As We Near the 100-Day Mark of the Trump Regime

I have a similar view but with a few key differences.

I think that “explaining Trump’s win” in terms of explaining why people who like Trump do so is missing half the picture. Conservatives vote for the conservative candidate if they can. I know staunch conservative midwestern households that wrote in third parties rather than vote for Trump. I know a woman who voted straight ticket Republican by checking the box on the top of the ballot rather than the box next to Trumps name because she felt that would give her some moral distance from a candidate she preferred but didn’t like. In a two party First Lady the post system with low turnout you don’t have to be widely liked to win.

So while Trump has his supporters, I think it’s worth remembering that a big part of his victory came from people who aren’t any different than they were in 2012 or 2008. They’re conservatives who vote for the conservative candidate. So the question isn’t how Trump appealed to them, it’s why he didn’t repel enough of them quite so far enough. And whether, having seen him in office, will they rally around him because their only option? Or will they be repelled further?

I agree that a liberalism that needs monsters to fight can’t convince the other side because understanding the other side becomes impossible, but I think you might be taking it too far and accidentally enabling what I think you mean to combat.

If you ant left wing explanations of right wing views, they’re a dime a dozen. Any given left winger is NOT going to see him or herself reflected in your description of a liberal who sees their opponents as inexplicable intellectual and moral black holes. They’ve got theories like privilege threat, patriarchy, unconscious racism, and more, all designed to give explanations for conservative behavior OTHER than the explanations the conservatives themselves would offer if asked, and all without any reference to any facts or evidence a conservative might muster in support of his or her beliefs.

But I tend of convincing people this is no better than the intellectual and moral black hole perspective. It certainly isn’t going to convince anyone. And worse I think it gives ammunition to conservatives.

Few political movements are intellectually spotless in all arguments and activities. They’ll include mistakes somewhere, and they’ll overreach at times and claim more than can be justified. And if you respond to people who call those moments out by lecturing about privilege threat, they’re going to look at the valid point they just made, your choice to respond by ignoring it and going after them as a person, and conclude that they’re speaking truth to power. After all, you made an argument, they correctly pointed out a flaw in it, and you responded by trying to shame them into silence. That sure LOOKS like someone speaking truth to power.

So if you want to understand and convince conservatives, make a list of isssues. And ask yourself why a rational adult might hold the conservative position on them, AND what talking points you’ve seen from your side that a conservative could reject. You don’t have to change your mind on them. But if you can’t even write it you have a problem.

A liberalism that needs monsters to destroy can never politically engage with its enemies.

A liberalism that fails to confront monsters enables them, as every left-oriented critic of Barack Obama will tell you. That is, they’ll tell you that unless they are talking about Donald Trump, whose supporters, they say, need to be understood and empathized with.

One can empathize with people who are manipulated, but it’s unwise to downplay the fact that Trump voters are complicit in their own victimization. They have significant agency. You can’t con an honest man.

Anyway, Job One right now is destroying monsters. A liberalism that pays insufficient attention to that responsibility is the liberalism that brought us GW Bush and Donald Trump.

“it is the Electoral College, after all, not some beating heart of darkness,”

I suggest that “a beating heart of darkness” is a splendid way to describe the Electoral College as it functions today. It was created to keep the slave states happy and it continues to perform satisfactorily for the same forces in their modern form by sending to the White House in recent years two conservative presidents who lost the popular vote, the second losing by a huge margin.

I am afraid I don’t follow the Carter-Trump analogy at all, although I do hope that Trump is also a one-termer.

Trump seems different from the usual ‘conservative’ Republican-reactionary-racist sort to me in that he does not work from principles and logic but rather from rather randomized intuition. That has advantages and disadvantages for combat. One significant advantage is that his movements and targets can’t be predicted. A disadvantage is that one play (event, move, battle) does not add advantage to others down the line, as in chess. In the fog and chaos of political struggle, the former may outweigh the latter. Trump’s dodging of the health care / medical insurance bullet was characteristic. To actually conservative people, this sort of individual in power must indeed be a nightmare.

The fact that someone like this got to the presidency strikes me as evidence that the ruling class (or whatever you want to call it) has lost collective control of the Federal government, a new situation given the policy continuities since World War 2. So not only is Trump doing random stuff, but there is not much to stop him at the moment.

what is the point of looking for a historical analogue?

I guess I agree with Nick S: if the American society, the making of its electorate and the policies emerging from it are all significantly changing, past comparisons might obscure as much as they illuminate.

“A liberalism that fails to confront monsters enables them, as every left-oriented critic of Barack Obama will tell you. That is, they’ll tell you that unless they are talking about Donald Trump, whose supporters, they say, need to be understood and empathized with.”

Careful there, politicalfootball, your ressentiment is leaking all over the place.

Did it ever occur to you, and the countless others who’ve picked up this sclerotic meme and run to the ends of the earth with it, that for at least a certain percentage of “left-oriented” critics BO and most Democratic leadership types are already well understood–and in many ways empathized with? And thus what the criticism expresses is much less haughty holier-than-thou-ism than radical disappointment and disillusionment in the utterly gutless, self-satisfied, status quo Democratic politics?

But really, are you actually claiming that, say, Clinton or Obama (or their patrons) are in greater need of sympathy and “understanding” than a random Trump voter in Ohio? How does that make sense from either a moral or strategic perspective?

I’ll say it again for the thousandth time: Trump is merely a symptom, a glaring one, of the massive rot overtaking our political system. That the R establishment could not put him down during the primary demonstrates this. That the D establishment could not put him down during the general demonstrates this. That the media could not put him down during either demonstrates this. That elements of the security state/IC apparatus have thus far failed to put him down demonstrates this. Above all, what is demonstrated is that much of electorate has no faith in the political establishment as such. Thus, the political establishment has no backing and no public will to support its actions against Trump. Trump–a real estate media-hustler, more clown than man– as head of state is living proof. He is an outcome, a result, not a cause, much less a purpose or direction. He is what happens when the coherence of ruling political and economic discourses falls apart. He does not represent anything–not an ideology nor a political will. He’s a figurehead of legitimacy collapse. He’s what you get when the most pervasive and powerful social lies are no longer believed. You get a clown who, wittingly or unwittingly, lays bare the absurdity of the declining arrangements.

The problem our entire political system faces is not that “you can’t con an honest man.” The problem is there are literally no more honest liars left–Democrat or Republican. I mean, as Robin kind of alludes to in the post, it is becoming obvious that only an intransigent and transparent rump of Republican lawmakers actually believe in and/or are willing to go to the mat on the feed-the-rich political-economic prescriptions that were ascendant 40 years ago. Their ideology is coming apart at the seams, undone by the actual impacts and effects it has had on the vast majority of the public.

Stunningly, losing the white house to a carnival act has not yet seemed to convince Democrats that the neoliberal restructuring of economy and society (runaway financialization of everything is fine; transnational capital flows do god’s work; job retraining heals all wounds) will no longer fly. No, it seems the Democratic strategy is to pull a page from the Bush-Delay-McConnell playbook in order to distract under the guise of patriotism–patriotism!–and cold war senility. I wonder why? Leave it to modern Democrats to be perpetually a day late and a dollar short when it comes to Beltway knife-fighting though. It’s hard to imagine a more consistent, focus-grouped, set of political cowards.

It’s true Trump is the problem. It’s even more true that Trump is a mere indication of the problem.

– and as somebody who never refused empathy for Trump’s supporters and even learned how to deconstruct a Harley Motor ‘for the sake of winning over a mythicized white working class’ I just don’t understand why Americas comedians are so much better in classifying, characterizing or defining Trump – than so called ‘political’ observers?

All these histerical analogues and especially the Carter one are just not… funny?
And it’s not that they should be ‘funny’ – but they let Trump appear so… important or let’s say even ‘presidential’.
And that’s a type of empathy he really doesn’t deserve and if the two comments I posted before disappeared because I called Trump by his ‘real name’ – and that was understood as ‘a liberalism that needs monsters to destroy and which ‘never can politically engage with its enemies’ – there is no better way than to call ‘monsters’ by their real names in order
‘to understand those enemies as political actors, making calculations, taking advantage of opportunities, and responding to constraints.’

Welcome back, Corey!

Val @15: I generally consider myself pretty savvy about what is and isn’t talked about in public discourse, but (being a man) I still find it very easy to overlook the obvious sexism at work here.

In addition to the media silence, part of my problem, I think, is that Hillary herself had to approach the topic delicately.

Another part of the problem is that the impact of sexism is complicated. It’s easy and accurate to talk about the Clinton Rules — the unfair standards that Bill was also subject to — but the impact of sexism is tougher to tease out.

Careful there, politicalfootball, your ressentiment is leaking all over the place.

No, that’s just plain old English-language resentment. I resent Trump. He’s a bad person, and he has made no secret of that fact. To the extent that his voters were dupes, I pity them. To the extent that they weren’t, I resent them.

But really, are you actually claiming that, say, Clinton or Obama (or their patrons) are in greater need of sympathy and “understanding” than a random Trump voter in Ohio?

Of course not. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything that could be mistaken for that by someone reading in good faith. What I did say was this:

A liberalism that fails to confront monsters enables them, as every left-oriented critic of Barack Obama will tell you. That is, they’ll tell you that unless they are talking about Donald Trump, whose supporters, they say, need to be understood and empathized with.

Seems quite clear to me. You show the same reading comprehension problem later, when you characterize my view this way:

Did it ever occur to you, and the countless others who’ve picked up this sclerotic meme and run to the ends of the earth with it, that for at least a certain percentage of “left-oriented” critics BO and most Democratic leadership types are already well understood

Read it again:

A liberalism that fails to confront monsters enables them, as every left-oriented critic of Barack Obama will tell you. That is, they’ll tell you that unless they are talking about Donald Trump, whose supporters, they say, need to be understood and empathized with.

Leftist critics of Obama understood quite accurately that silence on the subject of, say, drone attacks on civilians, enabled monstrous behavior. What some of them can’t get a grip on is that this does nothing to justify Trump. Less than nothing, because it’s clear that on every axis where Obama was bad, Trump will be worse, and Trump made it clear in advance that he would be worse.

You think voters went for Trump because Obama was too indulgent of bankers? Because Obama made war carelessly? Because he favored the rich? Because he was insufficiently interested in improving healthcare? Because he failed to act on the environment? Because he did too little for women and minorities?

If that’s what you think, I don’t share the contempt you have for Trump voters. I think, by and large, they had a pretty good idea what they were voting for, especially in a race where Bernie Sanders was available.

I get why you approach my comment the way that you did. That sort of mischaracterization is a powerful technique, as Trump has shown us, and I can see why you emulate it: It can be effective in politics and in the comments of blogs.

But I still resent it.

Val, I’ve been writing about sexism in this election since long before this election, saying that there are very few things in American reactionary politics that cannot be explained in whole or part as expressions of threatened masculinity. As you say, I have not seen this, which seems as plain as the nose on anyone’s face, discussed much at all.

Prof. Robin, this president you call weak still commands the most powerful military in history and the vast internal police force of the Department of Homeland Security, which has gone rogue. Half the reason the AHCA went down to defeat is that it was not cruel enough for the fascist wing of the Republican Party, and Trump will seek revenge for that humiliation. The Middle East is likely to explode in war soon (watch Yemen.) If so, that will provide the Trump administration and the various factions of the Republican Party with more excuses to expand their fascist domestic policy.

Engage, engage. Denial does you and us no favors.

As to the success of the Trump agenda, a lot of policy is going to be made through regulation, not legislation. We’re already seeing this with environmental regulation. Antitrust will likely become even more permissive. The private Obamacare insurance markets will get a push over the cliff. And on and on. My guess is that inequality measures have already surpassed the 1928 peak having just fallen short in 2007 and will just get worse. The top 0.01% and above are making out like bandits with the stock market increase.

He was in over his head on day one. If you’re not aware, real estate development shops are tiny(and he’s pretty much a branding operation now). Many have less that 100 people. The architects, contractors, etc are all outside. He’s never run anything big. Hell, many government departments and agencies have offices and divisions that are larger than his firm. That doesn’t mean he can’t do a vast amount of damage which he will. We’ve only seen hints of the mess he’ll make of foreign affairs. And when the domestic agenda isn’t going well? There’s always time for a war.

Finally, if his goal is to do well by himself, his family and his friends, he might consider his presidency very successful indeed. You keep measuring success by you’re standards, not his.

phenomenal cat @ 12

Yep. It is a legitimacy crisis. It was always going to be a legitimacy crisis. (I thought Clinton would win — I was wrong; but I think her prospective election and the narratives attached to it also had the markings of a legitimacy crisis.) Trump is in the hot seat and his clownishness maybe flavors it a bit, but a legitimacy crisis was close to inevitable, even if the outcome of the election in terms of who was elected, was chancier.

Trump’s defects of character are not causing the legitimacy crisis — this can be hard to see given how clownish he is and how relentlessly he is attacked, but this recognition may turn out to be important to understand what comes next, as events unfold.

politicalfootball @ 20

“A liberalism that fails to confront monsters enables them, as every left-oriented critic of Barack Obama will tell you. That is, they’ll tell you that unless they are talking about Donald Trump, whose supporters, they say, need to be understood and empathized with.”

I have to say I have read that paragraph several times and I do not understand what you are trying to say. Maybe it does seem plain to you, but I cannot make sense of it. The first sentence seems plain enough a declaration — no problem there. But, then, I have to connect the first sentence to the second and I am at a loss. Left-wing critics of Obama will not tell you “a liberalism that fails to confront monsters enables them” with regard to Trump? Huh? And, then that second sentence switches to what left-wing critics of Obama would say about Trump’s supporters (not otherwise identified) and I am lost without navigational aids. Is Trump the monster? The people who voted for Trump? The people who voted for Clinton? (I voted for neither.)

Your explanation, offered @ 20: What some of [left critics of Obama] can’t get a grip on is that this does nothing to justify Trump. Less than nothing, because it’s clear that on every axis where Obama was bad, Trump will be worse, and Trump made it clear in advance that he would be worse.

How does anything justify Trump? would be my question (as a left critic of Obama). Trump is not “just” in any common sense of the term. And, how are differences between Obama and Trump relevant, here? (There is a leftish meme that points to the fact that some key counties and states that voted for Obama voted for Trump — are you trying to confront some particular analysis associated with that meme? Just guessing here.)

P.S. Sanders was not a choice in the general election and was arguably disabled, along with the Democratic Party as a whole, by Obama and Clinton. That’s a whole ‘nother line of argument engaged in by “left critics of Obama” but I cannot tell whether you are taking a particular view on that line or not.

Thanks Raven and politicalfootball. We had a phenomenon here where Julia Gillard was attacked repeatedly by men (and a few women) on her side of politics, who seemed much more emotionally invested in attacking her than attacking Tony Abbott, even though he was far worse on all counts. It was this irrationality, as much as anything, that made me aware of the deep influence of sexism in politics here.

It seems very much the same in the USA. I saw men (and a very few women) on CT and elsewhere responding to Hillary Clinton in a similar way, even though Trump was far, far worse. Their emotional energy seemed to go into attacking her far more than into attacking Trump, who was normalised as just a normal Republican, just another politician (cf Corey Robin here and previously).

It’s depressing.

‘It’s depressing.’

It’s ‘most’ depressing that Trump was (is) normalised as ‘just a normal Republican, just another politician (cf Corey Robin here and previously) -as there are far more precise definitions existing.

Let me remind everybody with the list one of Americas premier (female) Poets – and even if the list is NOT complete – censoring this list -(like my comments about Trumps ‘real name) – will be considered as another ‘interesting sign that no one seems to consider the influence of sexism’.

What is ‘Trump’ by Samantha Bee:

‘Sentient caps-lock button
Freshly sandpapered reality star
Two-bit wall salesman
Melting hunk of uninformed apricot Jell-O
Erratic rage quasar
America’s first appendix
Backfired wish that Republicans made on a cursed monkey’s paw
Agent Orange
Bigoted See ’n SayDauphin of Breitbartistan
Demagoguing bag of candy corn
George Wallace in a wig
Cheap National Front knockoff
Muddled asshole yearning to scream free
Big hairy orange villain
Leering dildo
M. Night Orangeman
Grotesque caterpillar turning into a somehow even more grotesque butterfly
Heretical billionaire bully
Nativist foghorn
Crotch-fondling slab of rancid meatloaf
Casino Mussolini
Monstrous apricot bulb
Hometown embarrassment
Screaming carrot demon
First-grader with a head injury
16-month Hindenburg explosion
Orange supremacist
Sociopathic 70-year-old toddler
Failed QVC steak salesman
Nasty garbage monster
The white power movement’s orange ally
Thrice-married foul-mouthed tit judge who likes Planned Parenthood and thinks Corinthians is a type of car upholstery
Two-bit used hate salesman
The asteroid that just destroyed a party of dinosaurs
Dick-waving Berlusconi knockoff
Fat Elvis
Large-mouthed ass
Creamsicle
Rich asshole who wants to be king of America
Tangerine tinted trash can fire
Tax-cheating, investor-swindling, worker-shafting, dictator-loving, pathologically lying, attorneys general–bribing, philandering, mobbed up, narcissistic serial con artist
The least qualified candidate ever to lurch into the public spotlight and shit on Gold Star moms while cradling Putin’s sweaty sack’

– and as Roger Cohen of the NYT has added ‘Offender of the Free World’ to the long list of more precise ‘expressions’ for Trump – let’s… ponder for a moment – what would have happened if Trumps real name – the name Jon Stewart found out – would have been on the ballot?

