keep Republicans out of office, the better the chances of restoring the rule of law and rolling back the limitless growth of corporate power and the military-police-surveillance-torture complex.
Neither assumption is even remotely credible.
First, as everyone knows, the Republican party keeps getting crazier and crazier. This was predictable and I among many others predicted it. As Eliezer Yudkowsky noted in 2007:

Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover than when cults receive a major shock—a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed—they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism.

Source: “Evaporative cooling of group beliefs,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, Less Wrong blog, 7 December 2007.

The mechanism here involves the flight of cultists with weak beliefs in the crazy doctrines of the cult, leading to an ever-increasing fanaticism of the cult as its predictions crash into reality and repeatedly fail in the real world. This is clearly what’s going with American conservatism and the Republican party. There is no point at which American conservatism will reform itself by returning to common sense: as each new shock disconfirms its cult beliefs, American conservatism will only become more fanatical and more extreme, as will the Republican party. We’ve seen this process for 50 years, so denying it involves a denial of observed reality.

This means that all we need is one election in which Republicans assume power and the game is over. They will repeal the rule of law and abolish the constitution and turn America into a quasitotalitarian corporate-military-police-surveillance complex so savage that we’ll never be able to get back a recognizable democracy. This is, in fact, a large part of the Obots’ frantic arguments for why we must vote for Obama. This election is a must-win once-in-a-lifetime crisis! We must put a Democrat in the White House or all is lost! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!
But the Obots expect us to forget that they also told us 2008 was a make-or-break election. We had to vote for Obama over McCain. That 2008 election was a must-win once-in-a-lifetime crisis! Because if we lost the presidency in 2008, McCain would plunge us into endless foreign wars, he’d continue the endless unwinnable war on drugs, he’d turn America in a totalitarian nightmare of warrantless wiretapping where every American citizen’s email and phone and bank records and credit card transactions were collected and pawed through in giant data centers! And if John McCain became president, he’d extend the Bush violations of the constitution, ordering U.S. citizens kidnapped or even murdered without even accusing them of a crime! And McCain would order even more drone strikes in foreign countries, murdering thousands of innocent women and children! And McCain might even force something truly appalling on Americans instead of genuine health care reform — perhaps McCain would force every American to buy unaffordable private health insurance without cost controls, guaranteeing that everyone in America would have to pay infinitely increasing insurance premiums as medical costs rose without limit, forever!
And look what we have. All the nightmare scenarios the Obots warned us against have come true — courtesy of Barack Obama’s presidency. The Obots painted hideous pictures of endless war, of a militarized police state, of Americans murdered and kidnapped by a president above the law — and that’s what we’ve got. The Obots conjured up dark visions of McCain letting the Wall Street crime lords go without even putting a single one of them in jail, yet calling out police and the DHS to blast political protesters with LRAD military sound cannons and pepper spray and tasers and rubber bullets and beat women and old men with truncheons because they dared to publicly protest the imposition of vast new fees on ordinary people to pay the public costs of the financial metldown, while the financial crime lords who perpetrated enriched themselves with enormous bonuses and kept their privatized gains courtesy of a low 15% capital gain tax rate.
But Obama has done exactly what the Obots warned us McCain would do if he got elected.
So the dire predictions of the Obots are starting to look very much like the boy who cried wolf. Each new election, we are warned, is a once-in-a-lifetime make-or-break crisis. Every 4 years, we find ourselves one millimeter away from dictatorship. Each presidential election presents us with a world-ending existential death-knell for liberalism and a sword of Damocles hanging over democracy itself.
There’s only so many time the Obots can go back to this well before it goes dry…especially since history shows that the dark nightmare predictions they make a Republican presidency keep coming true under Democratic presidencies.
But the additional problem with this scenario is that the underlying plan is just stupid. American history shows that voters simply don’t vote for one party all the time forever. Over a period of years, the electorate as a whole tends to get tired of one party and vote for the opposing party. In fact, the longest any party has stayed in power continuously has been the 24 years from 1932 to 1956.
Yet the Obots assure us that the only answer to our current sociopolitical dilemma in America involves keeping the Republicans out of the White House forever. Not just 24 years, but 32 years, 40 years, 60 years, 120 years, without limit.
That’s not realistic.
At some point, history shows that voters will tire of one party controlling the White House and they’ll vote for a Republican. And since, according to the Obots, that’s the end of America, it’s all over. Liberalism ends, democracy disappears, we get a nightmare totalitarian state and a Supreme Court controlled by Paul Ryan and Ron Paul clones. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!
Not a very good plan, is it?
In order to make that plan work, liberals would have to do something that has never been done before in history and that almost certainly cannot be done — namely, keep Republicans out of office for longer than 24 years.
That’s just not realistic. It’s not credible. It’s not a real plan. It’s an underwear-gnome-type plan, built out of fantasy and self-delusion, the kind of plan that will only work in a My Little Pony world.
But wait…there’s an even more fatal flaw in the Obots’ logic.
As part 2) of their genius master plan for returning America to the rule of law and rolling back the corporate-military police state, the Obots assure us that the longer we’re able to keep Democrats in office, the better chance we’ll have of changing polices back to a liberal direction.
But the entire history of the modern Democratic party shows that exactly the opposite is true.
The longer we keep Democrats in power, the farther right the Democrats move. So the worse their policies become. As Democrats become more swaggeringly certain that their base can’t possibly vote for anyone else, the Democratic pols write off the liberals and concentrate on picking pu votes from the right — and in order to do that, of course, the Democratic pols must move their policies continually rightward.
So both of these assumptions by the Obots are 100% completely totally wrong. They’re wholly contradicted by reality.
As a result, the Obots’ argument in favor of voting for Obama must be rejected.

rootless_e 09.28.12 at 11:29 pm:
‘ “It’s just anecdotal, but my experience among the folk is that while they consider Welfare, unemployment insurance, OSHA, regulation of banking and commerce, and so on, sort of peripheral or even objectionable, Social Security is something they bought and paid for already, and they expect the money.”
—
Of course it is not. Half the money there is from the employer tax.’

Please. The ’employer tax’ is an obvious fiction, a way of hiding some of the real tax from the less observant. Value arises from labor, that is, from the employees, not from the employers (except those who also labor). Some is collected directly by the government, and some is collected by the employer and passed on to the government. From the employers’ point of view, it’s all labor cost, which could otherwise be paid directly to the employee (as is the case when the employee is nominally a subcontractor).

I’m mostly concerned here with the depressing effects on oneself if one voluntarily consents to supporting reprehensible acts. I suppose one could feel happy about it — ‘He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard’ — but most of you don’t seem to express that feeling.
—

Nobody gets a moral pass for inaction – or for ineffectiveness.

If only the hot air generated by the laughably ineffectual holier-than-thou left could be captured- we’d have the renewable energy problem licked.

Now we’re treated to more learned helplessness from rootless_e:
Actually, the plain fact is that even if Elizabeth Warren got the popular vote via write-in, she would not be president because she does not have slates of electors on the ballot. The next plain fact is there is no appreciable difference between E. Warren and Obama on foreign policy – apparently the moral litmus test (” President Obama has taken a tough, smart, and pragmatic approach to foreign policy that has not only gotten results but also repaired our image and leadership around the world. I strongly support keeping President Obama as the Commander-in-Chief. “).

Actually, the plain fact of the matter is no one actually knows exactly what Elizabeth Warren would do in terms of her foreign policy. If she continue the Bush-Obama plicy of mass murder and torture (which continued under Obama’s administration into 2010 and Bagram airbase according to Red Cross reports) and kidnapping and assassination of our own citizens abroad, then we liberals elect someone else once Warren’s first term is up.
Again and again, the Obots assure us that nothing can be done. Obama is the best we can do because we can’t change the system. All the candidates espouse the same failed dead ideas, American institutions are sclerotic and unchangeable, the best we can do is vote for more genocide and more corporate crimes and hope vainly for some amelioration in the ongoing horror.
This is exactly the same argument the pro-slavery factions made in the run-up to the Civil War. Nothing can be done. A pro-slavery presidential candidate is the best we can do because we can’t change the system. All the candidates espouse the same failed dead ideas, American institutions are sclerotic and unchangeable, the best we can do is vote for more genocide and more corporate crimes and hope vainly for some amelioration in the ongoing horror. Rinse, wash, repeat.
This kind of learned helplessness not only proves tiresome, but absurd. It’s not just a whine of futile despair that elevates nihilism to the level of a political religion, it’s simply unrealistic. History shows that when determined majorities of the American people fight for a change in policy and refuse to accept candidates who consider those policies “off the table,” then we eventually get actual substantive policy change.
It’s doubly amusing that rootless_e is now using the Rovian tactic of claiming that he didn’t say what he actually said. Faced with the implications of their failed and faulty reasoning, the Obots typically throw up their hands and bleat “But we never said that!”
Obots love to make self-contradictory arguments: in favor of Obama’s murder of U.S. citizens because the president as commander in chief enjoys such plenipotentiary powers that he rises far above the mere contraints of congressional or judicial oversight or the rule of law; but then, Obots turn around an argue that Obama couldn’t possibly order his DOJ to indict the Wall Street Crime lords or fire Pentagon generals en masse to rein in the miltiary-police-surveillance-torture complex, that Obama couldn’t possibly end the Afghanistan quagmire by executive order tomorrow or shut down Gitmo this evening by executive order or end warrantless wiretapping by executive order or nullify the NDAA by vetoing the law because, after all, the president is a mere pitiful helpless pygmy far overshadowed by the earth-shattering powers of the purse wielded by congress, and by the Colossus of Rhodes known as the Supreme Court.
Either Obama is a pitiful helpless ant (unable to arrest a single Wall Street criminal impotent to shut down Guantanamo, unable to end America’s endless foreign wars, incapable of rening in the TSA or the DHS or the Pentagon, incapable of making recess appointments in the face of Senate Republican obstructionism, unable to use signing statements or sequester funds to shut down bad laws like the NDAA or ram through good like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now held hostage by Republicans), or he enjoys limitless power beyond the power of law (including the power to wage endless undeclared war in every country on earth forever, to order the murder of U.S. citizens like a mafia capo, and to warrantlessly wiretap every American without the slightest judicial oversight) — you can make either of those arguments. But you cannot make both arguments at once, as the Obots do, to justify any and all of the atrocities and illegalities and depravities and war crimes in which Obama has indulged over the past 4 years.

If only the hot air generated by the laughably ineffectual holier-than-thou left could be captured

it’d be “regulatory capture” :)

but look. since you needn’t fear our success — none of us are really disputing ‘ineffectual’ — why expend all this energy calling us three-year-old-minded fascists? for the thrill of the rush? if our talk about principled nonvoting is just inconsequential preening, why do you feel the need to step in and grind it to a halt? what’s the impulse?

to answer my own question, my stake in this is, I’d like for CT people to be able to post about the morality of lesser-evilism without getting attacked for even raising.

yes 2000 and its aftermath was traumatic, and none of us can just get over it. just please, you’ve gunned at us with ire for over a decade now, at least please redirect your anger at those who actually voted for Bush. go chase them down and fire at them instead of firing at us whenever we pop our heads above water. I know that means you won’t get to yell at people over and over without them walking out on you, which might be a loss you’re not willing to take, but, you really need to reflect a little on whether or not that’s what you value most, getting to tear people down who still hope to stand beside you and ally with you on at least a few things.

Anarcissie makes a crucial point: I’m mostly concerned here with the depressing effects on oneself if one voluntarily consents to supporting reprehensible acts.

What’s really going on here is the normalization of atrocities. This is the real slippery slope — the slippery slope along which barbarism gradually becomes normative, until roasting human beings alive eventually becomes a subject of public laughter, rather than universal horror.

Make no mistake: George W. Bush and Barack Obama are both pushing America into the deepest shadows of barbarism. Repealing the rule of law that goes back 900 years to the Magna Carta by allowing the chieftain to arbitrarily murder his own citizens without even requiring an explanation or a justification is the kind of atrocity that even William the Conquerer was forced by his barons to renounce.

When you vote for Obama or Romney, you vote for a new Dark Age. You vote for a return to the Star Chambers, to shadowy figures who kidnap citizens and subject them to unspeakable torments and then use statements thus obtained as “evidence” in secret trials. When you vote for Obama or Romney, you vote to confer limitless power upon monied elites who need never obey any laws themselves, but who can send the minions of the state to brutalize anyone who protests their escalating crimes.

When you vote for Obama or Romney, you’re voting for a return to the Grand Inquisition and the Sun King’s laws making begging illegal even for starving peasants robbed of their land. That’s not just grossly immoral: history shows it’s unworkable. It’s a recipe for violent revolution.

I have a complaint to make about a trend on CT recently, I hope others will back me up. It seems like there’s a phenomenon of posters making controversial (or “trolly”) posts and then, after being (sometimes quite exquisitely) called on it very quickly in the comments, refusing to return to the post to engage in debate. This seems to be Tedra Osdell’s shtick (I’ve never seen her defend one of her more controversial posts), and now it seems to have crept into Henry’s work, and seems something of a habit for dsquared too.

I understand if you’re too busy, but if you’re not going to be able to engage with the argument you’ve made in the OP, you could at least say so. Otherwise it makes you look petulant, or like you think you’re some kind of superstar who doesn’t have to sully him/herself with the plebs in the comment thread.

One of the good things about CT in earlier years (I’ve been reading since 2006) was that the posters would engage heartily with the commenters. This isn’t happening as much anymore, it’s got a (dare I say it!) more presidential tone. If that’s the direction CT wants to go, that’s fine, I won’t stop reading and I’ll keep engaging, but I preferred the old tone, myself.

Wow. 300-plus comments arguing about the lesser evil dilemma, and not one mentions that it doesn’t have to be a dilemma at all.

Without plurality voting, there’s no duopoly or dilemma. Approval voting, majorty judgment, etc… take your pick. You could vote for your hopes AND against your fears, and third parties could grow at least big enough to get their ideas coopted. It would also break the unhealthy zero -sum dynamics the post complains of.

Don’t you love it when allegedly “liberal” political activists disdain those of us who point us that the president of the United States must obey the law as “the hot air generated by the laughably ineffectual holier-than-thou left”?

Since when did the fundamental foundation of Western society in the rule of law become a “magic pony” and the concern of “purity trolls”?

Without the rule of law, you’re back in the jungle. Folks…you won’t like it. Trust me on this. America is rapidly heading toward Argentina’s “Dirty War.” This is not something that you supposedly tough-minded “realistic” allegedly “politically savvy” people are going to be able to tolerate. When you wife or your child gets dragged away by ski-masked security service paramilitaries and then that selfsame wife or child winds up as a mutilated corpse in a ditch by the side of the road a month later, you’re going to think back on these remarks about ” the laughably ineffectual holier-than-thou left” and you’ll start screaming like an animal and weeping uncontrollably.

By that time, of course, it’ll be too late.

Jameson Quinn offers another quickie techno-fix to salvage American democracy. This one involves a new voting method.

Like all techno-fixes, this one leaves entirely out of the picture the blunt fact that all the schemes and procedures and institutions in the world don’t matter a damn if the American people have lost their moral compass.

Barack Obama seems like a decent guy who has completely lost his moral compass. Increasingly, this seems to be the case with the American people, and that’s the fundamental problem here, not this or that particular voting system or bureaucratic structure (2 senators per state as opposed to proportional population representation, etc.).

In America, Ayn Rand’s sociopathic screed Atlas Shrugged is the second hottest-selling book after the Bible. That’s the problem. Not the particular voting scheme we use in our elections. In America, a new poll shows that 41% of the American population approves of torturing terorrists, 66% of Americans approve of assassination, and 25% of American approve of using nuclear weapons (!) against terrorists. That’s the problem. Not the electoral college. In America, polls show that Americans believe Iran today is a bigger threat than was the 1980s Soviet Union (with its thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at us). That’s the problem, not the structure of the Supreme Court.

Reason remarks: All this boils down to pointing out in a round about way, that the US electoral system stinks, and leaves conscientious voters stuff between a rock and a bad place. Shouldn’t the target here be the US electoral system and not the democratic party.

Permit me to demur. America’s electoral system works well, especially compared to massively dysfunctional systems like, say, Germany in the 1930s, or Russia in the 1910s, or Italy in the 1920s.

The problem is not America’s electoral system. It’s the fecklessness and moral drift and corruption of all too many American who are willing to overlook the abandonment of the rule of law and the limitless growth of corporate power and the endless expansion of a military-prison-surveillance-torture state in the name of being “realistic” and “incremental” and “pragmatic.” Ridiculing the fundamental basis of Western society in the rule of law as “purity trolling” represents such an extreme level of self-delusion that it practically qualifies as self-satire. In fact, you have to suspect that people like rootless_e and Steve LaBonne are plants designed to deliberately discredit the pro-Obama voting argument, such is the absurdity of their classic logical fallacy of “the excluded middle.”

faustusnotes – I don’t think you’ve got a good model of the motivation of CT posters. First, I do usually participate in comments when I can, but also have had periods of several days sucked up in Someone On the Internet Is Wrong disputes, and can’t afford that at the moment – I have a piece to write with a hard deadline for the _Nation_ next week, as well as another paper, the usual student stuff, teaching etc. Secondly and more importantly, the suggestion that we’re writing “trolling” posts is completely off key. Trolls write trollery because they enjoy outraged reactions, stuttering incoherence etc. I don’t think, by and large, we do, and sometimes get driven away by it. That seems to be what happened with dsquared, and it’s also one of the reasons why I’m not engaging any more. Like Salient, I can sometimes get pretty fucked off with people, and say things that I regret later. Although mind you, the major provocations have not come from here, where people have merely hinted I’m an idiot, which I’m basically OK with, as what has been happening at LGM, where one of the regular posters has claimed that I’m advocating the Gary Johnson option, another has said on Twitter (admittedly after I suggested that he was “irredeemable” as an argumentative partner) that he’s “glad [I am] indifferent to legalized abortion, gays in the military, enviro protections, NLRB, etc.” I don’t want to comment any more, because frankly, I don’t trust myself not to explode.

