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What happened is that third-way centrism is and always has been complete horseshit and without a charismatic candidate like Obama to paper over the flaws it collapsed completely.
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Nov 10, 2016 18:19
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The big sin of Clinton's campaign was complacency. At some point they very clearly concluded that they had the whole thing in the bag, and therefore felt that they could ignore warning signs they had no business ignoring. And when you've convinced yourself that you've already won you're in the biggest danger of all, which is something that a supposedly professional and competent campaign staff should not have let happen. Hell, this one chinese guy figured this poo poo out about two and a half milennia ago. It's not hard.
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Nov 10, 2016 22:14
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theflyingorc posted:You can also choose policy positions based on polling data, and Clinton was exceedingly likely to do so. The problem is that if you go in for this strategy, you're liable to end up being viewed as an unprincipled and untrustworthy triangulating bullshitter. WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Leading up to the election, everyone, Trump included, thought the question was whether Hillary would win, or win in a landslide. Exactly. When you've convinced yourself that you've won already, you inevitably start making mistakes. See the Clinton campaign 2016.
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Nov 10, 2016 23:14
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Vladimir Putin posted:No I don't agree. All those things you listed aren't even quantitative. Politics isn't quantitative for gently caress's sake.
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Nov 10, 2016 23:26
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Alternate take: not enough time to undo damage from Comey letter It's not like the whole e-mail shitstorm was unknown to the Clinton campaign, you know? To assume that you've got the whole election in the bag with a potential problem like that still hanging around is just the kind of complacendy I'm talking about. Vladimir Putin posted:Well look. If you want to make a good decision you have to have the right information. The best information is quantitative. As in choice A is 50 and choice B is 20. Therefore I choose choice A since 50>20. Of course life is imperfect and those numbers may or may not be correct. But given the choice between decisions from numbers or things not quantitative I would always choose the numbers. That is no reason to dismiss qualitative information, especially when said information gives you reason to suspect your quantitative information. Otherwise you'll gently caress up when somebody has hosed up the numbers.
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Nov 10, 2016 23:48
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medchem posted:At the end of the day, I'm holding these people more accountable than the people running Clinton's campaign and her party. This isn't really directed towards you in particular, but I've seen this sentiment pop up more than a few times, and I thought I'd address it. First of all I fully understand why you would feel like this. However, it seems counterproductive to view things this way for two reasons. First, the vote or non-vote of any individual voter is negligible. So to put the lion's share of the blame on the individual doesn't seem proportionate. It's the job of a politician and their campaign to convince people to go out and vote, and if they fail to do that then the repercussions are far more severe than if some rando doesn't care to vote. Therefore the blame should and must fall on Clinton and her team, because their fuckup is far more damaging than the fuckup of some lazy fucker who didn't vote. Second, it doesn't help move the party forward. It's now clear that the third-way Clinton wing of the Democrats is incapable of delivering anything except disaster at the ballot box. Therefore they need to be removed from power and replaced with people who aren't completely out of touch. However, neoliberals aren't know for giving up power unless they're absolutely forced to, so if we put the blame on the voters it will help the aforementioned fuckups wriggle away from their own responsibility, which is pretty bad for the future.
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Nov 11, 2016 19:14
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sean10mm posted:Nobody of any stripe gives up power unless forced to. Clinton's influence was predicated on her building up networks in the party for decades. It's not guaranteed that this influence will just disappear overnight. To this we also need to add the common self-delusion of the neoliberal, i.e. that the solution to every problem is to move further to the right. It's almost certain that Clinton herself is toast, but the rest of the fuckers could very well convince themselves that the problem was that they ran on "the most Progressive platform in history", and that they should instead swing hard to the right to chase republican voters. And if they get away with that we all will be standing here in four years wondering how the gently caress Trump could have gotten a second term.
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Nov 11, 2016 20:58
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sean10mm posted:Those networks were sustained by the assumption that participating would have rewards. If she can't get elected she can't reward for poo poo. I mean, every rear end in a top hat won't go away in the party structure obviously, but they won't be loyal to her anymore, and most will jump ship for anyone who looks like they can win now because they're generally self-interested jerks with no principles. Yeah, but it's not Clinton herself who's the problem, it's the rest of the network of neoliberal fuckers who occupy the positions of power in the Democratic party. Even if Clinton herself is forced out in disgrace they still remain, and if they act in typical neoliberal fashion they'd rather try to sabotage the left wing of the party even if it means losing another election.
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Nov 11, 2016 21:15
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John_A_Tallon posted:That sounds like an argument for dismantling the Democratic party and building something better with the bones. Unfortunately FPTP makes that sort of thing kinda hard, so it would probably be a better bet to try and purge the neoliberals first.
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Nov 11, 2016 21:25
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Venomous posted:Corbyn was only elected due to grassroots support despite the fact that a lot of his MPs did not (and do not) support him. I fail to see how the DNC will elect Ellison now when pundits are already dismissing him as a city elite in the same way that the media dismissed Corbyn as an out of touch leftist. While hope is a lie, I'd still argue that Ellison has a fair shot if things move fast enough due to sheer shock from the election. EDIT: Also the pundit class has done a pretty good job of absolutely discrediting themselves.
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Nov 12, 2016 14:42
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Xae posted:Yeah, I can't possibly see having the problem with the presumptive front runner for the next election hand picking the DNC chair and stacking the committee with their supporters. Bernie will be 79 in 2020. He's not going to run again.
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Nov 12, 2016 17:28
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Actually I think you'll find that removing incompetent failures from important positions of power is, in fact, Cool and Good.
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Nov 12, 2016 17:56
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zegermans posted:Sanders has been in Washington for just as long as Clinton and yet accomplished less. His history puts him squarely into "literal communist" territory. He is a Jew in a pro-racism election whose closing argument consisted of "these global interests are bleeding you dry!" to shots of Jews. Yes, I suppose this is why he was crushing Trump in the polls. Thanks for your received wisdom, duder.