Or the NYT and every single other newspaper – or blog or journalist or ‘political’ observer would have called Trump from the beginning by his ‘real’ name?
And there is this silly theory that Hillary Clinton lost because she attacked Trump ‘personally’ and not about his ‘politics’ – completely ignoring that Trump never had any ‘politics’ besides being what he always was – and is – his ‘real name’ Clinton and every journalist and every ‘political’ observer in the US should have used over and over again – and which should have been on the ballot – as I highly doubt it – if the name would have been (‘lawfully!) on the ballot a lot less Americans would have voted for him.

At this point in time, I agree with the assertion that Trump is a weak president. He strikes me almost as more of a third party candidate with no influence whatsoever in the Democratic party (Bush 1 and 2 at least had a few Blue-dogs) and only partial influence within the various created Republican caucuses.

That said, as has been well documented Trump has no previous political experience – he’s the equivalent of a 10-year old kid playing his brand new X-Box, he understands a few really cool features like Executive Orders, but hasn’t really learned what all the buttons do, he only understands re-set.

He’s already wrecked pretty good havoc with what he understands, the danger is the strength he might accumulate (and the momentum that could generate) if he figures out how to work all the buttons on the game conrtoller within his hands.

Much of the DC establishment back in 2016 complained that Obama hadn’t been tough enough on Assad and the Russians. That’s where the “propaganda” about Clinton wanting a war with Russia comes from. It was widespread. There was much talk about the brutality of Aleppo (far more than about the brutality we were supporting in Yemen). It will be interesting to see if Trump’s increase in civilian deaths in Mosul will lead to the same cries of war crimes. This is an actual case where Trump really is doing something as bad as Putin, but it’s not qualitatively distinct from what Obama was doing, just an increase.

Getting back to Russia, talk of no fly zones meant war in Syria, which risked confrontation with Russia. And Michael Morell had just endorsed Clinton a few days before he advocated killing Russians in Syria on the Charlie Rose show–

JimV@31

I do not particularly want to (re-)litigate the election or the politics of lesser evils in the comments of Crooked Timber.

Once we are emotionally committed to some narrative, it can be hard to hear some of what other people are saying, on the terms of the people saying it. I, personally, can say I do not understand what the disputes are that are splitting the Republicans. I have no feel for them at all, but in my ignorance, I pay attention to what CR has to say, to learn if I can. I do have more confidence in my understanding of the major splits among Democrats. I am not saying I have much sympathy for “any Democrat” politics of the kind you espouse. I was a “more and better Democrats” kind of guy for a long time, but you “any Democrat” types prevailed with predictable results and you do not want to own any responsibility for the horrifying result. Imho, of course. I do not propose to hash that out. “More and better” lost and as far as I can tell Sanders is still coming up short; the Obama-Clinton establishment holds fast, able to play a louder media Wurlitzer than I thought they had, and the “any Dems” left in Congress do not look any more effective now than they ever were. As for heaping tribal abuse on Trump voters, I say, have at it, for whatever personal satisfaction it gives. I cannot imagine why you think “left Obama critics” (like me) are somehow inhibiting you or our lack of sufficient enthusiasm for pre-adolescent name calling is a moral deficiency.

JimV #37: “getting all the poison out of our system in the next four years”

That time frame is optimistic!

‘Trump is an ignorant and irresponsible grifter who is shamelessly profiteering off the presidency while catering to the most vicious and destructive right-wing elements in American culture.’

How true – but somehow I’m still more impressed about the power of Samantha Bee’s analyzes – as her analyzes are also so much more ‘up to date’ – while reading all the comments on this threat leave the impression that (most?) commenters are (still) more interested in (still) fighting some battle about who (was) is the better candidate for the US presidential election.

The election is over and WE erected a ‘Pick-Any-Insult-You-Prefer’ for so called ‘President. And this erection has lots and lots of current consequences. Very, very bad ones – currently for the climate climate and (surprisingly) also very ‘good’ ones as it seems to save at least Europe from ‘irresponsible grifters who shamelessly profiteering off the power while catering to the most vicious and destructive right-wing elements in World- Wide culture.’

Lee@33: “It may be better this way. If Hillary had won, the GOP would still be in full blockade, still causing frustration in the voters, and still coming back to take control in a future election. So let’s have the poisons all come out, now…”

I’ve been telling myself this since November. I was certainly not looking forward to 4 years of HRC, that’s for sure. But still, Trump’s cabinet and other appointments have me wanting to commit seppuku. (This too shall pass, though, I suppose …).

‘ to negotiate a no-fly-zone among the air-powers involved in the Syria conflict, to provide a corridor for refugees and humanitarian aide’.

I don’t see the connection between these two clauses.

Very belated acknowledgement to Donald Johnson: I have good memories of the Iraq debates at “Deltoid” and the part you played in them.

I’m not complaining, but noting that there has been a lot of crossing of comments due to moderation delays, which may contribute to misunderstandings. There are usually at least two or three comments which I didn’t see when I submitted a comment, which appear before mine. Maybe I’ll start mentioning the last comment number I saw before posting (#44 currently).

And now for something completely different: I recently finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New York 2140” and think it would make an interesting topic for a CT seminar.

Both things are true: That Trump exists on a continuum with other Republicans, and that he constitutes a break with the past in some key respects

By definition, a continuum can’t contain a break.

continuum noun something that changes in character gradually or in very slight stages without any clear dividing points

Corey,

Thanks for the post and I liked the Carter analogy. Historical analogies are good to think. The act of setting up a comparison, outlining the similarities and delving into the differences help us think through both Carter and Trump. As a historian. I recommend ignoring historians’ predictions about the future, we are usually wrong because history never repeats itself. But sometimes it rhymes. A good comparison might help us write the next couplet.

@47: This touches on one of the most depressing things about the last election for me: my deep pessimism about how a Clinton presidency would have played out in practice. This ties into Corey’s point about context.

For better or worse, the US system features regular shifts in party control of the executive branch. We’ve had 3 consecutive terms in one party only once since 1952 (1980-1992 GOP), and a party held the white for one term only once (1976-1980). Otherwise the pattern has been 2 terms D – 2 terms R continuously. The bottom line is clear: if the republicans didn’t get the White House in 2016 they would have been very likely to do so in 2020. This is especially true because the contours of a Clinton presidency would be likely to ripe for a a very strong republican showing in 2018 and 2020: third term fatigue, a hostile legislature, gridlock, and what would undoubtedly have been continuous congressional investigations and scandals, real and imagined.

If Trump is ineffective (the Carter mold), and deeply unpopular, then Democrats can do something that would have been utterly impossible with a Clinton win, namely to capture a lot of seats in congress, governorships, and state legislatures; there will be redistricting in 2020, so the outcome of the 2018 elections will have long-term consequences. If you also believe that he won’t be able to accomplish much (see “ineffective” above), then the short term harm is mitigated.

The bottom line for me is that you can’t expect to keep the republicans out of the white house indefinitely, because that isn’t how our system works; and that we were either going to face a reckoning in 2016 or 2020, and the latter could very well have been much worse. That’s not an endorsement of Trump, but the alternative was just not going to be Democrats elected to the White House forever.

(Last comment seen before posting: #53)
Hidari 03.30.17 at 6:08 am
‘ to negotiate a no-fly-zone among the air-powers involved in the Syria conflict, to provide a corridor for refugees and humanitarian aide’.

I don’t see the connection between these two clauses.”

HRC made a proposal to negotiate a no-fly zone with Russia in some part of Syria. The purpose of the no-fly zone would be to provide a corridor … (aide should have been aid).

One of the things in “New York 2140” which CTers might like to debate is that a local activist who dislikes politicians and politics decides to run for Congress to help pass financial system reforms, and chooses the Democrat party as the best (least bad) alternative. This is a person who refuses to give up.

OP talks about the need to understand Trump supporters as something other than a black hole of evil.

The comments contain, in significant part, people falling over themselves to demonstrate ideological purity by insisting that they scorned Trump voters harder and better than anyone else, and before it was even cool. The usual ‘isms are trotted out, in the usual amounts and under the usual rules, namely, the more aggressively you can scorn them the more points you earn. You get the most points for insisting that this MUST have driven his election… even while in other parts of the same thread while discussing democrats people are happy to admit that its easy to see the best in a candidate if that candidate is at least in your party… suggesting other explanations that might fit, unless your starting point is an insistence that all conservatives are black holes of evil, full stop, no debate.

Further, Trump is record breakingly unpopular, and what little evidence is available suggests that his unpopularity isn’t being driven by a “critique from the right” view of him as insufficiently conservative. A good part of it is conservatives getting a taste of him as president and not liking it.

So presumably there are people who like conservative politics, but don’t like Trump, and don’t like the recent direction of the Republican Party.

Either now is the opportunity to convert them, or converting people is impossible.

54: “If Trump is ineffective (the Carter mold), and deeply unpopular, then Democrats can do something that would have been utterly impossible with a Clinton win, namely to capture a lot of seats in congress, governorships, and state legislatures; there will be redistricting in 2020, so the outcome of the 2018 elections will have long-term consequences. If you also believe that he won’t be able to accomplish much (see “ineffective” above), then the short term harm is mitigated.”

HRC spoke often of her commitment to building up the party on the local and state levels, which had been neglected during the Obama years. Having control of the White House would have been beneficial for that, especially as the Democrats control little else.

Right now things are going “better” than Democrats could possibly have hoped for, but we still have two years to go. The “best-case scenario” is that Trump lurches from failure to failure (which would not be at all like Carter, who accomplished some big things), with voters in 2018 responding appropriately by voting for the Democrats in droves. I hope that will happen, but I see no reason to assume that it will, particularly if the economy is doing well. Trump is already deeply unpopular, but he’s not deeply unpopular among Republicans, who are much more reliable midterm voters. On the hopeful side, the Democratic base is up in arms. They need to stay that way and they also need to get out and vote. It could happen.

Either now is the opportunity to convert them, or converting people is impossible.

You point out that the status quo is converting people, then say that we need to change the status quo in order to convert them. I’m sympathetic to the idea that there are times when liberals have to compromise on principles for political reasons. This is unambiguously NOT one of those times.

Sure, we don’t need to demonize Trump supporters, but we can’t ignore it when they demonize themselves.

From the Harper’s piece: “Hence the refusal of empathy for Trump’s supporters.”

“…….that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

Out of curiosity — why did my comment get modded?

Not sure if anyone cares but here’s what Noam Chomsky thinks about Trump.

I think you can blame Chomsky for Trump. He wrote the book _Manufacturing Consent_, and that gave people ideas.

So while you can still buy artisan hand-printed American consent, for the most part the consent factories have been shut down and shipped off overseas. There are some protectionist holdouts who complain about the imported consent containing a lower truth content than they are used to, but you can’t argue with economics.

J-D: I suppose hypothetically it’s true that some elections will turn out, in retrospect, to be good elections to have lost, judging by some subsequent chain of consequences, but you can’t tell in advance which elections those ones will be.

I call this the “existential problem” of electoral politics. It sits alongside the problem of one vote among millions being insignificant.

In our personal lives, we don’t know if choosing to cross the street will take us like the proverbial chicken and as we intend, to the other side of the road, or if . . . as actually happens to a few thousand each year in the U.S. . . . crossing the street results in unexpected, unintended life-altering injury or death.

In electoral politics, our individual action is attenuated by many more steps, because electoral politics is a team sport, where our vote matters only as a drop of water in a river matters or a grain of sand on a beach, and because our vote accomplishes, if it accomplishes anything at all, is the election of one person in place of another and that representative person then acts for a term within the confines of office, typically also in a highly attenuated way, on the architecture and management of policy, policy itself often being some attenuated apparatus of rules for influencing the behavior of large groups of people.

In retrospective, historical perspective, we can have some fair degree of confidence that electoral politics and the policies that flow from it constitute collective choice and have consequences. History only happens one way, as I am fond of saying, and quoting some wag, historians can remember the future and imagine the past to suit. In retrospect, pretty much everyone’s life can seem like the unfolding of a novel, complete with pre-figuring events driving a plot toward a dramatic and meaningful climax; so, too, the life of a nation or a civilization.

It does seem to me that Corey Robin’s historical analogies are an attempt to pick up narrative threads and plot motifs from the past as a way to orient ourselves to the present. I have mixed feelings about the appropriateness of the method, though I appreciate the way it can bring to our attention the way our feelings about the moment can help create meaning and in the creation of meaning drive the consequences of events, especially the retrospective meaning assigned, which may be among the most consequential of consequences.

Political leaders and their minions contest elections and debates over policy with the rhetorical armoury of narrative drama. These contested dramatics are the means by which pundits and propagandists, electoral consultants and marketing mavens herd we sheep into the slaughterhouses known as the voting booth or opinion poll (or supermarket, for that matter). Except we are not so much like sheep as cats and we don’t form a single manageable herd very often. That people we admire like Brand X or people we resent like Brand Y may influence us strongly; not understanding or trusting much in our understanding of policy, we project onto televised images, our personal worldview and understanding of personalities. And, in this struggle to process a paucity of information in solving the jumbled Rubik’s Cube of politics into a recognizable pattern, we are not left alone; we are manipulated with a never-ending, alternately boring or entertaining flood of assertions, slogans and images, few of them entirely trustworthy.

The effort to choose for whom to vote or to root for (becoming part of a rooting crowd may be more political than the inconsequential act of casting a vote that may or may not be counted at all, let alone in favor of a winning candidate) blends into the struggle of individual to maintain a sane perspective on an insane world. On the whole — meaning from a perspective that can see the swirling kaleidoscope of shifting political allegiances and shibboleths among the millions — people vote at random, like unruly herds of cats, with expectations grounded in a fog of manufactured myths, eyes on patterns in the clouds or constellations in the skies.

I would like to think that there is some limit to the susceptibility of thoughtful people to manipulation. I certainly wouldn’t come away from a CT current politics comments thread confident in that opinion. You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but . . . or something to that effect. And, some of the hot buttons do wear out over time. And, the on-going contest itself places limits even as it enables. But, what limits?

I wanted to say something to Suzanne @ 60 about this: HRC spoke often of her commitment to building up the party on the local and state levels, which had been neglected during the Obama years. Having control of the White House would have been beneficial for that, especially as the Democrats control little else. But, really what could I say? That one comment just made me despair of ever locating an island of common reality.

I get that everyone, including especially me, is engaged in trying to assemble an image representing reality from a flood of contested information (really, “information”), but is there really no critical method or discriminating intelligence that could help us find some common reality, some common set of shared values and aspirations?

Apparently not and the CIA is a pillar of the Republic. Or something. I think if you want to keep your sanity, it might be better not to think about voting. Vote as it is your duty as a citizen. But, don’t think about it, before or after.

62: “Hate the sin, love the sinner”

These days I usually see that shibboleth in the context of people trying to justify their opposition to gay rights or abortion rights. It doesn’t work well there, either. I imagine Trump voters aren’t interested in lefties wanting to pat them on the head.

“…Whether these complaints are real or not, they are deeply felt. The “real” gains that white working men have won through unions and party politics do not produce eternal gratitude, nor do they alter the objective frustrations of blue-collar life. Now, from the well of these frustrations, bubbles of racism and anti-communism are exploding on the surface, and it is hardly surprising: America gives that gas to everyone. But for many blue-collar workers, the Wallace campaign is the first new means of expression they have found in years.”

— Andrew Kopkind, “Blue Collars and White Racism,” October 1968.

Layman #47: “These harms are more or less forever when viewed from the perspective of a single individual.”

Greater horror is being demonstrated in foreign policy. Two hundred individuals in Mosul would agree with you, if they were alive.

Why do I feel that the two pieces engels has just linked to

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/04/01/neofascism-in-the-white-house/
http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism

are written in different languages from each other?

@71
Not to spoil anyone’s history (or hysteria) party, but the comparison (at least at the moment) between Trump and Hitler is, not to put too fine a point on it, demented.

We are not 100 days into Trump’s shambling tenure, and all that has happened is that the ‘standard’ Republican policies (i.e. the policies that any Republican would have put in place)* have gone through, and all the ‘special’ policies that are unique to Trump, have failed to go through. If the United States really was a dictatorship (or even on the way to dictatorship) then all the things we have seen (the failure of Ryancare, the judges kicking out the Muslim Ban) would simply not be happening, and if they were, judges and rebellious Congressmen would now be on their way to the re-education camps. Obviously nothing like that is on the horizon (I stress, at the moment), and the comparison between a weak and unpopular President shouting at the Press (who openly despise him, while, so far, not incurring any penalties for that stance) like Nixon did, and Hitler having all the independent newspapers shut down and their editors shot, is, again, not to put too fine a point on it, out to lunch.

A comparison between what Trump has ‘achieved’ in his first 100 days, and what Hitler managed in his first 100 days is instructive.

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/burns.htm

*And it’s worthwhile reiterating that, as someone pointed out above, this was always going to happen. I got the victory of Trump wrong, but I do remember pointing out to people before the election that at some point a Republican would again stand in the White House. I just didn’t think it would be Trump. The ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ which only the Democrats knew about where the Republicans got the Senate and Congress and the Democrats got the White House was always a Democratic fantasy.