Salient, that was a very graceful apology. Human beings are such strange creatures. I’m fairly sure that Steve LaBonne was one of those loudly pledging never to vote for Obama some 4-5 months ago. Go figure. (I’m with Steve on the substance of this thread but I do wish he wasn’t such a bully.)

In fact, you have to suspect that people like rootless_e and Steve LaBonne are plants designed to deliberately discredit the pro-Obama voting argument

Oh, I do suspect it. I do.

well mclaren, looking at your electoral system from outside, it looks really really shit. So looking at it from outside, it doesn’s surprise me that a pro-plutocratic electoral system has produced a plutocracy. Instead of blaming ordinary Americans, I think you might be better off looking at the structural factors that facilitate the fucking up of your system. You could start with the electoral system, and then expand that to an examination of the clusterfuck that is your supreme court, and then start asking questions about your constitution more broadly.

“The Obots are dragging up these lame long-debunked canards in order to distract us from what really needs to be done: mass non-violent action on a scale sufficient to shut down America until the rule of law gets returned and corporate power gets crushed and the military-police-surveillance-torture complex gets shut down.”

Well there’s a plan to bank one’s efforts on.

“With the possible exception of Nixon, Hubert Humphrey is the purest and most disgusting example of a Political Animal in American politics today. He has been going at it hammer and tong twenty-five hours a day since the end of World War II- just like Richard Nixon, who launched his own career as a Red-baiting California congressman about the same time Hubert began making headlines as the Red-baiting Mayor of Minneapolis. They are both career anti-Communists: Nixon’s gig was financed from the start by Big Business, and Humphrey’s by Big Labor…and what both of them stand for today is the de facto triumph of a One Party System in American politics.” Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing

I don’t think it is “slandering” someone to call them unpleasant. Hunter Thompson was basically right. Hubert Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson’s bulldog in going around the country giving speeches in support of the Vietnam war. (I remember very well, as a student in 1967, picketing one of these speeches.) Early in his career, as mayor of Minneapolis, Humphrey pioneered the run-around of civil liberties and the rule of law. He frequently extended his influence where he had no power by appointing “voluntary councils of concerned citizens”, such as his Council on Foreign Relations – (perhaps modeled on political scientist Carl Friedrich’s wartime Council For Democracy that persecuted Pete Seeger), so that he could work with and get funding from sympathetic Republicans. He found it “pragmatic” to vote to override both Truman’s veto of the Taft- Hartley Act (that has crippled American unions) and the MacCarren Act (which Truman had called “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798,” a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and a “long step toward totalitarianism”). He also embraced Lester Maddox, as mentioned before, and believe me, this did not endear him to the Civil Rights movement — what was left of it by 1968. That he became extremely unpopular was Karma, in his case.

Harold @ 386

I applaud you for taking the trouble to tell a few of the more unpleasant characters commenting in this thread things that they probably ought to know, but don’t. (Insert famous Santayana quote here.) On the other hand, all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain, and that may be a good thing. Some revelations can’t — and probably shouldn’t — be taken on faith by the generations that come after. By learning them on their own, they’ll find them much more convincing, if damnably inconvenient. In any event, like it or not, it’s their show now.

Oh, please.

Discussions among progressives as to whether or not it is the right or prudent course to continue to support the Ds or not, seem to me much like discussions Polish nobles used to have in the 18th century about when it was right and noble to exercise their liberum veto in the Polish Diet to see the right vindicated in all its purity, versus when it was prudent to let imperfect policies by in order to let the state have any policies at all in place. In both cases, people are talking about the best way to work with an institution that has made itself irrelevant, that has dug its own grave and is probably beyond saving even if we all swore it undying and unquestioning fealty. At least each member of the Diet did have a veto in their doomed institution, which is actually more than we can say. And at least an independent Poland might have been saved by a Diet that enacted different policies, which again is probably more than is any longer possible for the Ds

Of course Ds can still win elections from time to time. Being an actual party, as the Rs are, with an agenda and long-term goals, definitely imposes strains that we mostly escape because we don’t have differences to iron out, we don’t have internal power struggles to get through. The Rs had a messy struggle this time, that ended the worst way for them possible. Their old guard lined up behind a trimmer early enough, and still has enough power within the party, that they were able to give him the nomination, but he has turned out to be a wildly incompetent trimmer, who trims incontinently in both directions at once. They’re still only down 5, but if they, as seems likely, can’t make up that deficit and lose this time, that just insures that there will be no old guard left by next cycle.

Next time they’re going to run someone who won’t trim, who won’t blow an uncertain trumpet. They’re going to run someone who will fully use the terror that that they have found to be their sole means to winning elections. Of course this will prove successful, that’s a foregone conclusion, because much, much worse than the D’s many ideological transgressions against their own natural ideological turf, is their complete unwillingness to recognize that they are at war with the Rs, a bloodless war so far to be sure, and let’s try to keep it that way, but a war in the sense that the Rs are trying their best to destroy our party, not reach any sort of accommodation with us, as the Ds are with them. The Ds while in power refuse to take the most basic measures to secure easily obtainable partisan advantages or to defend against R fearmongering attacks that seek to destroy our party’

The outstanding and probably most consequential example of feeding into, rather than trying to de-juice, R fearmongering, is our side’s concession that yes, indeed, the deficit is about to kill us all in our beds. We have probably already traded away SocSec and Medicare in this incredibly brain-dead gift we gave the other side. But I favor for its sheer undiluted illustration of how we fail to recognize we are delaing with fearmongers, an earlier and much less inherenty consequential example, the way the administration responded to the Underpants Bomber. If our side had any concept that we are in a war of competing fears, and that our side had to take every opportunity to de-juice the fears the other side feeds to gain advantage, we would have pounced on a case that shouted for exploitation in the service of getting the electorate to at least start to move away from the ridiculous fear of “global terror” inculcated by the other party for its advantage. Instead, the administration used this case that presented such utter reassurance of the complete efficacy of already existing security measures as the rationale for extending the Global War on Terror to include a Global War on Liquids. The media was even almost universally calling the guy the Underpants Bomber. What more do you need to tell you that the GWOT was ripe for a bit of reduction by ridicule?

Sure, this prediction of the imminent death of the party is almost certainly not destined to be fulfilled. Reality is always more subtle than the imaginations of the wisest of us, among whom I certianly do not number. But I offer these three policies, which, if the Ds win the trifecta, will be markers for how likely my prediction is to come true or be refuted. If the party doesn’t even tallk about doing any of them, it is doomed. If the Ds even talk about doing any of these three, I will have to retract my prediction. If they actually do all three, that will show that they have so thoroughly adopted the partisan militancy required by the times, that maybe we should look instead to the imminent demise of the other party.

The first measure is DC statehood. Two reliable votes in the Senate, one in the House, a permanent irresistable target for the other party’s outspoken racists — it would be malpractice not to do this if we get the trifecta. Forcing Puerto Rico to choose between statehood and independence, no commonwealth status allowed, would be even better if it results in statehood, but that result can’t be assured without a majority in PR, which may not be forthcoming. Puerto Rico as a state would be an ongoing irresistable target for the other side’s same racists, but in this case they would antagonize a larger demographic.

Second, take jurisdiction over campaign financing away from SCOTUS and pass a campaign finance law that shuts down giving by corporations and the wealthy. To push to change the Constitution to get rid of thr CU decision, when that is impossible, while jurisdiction restriction would just require a statute, is the same as supporting CU. If CU is left to stand, our party is committing elecotral suicide, especially at the state and local level.

Lastly, pass a law that pre-empts the states completely, leaves them no control whatsoever, over the conduct of all elections in this country, including eligibility to vote in all elections. Extend citizenship to the fullest reasonable extent, and to take effect in time for the next election. If SCOTUS finds any of this unconstitutional, take away their jurisdiction. If we can’t win every election with all those new voters, we need to stop trying.

The Ds don’t have to be ideologically pure to get my support, both vote and active campaigning. Even if there really was only a dime’s worth of difference, the issues at stake make even a dime’s worth of difference worth dying in a ditch over. But they do have to fight. I’m not so much a D as an anti-Republican, and a party that won’t fight the Rs effectively, that doesn’t want to destroy their party if possible, is worthless to me. Our side has been so little willing to fight the Rs that it’s even money on our side conceding the New Deal even if we do win this year. But I care enough about the ideological indentity of the party that I think it would be better, if the New Deal is to be dismantled, that the Rs be the ones in power doing it without any D fingerprints on the murder weapon. The plan would then be to win the next election by campaigning against the murder, and restoring the New Deal after we won.

But any talk of whatever course we choose having any sort of practical effect by way of its weakening or strengthening the Democratic Party, or getting it to be better ideologically, is self-important nonsense, and a misdirected self-importance at that. On our best day, we couldn’t do the Party near the harm that the Rs are in deadly earnest at doing it, and the Ds can’t and won’t be influenced by our pressure until the day the party, or its successor if it goes the way of the Whigs, decides to fight, because it will remain in a defensive crouch until then. When that day comes, they won’t need our urging to go way left of our fondest hopes, because all of our side’s natural fighting cudgels are out there on the left. If the party ever does choose to fight, it wins whether we support it or not. If it remains in its defensive crouch, it loses, probably goes out of existence, whether we we support it or not.

Correction — Council on Human Relations not Foreign Relations.

While the slow dying off of the Republican base is nice, the views of the average non-Republican aren’t the best. There is something to Mclaren’s overwrought screeds about the retrograde standards of much of the American electorate

mclaren, I think that’s a tractable problem. Try implementing a compulsory non-preferential voting system, with elections held on saturday instead of tuesday. Remove the power to make voter id laws at the state level, and implement a system of government funding for parties on a dollars-for-vote gained basis, to encourage minor parties. Ditch the electoral college – hey, you could even have the president chosen by a 2/3 majority of parliament rather than a direct election. Then implement strict rules about funding parties (I know it seems really hard, but trust me, its been done elsewhere) and political advertising. Japan doesn’t permit any, Australia permits some, etc. – I’m sure you can figure something out that’s a little better than the current super pac swiftboat crap.

See, it’s not so hard. But don’t blame individuals for structural factors – which is what this whole silly debate is about doing, and why it suits a silly libertard concern troll like this conor bloke.

Faustusnotes – our comments are only marked in blue when it is our own posts we’re commenting on. More generally, my purely personal take on it is that I have a reasonable idea which posts are likely to provoke argument. I don’t have much of an idea which posts are likely to bring out the arseholes, or turn normally reasonable people into same. And when people are behaving like arseholes (e.g., the dismal Barry accusing me in the one breath of being deliberately dishonest, and in the next telling me that I needed to explain what I meant), I don’t feel any obligation whatsoever to get drawn in, or to respond. The alternative of closing comments down, or bashing left and right with the banhammer doesn’t seem a good one either except under truly unusual circumstances.

rootless_e 09.29.12 at 3:19 am:
‘ “How? Where does the money, the value, that the employers pay to the government, come from, if not the employees? I’m not understanding your model of labor, wages and taxation. Please explain.”
——
‘It is not a question of value, it’s a question of pay. People do not get paid the value of their labor in a capitalist system, generally they are paid much less than that. Government rules that impose costs on workers can raise effective wages. That’s why minimum wage laws work to raise the wage of the lowest income workers and why abolishing social security employer tax would not automatically shift that money to salary.’

No, it wouldn’t immediately. However, as capitalists usually work over the long run, they allocate a certain amount to labor and other costs for a given activity which they hope will produce a profit for them through the extraction of value from the labor. If the government adds a tax to the labor costs, they’re not going to take that money out of their profits, at least not for very long. Either they will reduce the effective cash proportion or the benefits, or they won’t continue the activity at all. So the worker is actually in effect paying both sides of the FICA tax (as they do every other tax, ultimately).

Minimum wage laws seem to be rapidly neutralized by inflation, which in a capitalist state is probably one of the things that make mild inflation so evidently attractive.

I’ve just realised, by the way, that the “altruistic” argument against the Paradox of Voting also doesn’t work. Whatever the probability of my being the decisive vote in the two-way Dem/Rep contest, I have at least as great a chance of being the decisive vote that pushes the Greens over the 5% threshold. So if I think that the benefit of having a viable third party is at least as great as the difference between R and D (and if I’m a Green voter, I probably think that the literal survival of life on earth is at stake), I should still vote third-party.

bad Jim 09.29.12 at 8:14 am:
‘… We don’t need a revolution. …’

I need a revolution. Capitalist states seem to be irresistibly drawn toward war, imperialism, environmental destruction, internal tyranny, and a lot of other things which I don’t like, or so history seems to show, even in the case of capitalism’s great poster child. In the present case one may argue that slowing down the march to the edge of the abyss through the choice of lesser evils is desirable, but that’s hardly satisfactory for the long run.

Steve LaBonne 09.29.12 at 1:54 pm:
‘ “Minimum wage laws seem to be rapidly neutralized by inflation, which in a capitalist state is probably one of the things that make mild inflation so evidently attractive.”

Yes, ironically, yerite. I think plutocrats like a certain amount of inflation. If you have a whole lot of wealth and can hire financial experts, accountants, and tax lawyers you can usually deal with inflation pretty handily. It’s those who are on fixed incomes or incomes tied to labor contracts or government programs, and those with cash savings, those who do not have a lot of real estate, equities, collectibles, and durable commodities, in other words, the poor and not-too-well-off, who suffer.

Hmm, I don’t know, bad Jim:

Truman detonated the atomic bomb over Japan, Kennedy and Johnson got the US into Vietnam using chemical warfare and carpetbombing, Carter started the whole BS in Afghanistan, Clinton targeted civilians and infrastructure in Yugoslavia while his foreign secretary Albright claimed killing several hundred thousand Iraqis with sanctions was “worth it” …

@Steve LaBonne 09.29.12 at 2:23 pm #407 — I worked in the financial industry for many years (as a computer programmer, etc.) and met many people who were very wealthy or became so during the period I knew them. I never heard any of them ever complain about inflation, and some of them had clearly exploited the opportunities it afforded. One fellow I knew got several million dollars out of the real estate bubble and got away clean in ’05; pretty impressive. I suppose one might say they weren’t, strictly speaking, plutocrats, because they weren’t interested in politics and government except as entertainment. The actual plutocrats, on the other hand, may worry about inflation causing trouble among the folk, and they seem to feel duty-bound to inveigh against it publicly, whatever they do in private. After all, ordinary people seem to hate inflation, and the r.c. want to appease the folk as long as they don’t have to seriously inconvenience themselves. So you want to believe in Wall Street Journal editorials instead? I always figured they were a form of humor. Am I too cynical?

Steve – isn’t the simpler explanation for the inflation scare that plausibly higher inflation helps the economy and hence Obama? Do you believe that we’d see the same obsession about this under a Republican president. I’d guess no. (Though I’m sure some of the principled loonies like Ron Paul would still talk about it).

[I] sobered up, and got a fucking clue. If I can do that so can others

Yeah, but why are you berating people for making the exact same mistake you were making? Why aren’t you leading with (overdue) humility rather than disrespect? One of the reasons I wince so hard when I read your comments is I share some of the same weaknesses, like the tendency to be a bully. It’s something people like you and I should be working on. That’s what I think.

The motive of the inflation scare promoted by Republicans would be, I think, to use it as a tool for ‘deficit reduction’, that is, busting Social Security and other such programs, which they don’t like because they want more money to go to the rich, etc. Permit me to doubt their sincerity; it’s like Reagan talking about a balanced budget.

It would be easier to stomach the posts on how much more awful a Republican administration would be if the writers of those posts would acknowledge that the goddamn original post contains a pre-emptive reply to them, and engage with it:

Part of the case for persuading people to vote to keep the Democrats in government is that they’re so terrible at being in opposition. Specifically, their very weakness and incompetence in carrying out the business of politics is being used as an electoral asset. That’s not a cool rhetorical ju-jitsu move; it’s nightmarish.

Bush didn’t go wage war in Iraq unilaterally. He did so with the implicit support of the congressional Democrats, who on balance didn’t care enough about the immorality of war to even raise a finger concretely putting a stop to it (by unauthorizing funding, for example). We’re told a Romney administration would commit unprecedented atrocities, which is plausible only because the Democratic opposition would commit the very-much-precedented atrocity of shrugging and going along with it.

So we’re supposed to vote Democrats into a fully insulated majority in all houses because Democrats can’t be arsed to resist Republicans.