Hence the bizarre nervous breakdown of the Democratic establishment at the moment, as if, somehow, they were entitled to the White House and as if the Republicans were somehow ‘not allowed’ to take it. The US is a democracy of a sort, and that’s what happens in democracies: you win some, you lose some. All the ‘radical’ policies that ‘Trump’ is pushing through (the climate change denial, the privatisation of education) are in fact mainstream Republican positions and have been for years. Any Republican candidate who won the White House (and to repeat, it is inevitable that this would happen someday) would now be doing exactly what Trump is doing. Except for the crazy stuff, which Trump is not getting away with. I might also add that John Bellamy Foster, in concentrating on the anti-democratic tendencies of the Republicans and only the Republicans seems to me to be being slightly naïve about the motivations of the Deep State (e.g. the CIA etc.). in opposing Trump. The way Foster tells it Trump spontaneously decided to attack the Deep State (i.e. the Washington bureaucracy, the ‘intelligence’ agencies) for no other reason than they stand in the way of his absolute lust for power. The historical record shows a rather different timeline of events.

As I judge these matters, it may be best to keep our mouths shut and our powder dry — at least insofar as grand theories or strategies are concerned. Whatever else he is, Trump is an epiphenomenon. Although we have some idea of the underlying social, economic, and political forces which have created him, the resolution of the crisis he represents is not something that even the most august analysis can foresee, or, frankly, do much to bring about. We’re in that crisis up to our necks, and would do well to admit that we can’t see all the way to the horizon. Never mind the narrative for now, in other words, let’s, just get on with doing what we have to do. This is a time for tactics, not for strategy, and only a lack of humility about our own situation prevents us from acting accordingly.

78: “The US is a democracy of a sort, and that’s what happens in democracies: you win some, you lose some.”

Astutely observed, but there were some troubling elements, to put it mildly, surrounding this election, and it’s not only Democrats who are disturbed and angered by them. I hope.

Also, it’s the Democratic base that is fired up, or as you put it, having a nervous breakdown, and carrying their elected representatives along with them.

@81
‘It may be that our times are too much, too confusing.’

Admitted.

Trying to differentiate?

If you got sucked into thinking Hillary Clinton was NOT some shades better than the authoritarian clown, Donald Trump, therefore a lot of shades better than the ‘F…face’, you weren’t trying. ‘That’s not trying’.

Omega Centauri #83: “its impossible to know”

It’s quite possible that the military knows.

bruce wilder

You completely missed my point

I’m curious at this stage about whether you want me to get your point. If you don’t want me to get your point, then presumably congratulations are in order for your achievement. On the other hand, if you do want me to get your point, you are going about it the wrong way.

The people here advocating being nice to Trump voters and not using -isms to describe them in order to convert dissatisfied Republicans are, by and large, the same people who accused Clinton of being a neoliberal sellout for attempting to appeal to disaffected Republicans during the election.

Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping on Thursday and Friday, and has been firing off preparatory tweets about how evil China is. I’m hoping for his presidency to produce a long list of failures and non-achievement, but I’m more than a little concerned that he’s going to start a trade war, a cold war or even a real war with China. Presumably if anyone besides Trump is to blame for the resulting economic and/or physical destruction, it will be the people who voted for him. But around here, we get admonished for pointing this out, or for accepting the obvious fact that Clinton would not have started any kind of war with China.

@83 ‘Choosing to not be involved at all, is just another way of selecting door number 2.’

I believe Osama Bin Laden came to a similar conclusion.

FDR and Lincoln were war mongers; their partisans including me might say they sold war as being in a just cause, but objectively, they sold war. There is the possibility of telling the truth and sharing reality with people would do not share your point of view or evaluate everything and everyone the same way you do. People can disagree because, say, they have opposing interests or different philosophies, without making up stories with little or no basis in reality.

Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal sellout who attempted to appeal to disaffected Republicans in the recent election campaign. That is an objectively accurate characterization of her conduct. Highly compressed and judgmental, perhaps, but also in general accord with widely reported facts.

Clinton “would not have started any kind of war” is not a fact, obvious or otherwise. It just isn’t. It is a counterfactual and as such it might express a theory or speculation, but any such theory ought to make some contact with Clinton’s well-documented belligerent rhetoric and the actual facts of her ill-considered support for war in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

JimV’s smug assertions that one Party wants campaign finance and the other doesn’t or that one Party wants an Iran war and the other doesn’t flies in the face of the Democratic candidate’s circumvention of campaign finance laws and her very belligerent rhetoric on Iran.

I do not think CT comments are a good place to carry on or rehearse partisan contests. We should take this opportunity to reflect intelligently on events and developments, not just make shit up.

Hidari, if your response to either the Bellamy Foster or the Toscano essay I linked is that it is ‘demented’ ‘hysteria’ then I don’t really know what to say.

Virtually all the things that people point to that supposedly make Trump not like your typical Republican or conservative are, from my point of view, the emblematic features of what it means to be a conservative.

Granting this is true, isn’t it nevertheless the case that the making of the conservative electorate changed deeply? Pursuing the analogy with Carter, the electoral maps of 1976 and 2012 or 2016 are starkly different (almost flipped). Isn’t that reflective of a real change?

94: “We should take this opportunity to reflect intelligently on events and developments, not just make shit up.”

I suggest with all courtesy that you might well consider taking your own admonition to heart.

“Despite the rhetoric and bravado, the tweets and tantrums, Trump remains very much a captive of the institutions he rails against, with little sign, it seems, of being able to do much about them. At least FDR, when faced with challenges from the courts, had the wherewithal to try and pack the Supreme Court; Trump’s greatest threat is…to take it to the Supreme Court.”

He is lacking “the wherewithal” but more simply he’s just in over his head. Let’s hope he stays that way.

Leaving that aside, taking things to the Supreme Court may prove to be one of Trump’s better options going forward, particularly if Gorsuch takes Scalia’s place and ingratiates himself with Anthony Kennedy……

I’m half advocating it. But I was pro Clinton reaching out, not against.

I’m not personally suited, temperamentally, for reaching out. I’m just really glad at least some people (Bernie Sanders, and… *crickets*) are trying. And I don’t like when that’s attacked as a lack of liberal backbone. I want to win elections, not debate purity of ideology. I don’t care about fights between “the left” and “neoliberalism” and I usually write off people I see engaged in them. I’m fine with ejecting a compromised Party that is at least the home of the only people who want to do certain necessary things, like actually treat health care for the poor as a worthwhile priority. I don’t expect a pure and perfect faction, this is politics. The role of an election is to get as many of the best people through the door as you can, so that the issue driven fights are stacked in your favor. You still have to have them and you’re still going to lose some. I don’t know any better alternative to trying.

Meanwhile, over at lawyers guns and money, they’ve got an author going after the Times for being weak on Trump. The Times described Trump prior to the election as unprepared, unsuited for the job, and said his election would be a catastrophe. Apparently this is what passes for not being sufficiently anti Trump, because, after the election, they “clung to a slim hope” that Trump wouldn’t be as bad as they expected, and are now saying that their “slim hope” has fallen through and Trump is even worse.

The “falling over ourselves to condemn” thing is real and unhelpful.

My emotional instincts are to grab Trump voters by the lapels and shake them and yell “this is what you did!” every time I read a newspaper.

But that’s probably not going to accomplish anything and I admire people who are being more productive about this than I am.

Anarcissie

J-D 04.03.17 at 5:26 am @ 91:
‘The people here advocating being nice to Trump voters don’t exist. There are no people here advocating being nice to Trump voters. You’re making that up. Why?’

I advocated it. ‘Hate the sin and love the sinner,’ I said.

I apologise for my error. Presumably faustusnotes meant you and you alone, but did not use your screen-name to identify you, possibly on account of finding it difficult to spell.

So how do you feel about the rest of what faustusnotes has to say about you? Do you think it’s fair?

Hidari: “the Democratic base are furious that the Democratic leadership will end up kowtowing to the Republicans and facilitating their extreme right wing agenda as they always have in the past. . . . that’s what is riling up the Democratic base”

It seems to me that there must be two bases, yours and Suzanne’s (@82), roughly corresponding to the shadows cast by the Sanders and Clinton campaigns respectively.

For one the economic issues are primary and for the other, maybe not quite so much. For one, medicare-for-all, $15/hr minimum wage, college debt relief and so on, are goals and financialization and globalization are serious problems that need to be addressed, preferably with a wrecking ball; for the other, these goals represent nice sentiments and good directions, but not practical politics — there are complicated reasons, you see, why these things are never going to happen, while financialization and globalization are features of a cosmopolitan and hopeful future and class contempt is a moral imperative.

Neither base is electorally large enough, well-organized or reliable. If Democratic politicians seem to lack backbone, maybe it is because so much of their electoral constituency doesn’t vote often enough, doesn’t provide other resources and isn’t invested enough to be informed enough to detect let alone punish defection.

The “Sanders base” (for lack of a better short-hand term) for populist social democracy and working class solidarity, in my observation, is on the whole not so much “riled up” as deeply discouraged and apathetic, with only an idealist minority ready to rally. The “Sanders base” lacks ready leadership — that its nominal leader is 74 years old and not even a member of the Democratic Party ought to indicate the difficulty they have in finding champions among politicians and pundits in a political and media environment where powerful business corporations distribute resources and careers.

It wouldn’t be implausible to me, if “the Clinton base” (again for lack of a better term; I do not imagine that either elite nor base belong to the Clintons anymore) bet that the country’s owners will want a return to more competent technocratic management after 4 years of the Donald Trump / Paul Ryan / Mike Pence clown show. In class terms, this “base” are drawn from the professional and managerial elite that outsource and finance and generally make miserable the lives of everyone else, feeling good about themselves the whole time because of their enlightened views on race and gender.

I don’t like to be a total pessimist about these things, but I don’t see how the economically dispossessed ever get organized, ever find even half-way competent leadership (and keep that leadership from being hired away) without some kind of epiphany occurring within the ranks of “the Clinton base” of professionals and middle-managers. I do not see how that happens; it is not in their class interest to dismantle the instruments of oppression that they themselves makes a good living administering and apologizing for.

bruce wilder

I do not think CT comments are a good place to carry on or rehearse partisan contests. We should take this opportunity to reflect intelligently on events and developments, not just make shit up.

If I make the following assertions:
(i) Human beings make choices;
(ii) Election outcomes are the result of choices made by human beings;
(ii) It makes a difference who wins elections;
which (if any) of the following do you think I’m doing?
(a) Carrying on or rehearsing partisan contests;
(b) Reflecting intelligently on events and developments;
(c) Making stuff up.

faustusnotes

“have at it” equals “do not abuse” and “reach out”??!

That is some reading comprehension fail you have going.

I do not have much respect for the Fox News addled brains that would vote for Trump, deducing from his 3rd grader’s vocabulary and stream of consciousness some bizarre expectation of competence in high and powerful office and if you want to abuse such morons for your own amusement, you will get little objection from me. These are politically stupid and ignorant people.

It was not my intention to argue that the campaign strategy of reaching out to dissatisfied Republicans — particularly suburban Republican women — caused her to become a neoliberal sellout. Her commitment to neoliberalism was long-standing, part of the third way DLC branding she and her husband pioneered more than twenty years ago. Her money making and fund raising activities are also notorious.

J-D

If you understand that i, ii, iii do not combine neatly as axioms for a deductive proof of rational and intentional collective choice by means of electoral politics, then (b) Reflecting intelligently on events and developments

“JimV’s smug assertions that one Party wants campaign finance and the other doesn’t or that one Party wants an Iran war and the other doesn’t flies in the face of the Democratic candidate’s circumvention of campaign finance laws and her very belligerent rhetoric on Iran.”

1) I take exeption to “smug”. I don’t like disagreeing with CT commenters and try to research their claims and only respond when my sense of fairness seems to demand it; and when I do I try to avoid personal insults.

2) I agree Democrats take full advantage of the present CF law and its gaming opportunities; however the implied contradition is a logical fallacy – similar to when Warren Buffet complained about unfairness in the tax system and some thought that “then why doesn’t he voluntarily pay more taxes?” was a valid rebuttal.

3) Here is what I consider a reasonable summary of HRC’s position on Iran:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-iran-sanctions_us_5728dc4ce4b096e9f08f46b3

“It’s impossible to say what effect Clinton would have had on the nuclear negotiations had she remained in office. Her allies suggest that her willingness to ramp up the pressure against Iran wouldn’t have precluded her from reaching an agreement with the long-time U.S. adversary — and actually might have pressured the Iranians to offer more concessions. Her detractors say that her approach would have presented political challenges for Rouhani to continue the talks and could have tanked the negotiations entirely.”

I personally prefer President Obama’s approach, and agree that there may be a character flaw involved. However, I do not consider it prima facie evidence of a disqualifying flaw.

4) I will refrain from further comments on this issue, but my silence will not imply consent.

Bruce it appears you don’t understand your own saracasm – that quote clearly says that you think that heaping abuse on Trump voters is counter-productive, i.e. that you favour reaching out to them.

We’ve been going over this accusation of yours for a year now but you still don’t have any evidence to support it. How is the woman who campaigned on a promise to defend and expand the biggest transfer of wealth from rich to poor in recent Democrat history a neoliberal sellout? Because of something her husband did 20 years ago? Is that all you’ve got?

faustusnotes

Bruce it appears you don’t understand your own saracasm – that quote clearly says that you think that heaping abuse on Trump voters is counter-productive, i.e. that you favour reaching out to them.

You are reasoning by false dichotomy.

I don’t think ‘heap abuse on Trump voters’ is a good strategic choice, but I also don’t think ‘be nice to Trump voters’ is a strategic priority. Avoiding one does not commit you to the other.

Anarcissie #95: “The military does not know ‘how things are going to transpire, and what the tipping points might be, and what actions might trigger them.’ They’re guessing like everyone else.”

Almost everybody already understands that the future is generally unpredictable. (On the other hand, some commenters here persist in the error that Hillary Clinton’s responses in the future are necessarily pre-programmed as the responses of a “corrupt neoliberal sellout warmonger”.) I pointed to something else: #83’s comment that it is “impossible to know in other than a probabilistic way”. When applied to a single event in Mosul, this might be false. (Further, the victims would not care to be told to exercise “intellectual humility”, so the response seems emotionally wrong as well.)

@117

If only you’d been around in 1911, there would have been a party you could have voted for!

“A million candidates rose up
To hoodwink honest people.
The electorate would give them votes
And they would gladly take them.
Let others call for violent progress,
By force, world order (to) overturn.
Moderate progress is our aim
And Jaroslav HaÅ¡ek is our man”

http://www.brnrd.net/blog/archive/2012/05/01/the-party-of-moderate-progress-within-the-bounds-of-the-law

As it is, you’re stuck with the Democrats, who aren’t nearly so amusing.

Hidari
You are mistaken. I can’t vote for the Democrats. I’m puzzled to know what made you think I could. Do you just assume by default that everybody you read is an American? That’s not sensible.

That said, I did put forward in an earlier comment what seems to me a good reason to vote Democrat (for those who, unlike me, are US voters); none of your remarks seem to me to cast doubt on the reasoning I outlined.

You also seem to have made the elementary mistake of confusing the invocation of a name with the performance of the action named. Jaroslav HaÅ¡ek and his fellow-pranksters used ‘moderate progress within the bounds of the law’ to title their party without doing anything to achieve any such progress; the fact that their mentioning it did not make it happen does not prove that it cannot happen. Some people (and perhaps you are one of them) imagine that nothing good can be achieved without revolution, and find comical any suggestion to the contrary; they may enjoy their mocking laughter, but it doesn’t prove them right.

Trump equals Hitler and all monsters must be destroyed.

“The “big fight is between nationalists and the West Wing Democrats,” said a person familiar with Bannon’s thinking.”

Trump isn’t conservative and he isn’t a ‘Republican.’ He’s a race-baiting, bombastic, rodeo-clown who’s still riding the bull.

Go figure.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/bannon-resign-mercer-trump-236939

@Suzanne HRC spoke often of her commitment to building up the party on the local and state levels, which had been neglected during the Obama years.

Back at his own blog, Corey Robin has written what I find a very perceptive commentary of the discussion of the role of intents in politics. Here is a sample quote (with Obama substituted by Clinton)

“(And again the same kind of discourse often dominated our discussions of [Clinton]: not on the field of action in which [s]he led, but on [her] deepest intentions and motives, what [s]he really wanted or not.) That just seems like an extraordinarily unhelpful—and from an Arendtian view, entirely apolitical and antipolitical—way of viewing things.”

I am not unaware that Obamacare is a mixed bag, so to speak, and regard the Medicaid expansion, where it has gone forward, as in my state, California, with administrative dispatch and good will, as among its best features (along with the legal constraints imposed on insurance companies regarding coverage of so-called pre-existing conditions and related measures).

Faustusnotes claims I ignore the shiny goodness of Obamacare — the surtaxes on high incomes used to finance the subsidies given to for-profit insurance companies features high on his list — when I attack Clinton as “a neoliberal sellout.”

I think I am attacking the politics (and economics) of neoliberalism, of which the Clintons are progenitors, organizers, advocates and exemplars. To read Faustusnotes’ polemical comments, one might think I was using the “neoliberal” label as an unfounded slander, rather than as . . . well, a label for a political pattern and tendency that has come to dominate centre-left ideology and policymaking for over thirty years or more (not incidentally symbiotically complementing a conservative libertarian right neoliberalism), during which time the Clintons have been among the most prominent neoliberal political leaders.

Obamacare is neoliberal policy, exemplifying neoliberalism’s emphasis on complex administrative apparatus to make “markets” (meaning profit-maximizing financialized corporate business) implement public policy and provide what would otherwise be public goods, incentivized (may the lord forgive my use of that bastard word) by government payments and tax subsidies, and studied indifference to fraud and corruption. There is a lot for a leftist to dislike in Obamacare, qua neoliberal policy.

Here’s the the thing about neoliberal politics and the lesser evilism of Hillary Clinton: it becomes very difficult to critique Obamacare from the left and be heard or acknowledged. In a less pathological political dynamic, Obamacare would be a stepping stone on the path to single-payer, as Lee A. Arnold hopes, but contra Arnold, Obamacare is not going to “automatically” lead to single-payer. The automatic machinery of neoliberal politics is designed to frustrate and subvert that political and policy-making progression, while continuing to create and conserve many, many opportunities for a parasitic financial sector to harvest the soylent green of what remains of middle-class and working class incomes.

Or, at least, that’s my view of it.

I do not think Obamacare can be fairly represented, on net, as a practically significant redistribution of income (and certainly not wealth, as Faustusnotes carelessly claims). First of all, Obamacare has been implemented in the context of an on-going and truly massive and accelerating redistribution of income upward, and away from labor and to capital, which has been on-going for 40 years and which neoliberalism has aided and abetted. Two aspects of that redistribution of income and wealth (especially wealth, since a significant aspect of this redistribution is the shift in share of national income away from labor and to capital, particularly financial capital). At best, Obamacare is a patch on a system that is rapidly becoming untenable as a result of the falling share of labor income (and rising share of financialized capital income) and the increasing concentration of income at the top. I say, “patch” advisedly, as Obamacare qua policymaking design, did very little that is credible to contain or reduce the costs (aka prices) of medical care in the U.S. or to improve the quality and effectiveness of delivered medical care judged from a socially-conscious public policy perspective. U.S. health care is, by developed world standards, very very expensive and is failing enough people that the U.S. may not even be maintaining life expectancy — that’s pretty bad.

For-profit health insurance plays a critical role in the dynamic that has made health care finance into a hotbed for control frauds in insurance, administration and the delivery of specialty care. Obamacare preserves and expands the scope of for-profit insurance. The vaunted subsidies go to the for-profit insurers, not directly to the insured. The vast majority of those in the individual insurance market will receive pretty much nothing in the way of health care services they do not pay for out-of-pocket, and the payments for health services provided to the unfortunate few who need a lot of care will go to the providers of health services; Medicaid puts limits on those payments; the for-profit insurance companies are notoriously lax or inconsistent about restraining abuses by health care service providers. Medicaid is being privatized in a number of states, so for-profit insurers can get a larger cut.

I do not want to get bogged down in a wonky discussion of health care policy. Wonky discussions are a neoliberal trope, by the way. When Ezra Klein or Paul Krugman get “wonky”, the shell game has gone into overtime and there’s no telling where the pea will disappear, except you are going to lose any bet you placed on their integrity or good will. Such is neoliberal advocacy.

One reason to use the neoliberal label is remind people of the 30 year pattern. I see a number of people on the internets trying to normalize Hillary Clinton as the most left, liberal good person (she thinks of the children!!!) evah, the hapless victim of right-wing slurs indistinguishable from left-wing slurs. The follow-up is trying to rationalize neoliberal corruption and subversion as incremental progressivism. We are making everything worse, crapifying everything, redistributing income and wealth upward, step-by-step. And, that moderated step-by-step descent, the ratchet that has moved left politics steadily toward the center, moved the center steadily toward the right and now toward the far right — that pattern is an excuse for “half-a-loaf” tropes of not making the perfect the enemy of the good. As if neoliberal descent is indistinguishable from the half-remembered liberal or progressive ascents of decades ago.

Bill and Hilary Clinton and the Clinton’s Democratic Party faction, blending neatly with Obama’s Democratic Party faction — Democratic Party neoliberalism in other words — has gone a long way to create the dystopia of runaway financial parasitism which is the American political economy in the Age of Trump. They did their part in enacting critical measures deregulating banking and finance, NAFTA, the dismantling of welfare aid to the poor and some of the signal reforms that have helped to give the U.S. the largest prison population in the world. Against that pattern, it is perfectly reasonable to question the meaning of what Hillary Clinton — or any neoliberal politician or pundit — says. Neoliberal ideology and its outcomes to date are essential context that gives what is said meaning.

Faustusnotes wants to deny the neoliberal label and to latch onto one or two aspects of Obamacare’s policy design in isolation and proclaim it a massive redistribution of income downward, when in the full context of the times, almost all economic growth during the economic recovery since 2008 has been transferred upward — a remarkably extreme result compared to earlier post-WWII economic cycles. And, even within the full context of the Obamacare policy design, the redistributive incidence is quite ambiguous, with a lot of funds being directed toward entities of parasitic Finance and predatory Medicine.

john c. halasz : “The lameness of calling the ACA the largest downward redistribution of wealth in recent memory speaks for itself.”

If it is so lame, then of course it will be easy for you to come up with a recent example of a downward redistribution of wealth which was larger. If you can’t, then I gather what you mean to say is that it was an accurate decription, just one that irritated you somehow.

bruce wilder

Here’s the the thing about neoliberal politics and the lesser evilism of Hillary Clinton: it becomes very difficult to critique Obamacare from the left and be heard or acknowledged.

Taken in isolation, ‘it is difficult to critique Obamacare from the left’ is trivially false; so it’s the ‘be heard or acknowledged’ part that’s key, and this leads inescapably to this question: who is that you want to hear or acknowledge those critiques but is not doing so? People are making those left critiques, there’s no doubt about that, and they are being read, too — but not by …? Please, fill in the blank.

I see a number of people on the internets trying to normalize Hillary Clinton as the most left, liberal good person (she thinks of the children!!!) evah

Even if it’s true that there are people who take this incorrect approach (and, yes, I know it’s incorrect), that doesn’t affect the merits of the argument that in the moment when you’re in the voting booth and have to choose, voting for the Democratic candidate is the best choice available. Voting is a chess move, not a love letter, and when you’re looking at the chessboard and have to make a move, complaining that you don’t like the position and wish you had a better one doesn’t help you with the decision that you actually have to make. You can’t work up any enthusiasm about voting Democrat? Then don’t feel enthusiasm, just vote, as quickly as you can, and get on with something better.

John c halasz, Obamacare is not the heritage plan – this alternative fact has been roundly debunked and yet here still people who claim to understand politics and public policy still regularly spout it. Please do us all the favour of researching basic facts before you spout them. The only thing it has in common with the heritage plan is the presence of a kind of exchange.

Obamacare has been around for several years now and was legislated over an 18 month period starting 7 years ago. Yet its left wing critics still don’t understand either it’s basic functions or its shortcomings, preferring instead to recycle lies from the pages of jacobin mag. Is this how you do policy analysis?

Bruce, it’s a plain fact that Obamacare is the biggest redistribution in a generation. This isn’t something you can dispute – numerically it simply is. Yet you give no credit to Obamacare or Clinton or the democrats for this achievement, instead preferring to pretend it’s not a redistribution at all because it isn’t single payer. I’ve observed repeatedly hereabouts that it’s not single payer because of a bunch of right wing dems in states that voted for trump were unable to accept that policy. But you consistently refuse to engage with the fact that a large portion of the us electorate – many in swing states – won’t tolerate that level of socialism. While assuring us sanders would have won those states. Go figure.

Also Obamacare is not exploding and the price rises are not unusual. Again, we have a supposedly educated and aware left wing critic of Obama recycling the worst right wing fallacies. Why don’t you even try to research these lies before you swallow them?

Actually Val, what Trump is doing in Syria is what many people in both parties, including Clinton, have been wanting to do for years. Obama came under heavy criticism for not intervening as his critics put it. In reality he poured money into arming Syrian rebels, but they wanted bombs. And Clinton has a long record of supporting interventions, like a great many Beltway types.

And here is a former Obama Administration official applauding Trump’s action —

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/opinion/after-the-missiles-we-need-smart-diplomacy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

I have never understood why this isn’t obvious to everyone. There are plenty of people in both parties that favor intervention and while there are many many reasons to criticize Trump, some of the criticism on foreign affairs came from people who were disappointed with Obama already and really hated Trump’s ( former) decision to stop trying to overthrow Assad. Well, the interventionists have won the battle for Trump’s tiny little mind as I suggested they would upthread. And if the intervention goes wrong, as all of our Mideast interventions do, the interventionist set has a ready made incompetent they can blame.

And guess who else called for the bombing of Syrian airfields?

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-hillary-clinton-idUSKBN179058

Just checking in to see if everyone is still arguing about Hillary Clinton

Val @ 135, you’re pretty much suggesting that if Sanders was a woman and Clinton a man, “Bruce and his ilk” would have preferred the economically right-leaning Democrat, or at the very least been much less critical of him.

That doesn’t gel with anything I’ve read from Bruce. I think he makes his political leanings clear, and they are not towards the pro-military, pro-wall street candidate who receives exorbitant fees to speak at bankers’ dinners.

Did Prime Minister Gillard ever speak at bankers’ dinners in Australia? I don’t know for sure, but because her politics are rather significantly to the left of Hillary Clinton’s, I have a strong suspicion she wouldn’t have been caught dead at one.

I also don’t remember Bruce advocating that anybody should vote for Trump. And maintaining your political beliefs over time doesn’t make them “an obsession.”

The only positive outcome from the 2016 US election was that a woman very convincingly won the popular vote. I have no doubt Bruce is as happy as anybody here about that fact, and what it signifies for future women contesting. The US is quite clearly ready and willing to elect a woman as President. I honestly don’t think that’s his gripe.

The liberal NYT is delighted that the US president launched a missile attack on a sovereign state in the Middle East declaring it ‘the right thing to do.’ That’s the first NYT headline in one hundred days praising the new president and somehow this puts the ‘change’ in precisely the right context.
The headline is one that has been used for Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump. So, it might have taken one hundred days for the tensions of the election to burn off a bit, but with Warren and Trump at least expressing willingness to break up the big banks (again to the praises of the NYT) we’re starting to see the clearer contours of a Trump presidency.
I’m surprised, frankly, that nobody has examined the first hundred days for what it is: the first few challenges of “Political Apprentice” in which a serious of contenders do their best to make to the next round.
Thanks to a relentless campaign by the media to demonize the president as the most inept candidate/president evah, a day when he manages to tie his shoelaces is the new metric for success. His enemies on the right (yes, Ryan and company still hate Trump’s guts) flail in the legislative branch as the more practically-minded Democrats in Trump’s inner circle – that would be Ivanka and Jared, ensure a more even road towards regulatory reform, and other issues.
Even Nick Kristoff has noticed that calling Trump supporters a bunch of racist bigots has done nothing but drive the wedges separating these voters from Dems even deeper.
So, the first hundred days looks exactly like the first hundred days of Trump’s campaign – a virtually unanimous chorus of experts serving up their view that every single thing the president does is wrong, just as candidate Trump was doing everything wrong. Until he won.
On first evidence Trump is off to an excellent start. The media has even less credibility in 2017 than they did in 2016. The geriatric Democratic leadership shows no sign of relinquishing power. Some continue to look to the Clinton’s for ‘leadership’ and the fact that so many still credit Russian hacking with the lost election confirms ‘more of the same’ is all Dems have to offer to voters who’ve just rejected exactly that.
It’s possible Trump’s numbers will go down, but they’ve already been pretty low. He’ll get a bump for doing what O only threatened to do – actually attack Assad for using chemical weapons. My guess is the media will continue to claim the president is already a lame duck and nobody will much care, especially Trump supporters. Should he find common ground with Warren on bank reform he’ll get an even bigger bounce. Then what?

Actually, I think Val has made a fair point about Hillary being the lesser of two evils. If Hillary and Donald Trump are ad idem on foreign policy, then it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Donald Trump is worse than Hillary Clinton, particularly if, as expected, he follows a neoliberal line in the NAFTA renegotiations.

bob mcmanus: “Wilder dealt with that a little, but in order to really say that, you would have to show actual redistribution in detail.”

This strikes me as petty weak. The law raised taxes on those with higher incomes and better health care employment benefits for the purposes of funding the expansion of Medicaid and paying a substantial portion of health care premiums for those with lower incomes who were not reached by the Medicaid expansion. It is on its face redistributive, and if you want to say it isn’t, I think the burden is on you to show the hidden factors that counteract its redistribution mechanisms. I think you will find this difficult to do.

Not that anyone asked me, but a word about ‘Lesser of Two Evils-ism’.

There was once a CT piece that was at least implicitly about Karl Kraus, so I take it that most people would have at least some ideas who he was…if not he was an Austro-Hungarian satirist. Often perceived to be on the Left. And, self-proclaimedly about the ‘cut and thrust’ of ‘normal’ politics. He coined the aphorism: ‘When asked to choose the lesser of two evils, I choose neither.’

Except, when push came to shove, he did. In Austria in he ended up supporting the anti-semite and dictator Dollfus in the 1930s, attacking those ‘Idealists’ who argued against it. These people, thought Kraus failed to realise that when push comes to shove you have to choose The Lesser of Two Evils. The ‘greater evil’ was Hitler. Only support for Dollfus could keep Hitler out.

And what happened?

First Kraus lost his entire moral reputation. As someone who had self-professedly stood above politics, he was now seen as someone who was just part of the game, another power-player who couldn’t be trusted.

Secondly he ended up, however ‘implicitly’, giving support to the brutal Dollfus, and thus helping to reconcile the Austrian intelligentsia to anti-semitism and authoritariainism.

And finally, it didn’t even work. Dollfus was assassinated, and of course Hitler marched in anyway.

And this, it seems to me, is where ‘Lesser-of-Two-Evilisism’, tends to lead. To begin with, by even playing that game, you morally compromise yourself. You tell yourself that you are not doing so (indeed, that you are taking some kind of ‘high moral path’) but you are doing what Sartre termed ‘getting your hands dirty’ to engage in ‘normal’ politics. Sartre agonised about how much this was necessary (and of course some would argue that Sartre himself went far too far in dirtying his own hands) but at least he was aware that by doing so you morally pollute yourself. It might be a necessary thing (or not) but it’s not a good thing. And you’re not a good person for doing it.

Secondly by getting people’s hopes and expectations down and helping them get used to immoral situations, more often than not it prepares the ground for the Greater Evil you told yourself you were trying to prevent.

And finally, again, more often than not, it doesn’t even bloody work. No matter how much you compromise and ‘sell out’, you frequently still end up getting the Greater Evil you told yourself your self-abnegation was going to stop.

Dollfus or Hitler? Khruschev or Stalin? A kind slave owner or a nasty slave owner? Of course you can always argue the toss, and give reasons as to why one is ‘less evil’ than the other. On another and deeper level I think a better question is: ‘who gives a shit’? What do you really care if the person who oppresses you is more or less evil than some other hypothetical person who would also oppress you?

In an American context, few people* would have the balls to take ‘Lesser of Two Evilsism’ (LOTE) to its logical end conclusion and argue that Martin Luther King should have devoted his life to putting kinder and more liberal people in charge of Jim Crow, but that’s where the logic leads.

I might also add that despite the regretful tone of those who pretend they don’t like playing that game (and would ‘really’ like to vote for someone good, but gosh who is there?) when someone who really stands outside the sordid political game comes on the scene, more often than not the LOTE gang band together and attack them with far greater savagery than they ever attacked the Greater Evil they sold their political souls to allegedly prevent.

* now. Of course a lot of white liberals spent the 1950s and 1960s telling MLK precisely that. That’s now quite how they phrased it (they claimed that of course wanted democracy in the South ‘but not just yet’ and only if MLK sharply differentiated himself from the ‘radicals’). But that’s what they meant.

Incidentally a reminder to those who have any faith left in America’s political system (and you really shouldn’t by now): Bernie Sanders’ comments* on Trump’s racist terrorist attack on Syria were fundamentally not really all that better than HRC’s blatherings.

*at time of writing.

= = = Layman@2:22: “It is on its face redistributive, and if you want to say it isn’t, I think the burden is on you to show the hidden factors that counteract its redistribution mechanisms. I think you will find this difficult to do.”= = =

The ACA also solidified the role of large health-claim processing corporations as gatekeepers and processors of health care dollars, limited their skimming from that cash flow a little bit while substantially expanding the pool of people who were required to use it and nominally making it illegal to not do so. The health-claim processing industry in the US rakes off a huge amount of the national wealth (I’ve seen estimates of 5% of GDP over and above the actual value of physically processing claims) and as with most industries over the last 30 years has transformed itself into a vehicle for enriching the 1%. For example, locally-operated Blue Cross mutual organizations being transformed into national profit-making corporations without paying a cent to their nominal owners in the process, whilst increasing chief executive salaries from $500,000/year to $200 million/year to “stay competitive on talent”.

I cannot say whether the net effect of enmeshing the health-claims processing industry, drug industry, hospital industry etc into a fantastically complex system (cf Duncan Black), one part of which includes Medicaid expansion, has had a net downward or net upward wealth distribution effect – doing so would require a very detailed and complex study that AFAIK does not exist and I doubt very much would ever be funded.

Had the ACA included reduction of full Medicare eligibility age to 55 + the Medicaid expansion, and had Roberts not gutted said Medicaid expansion, then it would clearly be a net win for the lower 67%. As it stands, not clear. Which isn’t to say that we aren’t somewhat better off with ACA than without it, but the gains are not as crystalline as claimed in this thread.