And when we do manage to get a fully insulated majority in all houses, like we did briefly earlier this decade, you still won’t see much action taken against Republican abominable foreign policies, and you’ll still see the Democrats pulling a milder and less catastrophic version of the same foreign policy travesties, not to mention they’ll offer up abominable endangerment of core domestic achievements like Medicaid, in the interest of phantasmal comity with the Republicans.

Apparently the argument goes, if a Romney administration decides now is the time to go to war with Iran, we can’t rely on the Democratic Congress to put a stop to it. If a Romney administration decides to privatize Social Security and end Medicare, we can’t rely on the Democratic Congress to put a stop to it. If a Romney administration decides to issue a tax cut for the wealthy that bankrupts what shreds of social services yet remain, we can’t rely on the Democratic Congress to put a stop to it.

There are two possibilities. One is that the allegation is false, Democratic helplessness is bullshit, and the Democrats actually will use techniques well within their power as a minority party to prevent the Romney administration from taking action. (That’s what happened in 2004-2006, with regard to Social Security.) People arguing it’s morally imperative to prevent a Romney Presidency can’t agree to this, and I’m willing to agree with them. The second possibility is that the allegation is true, and the Democratic party won’t take action to prevent the atrocities of a Republican administration, even though it would be well within their power to do so.

In which case, arguing for lesser evilism is really just arguing for evil. Notice people who feel this way don’t say “vote for a Democratic President and fuck all those cowards in the Congress, vote Green downticket.” So what are they saying, when they’re saying what they’re saying? Basically:

“Since so many Democrats are uselessly complicit in every abominable policy of a Republican, you have to vote Democrat.”

“It’s morally imperative to support people from the party who won’t put up resistance against their opponents’ policies, because we need to do everything we can to put up resistance against their opponents’ policies.”

I resent being called a three-year-old fascist for finding this line of argument painfully unsatisfactory. If I can’t rely on the opposition party to stop the worst atrocities of the other party–which is certainly something the Bush era proved to be true, I’m not disputing Democratic spinelessness–then fuck the opposition party. If, in the event of a cliff-jumping precedentedly awful Republican presidency, the only opposition I can hope for from the opposition party is just slowing down the velocity at which we jump off the cliff, then fuck the opposition party. The people saying ROMNEY BAD VOTE D are so emotionally invested in it, they can’t even let us have a few threads on CT discussing the painfully hopeless inutility of doing what they’re asking us to do.

Harold @386
I’ll acknowledge that Humphrey had his faults and also that I’m not familiar with all the details of his career. He was an anti-Communist like some other ADA-style Dems, and as mayor of Minneapolis may well have engaged in red-baiting etc. I’ll take your word for that if you like (but not Hunter Thompson’s).

On the other side of the ledger, however, Humphrey was, as I said earlier, a key supporter of the civil rts plank at the ’48 convention. On Vietnam: he was Johnson’s vice-president, he really had no choice but to support the war in public and make speeches if LBJ wanted him to, though IIRC he developed misgivings about the war much earlier than he was able to reveal in public. He eventually broke with Johnson publicly in Sept 68 in his Salt Lake City speech, too late in the day. He was not a “cool” politician in the modern TV sense, had a tendency to talk too long and too excitedly. He infuriated student protesters etc not only b/c of his public support of LBJ but b/c he really didn’t know how to get on their wave length at all, in terms of how he spoke (by contrast w McCarthy, who wd quote poetry, etc.) I view Humphrey as something of a tragic figure, whose position as LBJ’s vice pres. really hurt him in more ways than one. Re embracing Lester Maddox: yes, he was running for pres. in 68, he needed the support of Southern Dems in the primaries facing challenges from Kennedy and McCarthy. Should he have embraced Maddox? No. Is it a hanging offense? Probably not.

Hunter Thompson is wrong to imply there was no diff betw Humphrey and Nixon. That’s just silly.

William Timberman @388

I rather resent your reference to me as unpleasant (I assume at any rate it’s supposed to include me, given the context) and your condescending, inaccurate assumption that I am too young or too ignorant (or both) to know much of anything. If you would perhaps take a few minutes off from throwing around quotations from Santayana, Edith Piaf and God knows who else, you might find it advantageous to exercise a little bit of interpretive — what’s the word? — charity. Otherwise some people may just stop reading your often somewhat sententious remarks.

So it was immoral to vote for FDR ? He interned Japanese-Americans, freely collaborated with segregationists.

What about the volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln brigade ? They enabled Stalinists after all.

Mclaren writes:

Daryl McCollough claims: As I said somewhere else recently, if someone has a plausible plan in which allowing Republicans to sweep into office will eventually lead to a better world, I’m all ears. But it seems to me that the effect of the principled rejection of “lesser-evildom” will most likely be that we are stuck with the greater evil.

This is the kind of gross failure in logic that typifies arguments for voting for Obama this fall.

I think you don’t really understand what “logic” is. I didn’t make a logical argument.

This formulation depends on two assumptions, both contrary to observed reality: 1) liberal voters can successfully keep Republicans out of office forever, as far as the eye can see, into the distant future and beyond. 2) The longer liberal voters keep Republicans out of office, the better the chances of restoring the rule of law and rolling back the limitless growth of corporate power and the military-police-surveillance-torture complex.
Neither assumption is even remotely credible.

I didn’t make either assumption. I didn’t say anything about “restoring the rule of law and rolling back the limitless growth of corporate power, etc.” I questioned how allowing the Republicans to win in 2012 could lead to a better outcome, however that’s defined. It would almost surely lead to a worse outcome in the period 2012 — 2016, and there is no reason to think that anything would be better in the longer term by allowing Republicans to win. That’s where I’m asking for a plausible strategy from you (or whoever). If you are making the claim that short-term pain will lead to better longer-term outcome, then make the argument. You haven’t, and it doesn’t seem at all plausible to me.

I am not making the claim that electing Obama will have long-term benefits, I’m only claiming that it will make things better in the short term and that I don’t know (and nobody seems to know) what to do in the longer term.

I really couldn’t care less to hear about how awful Democrats are. I want to hear a plausible strategy for making things better. In the short term, I know the answer: keep Republicans out of power, and things will be slightly better. There is no question in my mind about that. Longer term, I don’t know. Nobody appears to.

Shorter this comment: People who say If you somehow do convince a massive number of people to not vote Obama, then Romney will win do not acknowledge the plausibility of the alternative If you somehow do convince a massive number of people to not vote Obama, then Obama will change in order to win those people back, and you’ll have much the same electoral outcome with an improved political outcome. And if it is indeed correct that there’s no hope of Democrats changing their position in response to social pressure, well, that’s (1) a truly fucked up degree of learned helplessness and (2) wildly implausible given hundreds of examples to the contrary.

It’s not Obama loses, Romney wins; it’s Obama comes under fire, adjusts accordingly. And that’s painfully obvious the moment you pull back from THE ONLY POSSIBLE CHOICES ARE THE DEMOCRATS AS THEY ARE OR THE REPUBLICANS AS THEY COULD BE, SO SHUT UP AND VOTE DEM.

…

You know, now seems like the right time for me to break anonymity and reveal my true affiliation.

I am an Underpants Gnome. You may have heard of us. We’re infamous for our business model, which tends to take this form: Stage 1. Collect underpants. Stage 2. ? Stage 3. Profit!

What doesn’t get mentioned in that presentation is that your kind’s Roman letters and Earth question marks are actually sophisticated Gnomish-language ciphers, whose precise hue and shape communicate something slightly more sophisticated than your Earthly ink-jot question mark. In the interest of intergalactic peace, let me translate one such question mark for you:

Stage 0. This is actually the part we’re still working on. Convince lots of people to self-identify as part of an angry voter bloc willing to engage in principled nonvoting or primary challenger voting. Or, at a minimum, convince lots of people to complain vocally about the issues, even if they’re not sincerely going to engage in principled nonvoting.

Stage 1. Collect underpants. (Earth English translation: Collect data, e.g. by poll. Make the issue provoking this sudden massive unrest widely and specifically known by passing poll data along to media. They’ll be interested precisely because our Stage 0 was so successful. Even if your organization’s polls are accused of bias by opponents, you have hope of encouraging other pollsters to conduct similar research. A few thousand dollars are all you need to conduct massive polls and hire a branded research firm to launder the poll and interpret their results for you. To pay for this, sell underpants through the Jin-Gitaxian Federation’s Underpants Collectors’ Auction and Consortium, or just get some Earth donation money from ActBlue.)

Stage 2. ? (Earth English translation: Advertise an alternative that politicians can get behind in order to win the adoration, or at least the respect, of the angry voter bloc. Promote this relentlessly. Since we somehow managed in Stage 0 to get heard by a swathe of people potentially interested in this information, we should be able to maintain lines of communication to them. Since we somehow managed in Stage 0 to convince that same swathe of people to withhold their vote in protest, we should be able to convince them to accept and even celebrate the proposed alternative. Speaking of which, how the fuck are we going to accomplish Stage 0 in the first place? Better keep working on that part.)

Stage 3. Profit! (Earth English translation: A more left-inclined political regime, with respect to the issue we raised!)

There is a footnote that says “don’t make any huge moves just before an election because people need some time to receive new information and react to it. Try to have this unrest occur at least a month before the first primary.” (In Underpants Gnomish, things that look like lamps hovering over the top middle of a gigantic sign are footnotes.)

Now of course, the fact that we’re a small enough group to be negligible undercuts all of this. But the if-then statement implicit in Bernard Yomtov’s “the argument against voting for Obama becomes widely accepted, with the result that Romney wins the election” is really at the root of this disagreement.

If a substantial swathe of people become pissed and disillusioned about Obama for specific reasons we can cite, and you’re arguing that even Obama is incapable of adjusting to that, then you’re arguing for a degree of learned helplessness far beyond anything Daniel identified in the OP. You’re arguing that we have no hope of Democrats changing in response to social pressure… and then arguing this implies we have to keep our damn mouths shut and vote Democratic anyway.

Salient nails it when he points out that “voting for lesser evilism is just voting for evil.”

Daniel’s original post captures some of the problem by noting the paradox in claiming that we should vote for Democrats because they’re so unwilling (or unable) to resist Republican atrocities like extrajudicial murder of U.S. citizens (now adopted by a Democratic president) or extending grotesquely inequitable tax breaks for billionaires (now adopted by a Democratic president) or criminalizing non-violent political dissent and using security forces armed with military weaponry to brutalize non-violent protesters (now adopted by a Democratic president).

But Daniel’s post doesn’t go far enough. The real problem with this argument in favor of voting for the Democrats is that the lawlessness and atrocities of the R’s tends to infect the D’s. The Democrats soon wind up perpetrating the same atrocities as the R’s with a time lag. So really what happens is the voting for the lesser evil = voting for the full evil with a time lag.

The reason for this is clear. Two basic social laws:

Social law #1: Lawnessness, once accepted as the norm, tends to spread limitlessly outside the tiny domain in which it is employed.

Example: Once the authorities abandon the rule of law in one tiny little niche of society, the practice of abandoning the law tends to spread like wildfire. Israel saw this when it legalized torture of terrorists. Only terrorists were to be tortured, and then only when there was definite probitive evidence that they were terrorists, and then torture was permitted only to prevent further terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, torture soon spread throughout the entire Israeli justice system to the point where routine suspects of minor crimes were routinely getting torture. Eventually the Israeli supreme court had to step in and put a stop to it. Another excellent example of how lawlessness tends to spread: in Mexico, the Zetas were an elite anti-drug task force who were effectively above the law. They were permitted to do things outside the legal boundaries, like kidnap drug dealers without a warrant, assassinate cartel assassins, etc. Eventually the Zetas became so lawless that they crossed the line entirely and became one of the most dangerous drug cartels themselves.

When the authorities abandon the rule of law, lawless behavior spreads like wildfire until it becomes the norm. This is why Democrats adopt the same atrocities as Republicans. Once the Republicans normalize atrocities like kidnaping U.S. citizens without a warrant, Democrats also perpetrate the same atrocities because it has become a normal feature of civil society. This embolden R’s to perpetrate even worse atrocities. So the Democrats actually function as accelerants catalyzing the burning of the constitution.
Social law #2: Once an atrocity becomes accepted as normal behavior in society, worse atrocities get perpetrated without limit.

The “unthinkable” represents a boundary beyond which a society refuses to go. Once upon a time in America, torture was unthinkable. Now polls show that 41% of Americans approve of torturing suspected terrorists. At that point, the new “unthinkable” under Bush 43 became the murder of American citizens without accusing them of a crime. Now that boundary has been passed under Obama — and the new “unthinkable” has become the roundup and mass murder of American citizens without charging them with a crime. Today, that’s unimaginable… Until, in a few years, another Democratic president perpetrates that atrocity, and then the boundary will move again to even more extreme unthinkable behavior, like mass rape of suspected dissidents as punishment, or public impalement of criminals, or stripping K-12 schoolkids naked and cavity-searching them routinely.

The people who giggle and snicker “Oh, really, Obama will do those things?” don’t grasp how society works. Once some atrocity becomes normalized by being employed by people with badges and gets accepted as routine behavior, the extremes of behavior wielded by the people with badges move farther out to encompass more radically unthinkable behavior. This typically gets justified by the bully-worshipers who enable the muggers with badges as “getting tough” or “cracking down” or “getting real in our war with [fill in the blank: terror, drugs, copyright infringement, etc.]”

Here again the pro-Obama voters fail to grasp how things work. They seem to conclude “Because things have gotten horribly bad in the last 4 years, but only moderately bad, this process of abandoning the rule of law and normalizing atrocities isn’t going to get any worse.” Yes it will. History shows that when a society accepts barbarous behavior by the authorities, the barbarism gets continually worse. History shows that when a society allows atrocities and accepts them as normal behavior, the atrocities get limitlessly more savage.
So the answer to that snickering giggle is, No, of course Obama won’t round up dissidents and murder them — but the next Democratic president or the president after him (or the Democratic president after him) will. Look at your history. Once the government abandons the rule of law, it doesn’t tend to stop until you get gulags and people on trial for hooliganism and Year Zero killing grounds. Once a people accept torture as reasonable behavior by their government, they also tend to accept rape gangs and death camps and mass killings and political prisons and secret police bribing children to turn their parents in to the NKVD.

Anti-terrorist government squads above the rule of law always tend to become the worst terrorists themselves. This is where we’re headed in America, and voting for Obama merely ratifies this process. People who boast “I got a fucking clue” actually don’t have a clue, because their vote for Obama today gives the stamp of political and social legitimacy to the atrocities which their Democratic president will commit in another 4 or 8 years.

Daryl McCullough: “I am not making the claim that electing Obama will have long-term benefits, I’m only claiming that it will make things better in the short term and that I don’t know (and nobody seems to know) what to do in the longer term.”

Of course, that’s a critical divide in opinion.

You are basically confessing to short-sightedness. Others, who share your sentiments, seem to subscribe to a kind of random-walk theory of political trends. Anything to avoid confronting the reality that the “long-term” has been a steep downward slope for some time, now, and, has been a steep downward slope throughout Obama’s first four years,.

If you take seriously the possibility of Romney being elected, I can perfectly understand why that might make you the voter-equivalent of a white-knuckle driver on slick ice, losing control of vehicle, because you are trying so hard to steer away from skid.

If you are more cynical, and you strongly suspect the fix is in, and Romney(‘s campaign) is trying very, very hard to lose this election — a fact readily apparent to any sentient being with his eyes open — you relax, and let yourself turn around and really assess what your candidate, Obama, has, in fact, been about for the last 4 years. Then, you get to feel really hopeless and despairing.

Obama’s “short-term” is just a series of steps downward on a really frightening long-term path, the same damn long-term path as Bush, for the most part. There have been plusses. Gay marriage. Some people have access to health insurance, that they really need, while other people (and soon, a lot of other people) get to pay for really crappy health insurance that won’t do them much good.

The occupation of Iraq ended without anyone being held to account for the epic corruption and the enormously costly loss. The military is the most respected institution in American life, after losing two enormously expensive wars, and embarking, secretly, on a bunch more little wars, which we will also lose. The global financial crisis has ended continued without anyone being held accountable for the epic corruption. (Do you detect a pattern, yet?)

There’s a lot more at stake in the long-term than gay marriage or abortion rights. There’s peak oil and climate change issues: we’re on the downslope of the industrial revolution, and instead of engineering a 1st world future for the population, we’re letting the plutocracy stampede us into poisoning the groundwater, so that they can grab another ten percentile of a soon-to-declining GDP.

Instead of panicking about the short-term, you should be panicking about the long-term.

I’m not saying that there is anything obvious you can do about the long-term, certainly nothing you can do about the long-term, in electoral terms, unless you are one the rare people, who lives in a Congressional district, where there’s a candidate, who is not a complete tool(, or local officials running, who are also, not complete tools), though even that is little more than a protest vote. But, that’s kind of the point — something you should notice and pay attention to, instead of gripping your vote for Obama and regular Dems ever tighter in your short-term panic. The electoral process is being controlled and manipulated to eliminate any meaningful role for you. You are being asked to legitimate a very bad long-term trend with your vote for Obama, but you are not being given a choice. You are being a cue about how to act, electorally, but no clue, or choice, about long-term consequences.

The consumer sovereignty theory, applied to politics, says the masses must not want a choice, if they are not being given one. The masses want to be lied to. You want to be lied to, since you believe the lies. This is not my view, but it has been offered in this comment thread.