Clinton was flawed, but a better alternative than Trump

Neoliberalism v neofascism

But I get the impression a lot of media Clintonites have just decided Trump isn’t Hitler after all, now that he’s started killing people.

J-D @ 132

Why do you suppose people argue, not particularly about politics but including politics? Serious question, though I do not have an answer I find completely satisfactory. I am curious if you have considered any hypotheses while developing your understanding of politics and collective choice.

. . . who is [it] that you want to hear or acknowledge those critiques but is not doing so?

I think you can see the dynamic in microcosm on this thread. There’s a split on the left and not much generosity in interpreting interlocutors among those most determined to defend the record of the Obama-Clinton establishment.

the merits of the argument that in the moment when you’re in the voting booth and have to choose, voting for the Democratic candidate is the best choice available.

My objection to the Lesser Evil Argument has always been to the distorting psychological effect on the target’s political perceptions and appreciation. The LEA is a tactic in persuasion that I think has become pathological in the hands of neoliberals.

I have no problem with someone doing as you described, coldly assessing the choice in November and exercising personal judgment in choosing the Democrat and moving on, without much enthusiasm (because realistically there’s no cause for enthusiasm).

My objection to the Lesser Evil Argument begins with a demur to the notion that a vote is a morally significant choice presented to the individual. The connection to consequences, as I commented earlier, is so highly attenuated in so many ways that it is scarcely credible to rely on a speculative projection. If you are acting in solidarity and concert with a political movement of some kind, that changes the calculus; you are putting faith in the movement, and if the movement is large enough, the group acting in concert may affect the outcome of both the immediate election and other events to follow by concerted action. But, the Lesser Evil Argument is not addressed to collective movements in the sense of purposeful membership organizations; the Lesser Evil Argument is addressed to the individual perhaps thru that individual’s social identity, which is not the same as membership in a purposeful, formal organization. The Lesser Evil Argument is addressed — to leave aside the varnish — to people who are powerless and do not want to admit it, people who are trapped by decisions and choices made much earlier in the electoral process by others, and (this is vitally important) will be trapped by choices made much later by the elected and those who are politically organized and will continue to participate in political processes long after election day.

For those using it as a persuasion tactic, there are two important features to the LEA: one is that differences can be exaggerated or misrepresented in favor of one candidate by conventional means of broadcast marketing; the other is that the formula is laden with irony, an effective emetic for those nauseous with cognitive dissonance or other dissatisfactions.

Since the target of the LEA is not a member of anything and will be powerless after the vote is cast, the target is invited to resolve any doubts into differences with a net positive for the favored candidate and indulge in projective speculations that further reduce anxiety and doubt. It is a prescription for an inverted totalitarianism peopled by zombie voters. (Cf Sheldon Wolin)

– and to 157 –
if I may?

There is no ‘Lesser Evil Argument’ –
There is only the argument: ‘Don’t vote for the bigger idiot’ or you might be considered as big as an idiot as ‘the bigger idiot’.

@bruce wilder.

I also have deep misgivings about the lesser evil argument, on the grounds that it is morally corrupting. (E.g. In the uk, MPs who have pitched themselves to the voters as the Lesser Evil are on tricky ground when they try to oppose Ken Livingston, as theyve already argued that you should vote for someone you think is “evil” if they claim to be able to give you something you want).

However, I think the LEA is just as easily deployed to members of organozations. The way it goes is that the member is encouraged to remain a member, even thiugh they have deep misgivings about some of the organizations policies, on the grounds that this is the only way to get what you want.

@156
To the liberal elite*, Trump was Hitler when he wasn’t killing people (or at least saying that he wasn’t going to kill people).

Now that he’s killing people, he’s not Hitler any more.

HRC was never Hitler ‘cos she was always upfront that she was going to kill people.

*by which I mean those associated with the upper echelons of the NYT, the Guardian, the Clintonites in the ironically named ‘Democratic’ Party, and the Blairites in the ironically named ‘Labour’ Party.

Anarcissie

That has been said before. But sometimes when two choices are offered by the game, both are unacceptable. You have to start trying to break up the game.

If, by the time the next election comes round, efforts to break up the game have not yet achieved success, how are you going to choose (if you are a US voter) between the available choices: vote Democratic; vote Republican; vote for somebody else; don’t vote?

bruce wilder @ 158
“If you are acting in solidarity and concert with a political movement of some kind, that changes the calculus; you are putting faith in the movement, and if the movement is large enough, the group acting in concert may affect the outcome of both the immediate election and other events to follow by concerted action.”

I have always seen myself as part of a movement, or something which is bigger than me alone. Perhaps your problem is that you don’t, that you understand yourself as the ‘individual’ of liberal, neoliberal and libertarian ideology.

It’s meaningless. You are part of an ecosystem that encompasses society and community. The individual, as a comprehensive way of understanding society or politics, is a fallacy, even though a persistent one. It’s only ever a partial understanding.

I have always seen myself as part of a movement, or something which is bigger than me alone. Perhaps your problem is that you don’t, that you understand yourself as the ‘individual’ of liberal, neoliberal and libertarian ideology.

I rarely with Val but fwiw this is why I find about 80% of the ‘anti-managerial-financial-global-elite’ politics here annoying.

J-D

“I can’t see any evidence or any line of reasoning to support the conclusion that not voting Democratic in a US Presidential election produces better outcomes than voting Democratic.”

The majority of all voters (except 2004), fas well as the majority ofcentrist Democrats, and left Democrats have voted Democrat for 25 years. The long term outcome is Donald Trump.

The best outcomes along the way have been two, two-term centrists who have aggravated the carcarel state, the surveillance state, and the authoritarian military state, which is now in the hands of Donald Trump.

The more interesting question, since we’ve only ever tried voting Democratic in recent history, is how good is the evidence that it has worked better? Obviously, particular policies and candidates are better, but if the swings back to the right are worse, and the swings to the left often weaker, is that sufficient evidence?

FWIW, I’ve never remotely gotten the impression from BW’s posts that he is either liberal, neoliberal, or libertarian. My impression is quite the opposite. It seems a pretty surprising charge.

(Reminds me a bit of the Greenwald/Intercept weltanschauung, which I also respect as far as it goes)

There’s something almost paradoxical about the Lesser Evil Argument:

– If only a few voters think both candidates are “evil”, the candidates wouldn’t be bothering to deploy the Lesser Evil Argument: it would only win them a few votes, and possibly lose them some support

– But if a large portion of the voters think both candidates are “evil”: why didn’t a “non-evil” candidate get onto the ballot?

– A variant of this paradox: if there are three candidates, and one of two front-runners is deploying the LEA against the third. the very fact that that they’re deploying the LEA suggests that the third candidate has a substantial degree of support, contra to what the candidate deploying the LEA would have you believe.

So, Ok, it’s not quite a formal paradox, and there a several possible resolutions to it, but still.

One possible reaction to the LEA is that its a symptom of serious dysfunction in the organization, and that rather than choosing to vote A or vote C, what is called for is some political action over the earlier stages of the process by which candidates get on to the ballot on the first place.

@171 and 172
I wasn’t trying to be nasty to bw, or passive-aggressive, or suggest that he is the patriarchal enemy, or that he is a liberal, neoliberal or libertarian. I was suggesting something more like false consciousness, which wasn’t meant offensively. In fact I thought there was a certain pathos in his comment, as if he would have liked to experience solidarity.

The “problem” I was referring to was his perceived lack of political power, the sense that his vote doesn’t count for anything.

Practically, the reason bw’s vote mightn’t in fact count (if he wanted to vote for the Greens, say) is because of your first-past-the-post voting system. I’ve suggested before that might be the first thing to organise around, but it seems people think it’s too hard.

Also to be clear think Clinton and her cult followers amply deserve all the contempt CTers can muster; it’s the obsession with managers and neoliberalism (which takes the place of any thoroughgoing critique of capitalism) and the periodic shitting on the organised Left and Marxism in particular which rubs me up the wrong way.

_not beholden_

bruce wilder @ 175
Thanks for your detailed response. I’d be happy to try talking to you if you were prepared to at least try to understand what is wrong with terms like “identity politics”.

If you analyse your own comments, you will see that you set up a dichotomy where there are people like you (sensible rational people) on one side, and practitioners of “identity politics” on the other. It makes meaningful communication impossible.

Personally, I think the anti-HRC contingent has more of the markings of a cult than the pro- (they seem to believe a lot of things without good evidence, such as that she murdered people, or they dislike her because she doesn’t agree with their pure ideology); and that she is flawed but not evil. Off-hand I don’t know of any USA Presidents who haven’t been flawed. I am less sure of other countries but suspect that may be true of them as well. So for me it isn’t the choice of the lesser evil but the lesser flawed/more competent. I have been happier voting for other presidential candidates than for her, but I would roughly 100 times rather have her in office than Trump.

When I joined GE the Schenectady plant had 28,000 workers, mostly factory workers, with a strong and hostile union (IEEE) which went on strike for one to six months every three years when their contract expired. When I left the plant had 4000 workers, and was one of the only two remaining stream turbine plants out of the seven that had existed. This was one department of GE, and not the one hit hardest. NAFTA exacerbated the process, but Welch made more than half his cuts before NAFTA. The jobs were outsourced to Germany, Japan, and South Korea; only the last lot went to Mexico. Conventional wisdom at GE prior to Welch was that you plowed your profits back into Research and Development. R&D was Welch’s #1 place to start cutting.

Which is to say, short-sighted management and short-sighted unions accounted for much of GE’s contribution to the lack of good jobs, and Welch’s methods became popular in other large companies. I’m not sure what the government could have done to recognize and prevent this before it was too late, given our society’s prediction for capitalism; or what it will do about it now. Those factory jobs are not coming back. (Infrastructure spending would be a good start; but current indications are that the only infrastructure Trump wants to fund is military.)

Bruce Wilder:

the Parties are not the same by any means, but neither Party establishment is willing to respond adequately or proportionately to the economic interests or needs of their electoral constituencies

Here he carefully ignores Obamacare, the greatest redistributive program in generations. But Obama’s democrats were not “willing to respond adequately” to the economic interests of their constituency.

On Obamacare, Cranky Observer observes crankily that

The ACA also solidified the role of large health-claim processing corporations

and goes on to describe the problems this causes. This is certainly an aspect of Obamacare that is a problem, and other countries with multiple insurers (e.g. Singapore and Japan) tend to manage this by rigorously regulating the activities of those insurers. But this isn’t a fault that Obama could just solve overnight, or that Clinton will solve in the immediate future, because there is no constituency in America for regulation of private insurers to the extent required. Obama could never pass this idea – or single payer – past the Blue Dog Democrats, so complaining that Obamacare doesn’t do this is the same as complaining that Americans don’t like socialism. We know that, but it is the preference of the brocialists hereabouts to pretend that there is a big appetite for this in the USA, and only Clinton stands between the socialist masses and their inevitable victory. This might be a nice story but it’s irrelevant to the reality, which is that a large slab of the American population – probably the majority – don’t like government interfering in their healthcare because of Freedumb. As we have seen from the staggering ignorance on display here, understanding healthcare policy is difficult and it’s very easy for the Republicans and Fox news to scare middle class Americans into believing that things we in the rest of the world think of as normal are the first step to granny being forced in front of a death panel.

When I see a coherent plan for how to fix that from any of the brocialists on here, then I might be a little more receptive to their obssessive whining about Killery. In the meantime, blaming the lesser evil for the fact that Americans have no appetite for Actual Good is unproductive at best. Which brings us to hidari with this gem:

In an American context, few people* would have the balls to take ‘Lesser of Two Evilsism’ (LOTE) to its logical end conclusion and argue that Martin Luther King should have devoted his life to putting kinder and more liberal people in charge of Jim Crow, but that’s where the logic leads.

I suspect few people would have the balls to do this because a) half of all people have no balls and b) it’s complete bullshit. It was easy for Martin Luther King to advocate abolishing Jim Crow because he had a supportive constituency, and Jim Crow laws are easy to confront by simply breaking them. There is no constituency to regulate the big insurers, or to have the government negotiate drug prices en bloc, or to have a single payer health insurance system, and even if there was you won’t get that constituency’s goals enacted through MLK style activism because there are no laws to break and no confrontations to be had. You get these things through slow, careful attention to policy-making, compromise, defending established gains, and winning small battles. i.e. through lesser evilism and managerialism.

Of course this kind of process isn’t macho, it doesn’t involve masked men on the barricades, there is no role for beardy theorists with entourages of young radicals willing to die for a cause. In short, it’s women’s work. And we’ve seen clearly over the past year what the brocialists think of women’s work. They don’t want to do the hard, slow, boring work of dragging Americans to a sensible position on bland, boring issues like who should regulate drug prices. They want to storm the barricades and throw it all down and start again with socialized medicine and health insurance executives hanging from lamp posts. Everything they want to see is the antithesis of an old woman working carefully to make compromises that will improve the health of millions by incremental change.

And since there’s no one in America who agrees with them on what should be achieved, they want to blame their failure on the old woman who has made it her life’s work to change America piece by careful piece.

Cian @ 185
“Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because of lesser evilism, or purity. She lost because she was a bad candidate who couldn’t motivate working class, black and lower middle class voters to turn out.”

Always useful to remember that the very slight differences (in proportional terms) that you are talking about could have been caused by simple old sexism. America has one of the lowest rates of female representation in politics of all wealthy countries, though Americans here don’t seem very willing to reflect on that.

pro- or anti-Clinton camps is a barrier to useful discussion (engels please note)

But like it or not, that’s the fault line in this tedious, never-ending debate. Should ‘leftists’ support HRC as the ‘lesser evil’ in the face of Trump?

In the blue corner: you, js, rnb, layman, …
In the red corner: wilder, puchalsky, lupita, abb1’s various avatars, …

@188

‘ You get these things through …. compromise…’

Yes of course. Always through compromise. Compromise after compromise after compromise.

‘Of course this kind of process isn’t macho, it doesn’t involve masked men on the barricades, there is no role for beardy theorists with entourages of young radicals willing to die for a cause. In short, it’s women’s work. ‘

Golly.

Always useful to remember that the very slight differences (in proportional terms) that you are talking about could have been caused by simple old sexism.

The US is a sexist, classist, racist country with a deeply unrepresentative, corrupt and undemocratic political system, where voter suppression is tacitly accepted. You might want to look at institutional problems first, rather than assuming voter sexism for this problem. Just a thought.

JimV: Personally, I think the anti-HRC contingent has more of the markings of a cult than the pro- (they seem to believe a lot of things without good evidence, such as that she murdered people, or they dislike her because she doesn’t agree with their pure ideology)

I have yet to meet any anti-HRC person on the left who believes she murdered people.

And yes, disliking a candidate because they have a different ideology to yours is called POLITICS. Hillary Clinton is not on the left, she’s a neoliberal centrist. Strangely, people who are not neoliberals DO NOT LIKE HER POLITICS. Any more than Hillary Clinton supporters like the politics of Paul Ryan. Is this really hard to understand? Is it really necessary to make asinine arguments about purity?

J-D,

“Or, if you do not want to compare the outcomes of Democratic Presidencies with the outcomes of Republican Presidencies, why not?”

I want to include *all* outcomes, particularly *long term* ones, which includes the way Democratic failures reinforce successes of the far right.

The question, and I don’t claim to answer, is: which is a better long term strategy?
1) continue doing what has failed, for 25 years, to prevent both the rightward lurch and frequent success of ever more dangerous right wing politicians, as well as prevent the rightward drift of the left party. I.e., actively support things getting worse more slowly on the untested assumption that the alternative would be worse still.
2) strategically boycott the Democrats and build a competing party to force them to reform or replace them.

Frankly, they both seem equally hopeless to me, but it’s not at all obvious that (1) is less hopeless.

“Any suggestion that people voting Democratic is the primary or principal cause of Donald Trump becoming President would be either so shamelessly dishonest or so grotesquely deluded that it would have the effect of making serious discussion impossible.”

No one suggested anything remotely of the kind. Here’s a story:

Shitty Cola named their product for its two ingredients: soda and dog excrement.
Their competitor Shit Cola named theirs less accurately: its only ingredient is dog excrement.

Consumers decided to organize to encourage everyone to buy Shitty. After all, Shit was clearly worse, and maybe with success, the makers of Shitty would decide to reduce their shit to Cola ratio.

For a while Shitty took off, but then began to increase its excrement content. over time it began losing customers. Some thought they should cut the shit, but they decided to change the message instead with a new ad campaign: “we’ll cut the shit if enough of you buy it.”

Their competitor responded with a new ad: “unlike our competitor, we give you exactly what we promised: shit.” They quickly cornered the market.

Question: did the campaign to promote Shitty Cola–in contrast to, say, a boycott–contribute causally to the success of Shit Cola?

nastywoman – I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I find your posts incomprehensible.

Cian – that’s fine – as I finally find posts about why Hillary lost – incomprehensible.

Nastywoman – you misunderstand me. It’s not that I don’t understand how somebody could hold your beliefs – it’s that I don’t understand what your beliefs are, or what you’re arguing for. They just seem to be angry streams of consciousness about…something.

I find it fascinating that people like wilder and cian claim not to oppose Clinton for sexist reasons while judging her adequacy as a candidate by her husbands actions in 1994 and not the policies she campaigned on in 2016.

I also note that today the “equally evil” trump is going to reintroduce mandatory minimums and the criminal justice policies of the 1980s. So I find the crocodile tears about clintons husbands policies of 20 years ago a little too melodramatic.

And I wonder where is this mass movement for single payer? You talk about it but where are its marches and rallies, it’s barricades and newspapers and graffiti slogans and angry young representatives being misrepresented on Fox News? It’s a remarkably invisible movement, which might mean it’s ineffective and useless (perhaps because the ct brocialists are running it?) or might be because it doesn’t exist … And the brocialists are confusing “polls I agree with” with “mass movement”. Hint: the only mass movement of the last few years was BLM, and you all hate them for being obsessed with identity politics.

Arnacissie @ 203
“My single vote has not, to my knowledge, ever decisively altered the outcome of any election or referendum in which I have participated, nor does it seem likely to; …”

I’ve been puzzling a lot over this and similar statements by you and others. At first glance it seems like a form of heightened individualism, as if you think your vote is somehow ‘special’. I’ve seen a lot of sarcasm about this at places like LGM and Balloon Juice.

However, according you a bit more respect, it could be either:
a) you don’t understand the nature of representative democracy (seems unlikely)
b) you prefer some other form of governance (seems likely given your nom)

If b), maybe you would like to expand a bit? It would be more useful than the remarks above, which are irrelevant to an actual election in a representative democracy. What system do you actually want?

The Greens here, when I was a member, often used a system of consensual decision making. It has good and bad points, though I don’t quite see how it could apply to large scale politics like an American election.

However even in a consensual decision making form of governance – even in one that worked in practice as it should in theory – your individual view or voice would not count any more than anyone else’s, which might mean you would never get exactly what you want. In any form of collective decision making, that can happen.

So perhaps you could clarify what you want and how it would work?

In the meantime, when you are talking about current American elections, I note again that the first post the past system does disempower individuals much more than transferrable or proportional systems – other than that, however, your comments about your individual vote seem misguided and irrelevant to the situation actually being discussed.

Anarcissie

You write that ‘the collective choice of a multitude is arrived at differently from the choice of a single individual even though they affect each other’. If that is true, it seems to follow that your single choice affects the collective choice of the multitude; why would you not consider that to be a practical effect of your vote?

You also write that ‘the routine practice of voting might be useful in that it offers a mild threat to the ruling class which could become significant if they seem, to the people, to have become unusually predatory, corrupt, or inefficient’. Is that in practice one of your reasons for voting, and if you vote for that reason, how do you decide whom to vote for?

You also write that ‘voting does offer the possibility of increasing the vote for small-party candidates, which might indirectly affect other political processes of interest to me’. Why would you not consider that to be a practical effect of your vote? and do you actually and not just hypothetically vote for small-party candidates and, if not, why not?

@206
‘you misunderstand me’

That could be the problem? –
as I’m mainly posting about Trump and one time about ‘these Hobson’s things’ – and you are mainly posting about Hillary Clinton and your believes about Russia and that you ‘have no idea what Val -(a woman?) means – and you want to be enlightened ‘about what female socialists think of women’s work’.

Now I consider myself to be a bit of a ‘female socialist’ but also try very hard to be a bit of a ‘comedian’ and so let me repeat what another (perhaps) ‘socialist’ ‘female comedian said:
“There are plenty of people who won’t tune in because a woman’s voice bothers their eardrums. Their ear canals can’t handle the sound of my shrill voice talking at them about a subject.“

– and that wasn’t ‘angry’ -(as you might misunderstand?)
That was ‘funny’!

And about womens ‘work’ –
“What is the point of encouraging little girls to dream big if any career puts them in the path of boob honkers? There’s not a workplace on land or sea or even at the bottom of a big deep hole in the ground where we’re actually keeping women safe. … Wouldn’t it be so nice if they could go to work without carrying bear spray? Except for the park ranger…

– and that wasn’t angry either – It was hilarious and so finally:

‘America is still a great country and it is still worth fighting for. It has Shonda Rhimes shows and peanut butter and Beyoncé and Lin-Manuel Miranda rap-weeping at awards shows, and it has the beautiful U.S. constitution, which we should probably start teaching in schools. We still get to take pride in the peaceful transfer of power. And if Ms. Rodham’s not in the White House that’s okay — one of those girls is going to be. We still have millions of Nasty Women who aren’t going away,“…

Cian, if you don’t trust politicians and their promises you will always be deceived and fooled by politicians, who typically do what they say they’re going to do, to the best ability they’re able.

I didn’t believe Hillary when she was making promises that were inconsistent with things she had said and done in a long political career. Particularly when those promises were made in a campaign against an insurgent candidate from the left of the party. I believed her when she made promises that were consistent with her career. She just wasn’t promising anything I wanted.

I didn’t hold any opinion on what Trump would do, other than it would be fairly authoritarian and stupid, because he was clearly saying the first thing that came into his head. The man’s pavlovian – if it gets a cheer he’ll repeat it. Which probably means we’re now going to have 8 years of pointless cruise missile strikes now that liberals have declared this latest bombing ‘presidential’.

The irony of Trump is that after all the sound and noise we have a fairly typical Republican in power, albeit a particularly incompetent one. A typical Republican is an awful thing these days, but I’d rather have an incompetent one. And given Hillary couldn’t even defeat Trump, maybe we should be glad that one of the more competent Republicans didn’t get in.

And dude, Obama carried out mass deportations.

And if you dig around a little in the last year I think you’ll find plenty of commentary from Bruce Wilder and Puchalsky and McManus about how terrible BLM is for focusing on black issues and not class, and sneering asides about where were all those black people when the cops were being violent towards occupy protesters. The veneer of concern-trolling is paper thin in those comments. Hence my comment. Boo for you if you weren’t so contemptuous.

Despite your insinuations, most people on the left who did not like Clinton supported BLM. Sure there were some criticisms, but that’s normal.

faustusnotes,

My memory may be faulty, but this sounds egregiously, offensively false. I can’t imagine any of these posters sneering about BLM or calling them terrible.

“And if you dig around a little in the last year I think you’ll find plenty of commentary from Bruce Wilder and Puchalsky and McManus about how terrible BLM is for focusing on black issues and not class, and sneering asides about where were all those black people when the cops were being violent towards occupy protesters.”

In general, my experience has been:
Hillary liberals are mostly critical of BLM, to varying degrees.
The Sanders-left is mostly supportive, to varying degrees.

This was also reflected in their Hillary and Sander’s responses to BLM protestors–both made very uncomfortable and a little angry, but Sanders let them speak.

Obviously it varies by individual case, but FN’s overall characterization is certainly false.

Given how often FN mischaracterizes those he disagrees with, I no longer have any confidence that it’s unintentional.

@Yan My memory may be faulty, but this sounds egregiously, offensively false. I can’t imagine any of these posters sneering about BLM or calling them terrible.

Your memory is not faulty. In fact, since Rich Puchalsky is not around to set the record straight himself, I’ll quote him from the thread Thoughts on Charleston here at CT.

If we’re going to honor this church, let’s at least honor Black Lives Matter, which they seem to have been involved with in some way and which is the closest thing to a mass movement that the U.S. has right now.

in the same thread he quotes very approvingly of BLM’s platform of shifting from law enforcement to issues of poverty and education. The following is from his own blog in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election.

If you’re not [into electoral politics], join […] the local chapter of BLM or something else. Stop putting your personal energy into organizations that will disempower you and start putting them into ones in which your allies are your actual allies.

That’s some nasty sneering right there from you, Rich! And since we are apparently talking about him, I recall that he was one of the very few person here who clearly and consistently articulated the risk of invoking the existential danger of a fascist takeover every election year while doing business-as-usual politics the rest of the time, his only mistake being that he was right sooner than he himself expected; a small one compared to the vast majority of us here (including me) who were talking of demographic changes ensuring permanent majority and landslide victories right into November.

jch, it’s always seemed to me that faustusnotes has been looking for a job, a comfortable sinecure somewhere in the back offices of the DLC’s Disinformation Subcommitee, if indeed there really is such a thing. Then again, hard as he (or, it must be said, I suppose, she) works at it, maybe he/she already has one — with an armband and Facebook page as recompense, no doubt, as outfits like that tend not to pay very much.

Ah, well…. I used to think that villainy had to be subtle to be effective, but if modern political discourse teaches us anything, it’s that villainy in the modern age can work well enough if it’s merely loud, indefatigable, and inordinately proud of itself. The bantam rooster on a dunghill has no need of a public relations consultancy — an audience of the disaffected, however small — and deaf — is all that’s required.

Vis a vis the interminable HRC misogyny debate I was wondering if anyone saw this:

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/march/trump-clinton-debates-gender-reversal.html

Not saying I agree with it, just adding something more to the pot.

In this one thread we can see McManus saying that Clinton isn’t a real leftist because she “let” her daughter marry a rich banker, that the democrats lost because of feminism, we have another brocialist (Engels I think) saying he wants to see a real left wing party, not one that focuses on sexism and racism, we have hidari claiming the alt right are anti war. This is post election so it’s after the worst of the heat and light died down; in not going to bother going further back to find the thread where rich puchalsky and I argued about how blm are an identity movement because if they were serious they would have supported occupy (and comparing police violence against the occupy movement with police violence against black people!) or the many long, pointless arguments between Val and wilder about how the dems are useless because they’re obsessed with “identity”.

I’ve already done a lot of your homework for you on this thread helping you to understand basic details about the ACA, which you criticize trenchantly though you appear to know nothing about it. I don’t see why I should do your homework for you on identity politics and your own vociferous contribution to the Clinton is evil don’t vote canon. You all know what you said and the positions you influenced the campaign on, and we can all see now the consequences of sneering at voting for the lesser evil. But at least thanks to your fine contributions to political debate the bankers no longer have power in Washington, and then warmongers have been kept away from the red button – right?

engels

Anarcissie is referencing a stupid economics “proof” that no individual vote counts

Easy for you to refute if you disagree: give some examples of recent elections which were decided by one citizen’s vote (Supreme Court judges don’t count…)

Gangway! Knowledge coming through!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results
http://mentalfloss.com/article/59873/10-elections-decided-one-vote-or-less

Earlier at 211 cranky observer asked (rhetorically I guess):

if the Affordable Care Act was the best achievable legislation and congruent with so many goals of the Democratic Party why did essentially the entire Democratic congressional corps run so hard away from it in 2010?

Which I would like to answer since I think it tells us a lot about the political landscape.

In 2010 the law was passed but hadn’t been enacted – that started in 2013. So the dems weren’t being punished over that two years on the basis of its effects but its ideology. The republicans attacked it viciously in all their media outlets for the entire two year period, but they attacked it on ideological grounds from the right. Except perhaps in Jacobin there was very little complaint from the left, it wasn’t attacked for being too neoliberal and not having single payer. The dems weren’t running from angry news about the paucity of its subsidies or the iniquity of competition on the exchanges. It was attacked for being socialized medicine, death panels, the government deciding your treatment, it was too expensive, too much regulation. The mandate and the Cadillac tax were flogged ruthlessly. All its most socialist components were used to scare democrat voters in democrat districts. The problem the dems faced in passing health reform is that their voters are vulnerable to neoliberal criticism of their policies but not to socialist criticism. They know that to win they have to keep their white working and middle class voters engaged but those voters are implacably opposed to socialism.

If you don’t agree with this assessment of the political landscape then you can’t answer cranky observers question. But if you accept this then you have to acknowledge single payer has no serious constituency in the us and you also have to acknowledge that appealing to those “white working class” voters is going to make the dems less radical, not more radical. So ask yourself how you can have a political movement that eschews “identity politics” and doesn’t “pander” to “minority ” issues (like feminism ha) to please these people, but also has any radicalism in its platform? Because the compromises made on Obamacare suggest you can’t, and while the electoral college and the senate are stacked in favour of the whitest, most neoliberal electorates, you’re never going to get socialism or single payer.

So how are you going to make the dems more radically left wing knowing that that project will alienate the people they need to vote for them?

john c. halasz

The claim that lesser evil arguments don’t exist because no politicians explicitly campaign on them is naive to the point of stupidity.

Nobody has made that claim in this discussion. You’re making that up. Why?

@232:

I’m not going to re-read the entire thread, but yes, that claim was mooted somewhere above. Sorry, I’m not just making sh*t up.

No lurker, that is not my problem. I don’t live in the USA, I live in a country with single payer and would do my best to avoid living in a country without UHC. I would really like Americans to vote for the lesser evil so that you don’t destroy the earth through your reckless stupidity. Hence the concern trolling. Your idiotic debates about whether maybe the republican conman will be to the left of the earnest democratic lesser evil are a simple example of how dumb your politics is, and why the rest of the world is despairing of having to deal with the fallout of your stupidity.

@237

My understanding is that Chomsky only argued that one might want to vote for HRC only in ‘swing’ states. In ‘safe’ seats you should ‘vote for the … third party candidate you prefer, or not vote at all.’

That’s a bit different from the blanket ‘everyone must vote for HRC’ position.

https://chomsky.info/an-eight-point-brief-for-lev-lesser-evil-voting/

@236
‘Your idiotic debates about whether maybe the republican conman will be to the left of the earnest democratic lesser evil are a simple example of how dumb your politics is, and why the rest of the world is despairing of having to deal with the fallout of your stupidity.’

Well – Hey!! – there is a statement me too -(living mostly outside of teh homeland) wholeheartedly can agree with.

Where I reside – and a few thousand miles around it the people vote for what they think and believe is ‘the best politician’ – and a lot of these voters also might have this simplistic and dumb attitude that ‘all politicians are evil – or think – like supposedly – the majority of
my fellow Americans that ‘teh gubernment’ is their enemy – but still – voters vote for ‘the best choice’ –

And who came up with this stupid and demented idea of ‘the lesser evil’?

Chomsky’s version of the ‘lesser evil’ policy is very hard to argue with imo and every lefty I can think of IRL (i.e. not on CT) would endorse it.

@232, @234: See @183. (Apologies if this becomes redundant while awaiting moderation.)

Google’s ngram shows that ‘lesser evil argument’ has been around for a long time; usage is fairly steady between 1800 and now.

My favorite is the one with the picture of Satan and the legend ‘Why settle for the lesser evil?’

#230 I don’t really agree with any of your assessment of the political landscape, so the idea that this tells us anything about socialism and its chances (whatever that’s supposed to mean) stries me as dubious.

The reason the healthcare law did badly was because it was complex, wonky and confusing. In addition it contained the kind of market mechanisms that centrist liberals in the US like, but which are politically toxic. And because it involved a market, it required all kinds of enforcement mechanisms that were always going to be a hard sell.

In particular it forced people to buy insurance. Nobody likes being forced to buy something from a private company, particularly when that thing is expensive and the companies are loathed. Secondly the lost union support with the Cadillac tax (again very obvious, very predictable – and something the genius wonks said wouldn’t be a problem).

Then on top of this, because the Democrats SUCK at politics (we’ve just had yet another demonstration this week with the fillibuster), they allowed the Republicans to control the message. Instead of making it about how we’re going to force Insurance companies to sell decent products, they allowed the Republicans to turn it into a debate about how “you’re going to lose your insurance”. Even the death panels thing was an unforced error gleefully seized upon by the Republicans.

The dominant wing of the Democrat part are obsessed with two types of policy that are deeply unpopular all over the world. Complex, bureacratic, market mechanisms – and means testing. The fact that they cling to these mechanisms (neither of which work well) is pure ideology. The compromises in Obamacare exist because it’s a ‘fake market’ based solution. And ‘fake market’ based solutions are always complex and byzantine.

Incidentally, people on lower incomes who’ve had to use Obamacare also don’t like it much as they can’t afford to use the thing. The deductables basically make it useless for people on low incomes. But gotta have that skin in the game, right?

Medicare for All is a popular suggestion. I live in a deep red state and I now regularly hear Republicans ask why this isn’t an option. People know what it is, people who have it like it. Older people are often desperately hanging on until they get it. There are even easy first steps – it would be very cheap to put everyone under the age of 28 on Medicare, as the young are cheap to insure (and it would do wonders for job mobility).

One of the major reasons that the US government is so stacked with Republicans, is that half the population don’t vote. The reason that they don’t vote is that don’t think the Democrats are offering them anything. Some might see that as a huge political problem/opportunity to be addressed.

@226 FaustusNotes
Your summary of what people said in that thread is completely inaccurate. At best it’s a very simplistic rendering of nuanced arguments – Hidari for example merely observing that the Alt-Right tend to make anti-war statements, stating “I don’t know what to make of this…perhaps it’s just meat for the dogs: after all, even Hitler portrayed himself as a ‘man of peace’ at times”. Whereas you accused hidari of claiming the alt right are anti war. Engels made a pretty standard socialist argument for focusing on feminist issues from a class perspective – and one which is shared by many feminists (how do I know this – well partly because I read feminists). And McManus was demanding that the Democrats focus on the issues faced by poor women, rather than the barriers faced by elite women. As in, focusing on the issues faced by most women, rather than a tiny minority. One can disagree with any, or all, of these issues. But they are manifestly not the sexist, or racist, arguments that you are making them out to be.

At this point I can’t tell if you are just dishonest, or you just are unable to grasp nuance in arguments. Either way you’re seriously blowing any credibility you might have with these kinds of stunts. Argue with what people actually say, rather than these flimsy strawmen you keep creating.

Faustus notes:

“The reality is that in America the people most likely to support single payer are your “social justice warriors””

This is not true. 58% of all Americans and 41% of Republicans support it:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-funded-healthcare-system.aspx

On a related note, here’s a room full of Trump-voting WV miners cheering for universal healthcare:
https://trofire.com/2017/03/15/amazing-bernie-convinces-room-full-w-v-trump-voters-cheer-universal-healthcare/

@251
– ‘i blame her’

I did too – that she did ‘win’ against Bernie I voted for – and so I never could blame her for losing against Von Clownstick.