Not many have gotten off the Obama bus, yet. Even the young OWS-types haven’t really thought things through, and are not very numerous. Lots and lots of ordinary people are acutely aware of the decline, the downward trend. A lot of those people are — shocking I know! — either Tea Party voters or non-voters. They are concerned and anxious and maybe a little angry in an unfocused way about the decline, and about the effect on their lives. They don’t know what to do, anymore than I do. They don’t know what is going on. (Lord knows, no one in our corporate Media is going to whisper even the first clue, or allow a leadership voice to emerge that might rally folks.)

After the election, after Obama extends tax cuts for the rich once again, after Obama tries once again to cut Social Security, after Obama approves the Keystone pipeline and some other environment depredations, maybe after the economic crisis drags on and the demands of the big banks for free money balloon, after implementation of the ACA begins in earnest and the subsidies for the 60% prove inadequate to prevent net real income reductions, maybe after some military disaster . . . maybe, some day real soon now, you’ll begin to think about the long-term.

The anger is coming. I think it is still a long way off — five to eight years off, maybe. If the Left doesn’t get angry and busy right now, the anger that comes will come from the Right, because the anger is coming, regardless.

When Daryl McCullough claimed that “As I said somewhere else recently, if someone has a plausible plan in which allowing Republicans to sweep into office will eventually lead to a better world, I’m all ears,” and I pointed out that this kind of gross failure of logic typifies the faulty arguments of pro-Obama voters, Daryl responded by claiming that he was not making a logical argument.

Leaving aside the fact that Daryl’s retort destroys itself as any kind of argument (because why should anyone pay attention to an argument whose logic does not parse? For example, if you claim “We must vote for Obama instead of Romney because Neptune is a planet” no one will be convinced because the conclusion does not follow logically from the premise), in fact Daryl was making a logical argument. The fact that he doesn’t seem to realize it seems bizarre, and disturbing — yet all too typical of Obots.

Let’s lay out Daryl’s argument: it’s a simple syllogism.
1) Minor premise: Voting against Obama will let the Republicans sweep into power
2) Major premise: If the Republicans sweep into power, things will get worse.
3) Conclusion: Therefore we most vote for Obama.

This is a logical argument, but it’s a faulty logical argument. The weak links involve at least four different logical fallacies.

Fallacy #1: Begging the question. By stating that voting against Obama and instead writing in Elizabeth Warren will swing the election to the Republicans as though it were a fact, Daryl falls into a classic logical fallacy. But he begs the question because it remains a fact that if enough people write in Elizabeth Warren, she will become president and not Obama. So it’s by no means clear that not voting for Obama will let Republicans sweep into power.
There’s a second and even more severe problem with Daryl’s logic in the first premise. Namely, that he can’t see how a Democratic loss this election cycle could lead to better social conditions down the road. One of the reasons the Republican party has become so powerful is that it’s willing to accept a loss in one election cycle in order to solidify its principles and impose discipline on its party members so as to win future election cycles. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 loss gives an excellent example. So here’s how Republicans sweeping into power will make things better: if the Democrats purge the blue dogs and conservative lite and torture-lovers from their ranks, they’ll become a more disciplined party able to field farther left candidates, which will lead to a win by far more liberal Democratic candidates in the next election cycle. The Republicans understand the power of maintaining party discipline and holding a hard line on their principles (unfortunately those principles involve torture and unprovoked wars of aggression) but the Democrats don’t.
Fallacy #2: The second premise also has serious problems. It assumes that Democrats cannot mount the kind of massive obstructionism Republicans have engaged in to shut down the government when a president Romney tries to go to war with Iran and abolish medicare and social security. The second premise also presumes that non-violent civil obedience is not an option. Neither of these assumptions seems valid.
This is the fallacy of the excluded middle. “Either we must torture all suspected criminals or society will disintegrate into lawless anarchy!” No, there’s a third alternative in the middle of the two extremes which this argument deliberately ignores. Likewise, the argument Daryl makes ignores the third alternative of massive civil disobedience to shut down society when president Romney tries to use nukes against Iran, etc. In fact this was how the Democrats ended the Vietnam war.
Fallacy #3: the logical fallacy of the non sequitur conclusion. “Therefore we must vote for Obama” doesn’t follow from either of the premises. “Therefore we must have a general strike” is equally valid; or “Therefore we must write in Elizabeth Warren on the ballot” is a better option. Or “Therefore we must grass-roots organize in all 50 states and field massively more liberal candidates in the next election cycle” is an even better option.
It’s also worth nothing that Daryl’s argument falls into the base rate fallacy and the fallacy of denying the antecedent. The base rate fallacy arises from the claim that politics is likely to continue as normal if Republicans get into power and start perpetrating massive atrocities like nuking Iran or ending social security. This is clearly and obviously not the case, the AARP audience booing Paul Ryan showed. That kind of thing simply doesn’t happen in normal politics. The Republicans are now so far into crazy-land that proposals are getting active pushback from the broad middle of the electorate, and this is likely to grow exponentially more extreme as the R’s policies grow more extreme. The probability of mass uprisings that force change in society is not the same as the probabilities assigned to other normative political actions, because in a situation that extreme, the probabilities will change radically.
The fallacy of denying the antecedent comes in when Daryl assumes that “there is no plausible plan in which Republicans sweeping into office will improve things” therefore there is a plausible plan according to which Democrats sweeping into office will improve things. (A classic case of the fallacy “If A therefore B, so if not A therefore not B.”)
It should now be clear that not only was Daryl making a logical argument, he was making a logical argument riddled from top to bottom with logical fallacies — like the arguments made by all the Obots on this forum.

Now we know Steve LaBonne must be trolling. He ventures to essay: “It’s not Obama loses, Romney wins; it’s Obama comes under fire, adjusts accordingly.”

Which is why, you know, many of us who are going to vote for him (or rather, against Romney) criticize him often and not particularly gently, as I did myself not very many comments ago. Do try to keep up.

And a lame-duck president with nothing to lose will pay attention to your criticism because…?

This is the underpants gnome theory of politics once again:

1) Vote for Obama!
2) Criticize him even though he knows you can never vote for him again because he can’t run again, and he knows he’ll spend the rest of his life wealthy and adored by the elites he’s so richly rewarded by continuing Bush’s policies.
3) (…)
4) Change to a more liberal society!

As with the underpants gnomes, there appears to be a missing link here.

Do try to keep up, Steve.

Steve LaBonne once against trots out the tired and long-debunked “crying wolf” argument. We’re on the brink of doom, this is a must-win election, all is lost if we don’t vote for [fill in name of Democrat], human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!

And even then, since 45% of the [electorate: sic] would vote for a baboon if it ran as a Republican, it would be unwise to take chances given the high stakes.

If this is really true, then all is lost for American democracy. Our democratic process has broken down if 45% of the electorate would really vote for a baboon if it ran as a Republican. In that case the logical course of action is not to try to work within a catastrophically broken political system, but rather to kick over the chessboard and start working outside the rules. Mass general strikes, civil disobedience on an epochal scale, etc.
Martin Luther King arrived at the same conclusion when he recognized that the justice system in the American was irrevocably broken for blacks. Instead of continuing to try to work within it, he kicked over the chessboard. That turned out to be a wise decision.

Obots fail to recognize that this kind of we’re-all-doomed-unless-we-vote-this-current-Democratic-candidate argument defeats itself. If it’s really</I true that American democarcy is within microns of disintegrating because the electorate is so hopelessly corrupt and decadent that they’re vote for a baboon if it ran as a Republican, then the game is already lost within conventional politics. Therefore we must move beyond conventional politics to something entirely different if we want to reform American society.

BW, I do hope it’s only this thread that you’re bailing on. Otherwise, I’m gonna miss you the way I missed billmon (May the gods be kind, and see to it that his recent resurrection not be one of those three-days-and-then-the-ascension thingies.)

Panicking about the long-term is an awful temptation, but since I’m not gonna be around for the long-term, since I don’t believe that the Masters of the Universe have a genuine clue about what to do next, and since Change You Can Believe In tends to sneak up on far smarter people than those who snigger while they’re coming up with Obama bumper stickers, I’m not gonna panic. I’m gonna do whatever the spirit moves me to do, which for the moment is to tip my hat to you.

The crazy wing of the Republican party has successfully dragged their party to the right, so changing the direction of a political party is clearly possible. From reading the news, it looks like they did this by mounting primary challenges against moderate Republican candidates in districts where even a crazy Republican had a chance of winning.

It sounds like a plausible approach – affect the behavior of Democrats by voting in elections where there are no Republicans running – but maybe there’s a flaw that makes it less effective of a plan than just not voting for Obama in November.

Bruce Wilder also makes some predictions which seem entirely valid. In fact, we can test the credibility of his arguments by seeing whether his predictions come true after January 2013: I think most of them will come true, and very much sooner than anyone thinks.

Wilder writes: After the election, after Obama extends tax cuts for the rich once again, after Obama tries once again to cut Social Security, after Obama approves the Keystone pipeline and some other environment depredations, maybe after the economic crisis drags on and the demands of the big banks for free money balloon, after implementation of the ACA begins in earnest and the subsidies for the 60% prove inadequate to prevent net real income reductions, maybe after some military disaster . . . maybe, some day real soon now, you’ll begin to think about the long-term.

Obama’s extension of the Bush tax cuts is a given. That’s easy to predict, and a no-brainer. He’ll excuse it as a plot to get some meaningless concession from the R’s [fill in the blank: another 10 weeks of unemployment insurance, restoring food stamp cuts, whatever] but in the end, Obama believes deeply as Romney does in the insane policies of Andrew Carnegie during the Great Depression. (Look up Carnegie’s proposals for ending the Great Depression, which actually made it much worse. He proposed reducing the maximum tax rate form 70% to 24%. Exactly same as the Reagan/Bush 43 tax cuts and exactly the same long-debunked economically destructive policies embraced by Obama. It’s clear that Obama is an economic royalist who has fully embraced the neoliberal spontaneous equilibrium macroeconomics policies of the University of Chicago. Policies which, as Paul Krugman has repeatedly pointed out, are only making the current recession worse, and which economic facts since 2009 have decisively rebutted.)

Obama will not only try to cut social security and medicare, he’ll succeed, and very soon too. Obama’s cuts will occur when he embraced the sequestration cuts but signs off on emergency legislation to exempt the U.S. military from any cuts. This will have the effect of increasing American military spending while savagely cutting social security and medicare. Obama will blame congress, but of course he will be responsible because he refuses to veto the emergency legislation exempting the military from sequestration cuts. Incidentally, news stories about this bipartisan emergency legislation are already appearings, so this is a done deal. Obama will brutally slash both medicare and society security by maneuvering within the sequesteration legislation and accepting the emergency bill that makes U.S. military spending immune to those cuts.

Obama will of course approve the Keystone pipeline and fracking. That’s uncontroversial. He’s already said he’ll do it. Mountaintop removal continues under Obama. The destruction of entire communities with the toxic tailings of mountaintop removal accelerates as we speak. This isn’t even a prediction, it’s a fact, and it will continue.

The economic crisis will clearly continue, since Obama has embraced the foolish and long-debunked economic austerity policies which are now driving Europe into an even deeper recession and shrinking the GDPs of the nations employing those failed and disastrous policies.

The demands of banks for more cash will clearly intensify, since America’s financial system is at present insolvent. Moreover, Wall Street has not been reformed, so it’s only a matter of time before an even worse financial collapse requires an even bigger bailout than 2009. We even know the trigger for the next bubble and the next global financial collapse: high-frequency trading, a gigantic financial time bomb ready to explode.
The ACA will get fully implemented by 2014 and soon thereafter it will become clear that the ACA’s lack of cost controls haven’t stopped the death spiral of costlier medical procedures requiring endless health insurance premium hikes, which will lead to fewer able to pay those premiums, which will lead to a smaller insurance pool and higher premiums, until the entire medical-industrial complex in America collapses. The state exchanges won’t pick up the slack because they’ve already been swamped. States can’t afford the deluge of payouts for people with chronic illnesses and are already going brankrupt from medicaid payouts: this will only get worse as the co-pays and premiums mandated by ACA force more and more of the middle class out of private insurance and into medicaid and the state exchanges.
The ACA was in essence a scam by the medical-industrial complex, the last frantic resort of a dying monopolistic sclerotic industry whose business model had failed completely: they could foresee the insurance death spiral, so the U.S. medical-industrial complex (instead of reforming itself) threw a hail Mary pass and bribed politicians to force all the voters to put unaffordable private health insurance whose cost was guaranteed to rise endlessly and whose premiums were consequently guaranteed to increase without limit. This was not a solution, merely a means for the U.S. medical-industrial complex to kick he can down the road for a few more years so it can extract even more rents from an increasingly impovershed population. Like the other vampire squid, America’s financial Wall Street crime lords, America’s medical-industrial complex has clamped itself to the faces of American vogters and sucked their blood so aggressively for short term gain that it fails to realize the long term death knell its policies sound for its own survival as an industry.
It’s particularly hilarious to watch the Obots scream in outrage against Bruce Wilder for his alleged “moral cowardice” — these are the selfsame people who embrace the murder of children and Red Cross aid workers by drones, the same people who complacently acquiesce to the brutalization of homeless formerly middle-class citizens for daring to peacably assemble in public and dissent, the same people who smile rhapsodically when Obama signs on extending the Bush tax cuts for billionaires and gives the Wall Street crime lords a Get Out Of Jail Free pass. As Bill Clinton remarked at the Democratic National Convention, it takes a lot of brass to criticize someone else for what you’re doing.

Obama will of course approve the Keystone pipeline … He’s already said he’ll do it.

I must have missed that.

The crazy wing of the Republican party has successfully dragged their party to the right, so changing the direction of a political party is clearly possible. From reading the news, it looks like they did this by mounting primary challenges against moderate Republican candidates in districts where even a crazy Republican had a chance of winning.
this. I think the power and ruthlessness of the Republican party is widely overstated by many people on the left, including in this thread (if you look at actual successes, Republicans have been very successful where they have unified corporate power on their side and not all that successful otherwise), but if we look at how the Republican fringes scare their politicians it’s through primaries, not in the general election. All the loonie right-wingers who care a modicum about politics voted McCain and will vote Romney, many of them holding their noses. But they scared Romney and McCain enough to get them to run much further to the right than their prior history suggests they’d have been naturally inclined to and probably further to the right than short term electoral success would have suggested.

McLaren
I am so totally in favor of “mass general strikes, civil disobedience on an epochal scale” but,— show me the numbers. During the 60’s we called a student strike pretty often- but nobody came. OWS is the only mass movement of civil disobedience I’ve seen in 20 years and they’ve fizzled. Iraq and Iran motivated only tiny protest marches with a disturbing large number of familiar middle aged participants. Underpants gnome non-voting will disappear into general apathy and Republican ID requirements.

Wisconsin was a mass movement which lost its election and was only one out of fifty. To assume that such a lucky happenstance will always pop up and be more appealing than a revival of the KKK is foolish.

I don’t need another 5000 word essay about how evil Democrats are. Please don’t print another thousand words along those lines. My question is: What is the strategy for making things better?

Short term, it seems to me that getting Democrats elected is the best approach. Longer term, we can use primaries to try to replace bad candidates by better candidates. We can work toward electoral reform (maybe changing to instant runoff or something better, like Condorcet or approval voting), to make it easier to vote for your ideal candidate without worrying about throwing the election to the worst candidate. We can hold rallies and protests and letter-writing campaigns. We can have a general strike. I don’t know. There’s lots of things that we can do longer term. I’m not sure if any of them will be effective.

We just keep getting that last reel of the first Ghostbusters film over and over again from the Obots. Zuul is going to eat our souls if we don’t vote for Obama. The Stay-Puft Marshallow Man will destroy us.

You can certainly write endless amounts of nonsense without breaking a sweat. The only thing that I have said is that almost certainly the next four years will be worse if Republicans are in power than if Democrats are in power. That’s not the difference between paradise and hell, but it’s something. If you want to sacrifice a small good in exchange for a greater good, fine–tell me what that greater good is, and how making the next 4 years worse helps it along.

If people are saying that a certain strategy will bring about a better world in the long run, but we have to make short term sacrifice, great. I want to hear about it. If people are saying that we’re screwed anyway, and the most important thing as this point is to make sure that we have clean consciences, you can count me out. I care about real-world consequences, but I don’t care about your conscience. If you think voting for the lesser evil is itself evil–I really don’t care about your moralizing, if it doesn’t actually help make the world better. And I don’t see how it does.

I agree with Steve LaBonne @435.

Hey look, Mclaren’s plans are… completely consonant with the position of all the so-called Obots, except for the single issue of voting Obama in swing states. One might suppose, then, that Mclaren is a borderline psychotic engaged in an endless tirade against his own delusions.

McClaren,
or you change to an Australian voting system of single transferable vote and compulsory voting, BOTH of which help the elected parliament to more closely reflect the population at large. (Or you could achieve the same effect by randomly appointing representatives – but that might be regarded as too radical and has some odd side-effects). Of course that doesn’t help much if the population at large is nuts, but it still better than the disfunctional democracy the US currently has, where people are elected as the worse of two evils, but policy is mostly dictated not by the wishes of the voters, but by the wishes of the contributers of electoral funds.

But even proportional systems are better, as long as the hurdle to acchieve representation is not so low that real nutters end up with the balance of power.

The great problem in the US is that a third party has no chance to grow, because voting for a third party is exactly equivalent to not voting at all. It doesn’t sway the election in the direction you vote, it sways it in the opposite direction. The way to reform the democrats is if they see the danger of a party to their left growing to eventually become a dominant force in a left-centre coalition. Otherwise logic dictates they should position themselves slightly but distinctly to the left of the republicans, who keep verging further to the right.

Yes, the US-style winner takes all two-party system facilitates this sort of blackmail, and this sort of campaigning, campaigning by demonizing the other party. In a good system with proportional representation you could vote for whichever party you choose, and they would likely be in the government. Your vote is never, or almost never wasted. With this system, if you live, say, in Georgia, your vote is always wasted; you’re not represented. Voter turnout in Sweden is always over 80%; and in the US it’s about 50 in presidential election years, and below 40 in between. It’s just not working. 38% turnout in 2010, with means that this congress was elected by 20% of the population.

I agree with Steve LaBonne @435.

So do I.

And, Salient, you’ve lost both your composure and your good sense. For the time being anyway. Maclaren… Less said the better.

rf 09.29.12 at 10:52 pm

That was his point, but it’s still false. If I say, bone cancer is worse than breaking a leg, it’s very odd to then claim I have no objection to breaking a leg.

My failure to accept Connor F.s FP analysis does not mean I approve of US foreign policy anywhere.

By saying Obama’s bank regulations are too friendly to bankers, you are absolutely saying everything that needs to said about the Republican Party’s bank regulations.

Nothing, because they don’t deserve any attention.

But that is absolutely not what Obama voters have done for the last four years.

rootless

But you’re very selective on which parts are worth remembering.
Would it be fair to state that Obama officials, to use your word, are murdering people in the drone war? (Or is murder only something Rep admins carry out?) And this idea that Iraq 2003 exists in isolation, not the context of a post cold war ideology that encouarged military intervention and an Iraq, at the end of a Dem admin, that was the victim of a policy of sanctions and bombings, which could not be sustained. (Morally or probably politically)
It appears that foreign policy abuses are either an evil that Republicans carry out, or the result of a system beyond Dem control. That might be the problem, the left believe they’re to good and their opponents to evil

rf 09.29.12 at 11:21 pm

I think both Democrats and Republicans operate within the constraints of empire in ways that are often unjust or even criminal. Currently, Republicans are in the grips of reckless and cruel people who magnify the damage – enormously. This administration has been far far better than the Bush administration, but I never expected it to abandon empire and become pacifist or isolationist. Certainly Obama never suggested he would do such a thing or would the public have stood for it. As long as the US depends on ME oil and remains the great power, it will murder people in the cause of protecting oil supplies – no matter who is in charge. However, to naive obots like me, there is a significant difference between a small number of drone attacks and the massive destruction of Bush’s shock and awe, or Romney’s hopes of both reinstating torture as a policy and attacking Iran. States are inherently amoral, at best, and way too often immoral. I don’t see what virtue there is in pretending to be shocked, like Friedsdorf, that 50 years after installing the Shah of Iran into power, the US is engaged in brutal activities in the middle east. In fact, I find his pretend shock to be grossly disingenuous and repellent.

Furthermore, if you want to morally oppose US policy in the Middle East, you owe an explanation of what the alternative policy should be. For me, some is easy: we should engage in a massive program of energy conservation, green energy development, and R&D, so that the fate of the US economy can be disengaged from the fate of the Saudi monarchy. I’m sure Friedsdorf opposes such a policy, because, in the end, he really does not give a damn about his fake principles. But I also do not have simple solutions. 100 years of imperial meddling in the Middle East has created a huge mess in which all actions or inactions are going to cause innocent people do die. For example, I am a strong opponent of the US war in Afghanistan, but do not have any illusions about what our departure will mean for weaker ethnic minorities, secularists, and women.

I also think Ben Alpers said some good things way upthread @28, 51, etc.

Henry, Chris B, Salient: maybe the reason people didn’t bother engaging with this post at the intellectual level you demand is because it is, in many substantial points, wrong? And when commenters popped up to make that point, dsquared ignored them?

cf John Quiggin’s posts, which can sometimes start out egregiously wrong, or people think they are, and he seems to be able to find time to defend them in comments (I see this a lot on his posts about war). He even hangs around long enough to clarify things or explain nuance. Not so dsquared or Tedra, whose posts attract a lot of quite straightforward corrections. In this case it is being pointed out by Americans that dsquared doesn’t understand American politics, reasons are being given, but he isn’t bothering to defend them.

This creates a bad atmosphere, it’s part of the reason the comment thread has gone to hell; it also isn’t beneficial for non-commenting readers, since they see a whole bunch of factoids being contested and don’t see a response from the person whose post they, presumably, came here to read.

Also I’ll note that some time back people started using offensive language like “Obots,” which is straight out right-wing hipster-punching, but because no one from the CT crew is even bothering to look in on the moshpit, it’s getting more and more heated.

“but there’s nothing uniquely evil about it, whatsoever, compared to any other mode of warfare”

Perhaps there’s not anything uniquely evil about it, but a lot of the disagreement seems to be coming from a difference in how ‘problematic’ it is. Not only in its own right in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan etc, but in the myth that surrounds it’s necessity and that feeds policies and rhetoric domestically that overwhelmingly affect one demographic.

One thing that’s been quite obvious throughout the ‘debate’ is that for a group that polices language very carefully, (and that’s not something I’m used to), there has not been close to the same opposition to caricaturing and lazy thinking when the subject is some foreign group. (This is more the case in other places than here) The fact that the primary issue raised by the article, the actual reality of the WOT, has also been the one most ignored, should give a lot of people who speak about privilege pause.

What’s shameful, immoral, and delusional, is projecting arguments on to people they don’t make, over and over again, ad nauseum, and continuing to act as if they are making arguments they aren’t making, while they continue to not make the arguments you attribute to them.

mclaren, if you don’t want people trotting out the mental illness smear, don’t refer to them as “obots,” which is an offensive right-wing trope. If you really must engage in hipster-punching, you’ll find yourself in better company at the NRO.

You fucking know full fucking well that we’re fucking horrified by the prospect of a Romney presidency, and you fucking know full fucking well we wouldn’t want to see that happen, and you fucking know full fucking well we wouldn’t want to cause that to happen, and you fucking know full fucking well we’re avoiding engaging in any actions or behavior that we believe actually could throw the election closer to Romney (this is a very small set of things to avoid).

to be honest, I find that puzzling. I don’t know that full well – I mean, I know that about you now, but from what I have read, it doesn’t seem clear to me that mclaren e.g. shares that opinion. (If I understand her/his longterm theory of politics correctly, electing a democrat moves the political to the right, so if anything getting Romney would be preferable).

But as long as you say that “we’re avoiding engaging in any actions or behavior that we believe actually could throw the election closer to Romney” , to be honest, I have no idea what the argument is about.
I mean – how is that different from the statement of someone from team “lesser” that “in a situation where your vote has a plausible chance to make a difference, you should really vote Obama” – which is really the whole content of most ot what team “lesser” has argued here.

There may be some exceptions, such as rootless_e’s bizarre statement that
In fact, there is only one national political movement for social justice with a mass following right now – the Obama campaign.

but I don’t think anyone else on team “lesser” here has expressed any affinity to the position that Obama’s campaign is a “national political movement for social justice” (??? I’m not even sure whether rootless is being sarcastic here, maybe I’m just not getting it).

Is your position basically: Yes, it does matter whether Obama or Romney is president, but I’m so angry at Obama & the Democrats that I don’t want to say it? Because that’s kind of how the whole “saying uncle” thing sounds. If that’s the case, I for one am perfectly fine with that.

If you want to see a large number of working class Americans of all races engaged in the political process – there is little alternative to OFA. You can make the vanguardist argument that all those people are victims of false consciousness, suckers, lacking in proper theory, whatever – and then go back to your faculty meeting or your white man affinity group or some other remnant of the left wing movements of the past. But, you could also try an experiment and knock on some doors, meet your fellow citizens.

While “the left” has been writing articles about how nobody appreciates the articles they write, for 4 years, OFA has been training grass roots organizers.

Anarcissie:

Except the whole point of contemporary conservative PAC politics in the US is to minimize the effect of utilitarianism by demonizing it, and thus maximize minority capitalist interests frustrated by that part of the potential electorate. They get the fact that every vote counts. Utilitarians need to get that too. Abstract calculations of impact of one’s individual vote are just a distraction that are logically irrelevant to reasoning about the impact of the whole, on which the final reasoning of GGGN is based.

Is your position basically: Yes, it does matter whether Obama or Romney is president, but I’m so angry at Obama & the Democrats that I don’t want to say it?

What I *think* Salient, and Dsquared & Henry, are saying, and I know I am saying, is that people on the left should vote for Obama this year, but who also think that strategically withholding support from Democrats is a legitimate and sometimes necessary electoral option for leftists, so we see not voting for Obama as a mistaken judgement of a particular case and not a fundamental error of principle. As opposed to those who think that voting for the better candidate is the only legitimate choice in elections.

Another way: If people on the left do not vote for Obama, this increases the probability of a Romney victory by some amount, which is bad. On the other hand, if people on the left refuse to vote for Obama unless there is some improvement in policy, then Obama is more likely to make those improvements, which is good. So a pure consequentialist argument cannot stop with the fact that Obama is preferable to Romney, indisputable though that is.

This is a real tradeoff; it’s not stupid or vain or irrational to want to weigh the costs and the benefits on both sides. And it doesn’t matter for this question if the left is big or small, since that affects both the benefits and the costs of our choices proportionately.

And it’s not just in presidential elections. We’re constantly faced with something that will produce the better outcome under the existing structure, vs. choices that have worse outcomes but that you need to b able to threaten. I recently happened to catch part of the segment of “Eyes on the Prize” on Chicago. They play an interview with King where he’s asked about the riots. You expect him to say something about condemning violence, that rioting is wrong, etc. But he doesn’t, there’s not a word of criticism of the rioters. What he says is, This is exactly what the city should have expected — if you don’t allow nonviolent protest you are going to get violent protest. King understood that his position as a “responsible” leader was much stronger when there was a credible threat of irresponsible action, even though that action would leave everyone — especially the people involved — worse off.

Politics is full — life is full — of situations where actually acting on anger is bad, but never getting angry is bad too.

It’s so persuasive when one is called a hack by handwringing narcissists who are apparently unable to read.

It’s so persuasive when one is called a hack by handwringing narcissists who are apparently unable to read.

Just wondering whether you would consider backing up “handwringing narcissists” with something as banal as evidence. Like, say, quotes!

I mean I’m not Ed, who I think you’re responding to, and s/he can speak for her- or himself. But the relentless straw-burning has gotten beyond fuckin’ tiresome.

“The position as I understand it is that the Republicans are so horrible that every decent citizen has a moral duty to vote for whatever hack the Democrats throw up at election time, without looking too closely at that candidate, and also to advocate that others do the same.”

Where has anyone here advocated something resembling this position? I’m pretty sure that what has actually been advocated by most amounts to this: in situations where vote suppression can affect the outcome of an election (where margins are sufficiently thin), one ought to do what one can to make sure a Republican presidential candidate loses to someone meaningfully to their left, i.e. vote Obama.

A similar debate has ensued @ common dreams and elsewhere over the Rebecca Solnit “article” (more like a petulant, arrogant rant demanding that everyone else SHUT UP and…follow her?).

McClaren, Mao and others have argued this well, so I’ll ask just one question: If we don’t question and confront the depredations of a rouge imperial regime, headed by Obama, now turning against it’s own people, as well as the rest owf the world, who will?

PS: If the Obamaists continue to reflexively defend the indefensible then, yeah, you fully deserve the sobriquet “Obots” regardless of its provenance.

“But all that’s been defended is casting votes in marginal situations.”

It’s always a marginal situation. That’s the model, the strategy both parties rely on: ‘if you don’t support us this time (never mind our minor imperfections), the other party is certain to turn the country into a dreadful fascist/communist dictatorship. That’s your only choice.’ If you’re willing to submit to the blackmail, you’re stuck with it. Forever.

True, casting your vote for Obama in Vermont is not critical (only because of the electoral college), but that’s a minor detail. If you follow the logic, even if you live in Vermont you must do everything you can to prevent armageddon: send money, work for the campaign, rally those living in battleground states to vote for Obama. Anything less, and you may be complicit in bringing about fascism, which is all but inevitable under Romney presidency.

Not necessarily armed insurrection, could be civil disobedience, a boycott, a number of things.

But how do you explain that for a person living in Ohio voting for Obama is a duty, yet a person in Vermont is free of any obligations? That doesn’t make sense to me, it can’t be true.

And of course civil disobedience, boycotts, strike organization, &etc are not compatible with counseling voting for Obama.

How do I explain a vote mattering in Ohio but not in Vermont? Um, quite easily. In one place, a point or two swing changes the outcome of the election. In the other place, it doesn’t.

That you see this as logically incompatible and hence analytically invalid and therefore necessarily untrue, well, that says a lot more about you than it does about anything else.

Really, I’m not sure what the purpose of high handed language about “duty” and “obligation” is. These are “oughts of counsel”. Whatever “duty” or “obligation” they entail is remarkably weak. One may be subjected to being chided by someone else. The horror.

No I don’t se you’re point at all, though that’s probably due to a problem on my end

Ok, the claim is that the chain of reasoning “these people are advocating voting for obama, therefore they must think that one needs to be deeply involved in a GOTV campaign in a battleground state, and fully invest themselves in party politics” is parallel to the chain of reasoning “these people are advocating not voting for Obama, therefore they must think that one needs to be an insurrectionary.”

Both chains are ridiculous and completely unserious. I was presenting my chain unseriously. Unfortunately, Mao, Mclaren, cripes, &etc seem to present the original chain completely seriously, over and over again.

For the record, I am not a “lesser-evilist” – a term as meaningless as it is awkward. Electoral politics in liberal democracies is inextricably about compromise and coalition, no matter how hard one stamps ones foot. There is an argument that its not worth it to play such a morally fraught game, but that argument is rarely raised seriously – and it has its own problems. Zizek’s challenge in his LRB note is generally evaded by leftists.
http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/14171228736/slavoj-zizek-for-the-win

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it?

If you chose a political path that is merely ineffectual nostalgia for the general strike, you are not choosing a principled moral stand, you are choosing to try to absolve yourself of blame.

@js @JWMason
OK, so it’s about strategically withholding support.
I know JS writes above that we should just trust that you have thought through the primary vote option, but “trust me we got that covered” isn’t really an argument, is it? And it’s not like I’m doing the trollish “dig up some stats that I could google myself in 2mins” thing here. I genuinely cannot think of a plausible scenario where strategic non-voting in the general election can be effective where primary challenges cannot be at least as – and typically more – effective. The Romney campaign is a perfect example of that: primary voters have been able to move and commit Romney so far to the right that he can’t move back sufficiently towards the center to appeal to a median voter. I don’t see how a non-voting strategy in general elections can ever move a candidate to adopt a losing position.
Since primary voters tend to be more partisan and fewer, you can make a huge difference with ~10% of the electorate (see Party, Tea). But the same group of dedicated 10% are going to be much less effective threatening to “stay away” in a regular election (even if they are able to make a credible threat of self-inflicted pain) with a center heavy electorate and a campaign finance set-up where a lot of the money is towards the center.

@Mao – the serious answer to your question/argument is in what JWMason says. Politics involves trade-offs. The cost of voting is very close to zero and voting does not take energy away from other political activity, so while there may be other reasons not to vote, the time/cost argument doesn’t really apply. Donating money and investing serious time in GOTV efforts does take time and money away from other forms of political activity, so there are very good arguments against doing that that don’t apply to voting.

I am not a “lesser-evilist” – a term as meaningless as it is awkward. Electoral politics in liberal democracies is inextricably about compromise and coalition, no matter how hard one stamps ones foot.

In any political situation, one must be prepared to compromise, and be prepared not to compromise. The hard part is figuring out where to draw the line in particular cases.

Remember the ultimatum game? There’s a sum of money to be divided. The first player proposes a division. The second player then decides if they will accept that division or refuse it; if they refuse, both players get nothing.

It’s obvious that the “rational” thing, faced with a pot of, say, $1,000, if for the first player to propose a division like “$999 for me, $1 for you,” and for the second player to accept it. After all, a dollar is still better than nothing, right? But when you get people to play the game, that’s not what happens; the person playing second will consistently refuse a division that’s too far from even. That might seem foolish, self-defeating, narcissistic; one might remind the second player that “the game is inextricably about compromise, no matter how hard one stamps one’s foot.” But while refusing to accept an uneven division in a single game is irrational, having a disposition t refuse uneven divisions in general is very rational. because it ensures that the person playing first won’t offer an uneven division in the first place.

Same idea here.

Alan 09.30.12 at 4:44 am:
‘Except the whole point of contemporary conservative PAC politics in the US is to minimize the effect of utilitarianism by demonizing it, and thus maximize minority capitalist interests frustrated by that part of the potential electorate. They get the fact that every vote counts. Utilitarians need to get that too. Abstract calculations of impact of one’s individual vote are just a distraction that are logically irrelevant to reasoning about the impact of the whole, on which the final reasoning of GGGN is based.’