How can anybody blame ‘the loser’?
Is that one of these crazy things – like supposedly voting for some ‘lesser evil’?

Cian, I don’t think you are being fair to faustusnotes. I agree he is overstating his case, but I suggest he is understandably exasperated with a group of people on CT who keep misrepresenting HRC. They did it in the election and they are still doing it now.

It is well known that one form of sexist bias is to exaggerate the failings of women and exaggerate the strengths of men. This is one reason I suggest sexism is operating here, though I feel there may also be other, more unpleasant reasons too.

There is clear evidence, presented repeatedly at LGM for example, that the public got a negative view of Clinton based on relatively minor failings like email management. Whether the repeated attacks on her from the ‘left’ in social media contributed to her losing the election (particularly by potential Democrat voters staying home) I can’t say for sure, and absent really comprehensive high quality qualitative research, I doubt you or anyone else can either. But it certainly seems possible.

I reckon a lot of people involved in these debates are being less than honest, and it annoys me a lot, because Trump winning the election is a really serious matter with potentially disastrous consequences for climate change and social justice, amongst other things, which don’t only affect Americans. So I can understand faustusnotes getting fed up.

we have another brocialist (Engels I think) saying he wants to see a real left wing party, not one that focuses on sexism and racism

And here’s what I said;

identity politics isn’t the same thing as feminism, anti-racism, LGBT politics, etc. They’re all needed now more than ever. What we don’t need more of imo is a particular liberal/middle-class form of those things with particular assumptions (meritocratic and individualist), epistemology (strongly subjectivist) and rhetorical style (which often aims humiliating opponents from a position of relative knowledge/status rather than verbal engagement)

HTH

Oh noes! Unfairness to the honorable faustusnotes!

Cian, I don’t know how long you’ve been around, but don’t worry. If anything, you’re being far to kind to FN. Outrageously brazen strawmanning is his standard procedure. It’s so frequent and over the top, I have a hard time believing FN totally lacks self awareness about it, and suspect it’s an intentional strategy. Maybe he enjoys seeing people respond seriously to characterizations he doesn’t even believe.

Val, Faustusnotes accused them of being racist and sexist because they didn’t share his opinion of Hillary Clinton. That’s beyond dishonest and moving into libelous. And what you characterise as ‘misrepresentation’, I’d describe as a ‘disagreement’. If you read Doug Henwood’s book on HRC, or the excellent ‘False Choices: The Faux Feminism of HRC’ that was put together by feminist critics of HRC, you’ll see that there’s some pretty solid evidence backing up these opinions. One can disagree of course, but it’s hardly groundless.

It is well known that one form of sexist bias is to exaggerate the failings of women and exaggerate the strengths of men. This is one reason I suggest sexism is operating here, though I feel there may also be other, more unpleasant reasons too.

Maybe. I’ve always thought that Bill Clinton was an unprincipled sleazeball/possible rapist and that John Kerry was an airhead. If I had to choose one of them (and I’d rather not) I’d choose HRC. She is very good at backroom politics, and creating political machines. Taken for what it was, a patronage machine, the Clinton Foundation is an impressive achievement. However, she seems to be a bad manager, has dreadful political instincts and is a terrible campaigner. She is a formidable power broker, but is a terrible politician. The signs were all there in the campaign she ran in 2008 – that was mismanaged and profligate. Then in 2016, having apparently learnt nothing from that debacle, she ran an equally bad campaign repeating many of the mistakes from the first time round. In another year she might have overcome these things – but 2016 was always going to be a difficult one for establishment politicians.

I don’t think it’s sexist to point these things out. I think a lot of older people, particularly women, have (understandably) so much invested in the idea of the first female president that they don’t want to admit/see these things. As an example of this is the email thing. Even people in her campaign didn’t believe it

The ‘clearest’ evidence I’ve seen is that HRC lost because of lower voter turnout among black and low income voters in swing states. Some of which she didn’t campaign in. The turnout on the left was no different from any other election. Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary mostly voted for HRC in the election. The reasons for low turnout ‘seem’ to be due a combination of two things:
+ Massive voter supression by the Republicans (which the Democrat party, and HRC in particular, have been largely silent on).
+ low income/minnority Voters not seeing anything in HRC’s manifesto that they wanted to vote for. Or in many cases even knowing what she stood for. This is based solely on journalist’s interviews before, during and after the election (I’m not aware of any academic research on this unfortunately), but it seems consistent with the research generally on voter preferences.

I reckon a lot of people involved in these debates are being less than honest, and it annoys me a lot, because Trump winning the election is a really serious matter with potentially disastrous consequences for climate change and social justice, amongst other things, which don’t only affect Americans.

Val, we have just seen a total rout of the Democrats at every level of the political system. We saw a presidential campaign that did _not_ campaign in critical swing states. In a year when Republicans are deeply unpopular, against a presidential candidate who breaks records for unpopularity and distrust, they could not win.

And how do HRC supporters react? They blame Putin with Fox News style conspiracy theories. They blame Bernie Sanders. In fact they will do anything rather than critically examine what HRC might have done wrong – and maybe think about how to reverse this catastrophic rout. While the decline of DLC style liberalism was probably inevitable post-2007 – such an utter intellectual collapse was not inevitable.

Val @ 254

Hmm…. Accusations of crypto-sexism because the group of people on CT who keep misrepresenting HRC are a) old white guys, and b) when they look at Hillary, they don’t see someone who’s labored her whole life in defense of the downtrodden.

Maybe you have a point, Val. No doubt as old white guys they do have some subconscious demons which they’ll only be able to recognize and master by paying rapt attention to your analysis, but it shouldn’t surprise you if they ask, as a matter of fairness, that perform a similar analysis on yourself.

Anyway, being an old white guy myself, and figuring I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, here’s my own take on the Donald/Hillary matrix, written back in September, a month before the elections:

Trump is a bundle of pathologies, none of them admirable. How dangerous they’d be in a President Trump — current liberal hysteria aside — is at least debatable. His advisors might well choose to fence him off the way their counterparts did with Reagan once the Great Communicator’s advancing senility emerged as a threat to their own ambitions. Alternatively, advisors with agendas of their own might manipulate his nibs the way Cheney apparently manipulated GW Bush. This would undoubtedly be a Bad Thing, but we really have no way of telling en avant just what kind of Bad Thing we’re talking about. In any event, what seems clear is that not every bit of bombast issuing from a President Trump’s big mouth would straightaway become policy, any more than has been the case with other Presidents.

As for Hillary — and Bill, Chelsea, and the rest of Clinton inc. — my question is what they amount to beyond their patently obvious ambition. To put it bluntly, we all understand how the Game of Thrones is played. Plausible deniability is its first principle. We earnest reformers do sometimes find the bodies afterwards, but since by definition there are no smoking guns in such matters, we are never, ever, going to find any. (Well, there was Watergate, but that was something of a fluke, and the cover-up very nearly succeeded. These days, I suspect no one would actually give a tinker’s damn who was being stabbed behind the arras. It’s all just part of the game, right?)

So, smoking guns aside, what do I make of Hillary? I’d say she’s a creature of our decadence, no more nor less so than anyone with political ambitions is who’s aware of the real power relationships in our society. Having been outflanked to her right early on, and at the same time made painfully aware of the weakness of the Left, she did what she had to do. Cozied up to the bankers and corporate leaders, made sure they knew that their interests would be safe with her. Made sure that the Pentagon and the CIA were aware that as Secretary of State, she’d learned not to challenge their takeover of diplomacy and foreign policy in general. Reassured AIPAC et al. that whatever Israel wanted, Israel would get. Countered the Republican machinery of character assassination by setting up and controlling up her own lines of communication, as, for example, with the introduction of her own private e-mail server — illegal and all that, but arguably necessary. Faced with the historical Republican advantages of Super PACs, Cato Institutes, ALEC, talk radio, etc., she countered with a money-laundering and influence-peddling machine of her own, the Clinton Foundation, which had the added advantage of giving Big Bill a harmless platform for his seemingly tireless schmoozing, keeping him on the golf course and out of trouble, and providing Chelsea with a leg up on her own political career, should she ever actually want one.

Mind you, I don’t really blame Hillary for all this. Politicians are like cops; they do the dirty work of our society, allowing us to ignore them when they manage to control things, and blame them when they can’t. My problem is that as long as the game goes on, and the energies of our smartest people are engaged in it to the detriment of their own integrity, and more to the point, to the rest of us, their supposed constituents, Hillary is probably the best we can hope for. In my opinion, this is a colossal waste of talent, and given the real issues facing us, we can’t afford to have our most savvy politicians decide to go into business strictly for themselves. Winning in that context is, in my opinion, more or less meaningless. Frankly, I’m not much impressed with the accusation that not voting for Hillary will make me complicit in any future crimes of the Donald and his yahoo followers. It’s a specious argument, manipulative and intentionally demeaning to those of us try to see things as they are, and act accordingly. As I see it, the US has reached the end of its historical rope. Whatever follows is likely to be a lot more chaotic than we’ve been used to, and may well be more violent than we hope for. If so, Hillary’s campaign, successful or not, won’t amount to much more than the swan song of the status quo, which, by any honest assessment, is already long past its sell-by date.

I am kind of surprised that the ACA is being described as a transfer of wealth from the rich to the less-rich, since it compels people to buy insurance from companies which are operated for profit, that is, with the purpose of extracting wealth from one set of people for the benefit of another, better-off and more powerful set. Those who in theory cannot pay are subsidized by the government, which at least pretends to get its money from taxation. Going by the visible distribution of the social product, I’d say the rich don’t pay taxes, so the subsidies come from the somewhat better-off working people (insofar as they are not funny money.) None of this is surprising in a program which, I am told, was originally constructed by Republicans. As a friend of mine who is sort of a social democrat said, ‘This is the best we can do. We have to pay the rich to be permitted to support the poor.’

In other news, I think you all are being too hard on H.R. Clinton. She’s not that different from the other big-ticket Democrats. The things I object to, like a casual attitude towards killing and maiming foreigners, total surveillance, militarization of the police, industrialization of the prisons, accelerating wealth inequality, cosy relations with bankers and brokers, etc. etc. etc., are evidently just fine with almost all of them. Anyone who doesn’t go along with these things is going to be kicked out of the company of the blessed and electable by the owners and operators thereof. Why blame one if not the others?

To be fair, I might have ended hating her more than I once did, and more than is strictly justified, because of the sheer arseholishness of her liberal defenders.

Cian 04.12.17 at 8:47 pm @ 267 —
faustusnotes @ 107 mentions ‘…. Clinton’s desire … to protect the massive redistribution of money from the wealthy to the poor….’ Moving some money from the upper end of the working class to the lower end, or off the edge of the cliff to the poor, does not strike me as a ‘massive redistribution’ in its context, unless maybe the redistribution is actually upward. (After all, it appears to compel people to do business with profit-making institutions, that is, to be disadvantageously exploited.) What am I missing? What are the profit margins of the insurance companies, the medical industry, big pharma? Didn’t I read that they now take 18% of the GDP?

Anarcissie, this is a simple explainer about the redistributive properties of the ACA. A key point from a speech by one of Obama’s policy advisers:

In concert with the effects of the ACA coverage provisions, changes in tax policy since 2009 will by 2017 boost incomes for families in the bottom quintile by 18 percent, or $2,200 (the equivalent to about a decade of income gains), and in the second quintile by about 6 percent, or $1,500, relative to what they would have been under the continuation of 2008 policies,

Also healthcare is 18% of GDP – including all the components of government spending and public health (e.g. medicaid and medicare). I don’t know about whether pharmaceutical companies are included in that number but their turnover is from global sales, not just services provided to the US consumer. And if you are going to have a health care system in a non-socialist setting you need to accept that some of that money – including compulsory spending through taxes or subsidies – will go to rent seekers. The same applies to car insurance, for god’s sake, or to subsidies for poor people to heat their homes. It’s a very strange definition of redistribution indeed if you have to ignore any redistribution which the recipients spend on privately purchased services.

I’m intrigued by how people here can say that Obamacare was a neoliberal sellout if they a) don’t actually know anything about its taxes and transfers, b) don’t know anything about its genesis, and c) don’t know anything about what laws it is similar to. On what basis do you make this claim, if you know nothing about the content of the law? And how can you expect us to believe you aren’t blathering out of simple prejudice?

@Faustusnotes 269

I mostly agree with you, however I’ll point out that:

“Yes it requires people to participate in a capitalist market, but almost every UHC plan does – it’s a rare country where doctors and hospital admin are paid the same as the majority of their patients.”

is wrong. Italy, the UK and I think many other countries have government run systems (meaning, systems where doctors and nurses are government employees), though doctors are still paid more than their average patient.

I think Faustusnotes is arguing that because doctors are paid salaries, it’s somehow a capitalist system. Even by his standards it’s a pretty asinine argument.

MisterMr, if you check my most recent blog post (as of writing this) I have a report on three UHC systems that use private mechanisms. Also, even though the UK appears to be a government run system, in fact General Practitioners (GPs) in the UK are private contractors employed under a contract by the state – this isn’t a new innovation (like Foundation Trusts or some of their other weirder “market based” innovations), it harks back to the foundation of the NHS when Atlee said he would silence the GPs’ complaints by “stuffing their mouths with money”. Similarly Australia has a single payer insurer but its GPs and some of its hospitals are private run – Australia allows polyclinics, which are generally excellent quality services, while the UK generally does not. Also Japan, although the rules on who can run their providers and how are very strict (much much stricter than the US, unsurprisingly).

The key point is that you get to UHC by whatever is the mechanism most suited to your country’s politics, culture, economics and health situation, and you always have a transitional stage where it doesn’t work so well and you need politicians to work in good faith to fix it, and the public to support the effort. The US has neither of those conditions because the GOP won’t even try, and people like Cian and Yan can’t be bothered finding out how the system works but would prefer to believe the lies they see on RT. Sad!

Meme from the French election: “To defeat Trump, follow Sanders (Mélenchon) – don’t make the same mistake!”
https://mobile.twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/852593731257716739

@269:

“(This “designed by republicans” “heritage plan” meme is bullshit and you could dismiss it as a lie yourself with five seconds of googling).”

Oh, jeez, do I have too? That’s too much homework!

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/15/ellen-qualls/aca-gop-health-care-plan-1993/

And then there’s this fierce critic of HRC:

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/conservative-origins-of-obamacare/

The tax surcharges involved are a .9% Medicare surcharge on incomes over $250,000 and a 3.8% surcharge on capital at the top rate, which is currently 20%, (i.e. far lower than earned income taxes). In addition, there are taxes on “cadillac plans” and on those who fail to provide themselves with insurance. The total tax increase amounts to ,5% of GDP, far from the largest increase evah.

In the meantime, between June of 2009 and the end of 2012, 115% of all increased income during the recovery has gone to the top 10%, and though that trend has abated somewhat, though not much, since, Fed QE has inflated financial assets and thus capital incomes far more than any tax increase on them. The exact tax incidence of ACA would be highly variable, let alone its effects on wealth distribution, but calling it the most progressive downward redistribution in a generation is dubious and only bespeaks how badly upward redistributive trends, (based on political policy choices, not economic inevitability), have been going for more than a generation. The patter of “progressive” baby steps hardly negates the speed at which the treadmill has been running in reverse.

Since FauatNotes is a self-declared UnAmerican, maybe s/he should just butt out and leave the issues up to us dumb ‘Merikans. Since s/he has shown forth as an unreliable, inaccurate, non-credible and maliciously polemical interlocutor, (with little grasp of basic economics to boot), I don’t think s/he is worth engaging with any further.

Goodbye!

John c halasz, any plan which keeps private insurers in the health financing market place has to have the three legs of the stool that Krugman refers to – the “Republican plan” (that Republicans did not support) and Obamacare have this in common because they both stole the ideas from every functioning private marketplace in the world (e.g. Switzerland, Germany, Singapore). The differences are important though – the medicaid expansion, regulation of products the insurers can offer, and downward redistribution by increasing taxes on the rich to pay for the subsidies are all parts of the ACA that its critics often forget (or in the case of people here, don’t even know).

I don’t know why you’re trying to conflate health care reform with the basic flaws of capitalism as if they’re all Obama’s fault (actually I do, this is a rhetorical statement). Do you also oppose subsidizing elderly people’s heating bills because some of the money would go to an energy company? Better to let grandma freeze to death, eh?

– ‘Since FauatNotes is a self-declared UnAmerican, maybe s/he should just butt out and leave the issues up to us dumb ‘Merikans.’

Yeah! –
‘Them UnAmericans know nutting bout them Healthstuff – they just should ‘butt out’ and leave the issues up to us dump ‘Mericans’.

FAUSTUSNOTES: You really are impervious to evidence aren’t you Cian? I describe market based mechanisms in multiple other systems

One of the ‘market mechanisms’ you described was that doctors in other systems get salaries. Which suggests you don’t really understand what a market mechanism is.

Let’s take one other system: the Netherlands. I’m focusing on it because I just happen to be familiar with it (and because my mate is a hospital administrator there). Everybody over 18 pays an identical premium, while private insurance companies all provide identical coverage (coverage being defined in considerable detail by the government). Insurance companies are only viable because the government acts as a reinsurer (in much the same way governments make nuclear power ‘commercially’ feasible), flattening the different risk profiles. In addition, all companies have to pay about half of the insurance costs (so it’s basically a payroll tax).

In practice it’s an inefficent way of delivering single payer, with the further disadvantage (for people on the left) of being a flat tax (albeit with some subsidies at the low end). Or, exactly what you’d expect from that particular Dutch coalition. It also (unsurpsing to anyone who’s ever studied these issues) does a poor job of controlling costs.

The heritage institute created the idea of the insurance mandate for the US insurance system as a way of keep US insurance companies as an integral part of the system, while preventing the US system from falling part. The Insurance mandate was crucial to the ACA. Take it away and you basically have medicaid expansion, and a few tweaks around the edges (because obviously none of the insurance regulation would have been possible without creating a lot of failed insurance pools).

But yes, you’re right in your incredibly banal way. The ACA is not a literal transcription of the Heritage plan.

Alternatives would have been medicare expansion, or a public option insurer (with a national pool). Both would have worked just fine within the existing system (with insurers offered the opportunity to either directly compete, or offer additional supplemental insurance) – and also would allow the US to focus on spiralling costs. The ACA has been very ineffective in this regard.

Do you also oppose subsidizing elderly people’s heating bills because some of the money would go to an energy company? Better to let grandma freeze to death, eh?

I think his point is that if the energy company is gouging customers, helping Grandma pay the inflated bills is a nice little subsidy to the energy company.

@287 Sample size 10. Sampling strategy voxpop. Evidential value ?

OK, let me increase the sample size by one. I’ll vote without hesitation for Macron on the second round if the second round is Macron/Le Pen or Macron/Fillon. I won’t vote at all if it is Fillon/Le Pen. For the first round, I’ll support the Left/Green in the sense of John’s three party system. At the moment, that means voting Mélenchon.

According to Wikipedia, Macron is indeed the candidate who wins over Marine Le Pen with the widest margin in the polls (not surprisingly, as they are polar opposites) but all polls have Marine Le Pen defeated in the second round against any other candidate, and by huge margins.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_sondages_sur_l%27élection_présidentielle_française_de_2017#Sondages_de_second_tour

Not to butt in where I don’t belong and where I don’t have any vote or influence, but, hey…everyone else is doing it, so it’s the fashion nowadays! According to the polls, today’s Delphic oracle, if Hamon would drop out, then Melenchon,- (IMHO the only credible candidate),- would likely make it to the run-off round. LePen vs. Melenchon: now that would be an election worth having!

Cian et al
I think faustusnotes is trying to tell you that Obamacare was probably the best you could get at the time given that your political system is fucked, and for the same reason any improvement is likely to be incremental.

Your country has just elected Trump, but you’re still determined to tell faustusnotes he’s wrong. Just reflect a little, maybe?

Personally, I’d back Macron from the off, as the only one who is sure to beat MLP in round 2, imo.

Honestly, I think you have it wrong here Chris. The reason many people on the left (in the sense of the three party system, not in the sense of the obsolete left/right divide) consider voting for Macron, as pure a soft neoliberal candidate as can be found (and consequently an especially unappealing one from a left/green point of view) is not primarily because he is the safest bet to defeat Marine Le Pen (every major candidate wins against her by safe margins), it is to ensure that the second round is not Fillon against Le Pen, which would be a choice between “la peste et le choléra” as we say here.

If Fillon was in position to reach the second round and if no candidate from the left/green bloc was in position to do so, then this argument would be very valid, imo, but it has been severely weakened by Mélenchon equalling Fillon in the polls and Hamon doing all he can within the bounds of the electoral procedure to make it clear to his electorate that he has conceded to Mélenchon. Personally, at present, I see no good reason to vote Macron if you are not inclined towards the neoliberal bloc (and every reason to vote for him if you are). More generally, there seems to be no good reason at present to vote strategically: whether you are from the traditional catholic hard right (French Romney), the nationalist populist far right (French Bannon), a soft neoliberal (French Clinton) or from the eco-socialist left (French Sanders), there is a candidate strongly and unambiguously defending your political priorities in position to reach the second round. Why vote somebody else?

Tried twice to post a link to a Piketty column (first in French then in English) and each time it got auto-zapped. Anyway: he doesn’t like Macron.

Yes Anarcissie your system is broken, and a long way from being fixed. And yes the transfers in the ACA don’t give people cash. But in your current system just giving people cash won’t help them get health care – even lots of cash won’t- because the system needed regulating, and that’s what the ACA did. It introduced income based subsidies and ensured people could use them.

I note above someone complaining that the system doesn’t have a sliding income based payment system just moments after someone else complains that it uses means testing, which has been “shown not to work”. It can’t be both ways, and it appears that no one criticizing it understands how it works. Someone else complains that offering subsidies simply subsidizes price gouging, which is also untrue since the subsidies are determine by your income not the price of your health insurance (which incidentally is regulated – you will have heard that there is a deadline for the companies to make their insurance offers, right?)

The problem here is that you are literally refusing to believe the content of the bill – and disagreeing with each other over what its flaws are – while rejecting any information about it that comes from outside your own experience. How does this make you different from a fundy trump voter who insists that the country is being flooded with illegals and refuses to accept any evidence to the contrary? Am doing what does it say about you that all the lies you believe were sourced from the far right and laundered for you through RT and the pro putin left?

You’re being played, you’re being repeatedly told you’re being played, and you act no better than the born again Christian true believers. It would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high for the rest of us.

… the obsolete left/right divide …

People who think the political concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are obsolete don’t understand what they meant in the first place.

Cian, I don’t think you can say anything about the bombing of the convoy in Syria because it is being reported to the western press by the Syria Conservatory for Human Rights, who you think can’t be trusted and are in any case just some dude in Coventry. Surely that bombing is just fake news?

It’s been

Layman, that’s a 3 year old forecast. While I would be surprised if there wasn’t a certain amount of redistribution, the problem with measuring this is that you have to make certain assumptions. If you give people 60% of the money they need to buy insurance, but then make them buy insurance, is this redistrubtion? There’s not really a clear answer. What if they can’t afford to make use of this insurance? Have they benefitted, and how would you even measure/estimate the ability to use insurance.

Faustusnotes, while I’m not entirely sure I understand what your latest argument is supposed to be, the problem with the subisidies in the ACA is that it requires poor people to estimate their income. If they get the estimate wrong, then the money will be clawed back from at the end of the year. If you don’t understand why that’s a problem for a program helping poor people, then your opinion on this matter is pretty worthless frankly. There’s a pretty large literature on the problems with means tested programs for poor people. Which I’m sure you’re completely unacquainted with.

It would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high for the rest of us.

I would imagine the healthcare stakes are pretty low for you given that you don’t live in the US. The stakes for those of us here is that every year our insurance costs become that little bit less affordable. This is true for EVERYONE that I know. Locally the power of hospital systems increases as they consolidate. The big thing that hit Clinton in the fall was the increase in Insurance rates, something that the ACA seems to have done very little to have prevented (despite all the theory that went into it’s design).

Val: “Your country has just elected Trump, but you’re still determined to tell faustusnotes he’s wrong. Just reflect a little, maybe?”

faustusnotes: “You’re being played, you’re being repeatedly told you’re being played, and you act no better than the born again Christian true believers.”

I find this thread so discouraging. It really endangers what little hope I have of the left consolidating its forces against the right and winning ground in future elections.

I literally cannot conceive how anyone could claim Cian is not very seriously reflecting on precisely the issue that Trump has won–in particular, on why he has won.

Can and others have reflected and have sincerely drawn a different conclusion, is that really so hard to imagine?

It’s unimaginable to me that anyone who disagrees with Cian’s posts could find them lacking in reflection, even if they were mistaken (which they aren’t). Just unimaginable.

If faustusnotes can’t tell the difference between Cian’s thoughtful, informed, reasonable disagreement and some imagined dogmatic born-again right-winger, then it tells us more about FT than Cian.

France, run-off scenarios, Terrain poll:

#Mélenchon/#Macron: 42% / 58%
Mélenchon/#Le Pen: 64% / 36%
Mélenchon/#Fillon: 60% / 40%

#Sondage
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/854034335657283586

To repeat what most reasonable people other than Cian and Yan have concluded, HRC won the popular vote by a non-negligible margin, but lost the Electoral vote due to Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics, plus lack of appeal to those voters who voted against their interests for Reagan and Bush. Bernie Sanders lost the Democrat Primary by a significant margin and would likely have appealed less to minorities and women. What mud the Republican propaganda machine would have slung against him remains unknown but it would have certainly created some. The white evangelicals who were largely responsible for electing Trump might or might not have defected to a pro-choice socialist of Jewish heritage – but to assert that Sanders would have been elected (with strong emphasis) is hardly an appeal to reason. Reason does not assert unknowable hypotheses as fact – or so I imagine.

I do however share Yan’s despair over the human race’s inability to reach reasonable consensuses on policy – or on anything else.

As for the authority derivable from successful predictions, while I made no prediction on who would win the election, I did predict how bad a President Trump would be, and feel amply confirmed in that so far.

“Your country has just elected Trump, but you’re still determined to tell faustusnotes he’s wrong. Just reflect a little, maybe?”

Iow: my preferred candidate lost the election to a wildly unpopular far right nutcase so perhaps you should shut up and listen to me now?

Cian: “Right, because as someone who suspected Hillary was going to lose in the summer of last year (for the reasons she did lose) and who supported Bernie who would have won, I’m the one who has to reflect.”

If any explanation was required as to why you need to reflect, you have provided it here. Of course a man who couldn’t even beat Clinton for the nomination was sure to win in the general. Of course having failed to appeal to more minority voters than did Clinton, he would somehow have energized those same minority voters in the general. Of course Republican voters who, in the next, did what they always do, which is join arms and in lockstep vote for the party candidate, would have been convinced to do otherwise by Sanders. It’s certain, as you say.

Yan: “It’s unimaginable to me that anyone who disagrees with Cian’s posts could find them lacking in reflection, even if they were mistaken (which they aren’t).”

Your imagination is poor, and some things Cian says are, indeed, both mistaken and lacking in reflection. Example provided.

Anarcissie: “I did not say anything about the veracity of the authors of the study you cited…”

The implication of what you wrote was perfectly clear. As to your anecdotes, I imagine you could think of many, many, many things you would not like to be decided based on a couple of anecdotes offered to you by a random internet interlocutor. You don’t like the study I offered? Fine, but I’ve offered something, whereas you’re offering nothing.

= = = JimV 04.17.17 at 7:23 pm “To repeat what most reasonable people other than Cian and Yan have concluded, HRC won the popular vote by a non-negligible margin, but lost the Electoral vote due to Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics, plus lack of appeal to those voters who voted against their interests for Reagan and Bush.” = = =

FWIW, as a supporter of Obama from the Springfield candidacy announcement forward I think that Secretary Clinton ran a far better campaign than she did in 2008, and did make changes to her positions, staff, approach, etc based on that experience. Still, an alternate explanation of the popular vote/Electoral College difference in 2016 is that she made the exact same mistake she did in 2008 when Obama and his team read the primary/caucus rules in all 55 states [1] and HRC and her team did not. The popular vote win is fun, and can be politically useful if one actually takes the Presidency in a divisive election. Otherwise it is entirely meaningless under the US’ current system.

I tend to agree with Yan: this discussion has followed the same path as most I have seen on Democratic/liberal/progressive fora since about mid-December. With the high level of thought and argument which is CT at its best, but leading to the same cliff nonetheless. There is no agreement on what went wrong in the 2016 election. Or even what happened: there is as far as I am aware no detailed analysis on a precinct-by-precinct basis of how those who had voted for Sanders in the primary ultimately voted in the general, yet there is no end of opinions expressed on that topic. Very strong opinions.

Personally it seems inarguable to me that the 2016 election went very very badly. One weak point of CT is that one gets the impression that many regulars live in the Northeast/Pacific Coast or have secure positions in academic enclaves. Those few of us who actually live in flyover states and have watched them turn from reasonably rational/purple to fully in control of the hard Radical Right over the last 20 years do not have quite the cushion that residents of Massachusetts or California have.

It also seems inarguable that when things have gone that badly for a long period of time, and that affairs have been in the hands of a known and cohesive group for that period, that that group needs to step down, fully retire, and allow a new team to have a go. Yet those of us who carefully, politely, almost diffidently attempted to point out a few problems with the Democratic Party strategy and leading candidate in 2015-2016 are now facing severe counterattack from the architects and operators of that, losing, strategy for suggesting that new approaches are needed. As well as attacks on our intelligence, morals, and political experience from those who serve as the boundary maintainers of the (current) party elite.

We shall see what we shall see. I managed to maintain optimism through the entire W Bush Administration as did many progressives and Democrats I know/interacted with. I’m not sure that hoping for a Trump self-immolation that doesn’t somehow leave Pence in power is a good basis for trying again.

[fn1] in the primaries US Territories and registered party members living abroad with no declared home state have State primaries , raising the number above 50.

People who think the political concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are obsolete don’t understand what they meant in the first place.

@J-D I take the (fairly conventional) position that the political history of the most educationally advanced societies of the 1800-1970 period has been shaped by the rise in political power of the alphabetized working class and reaction against it. In most western advanced democracies, universal literacy, quasi-universal secondary education, universal suffrage, open access to political positions and a politically dominant middle-class have all been achieved around the 1970s at the latest. I doubt the analytic categories forged to analyze political movements in 1917 remain pertinent in such societies.

Or if you prefer empirical arguments, the current overwhelming favorite for the next French presidential election is the former chief of staff of a socialist President and a former Economy minister of a socialist government. He is (successfully) campaigning on lower taxes, greater acceptance of diversity and multiculturalism, suppression of capital gain taxes, easy immigration, a longer working week, openness towards refugees, lower pensions for workers, strong European integration especially with Germany, financial deregulation, greater acceptance of gay people, a general preference for the private sector, significant cuts in the public sector etc. I see little value in describing this program (which I find highly ideologically coherent) in the usual terms of the left/right divide of the 1850-1970 period. Do you?

As I see it, there are two good reasons to vote Macron in the first round: 1) adhering to his program 2) ensuring that the second round is not Fillon/Le Pen (the refined version of Chris’s argument). A crude estimation is that 20% vote for him primarily because of 1) and 3% primarily because of 2). I admit that I have been surprised by the margin of victory polls predict for Mélenchon in the (unlikely) eventuality of a second round Mélenchon/Le Pen and Mélenchon/Fillon. To some extent, this probably reflects the efficiency of his campaign (deemed quite universally exceptionally good), I guess.

engels @ 319
Are you trying to suggest that I am somehow associated with or supporting corporate business lobbyists in America? Because that suggestion is so out there, so completely ludicrous, that even you might conceivably be ashamed of making it, if you ever stopped to think about what you were saying.

Cranky Observer made the point I would want to make better than I could. I live in the Deep South, though, so I’m probably a white racist.

I have zero sympathy for people who complain that Hillary lost because of the Electoral college, gerrymandering, or smears. Those are the rules of the game – she ran as an insider who know how to win in the real world. And then ran a campaign that ignored political and electoral realities. And when they lost they made excuses, including the ultimate excuse: the Russians. Pathetic, truly pathetic.

The Democratic party have done nothing to address voter suppression, or the gaping hole left by ACORN’s demise. Meanwhile the Republicans, who know how to win, have changed the rules, illegally supressed votes and massively gerrymandered states. And they got away with it because the Democrats. Did. Nothing.

And the Democrats lost against Trump. Who is massively unpopular. They lost against Republicans who are despised, whose policies are unpopular.

Layman: minority voter turnout in the primary was very low. Around 10% if memory serves (don’t have time to track the numbers down). Turn out for primaries is generally low, and is pretty unrepresentative of the country as a whole. Hillary also had the backing of almost the entire Democratic party, and the benefit of name recognition (most people didn’t know who he was until quite late in the process). Frankly Bernie Sanders should never even have been a contender.

Could Bernie Sanders have won? We will never know. Conventional wisdom says no, but conventional wisdom has just had a very bad election. Sanders appeal was strongest with Democrat voters who didn’t bother to vote this time (or who voted for Trump).

Cian: “Could Bernie Sanders have won? We will never know.”

This is an improvement, thanks.

“minority voter turnout in the primary was very low.”

But there are polls, which consistently showed him doing poorly compared to Clinton among minority voters. Is that not so?

“Sanders appeal was strongest with Democrat voters who didn’t bother to vote…”

And weaker among those who did bother to vote, right? How does that help?

Layman 04.17.17 at 10:47 pm @ 314 — If I may parody one of the Gnostic gospels: I offered you something, but you did not see it because you do not belong to it.

faustusnotes 04.18.17 at 12:59 am @ 315: ‘… purity….’

What’s this, I shouldn’t call ’em as I see ’em? But in any case, I think you can relax about any effect I might have on any election or other political gyration in the U.S. any time soon. Really. The state is safe from me.

john c. halasz: “…but the fabrication that the recent United Airlines (flagship?) incident that went viral indicates popular preferences rather than corporate abuse…”

Pithy, but the corporate abuse doesn’t develop and prosper in a vacuum, it develops and prospers because of an ideology fostered by people who vote for Republicans so they can deregulate corporations and free them to abuse people; and put judges on the court, which judges support notions like the one which says corporations can use the threat of termination to compel their employees to freeze to death. And, if you really want to be a stickler for the facts here, I think it was public employees, police officers, who doled out the abuse, while the corporation was a bystander. Maybe check your facts before you call others on theirs?