Could you explain that more fully? Let’s start from me, thinking about what to do politically. One thing I can do is vote, but it is obvious that there is effectively no chance that my vote will affect the outcome of a national election, and it will not affect any other vote. Every vote counts in a mathematical sense, but it does not count individually in a practical political sense. Managers of ‘conservative’ (and other) PACs are supposedly affecting votes in large aggregations, and are using hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of workers to do it. Now, if you’re suggesting that we go out and work for PACs or candidates or celebrities, that’s different. That’s a kind of activism, and indeed, the more powerful among the managers of such enterprises, theoretically casting whole cities of votes, might reasonably feel impelled to choose lesser evils. I can’t see how this applies (outside of delusions of grandeur) to the average citizens casting their individual votes, which is what this discussion has been about, at least superficially.

rootless_e 09.30.12 at 1:00 pm:
‘… If you chose a political path that is merely ineffectual nostalgia for the general strike, you are not choosing a principled moral stand, you are choosing to try to absolve yourself of blame.’

Occupy Wall Street did seem to quash the talk about cutting Social Security and Medicare last fall (although that was probably not their specific intent) whereas voting for Obama did not. If so, who is ineffectual? After the election, when you have all voted for Obama, we can reasonably suppose from previous observation that the knives and axes will be taken out and limbered up again regardless of who wins. So what’s your effectual plan?

Your sense of a fair characterization is truly fucking remarkable.
—

All factual. Connor is a conservative with libertarian leanings. He proposes voting for Gary Johnson, a classic libertarian (a Republican who gets high) who has advocated repealing the voting rights and fair housing acts as well as the child labor acts in the name of freedom of contract.

The hypocritical part comes from his claimed deep sensitivity to the drone war, a war that Gary Johnson does not oppose.

JW Mason 09.30.12 at 4:34 pm

In game theory as in real life, taking a hard line only works when the other side has some penalty for not settling.

Certainly one can propose as a tactic that “the left” refuses to vote for candidates who do not meet a certain test. However, the defeats of Humphrey, Carter, and Gore did not result in the desired changes in the Democratic party

If you have to act on your threat, that means it was not successful. But I reject your premise. I think there have been positive changes in the Democratic party, and I think those owe something to the fact that the Dem base has shown, to at least a small extent, that it cannot be taken for granted. I think that it’s very unlikely, for instance, that Obama would have chosen to block the Keystone pipeline or change his position on gay marriage if his team hadn’t been genuinely worried about disillusioned progressives staying home. More broadly, I think that the real progress this country has made in equal rights for African-Americans, gays and women, on environmental regulation, on civil liberties, and so on, owe a lot to the willingness of people committed to those causes to be intransigent and disruptive.

In game theory as in real life, taking a hard line only works when the other side has some penalty for not settling.

Right, but we all agree that they do. If there were no electoral cost to leftists abstaining or voting third party, no one would be talking about it.

Right, but we all agree that they do. If there were no electoral cost to leftists abstaining or voting third party, no one would be talking about it.
—

There are multiple “theys”. Certainly the DLC wing of the Democratic party don’t care – and there is a huge part of the establishment of Democratic/Progressive political class that prospers as well or better when the Democrats are not in office.

And the “base” of the Democratic party is not uniform either

” I think that it’s very unlikely, for instance, that Obama would have chosen to block the Keystone pipeline […] if his team hadn’t been genuinely worried about disillusioned progressives staying home”

And in doing so he alienated the Teamsters union – certainly an important part of his base, and one that is better organized, more loyal, and better at generating votes and money than e.g. The Nation readers. The Democratic party is a coalition with disparate goals and one does not gain more power in that coalition only by threatening to bolt. You have to bring something positive be willing to make deals. When Phillip Randolph forced FDR to desegregate defense plants, he had the credibility to be able to threaten 100,000 protestors if he did not get his way, allies like Laguardia, and a history of bringing supporters to the polls. “We’re going to encourage people to stay home” is not the same kind of bargaining position. Or contrast to gay rights – your other example. The proposition of gay rights has been actively marketed to the public for 20 years and gay rights groups are active and strongly organized and the results are a huge social change so that a very large number of people who are not political and certainly not progressive consider discrimination on sexual preference to be wrong. Compare to “progressives” and the 7% of the Democratic party primary voters who supported Kucinich. No organization, no outreach, no incremental goals, no strategy.

Git, 506 “How do I explain a vote mattering in Ohio but not in Vermont? Um, quite easily. In one place, a point or two swing changes the outcome of the election. In the other place, it doesn’t.”

I live in NC. If I vote, I add 1 Obama vote. You live (for example) in Vermont. You could send $1000 to the campaign, to help broadcast a TV commercial in NC, that will add, perhaps, 10 Obama votes (or suppress 10 Romney votes). How come I’m the center of attention and not you?

Because the number of possible ways one could effectively spend $1000 on politics is vast, while the number of ways one can effectively cast a Presidential vote in Vermont is not.

Of course there are plenty of ways one can spend one’s time rather than voting. But if one is going to vote, or devote one’s time considering whether or not they, or others should vote, well, the 20 minutes or so is pretty all things considered.

What I *think* Salient, and Dsquared & Henry, are saying, and I know I am saying, is that people on the left should vote for Obama this year, but who also think that strategically withholding support from Democrats is a legitimate and sometimes necessary electoral option for leftists, so we see not voting for Obama as a mistaken judgement of a particular case and not a fundamental error of principle.

I would even accept a characterization as meek as “we should let ourselves talk about various conjectured consequences of strategically committing support to the Democratic party.” Even if we were to concede it’s morally imperative to vote D lockstep, it’s still reasonable to discuss the implications of this, how we anticipate the Democratic party will evolve and adjust to that support, and it’s also still reasonable to discuss historic examples of this kind of lockstep support, with plenty of space to talk without getting harassed, jeered at, dismissed, or bullied for daring to raise those points of discussion.”

Dude, you have to understand that many of us have spent lots of time working for avowedly progressive organizations that do outreach, set incremental goals, have a strategy. (Again, I was the policy director for the New York Working Families Party for over five years, just to establish my bona fides.)
———
I’m sympathetic to the NYWFP, but obviously it is a very long way away from the Connor Friedsdorf theory of politics. In fact, the WFP often endorses far from progressive Democrats. If we are agreed that such tactics are often essential, we then disagree with Freidsdorf silly article and may only disagree about where the tradeoffs are in particular cases. That’s nowhere near the position advocated in the post that starts this thread – a post that dismisses such considerations as “lesser-evilism”.

“I am genuinely curious: Are you saying that it’s impossible to move the Democratic Party to the left by threatening to withhold votes in presidential elections? Or are you saying it’s impossible to move the Democratic Party to the left, full stop?”

The former (as the parties currently stand). Case in point: one of the worst crimes in US foreign policy was the Carter administrations support of religious terrorism in Afghanistan and deliberate effort to force the Soviet Union to invade. And yet, the election of Reagan was a catastrophe. Two forces pushed FDR to the left: a strong labor movement and liberal elected officials like Laguardia. Consider the NYC mayor President Obama has in place of Laguardia. Threats to not vote for the Democratic President in the absence of any mass movement and the shortage of effective left wing elected officials, are just threats to build right wing power.

adam.smith @514:

Ok, I’m going to say this for the 15th and last time, and I am going to say it really slowly:

I. am. not. recommending. a. strategy. of. strategic. non-voting. in. this. general. election. I have in fact repeatedly noted in these threads that I changed my voter registration this past week so as to vote for Obama in a swing state!

Now, can we for fuck’s sake move past that and talk about the medium to long-term ailments of the Democratic party and what might or might not be good strategies for halting the rightward ratchet effect (among other things). And as far as the “primary strategy” goes, it’s not that I have all the answers or anything. It’s just that it seems fairly clear that capturing primaries was in fact a relatively late stage in the hard right’s takeover of the Republican party.

A lot of movement-building etc. had to go on entirely outside of party institutions before they could successfully field hard-right primary candidates, esp. at a scale to make a significant difference. Now it doesn’t seem like that sort of organizational capacity doesn’t exist on the left, at least not now. But building this sort of organizational capacity is the sort of thing we should be talking about. And if it had seemed to me like Jake or whoever had any interest in this sort of conversation, I might have elaborated, but that’s not the sense I was getting from his or her comment.

(I’m going to bet that someone is actually going to respond to this with: But we must vote for Obama!)

js. @ 534

Erik Loomis wrote this over at Lawyers Guns and Money, and it sounded pretty accurate. “A really transformative moment in my political thinking came when reading Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors. In this book about the rise of conservatism in the defense industry suburbs, McGirr shows how conservatives, outraged that the country had moved so far to the left during the New Deal and had not really shifted back right under Eisenhower, started taking over their local political structures. They ran for school board, county commissioner, other local offices. They volunteered at county-level Republican Party HQs. They very quickly controlled the machinery of the Republican Party on the local level.”

Maybe there should be a conversation about building local organizational capacity. It might be worth suggesting this to Henry and Daniel would rather talk about how not voting Democratic in general elections is somehow going to advance leftist causes or is otherwise the moral thing to do.

No problem. Sorry if my “you should understand what you’re reading” was condescending. The high degree of condescension being thrown around this thread is sort of a malignant cancer.

Now, can we for fuck’s sake move past that and talk about the medium to long-term ailments of the Democratic party and what might or might not be good strategies for halting the rightward ratchet effect (among other things).
sure, I completely agree with that and I completely agree that “vote Obama” is going to have an absolutely minimal impact on that larger issue.

I also agree that
it doesn’t seem like that sort of organizational capacity doesn’t exist on the left, at least not now. But building this sort of organizational capacity is the sort of thing we should be talking about.

and I’d also say: and while we do that, it makes sense to spend the 20mins on voting Democrats, at least where there is a reasonable chance, because it’s going to make life a little less crabby for some people and may actually make organizing a little easier in some places because you’ll have some genuine progressive allies in a Democratic organization (think DoJ civil rights division, parts of the EPA and some other spots).
And you don’t even seem to disagree with that.

And I feel like that’s what most people on team “lesser” have been saying all along – really with the exception on rootless, (who says he isn’t on team lesser anyway), who shows an enthusiasm for the Obama administration and its achievements that I certainly don’t share and judging by statements from, e.g. Steve LaBonne and some others, they don’t share either.

So if your point is “voting Obama is not going to do a huge amount of good” – absolutely. That’s why I don’t think people on the left should spend their energy on the Obama re-election campaign (except as a networking and learning opportunity).

If your point is “as part of a long term strategy, a strengthened left should threaten to withhold votes in a general election” I disagree with that. Lets assume a quasi-utopian 20 years in the future, where the left does have enough strength o make such a thread plausible and effective. What I argue is that at the point where we do have that type of power, we can exert it more forcefully and effectively in the primaries.

Where I do think an organized and forceful interest group (left or otherwise) can use effective pressure in the general election is in withholding strong support. Since gay activists were mentioned above, that’s what they did. The threat to Obama 2012 wasn’t “we’re going to vote Romney or not show up at all” the threat (at times quite explicit) was – “don’t count on us to hold your fundraisers if you’re not going to be an effective advocate for our interests”.
As I say above, the difference here is that “strong support” is fungible – the HRC can spend their money and time on other useful things than supporting a Presidential candidate. But a vote in a Presidential election really isn’t fungible. If you’re not using it to support the lesser evil you’re throwing it away.

js, I want to support what Jake said in response to your approving cite of Salient:

Whether the Democratic party stands to ever improve, when massively voted for on lesser-evil grounds, is worth discussion. It’s not just a question of personal morality, it’s a question about social systems and how they evolve.

First, it’s a mistake and a distraction to impute motivation to others. I don’t know why other people might vote for a Democrat in a given situation. Projecting “lesser-evilism” adds nothing to our understanding. But the obvious problem with the reasoning here is it assumes that the voting booth is almost exclusively where the party is shaped. Isn’t that absurd? The political process is ongoing and ultimately local. Communities give birth to political careers.

What I have a problem with is the alienation implied by the excessive focus on what happens in the voting booth. As if there were no other outlets for our political energy. And since there are other ways to shape the process, I’m looking at my vote as a chance to apply a “progress ratchet” by preventing retrograde motion, at the very least.

Also, to those citing the mathematical insignificance of a solitary vote, the point is to develop good habits. Sitting out increases the probability that I’ll go missing when my vote might really make a difference. The bottom line in life, our habits are everything.

I’m “projecting” exactly nothing. For some bizarre masochistic reason, I have read every single one of these comments, and I’m simply noting the reason most consistently offered for why everyone must! must! must! vote for Obama, and is some kind of monster if they don’t. Same goes for Henry’s first post on this.

Now suddenly the people who from the very beginning have been emphasizing the importance of non-electoral politics have turned out to be ones investing the ballot box with magical powers. This would be people like Salient; also me; also Daniel Davies! The mechanics of this transubstantiation escape me. Sorry if this is a bit harsh (as it likely is), but I guess I have absolutely no idea why you are imputing the positions you are to people like me.

(And with that, I am completely and entirely done with this thread.)

Salient, my problem with the idea of voting boycotts is perhaps more practical, and one you could answer for me. When people refuse to vote, how is the Democratic party meant to know that they are doing this for left-wing reasons? They will see themselves trounced by a popular right wing party, when their own supporters stayed home, so what’s to stop them concluding they aren’t right wing enough? Why should they assume that any voting boycott is from the left? This seems the single biggest problem with voting boycotts, which isn’t offset by increases in third party votes because the non-compulsory nature of US voting means you don’t know whether a shift in votes from the Ds to (e.g.) the Greens represents low turnout for the Ds and/or a new demographic entering the booth.

So it seems to me there is a risk with boycotting the Ds that they will see it as confirmation of their failure to be right-wing enough – especially if the boycott is not expressed through a third party vote (where htere is a third party I strongly support voting for them first, but I vote in a system with preferences so I don’t know what I’d do in your situation).

Another problem I have with the call to “build a broad movement” as an alternative to voting Obama is perhaps best shown by Labonne’s behavior here. He comes on all frothy and angry about Obama, heaps scorn on the modern Ds and the left generally, gives us a few pronouncements about “what is wrong with the modern left.” Then, in response to the suggestion that a broad movement is a good alternative to teh limitations of the ballot box, he says

if something serious along these lines comes to exist in Ohio I would like to get involved in it, particularly in a few years when I’m retired

What I see here is lots of fulminating about starting a movement, but no one willing to get down and do it. I think that’s the essence of someone’s point above that the only mass movement out there is the one behind Obama.

If you have problems with voting as a political mechanism and you think (as Labonne obviously does) that things are getting desperate and all fucked-uppedity, then your claims are kind of belied by hte fact that you don’t want to lift a finger for the alternatives until you retire, and only then if someone else does the heavy lifting first.

I know Labonne stated he’s going to vote Obama anyway, so I guess it’s not an inconsistency for him to also rant on about movements while refusing to start one. But there’s the thing – I read this call for a broad movement a lot, and I read a lot of Very Serious People refusing to do the early hard yards. In which case, it seems like voting Obama is the only real option.

I’m sympathetic to the NYWFP, but obviously it is a very long way away from the Connor Friedsdorf theory of politics. In fact, the WFP often endorses far from progressive Democrats. If we are agreed that such tactics are often essential, we then disagree with Freidsdorf silly article and may only disagree about where the tradeoffs are in particular cases. That’s nowhere near the position advocated in the post that starts this thread – a post that dismisses such considerations as “lesser-evilism”.

I agree with all but the last sentence of this paragraph. I think the argument made by DD in the post that started this thread is different from the Conor Friedersdorf argument. Daniel is not saying that it is deontologically wrong to vote for Obama. He is saying that in a consequentialist analysis of voting D, you have to consider the long-term effect on the kind of party the Dems are, and not just the short-term effect of getting this particular D rather than that particular R. But yes, if we can agree that the disagreement is really about tradeoffs in particular cases, then we will have done much better than I would have expected to in this thread.

Two forces pushed FDR to the left: a strong labor movement and liberal elected officials like Laguardia.

OK. But you don’t get a strong labor movement without people willing to risk bad outcomes in defense of a principle. A long strike is always a disaster for workers, even if they win. Yet you can’t win short strikes if you’re not prepared for long ones. So you need to have principles you’ll follow even when it makes things worse, in order to get the power to make things better.

A long teachers strike in Chicago would have been a disaster for the schools, and for the teachers (especially given that the CTU does not have a strike fund.) But would the city have settled as quickly as they did, if they didn’t think the teachers were prepared for a long strike? The Chicago teachers were only able to fight for their students because they were prepared to take action that would hurt them. The people who tell us that politics sometimes requires unpalatable compromises are right, but they should remember that it sometimes requires unpalatable toughness as well.

Now you may say, But this election isn’t like that. And I agree! I think we should all vote for Obama. But as Salient keeps saying, we need to be able to discuss the *possibility* that it might be better to strategically abstain, without being accused of narcissism, complicity with evil, etc.

Has the distinction between personal reflection and mass advocacy gotten lost?

Even CT posts written in the form of explicit advocacy aren’t exactly, you know, ads on TV. Even with the threadjacks included, we’re still just talking amongst ourselves about what it means for us to engage in various voting practices, which reasons for those practices make sense and which are specious, and what it would mean for large numbers of people to act as we do, or as we consider doing. It’s all reflective.

That’s why it stings so damn much to be attacked for one’s comments on this: part of what we’re doing is baring how we feel to acquaintances in a public forum. And we were all traumatized, at least a little, by the Bush years and their inception, so these feelings run as deep and as hot as geothermal crevices. Getting called a three-year-old fascist for that personal an act of sharing stings substantially more than getting called a three-year-old fascist for a purely analytical comment. Even if you have deep feelings about labor unrest in China or plantations as wedding sites, they’re far less likely to be tinged with the horror that personal trauma engenders.

From that perspective, I can almost understand stuff like mclaren’s otherwise unconscionable use of ‘bleated’ upthread, as well as my own crazy outburst, and the taunts that provoked it–this topic trips triggers that run deep. How to broach the subject without triggering defensive impulses, or how to recognize and swallow those impulses before they see print, uh, I have no clue…

Salient, I’m not convinced poll data is sufficient. How can those results be linked to voting outcomes in a non-compulsory system?

JW Mason 10.01.12 at 4:39 am

Ok, but if you are arguing on pragmatics, you need to actually understand the process. Statements like:
” Recall, Obama’s whole strategy was based around abandoning all other priorities such as carbon tax, an effective stimulus bill, half his nominations, most of the financial sector reforms and so forth, all to concentrate on passing health care.”

won’t get you anywhere because they are just cable news level arm waving – without the level of information one can get from e.g. David Corn’s Showdown or Gruber’s book. One thing that amazes me is that the significant wealth equalizing effect of ACA is not even something that the “left critics” try to refute. Or consider:

” So given that, how are we to suppose that President Romney would be able to push through an agenda five times as radical, including the ultimate third-rail issue of abortion? ”

The sentence above is a succinct confession of ignorance. You cannot discuss tradeoffs in politics if you don’t grasp basic civics.

Anarcissie 10.01.12 at 2:26 pm

I recommend you read Corn’s book and Gruber’s if you want to understand the political process. You won’t learn much from the kind of WAPO articles you cite, because the WAPO is not a neutral observer on matters of “entitlements”, but is in fact a strong proponent of cutbacks. Also, the WAPO and other establishment media are prone to the storyline of “realism setting in” to cover any issues where they advocate a right wing solution against some other proposal. They did this at the beginning of the Obama administration with Iraq, as they wrote articles explaining that President Obama was going to have to back off from his silly ideas and keep the army in Iraq. So a WAPO article, citing vague statements of unnamed sources to validate their wold view is not much to hang your hat on.

Furthermore, the tactic of making offers you know will never be accepted is not new in DC. The health care proposal of Dole during the Clinton administration contained many provisions that were and are anathema to the GOP, but was offered in a successful effort to derail Clinton’s proposal. The GOP wanted to appear reasonable and willing to compromise while actually diverting the legislative process off track. Similarly, every knowledgeable observer understands that a grand bargain in which cuts to Medicare/SS are offered if they are accompanied by major changes in the tax code to eliminate tax treats for the elites are absolutely unacceptable to the GOP.
http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/31058471477/why-paul-ryan-fears-simpson-bowles-and-the-grand
What’s the point of offering them (if they were offered, which we don’t know) ? Obviously to split the opposition and to decrease the credibility of the Republicans in the eyes of the media and the public. And people should remember, the Republicans actually don’t care about the debt. The debt is a proxy for racial resentment
http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/14744924262/the-unacceptable-naivete-of-the-liberals-dean-baker

And finally, details matter in these kind of discussions. When Obama has offered to cut Medicare, his cuts have come from bloated provider/insurer payments, not to benefits. Cuts to medicare advantage, reduction of payments that offer no benefit are not cuts to the social welfare system – and clearly that’s what the administration is interested in cutting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/health/policy/parting-shot-at-waste-by-key-obama-health-official.html

558 — Somehow learning (yet again) that Mr. O is profoundly duplicitous does not assuage. I suppose it goes with the territory.

Anarcissie 10.01.12 at 4:14 pm

Somehow learning that you are disappointed that President Obama knows how to negotiate does not surprise me.

In the spirit of dragging this out, F-Dorfs response….

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/the-responses-to-why-i-refuse-to-vote-for-barack-obama/263057/

@Jake: There are going to be 468 elections for members in congress in 2014. 2010 showed that non-presidential elections matter a lot, so why wait four years?

Because I’m trying to find a way around the people who are intentionally shutting down the conversation we’re trying to have, and I’m conjecturing maybe it’s just that they don’t want us talking about the short term. The thought is, maybe if we restrict ourselves to discussing a faraway future, we won’t get bullied/threadjacked by people who are feeling panicked about 2012, or 2014, for that matter.

I was thinking about this exchange:

mclaren: Because of “lesser evilism,” Democrats are Republicans with a phase shift of 12 years.

[So, I’m thinking, agreeing to delay our topic of discussion 12 years also reverses the imperative about ‘but the Rs are so much worse’ because it transmutes into ‘but the Ds by that point will be so much worse’]

MPAVictoria, in response: Let’s make it as bad as possible as soon as possible!

[That’s a pretty hostile response, but, water under the bridge. At least MPAVictoria agrees with me that what we’re doing, when we vote D indefinitely, is buying ourselves some time. We’re gonna see most of these same policies again a generation from now, when voting D indefinitely won’t prevent their execution, because by then they’ll be D policies. Not all policies, but foreign/international policy especially, as well as domestic welfare and safety-net policy.]

Given the long lists of hypothetical Republican acts we can construct on a moment’s notice, it’s obvious we know what we’re delaying–but those same lists mostly enumerate plausible Democratic acts a generation from now. (I say “mostly” because some stuff, like abortion, does seem to hold firm.) We should also wonder, what’s the price? Are we creating an even more adverse battlefield a generation from now, than the one we have today? Are we buying time for our future selves, or from our future selves?

To paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions do the moral purists in this thread have? You guys talk big online, but your actual electoral strenght is miniscule, which is why this whole debate is about what a few marginal voters can do in a close election given the US’ electoral college set-up.

And given that your side likes spending its time telling your only viable ertswhile allies how terribly unpure they are, I don’t expect your side to really muster much power any time soon.

“That’s a pretty hostile response”
It wasn’t THAT hostile. In fact I feel that it was a damn honest portrayal of mclaren’s comment.

“If you feel it’s fair and nonhostile to collapse the difference between someone horrified enough by those policies that they’re afraid of seeing them in twelve years with a far smaller chance of resisting them, and someone who is so enthusiastic about those policies that they don’t want to wait 12 years for them, then… ugh. C’mon. You’re better than that.”

It is a fair and nonhostile summary of the obviously foreseeable EFFECTS of mclaren’s preferred action of not voting and allowing the republicans to regain government.

/Also just to be clear I continue to feel that many here are underestimating the good that Obama has accomplished in his first term. Is he my ideal president? No but show me a better realistic alternative.

Bruce (563.): I tried, believe me, I tried. I brought up Stalin and Hitler hundreds of comments ago… or maybe in a previous thread I have lost track… and this thing is still going. In comment 568 (sic!) we are told, for example, that we on one side of the debate don’t matter, so there. In comment 568! This must be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on the internets.

I should add that there is a method to the madness. Just like in Israel/Palestine threads. By making such threads so impossible and aggravating, it is assured by commenters pushing the standard position that they won’t happen again any time soon, thus precluding debate outside certain narrow parameters.

I am happy you found my comment funny christian_h. Its more than I can say for your comments: purity trolls aren’t that amusing.

Obama continues the drone program because it has widespread support. One of his promises in 2008 was shifting the focus of the “war on terror” to Afghanistan and Pakistan – and surprise, he did. Outside of places like CT crying about the evils of this campaign will get you no real support. You are more likely to get the average American voter to agree with your positions on a cost issue (ie., the financial cost to the US taxpayer) than you are over the immorality of how it is conducted. In order to build grassroot support you need ideas that will get grassroots support, yet you and the other purity trolls seem distinctly lacking in these.

So yes, it is more than valid asking how much power folks like you have, or even better yet, what plans do you have to gain any power at all, because in the real world we inhabit one needs power to get things done but again, your side hasn’t been able to post a realisitc plan to get any, not at least in the 570+ comments on this discussion.

As I pointed out about a million comments ago, this “but the majority wants it!” excuse would NEVER fly with most of the commenters here – or the blogs dismissing concerns about the racist terror campaign as “narcicissm” – if the issue was, say, same-sex marriage. Never. And it’s good it never was flying, because if it did Obama would not have come out for overturning DOMA, or refused to defend it in court (see – he did some things right and I am even admitting it! Wow!). Although it’s possible I give you guys too much credit, I don’t remember what you were arguing four years ago.

rootless_e 10.01.12 at 4:36 pm:
‘Somehow learning that you are disappointed that President Obama knows how to negotiate does not surprise me.’

I don’t think you have given evidence that he does know how to negotiate. In my experience, you want to avoid offering something you’re actually unwilling to give; it encourages the other party to believe they can get it. This is especially the case if you’re negotiating as a representative for, and dependent on, someone else’s interests. But this is assuming Mr. O is actually determined to protect Social Security. I don’t think he is; I think he is as duplicitous with his own followers as he is with his supposed opponents, and I am not alone in that apprehension. Vote for Mr. O and support him if it makes you happy, but look elsewhere for effective allies and activities.

OK, and that is the last comment I will make on this thread. I really need to be doing other things….

If Republicans were expanding health-care coverage and the treatment of birth-control under insurance regimes I’m interested.

Thanks (I think) to all who have invested the considerable time required to read and comment on this admittedly painful and disheartening thread. As a reader / infrequent commenter, I must say that I very much regret the fact that as an expatriate I cannot do grassroots work for the progressive cause. Perhaps one or more of our hosts (e.g. Professor Brighouse?) would be willing to set up an ongoing forum for discussion re: 2014 and 2016? My own inclinations would suggest that involvement in local elections (school board, county board, city comptroller or manager, etc.) must take precedence over hand-wringing about national elections for the Congressional and Executive branches of our government.

I’ve ordered Jacob Hacker’s Winner-Take-All Politics as a result of reading this discussion thread over the past several days, and look forward to achieving a better understanding of what happened to my native land over the past 30 years.

“it certainly was hostile.”
No it was not. You do not get to dictate what is and is not hostile Salient. It was sarcastic sure, hostile no.

“Taken literally, it imputed to mclaren something that mclaren had not literally said or expressed.”
No. It was taking what he expressed to its logical conclusion. And from the look of the 10,000 plus words mclaren has since posted on this topic I am fairly certain i did not shut down his “contribution”.

“Taken literally, it imputed to mclaren something that mclaren had not literally said or expressed.”

No.

Okay, this has gone beyond ridiculous. You’re saying that, when taken literally, your comment did not impute to mclaren anything that mclaren had not literally said or expressed?

You attacked what he said. You attacked what he said through the use of an inflammatory reductio ad absurdum that you knew would set mclaren off because you knew it was not a fair representation of the feelings that mclaren expressed.

And from the look of the 10,000 plus words mclaren has since posted on this topic I am fairly certain i did not shut down his “contribution”.

Yes, you did. The two of you got into a spat back and forth that would not have otherwise happened, and mclaren got set off furious much like I did and said all kinds of obnoxious incredible things with overheated hostility that wasn’t present in mclaren’s original comment. You most certainly are the one human being that folks should consider most responsible for shutting down whatever contribution mclaren would have gone ahead and made in a less hostile atmosphere. That doesn’t necessarily imply that what you did is wrong, but it does imply you considered it morally imperative for you to attack what mclaren said.

“It was taking what he expressed to its logical conclusion” is just bullshit. There’s a logical difference between believing something is inevitable, and believing something is desirable. mclaren made a comment about inevitability, and you are trying to tell me the “logical conclusion” is desirability.

Your “shorter” summary imputed a desire to mclaren that they neither expressed nor supported, mclaren got offended and did the same thing back to you, and voila: more crap for the crap thread.

You have been here long enough to know that my comment was completely in bounds for this forum.

A comment can be hostile and still be “completely in bounds for this forum.” I remain angry that you’re continuing to allege your comment was friendly and encouraging instead of hostile and discouraging, because I think the very least we can offer one another at the end of hundreds of comments in the trenches is some truth and reconciliation. You sure as hell didn’t interpret mclaren’s response as friendly and encouraging, so I know you’re not just honestly blind to when you’re taking the piss on somebody. Kind of hard to trust that you won’t be vicious elsewhere if you’re protesting a very mild and very well-justified description of your comment (and less personally, kind of hard to hold out hope that future threads on the topic won’t end up in the same ditch we’re sitting in now).

Oh, and if you genuinely wanted reconciliation or silence from me, you wouldn’t have gone for one last jab with “pearl clutching.” Cute, kid.

I went back and read mclaren’s first comment (@83 if anyone still cares). It’s really on point. I responded to MPAVictoria’s “let’s make it as bad etc.” comment soon after, but then gave up with MPAV, because I only seemed to be getting non-sequiters in response. More importantly, Steve Williams clearly brought out the utter bizarreness of some of the Dem-defending responses to mclaren’s point @115. He didn’t show up much afterwards, for probably obvious reasons (thinking it’s a safe assumption that “Steve Williams” is a man?).

Point being: yeah, lots of people would have probably (a) commented more, and (b) not gotten angry if the responses had been less knee-jerk, not forwarding non-sequiters or attacking straw-men, and not repeatedly hammering the drum about the moral necessity of voting for Obama—which several of the other people are or were planning to do anyway.

More than anything though: cheers to Salient and JW Mason for their patience and evident good will.

Get a life.

for intellectuals, there seems to be a curious lack of history; A J Muste, war resistors league, E Debs,……
I mean, it is not like this sort of argument is new in any way shape or form
heck, I bet Bertrand Russell and Orwell went thru this for WWI and WWII and before that people I don’t know for the Boer War…

I just think it wierd, all the time spent on this; alot of which is self indulgence: it is easier to write 500 or 1000 or 2000 words then spend the next two or 4 years at boring meetings, trying to get the local dem party to support a more liberal candidate…

typical self indulgent yuppies
during nam people worked DAMM hard to make demos happy, and after trying to levitate the pentagon, they would take off an hour or two and get back to work while the kids partied and thought they had ended the ware

same thing at OWS last september; lotta self indulgent kids, and one kid, I shoulda talked to him, working to keep the park clean by picking up litter

435 Representatives plus 33 Senators. In 2016, senatorial class 3 will be up for election so there will be 469.

Maybe we should be trolling RedState saying that Obama is going to use drones to look in your backyard to see if you are… growing weed? Watering your lawn in violation of water conservation measures?

1000!

GiT, that rather raises the question. If all these people within the Democratic Party, even if we just count “reliably votes for it” as within, are working to move the party to the left, how come it is moving to the right?

It strikes me that in any conception of the problem that allows itself the luxury of a >4 year time span (something more or less trained out of American political commentary) must contain something more to bring the disillusioned left to the voting booth than republican bogeyman under the bed and a thousand years of darkness. It’s not unreasonable to say “I will vote for your guy here in 2012, but we need to consider that deal off if by 2020 your guy is even worse.” I’m not entirely sure it is incumbent on people whose position it is that they’re both parties of corporate power so any distinctions are cosmetic has a responsibility to work on something they consider to be an impossibility, ie the shifting of the Democrats into a meaningfully Left position, when it appears that actual Democrats who believe that it can be done either don’t try to do it or try and can’t.

‘The Democratic Party under Obama is not to the right of the Clinton era DP.’

Different context. Certain political opportunities opened up after 2005 as a result of Bush 2’s disastrous reign. They were not used; instead, the tottering ancien regime was restored.

Every now and then you get presented with an interesting natural experiment. Tonight, Romney threw the rich and the Tea Partiers under the bus, saying that he was not, in fact, going to cut taxes for the rich. Will he be criticized on the Right? Stay tuned …

politicalfootball, actually what history has vindicated is the conservative turn away form lesser-evilism in the very next election. They got very little they wanted from Nixon – the EPA, detente, surrender in Vietnam, wage and price controls, affirmative action in its modern form. In 1976, they were faced with a very weak centrist incumbent (Ford), whose ascent to the office was questionable. He was, however, very much the lesser evil from their perspective compared to the Democratic Party of the day. The last Dem nominee was George McGovern, after all, an absolute nightmare for them, and although he lost badly, that was before Watergate became big and many other things. Kneecapping their own nominee was very dangerous. Nonetheless, they did so to try to nominate a man widely regarded as extreme and unelectable, who did indeed promote their ideas in relatively pure form, and they decided to do this before they knew the Dem nominee would be. Took it all the way to the Convention. They decided changing the conversation was more important than winning the Presidency. When the election came, Ford lost extremely narrowly. Given the margin, it is very unlikely that he would have lost without the primary challenge. The challenger was, of course, Ronald Reagan, and it was this challenge that prepared him to take the nomination on the next go. For that reason, the next election the conservatives won really counted – it enabled them to actually further their agenda.

The Tea Party showed a similar dynamic. There are very few in the Senate who could really be called tea party Senators, but the Senate does not cross them. Why? Because the tea party has proved that it will run primary challengers even if it means costing the party seats, and will show not a bit of regret over it. The likes of Sharon Angle very arguably cost the Repubs the Senate, and the Tea Party is very visibly not a bit upset over this. And it was a strategy. Many fewer primary challenges this time out. The Party got the message; no more need to punish them.

All of which is not to say that lesser-evilism is never the way to go. But the historical success of the conservative movement in taking over the Repub party does not support it as a strategy.

613 to 610.

Continuing to debunk the arguments in favor of voting for Obama, we get the predictable scare tactic:

Argument #2: “If Mitt Romney gets elected, we’ll have austerity policies that turn back the clock to the 19th century!”

Example of argument #1: “REPUBLICANS FIND THEIR BRIDGE TO THE 19TH CENTURY…. The Republican majority in the Iowa House this week passed a measure declaring that they intend to ignore a federal law they don’t like. It’s unlikely to pass the state Senate, but it’s a rather striking development anyway.

“The underlying issue is called “nullification,” and it was a popular concept with conservatives before the Civil War.”

Source: Washington Monthly, Steve Benen, 3 February 2011.

“Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate, as the Prospect’s Jamelle Bouie points out, leaves no doubt that if elected Romney will pursue Ryan’s agenda of savage cuts to the already threadbare American safety net in order to finance upper-class tax cuts and additional defense spending that even the Pentagon doesn’t want. The Ryan choice does not merely reveal, however, Romney’s commitment to 19th-century fiscal policy. It also demonstrates Romney’s commitment to a 19th-century view of women and gays and lesbians. ”

Source: “Paul Ryan, culture warrior,” Prospect.org, 11 August 2012.

Debunking argument #2: Obama has already acquiesced in turning back
the clock back to the 19th century.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/money-in-politics_b_1840173.html

“Walmart workers ask for basic rights, Walmart calls riot police”

“No one should come to work and endure extreme temperatures, inhale dust and chemical residue, and lift thousands of boxes weighing up to 250lbs with no support. Workers never know how long the work day will be- sometimes its two hours, sometimes its 16 hours. Injuries are common, as is discrimination against women and illegal retaliation against workers who speak up for better treatment.”

(“Extreme temperatures” here means temperatures of up to 125 degrees Farenheit inside the warehouses. Walmart routines keeps an ambulence on hand in case workers have to be taken to the hospital for heat prostration. Tell me that isn’t 19th century working conditions. And what does Obama do about all this? Nothing. He sits back and watches and does nothing at all. Obama has at his command the entire resources of the DOJ, of OSHA, of the full federal government to supervise and punish companies that abuse or dscriminate against or endanger the health of their workers. And Obama does…nothing at all.)

Debunking argument #2: Obama has already acquiesced in 70% of the cuts in Simpson-Bowles, savagely slashing the social safety net.

“We’ve Already Cut Spending By Almost All of the Bowles-Simpson Targets,” Dan Dayen, 3 October 2012, Firedoglake.com

“We’ve Actually Already Cut a Bunch of Spending,” 3 October 2012, Jared Bernstein.

“There is a strongly held view—one I’ve contributed to myself—that our dysfunctional federal government cannot accomplish anything useful on the budget front. To the contrary, they can create recessionary cliffs, i.e., they’re good at creating problems, not solutions.”

Obama’s budget to slash 100 billion from Pell Grants.

“Obama Calls for Partial Spending Freeze in State of the Union Address,” Wall Street Journal, 26 January 2011.

A freeze on every government program — except the military, which got an 8% boost. Remind me again — who is slashing the social safety net while radically increasing funding for America’s endless unwinnable wars?

Why, both candidates, of course.

Worst of all, Obama has embraced the crazy and counterproductive austerity economics of Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s secretary of the treasury: when you’re in a depression and the deficits are mounting, cut spending to reduce the deficit! This is demented. Economists have recognized since the 1930s that John Maynard Keynes was correct when he proved mathematically in his General Theory of 1936 that in the face of a massive balance sheet recession, cutting spending actually increases the deficit. The reason for that, of course, is that government spending in such a massive recession primes the pump to restart the economy, and without that pump-priming effect, the economy continues to sink and more people lose jobs, creating a vicious cycle of unemployment leading to decline in aggregate demand, which leads to more unemployment, which leads to further decline in aggregate demand.

Yet Barack Obama has wholeheartedly embraced this long-debunked 19th century economic delusion:

“But families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same. So tonight, I’m proposing specific steps to pay for the $1 trillion that it took to rescue the economy last year. ” — Barack Obama, State of the Union Speech, 25 January 2011.

Economists have denounced this lunacy. Yet Obama gives every evidence of continuing to believe this 19th century economic canard that if times get tough, the government must “tighten its belt” and reduce spending.

At the same time, under Obama, imprisoning poor people for being in debt has become a growth industry. Yes, under Barack Obama’s presidency, the debtor’s prison has made a dramatic and horrifying return:

“Jailed for $280: The Return of Debtors’ Prisons,” CBS Moneywatch, 23 April 2012.

“How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn’t pay a medical bill — one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn’t owe. “She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn’t have to pay it,” The Associated Press reports. `But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs.’

“Although the U.S. abolished debtors’ prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don’t pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff’s deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.”

So much for the fantasy that “Romney will take us back to the 19th century.” Obama is already taking us back to the 19th century. Both candidates will take us back to the 19th century. Stop pretending there’s a choice here.

This phony argument is over. Stick a fork in it: it’s done. The claim that “Romney will take us back to the austerity policies of the 19th century” is bogus because America is already hurtling backward to the 19th century under Barack Obama’s “hands off” leadership that gives a Get Out Of Jail Free pass to every possible corporate atrocity while continuing the insane and long-debunked austerity policies of Herbert Hoover.

Proceeding apace with debunking the disingenuous, logically self-contradictory, and factually false arguments in favor of voting for Obama, we come to the “all is lost!” argument…

Argument #4: Romney will destroy America is he’s elected!

The damage will be so extensive there’ll be no coming back from this socioeconomic apocalypse.

Examples of argument #4: Youtube video: Papantonio – Romney’s vulture capitalism will destroy America

“4 Ways Romney & Ryan Would Roll Back the 20th Century: this election will decide the future of our welfare state,” Jake Blumgart, AlterNet, 31 August 2012.

There will be nothing left but ashes if Romney gets elected. A desolate moonscape wherein slink creatures formerly human, now devolved into hideous mutants.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to ignore the fact that Barack Obama explicitly ran as the guy who would heal America and roll back the horrors and grotesqueries of the Bush maladministration. Hope! Change! YES WE CAN!

Well, which is it, folks? We’ve been down this road before. We were told in tones of punitive hysteria that failing to elect mediocre-candidate rich guy John Kerry would destroy America. All was lost, lost if we refused to vote for him — and so we did vote him. But the jiggery-pokery with the Republican owned e-voting machines in Ohio resulted in an explicable Bush win in 2004.

Even more inexplicably, the country survived.

Then we were assured in even more hysterical intonations that if McCain won, all was lost! Lost! America would be sunk in war and deficits and tax cuts for the rich and goon squad riot-armored cops beating and clubbing peaceful dissenters as far as the eye could see.

So we voted for Obama, and we got…

…War and deficits and tax cuts for the rich and goon squad riot-armored cops beating and clubbing peaceful dissenters as far as the eye could see.

Now the Obots trot out another bogeyman to scare us with. And we’re old once again of the unspeakable horrors that will befall us if we fail to vote for Obama. Horrors like massive preparations for an attack on Iran, horrors like the return of debtors’ prisons in America, horrors like the savage decriminalization of peaceful dissent, horrors like the president of the United States ordering the murder of U.S. citizens without even accusing ’em of committing a crime, horrors like Obama signing off on an extension of the Bush tax cuts for billionaires, horrors like a full commitment to the insanely counterproductive and long-debunked economic austerity policy of Herbert Hoover (when in a depression, cut spending to reduce deficits!), that we’re supposed to ignore.

What we have here is a contradictory message by the Obama supporters. On the one hand, we’re told that America is fragile and can’t come back from the kind of damage Romney will do if he gets elected. On the other hand, Obama himself continually assures us that America is dynamic and is capable of renewing itself and restoring itself. Obama himself preaches optimism and buoyant hope.

So which is it?

Which one of these self-contradictory stories are we supposed to believe?

And why are we expected to believe yet again, for the third time now, that failing to vote for the designated corporate sock puppet anti-worker pro-military-police-state Democratic candidate will result in the destruction of all we hold dear, puppy dogs and My Little Pony, Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh included?

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. This argument in favor of voting for Obama is toast. Stick a fork in it: it’s done.

I think a consistent lesser-evilism has to mean that you do not vote in a such a way as to make more likely the election of a worse candidate from your perspective thana better one. Supporting Reagan against Ford certainly qualifies, as does supporting Angle.

As for not lining up in the general: Perot, then. He drew from both sides, but had more registered Republicans than Democrats, and, even if he hadn’t, if Repubs were committed to a lesser-evil strategy, they would have stayed united behind Bush, regardless of what the Democrats did. It might’ve worked, too, in the sense of keeping Bush in office. But Perot also enabled them to push the Party further right, even though Perot’s appeal was not simply right-wing. To counter Clinton, the Repubs needed a movement, an insurgency, and this rules out centrism. Enter Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America. When the Party selected a relative centrist again in 96, Perot stayed in the race, though this time he turned out to be superfluous to the outcome.

I misstated 1 above. More properly it’s:

1. Assert neutrality between Obama/Kerry/Gore/Clinton in the general election.

Is it realistic to imagine that you can rationalize active political support for either major Party candidate, and still tell the truth about just what a ripe, evil bastard he is?

I’m not sure, in the present configuration of our politics, that it is possible for partisans to even tell the truth about the other Party’s candidate, which is what is supposed to happen in a two-party system, with active rotation in office. I don’t see Republicans telling the truth about Obama; instead, they say he’s a Black Muslim socialist, or some such. Honestly, I don’t even see Democrats telling the truth about Romney, though it would seem to be to their advantage. Obama, in the debate last night, could have highlighted the absurdity of a man with an income of nearly $20 million, and an extensive history of tax evasion, paying a lower percentage tax rate than a minimum wage worker, arguing for a policy of reducing tax rates. I’m not holding my breath.

Both Parties and both candidates are pulling their punches, and actively avoiding the truth and avoiding a discussion of issues, challenges and options, which are vital to the future, but which neither candidate or Party want open to democratic discussion. There’s no space for discussing the need to increase Social Security benefits or lowering the retirement age. There’s no space for discussing the need to address the deficit by increasing stimulus spending on infrastructure investments that address the structural problems limiting employment recovery. There’s no space for a serious discussion or how we respond to peak oil or climate change. No one is going to discuss the implications of losing two prolonged, absurdly expensive, purposeless wars in the last decade.

The political, media, financial and (a large part of the corporate) business elites are deeply corrupt, and they are acting to avoid exposing their own corruption to democratic scutiny or the possibility of political reform. Investing a lot of energy or hope in Obama’s re-election as a remedy for that corruption is delusional.

And, not because Obama’s re-election is some slim chance. On the contrary, Obama is very likely to be re-elected, in no small part because Romney’s campaign is so absurdly self-destructive. (Obama doesn’t your help, liberal Democrats, when he has Romney’s. If Romney wants Obama re-elected this badly, nothing liberals say or do is going to have any discernible effect or influence.)

So, what is the point of supporting Obama, when it requires rationalizing or minimizing policy conduct you despise and a level of continuing corruption that may well bring the country to ruin and completely ignoring or misconstruing the most important problems and issues of the day?

Especially, when it is obvious that Obama neither needs nor wants your help, and will give your views and values exactly zero influence on policy?

Continuing the debunk the argument for voting for Obama, we come to…

Argument #6: “This election will be like the one in 2000 where voting for Nader threw the election to Bush!”

Example of argument #6: comment 585 on this thread by Hidden Heart:

“You know, if one Nader voter in 10 had spent some of the last 12 years years taking part in grassroots efforts to shift the Democratic Party to the left…it wouldn’t have ushered in utopia or anything, but it might have made some of the current depression less bad in some states if there’d been a more reliable bloc of votes in opposition to austerity…

Also comment 345 from this thread by Bernard Yomtov:

“It seems to me that there is a glaring inconsistency here. Those who argue that a vote for Obama is immoral are at the same time unwilling to accept that the Nader voters cost Gore the election in 2000. So they are, it looks to me, unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their argument.”

(Not that it has been conclusively established that people on this thread have in fact made this argument, let’s not have more claims “you’re debating a straw man.” That claim is in fact the greatest straw man argument of all, as examples like this demonstrate.)

Debunking argument #6: First, 2012 is nothing like the year 2000. Let’s run down the reasons:

[1] 2012 is nothing like 2000 because there’s no third party candidate with the capacity to take a significant amount of the Democratic vote this year.
[2] 2012 is nothing like 2000 because in 2000, the Republican candidate successfully concealed his sociopathy and passed himself off as a moderate Republican, a so-called “compassionate conservative.” In 2012, by contrast, the Republican candidate is widely regarded as unlikeable and people remark that there’s something “off about him” (which I believe to be evidence that Romney is a high-functioning sociopath who has not managed to completely conceal his pathological lack of empathy for other human beings). More: those damning first-person testimonies by workers whose lives were wrecked by Romney’s Bain Capital offshoring and outsourcing have made is pellucidly clear what Romney’s motives and typical behavior actually are, unlike Bush in 2000 when his record as governor of Texas was thoroughly unclear and when Bush was able to spin his record as governor as alleged evidence that Bush was a moderate who would work with Democrats once elected.
[3] 2012 is nothing like 2000 because in 2000, Bush successfully lied about what policies he’d put in practice if elected — and enough people believed him to throw the election to Bush. But in 2012, Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan has given the game away. Romney is now forced to run on Ryan’s insane austerity economics scheme. Romney has lied about what policies he’ll implement if elected and he’s lied many times, but unlike Bush in 2000, Romney’s lies aren’t going over with the electorate — partly because Romney is such a poor liar, partly because of his choice of Ryan, and partly because the Democratic candidate this time is mounting a ferocious and largely successful campaign to reveal the Republican candidate’s lies to the electorate.
[4] 2012 is nothing like the year 2000 because in 2000, the electorate enjoyed a humming economy and a long period free from long-term foreign wars, so voters were feeling pretty good. They thought they had the luxury to choose wrong because after all, how much damage could a Republican do? In 2012 the electorate is trapped in a collapsing economy and America has been mired in endless unwinnable wars since 2001 and everyone is sick of it — and this time, voters know exactly how much damage a Republican president with extreme policies can do if he gets elected. We have the 8 hideous years of the Bush nightmare to remind us.
[5] 2012 is nothing like the year 2000 because in 2000, the previous Republican president was one of the most beloved in American history. Today, the previous Republican president is one of the most hated in American history. In 2000 the Republican candidate ran on Reagan’s record — today, Romney has to run away from Dubya’s record.

But wait…there’s more!

The above evidence proves conclusively that the 2012 presidential election has nothing in common with the 2000 presidential election. But even if that claim is wrong, the assertions made by pro-Obama voters still fail.

How so?

Let’s grant the affirmative even though it’s not true — let’s assume, contra reality, that the 2012 election really is like the 2000 election and let’s further assume that liberal voters who refuse to vote for Obama today would play the same role that liberal voters who refused to vote for Gore played in 2000.

The pro-Obama voter argument triumphant trumpets that liberal voters today who refuse to accept the “lesser evil” of Obama are just like the Nader voters in 2000, and therefore they refuse to accept the consequences of their heinous actions! So there! Debate over, right?

Wrong.

In fact, every Democrat owes Ralph Nader an eternal debt of gratitude. Because think it through.

If Nader hasn’t acted as a spoiler and if Gore had won in 2000, he would probably have served 2 terms. And then the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression could have been successfully blamed by the Republicans on “16 years of Democratic regulation and red tape and tax hikes!”

And what have happened then will freeze the lymph in your glands.

Then, mired in the biggest economic meltdown since 1930, the Republicans would have been able to sweep the presidency and house and senate in 2008 and they would have set about their insane policies of cutting the deficit while slashing social programs and cutting taxes on the rich. This is exactly the same policy that Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s secretary of the treasury, proposed in 1930, and it was a catastrophe. Unemployment skyrocketed. Industrial production collapsed. America sank even deeper in recession, worsening the Great Depression.

If Nader hasn’t run in 2000, today we’d have a Republican house and senate and president and the unemployment rate would be 25% and instead of having 25 million homeowners with underwater mortgages, we’d have 100 million homeowners foreclosed and homeless, armies of starving homeless people dying in the streets because food stamps had been eliminated and social security had been slashed and medicaid and medicare had been abolished.

So the people who refuse to accept the consequences of their decisions are in fact the pro-Obama voters.

Notice the jiu-jitsu here: the first part of this debunking shows that the pro-Obama argument here is false; and the second part of this debunking demonstrates that even if the pro-Obama argument is true, their overall claims are still false.

This is a fatal antinomy from which there is no appeal. This pro-Obama argument is so completely destroyed, there’s nothing left of it, not even elementary particles.