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Nov 12, 2016 19:55
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Xae posted:Name one Legislative Accomplishment of Sanders during his 40 years in public office. Name one accomplishment of Donald Trump during the last 40 years.
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Nov 12, 2016 19:56
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Xae posted:Dishonesty, Deflection, Denial and Circle jerking. I take it that around eight and a half years ago you were angrily demanding to know what the gently caress that Obama nobody had ever accomplished?
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Nov 12, 2016 20:01
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zegermans posted:Theoretical matchup polls are useless, everyone loves someone that isn't actually running for president. Well gee, thanks for that bit too, duder. I can totally believe that Sanders would have suffered far worse fron the GOP attack machine than the lady who's been demonized nonstop for about 25 years straight by now.
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Nov 12, 2016 20:03
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Star Man posted:Well, while the rest of you fight each other over who would have been a better candidate in an election that's over, I'll be over there and trying to help rebuild this party and not wish that anyone with a political career longer than five minutes would vanish. When y'all are done fighting, then maybe you can join the rest of us. Nice smugging, mate. But seriously, if the Democratic party is to have a future it needs to be hammered into people that neoliberalism doesn't loving work and fielding neoliberal candidates will only lead to defeat. Hence one should not leave the assertion that the leftist candidate is ~unelectable~ and would do just as badly as the neoliberal unchallenged, because that would let the idiots who lost the most critical election of the century off the hook for their fuckups and hinder the necessary reforms of the party.
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Nov 12, 2016 21:24
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Star Man posted:Call me smug all you want. Hell, I'm proud of it. I'm going to take that smugness and go help prop up a progressive candidate for president and help get some progressive candidates in state and federal offices with Sanders and Warren's leadership. I love Howard Dean and thank him for what he did in 2006 and I believe it can be done again, but I'd rather it not be Dean because he had his turn as DNC chair already. I was behind Clinton from day one and if Sanders had come out on top instead, then I would have been right behind him. Well, you're not going to be very helpful if you're unwilling to learn about what went wrong, and this includes trying to shut down discussion about what could have been done better.
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Nov 12, 2016 22:05
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zegermans posted:Trump's actions are irrelevant, nothing he did mattered and he was a unique case. Clinton's Deplorables comment was more damaging long term than his on-tape admission of sexual assault. Bernie's poo poo would have mattered because he didn't have the Trump immunity bubble. Do you think that Trump has some magic force shield or something? It's clear that his actions hurt his chances, and hence helps explain why he only managed to turn out the Republican base. It's just that Clinton was such a poo poo candidate that this didn't matter.
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Nov 13, 2016 00:34
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Feral Integral posted:I'm not say be all hippy dippy and silly about it either, like why would you discount an entire group of people in a general fashion as unreachable? Because some groups will vote Republican no matter what, e.g. Evangelicals, and thus one shouldn't waste limited resources on trying to achieve the impossible,
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Nov 14, 2016 08:57
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DoggPickle posted:What percentage of voters do you guys think, just COULD NOT pull the trigger on a woman president? 4%, 5%, 10%? I don't want to get into an entire gender politics discussion, but as a woman, I still think it was just too early to run a woman. WE got the vote (with crappy exceptions on BOTH sides) a full 50 YEARS after black men could vote. Accounting for some social progress and a more liberal citizenship overall, I was still not expecting a woman president in my lifetime. Maybe 2030 something? This is just me speculating so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the people who could not bring themselves to vote for a woman are overwhelmingly likely to be people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for a Democrat either, so in this case I'd say it's not relevant.
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Nov 22, 2016 21:56
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PT6A posted:What the gently caress are you people all voting on? Good god. Backup reserve dogcatcher?
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Nov 25, 2016 22:57
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BarbarianElephant posted:Hope they like Trump. Don't think that the mentioned people as a whole live in semi-rural rust belt counties.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:00
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Are you literally wearing a red diaper right now At this point conventional wisdom about what's politically possible and what's not seems kinda suspect. Also actually existing Social Democracy is a garbage ideology because it leaves the economic power in society in the hands of people who want to destroy it. This is a really dumb thing to do.
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Dec 3, 2016 21:40
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:As an American looking across the pond at Scandinavia all of these theoretical critiques of social democracy seem like the ultimate in pointless left wing navel gazing. I honestly don't give a poo poo about your abstract theories. I want health care and education and I can look at our system, recognize it isn't working, and look at the Scandinavian system and recognize that it is. I am from a Nordic country, and right now our rightwing government is busy wrecking the welfare state. Our healthcare and education are on the chopping board and it's unclear if the damage can be repaired within a reasonable timeframe even if our current Social Democratic party gets into government and actually bothers trying to fix things rather than forming another rightwing-lite government, as they have done for decades. This is not theoretical navelgazing, it's the inevitable result of leaving the capitalist class in power and free to use that power to roll back all the good that the left has managed to accomplish, and the consequences are unironically deadly serious.
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Dec 3, 2016 21:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The fight never stops but that doesn't mean y'all aren't demonstrably better off than we are in every way. I mean say what you will about right wing dismantling things but America is like king of that right now. No, the critique is that if you want to make lasting gains you shouldn't leave people who want to destroy all you've achieved in positions of massive power. This shouldn't be a hard concept to grasp. It's insane to deliberately put yourself in a position where you have to refight the same goddamn battle every thirty years just to keep what you've got, and hence actually existing Social Democracy is an absurd ideology.
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Dec 3, 2016 22:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Unfortunately this isn't Rimworld and I can't put all the pyromaniacs up against a wall. A year and a half ago Donald loving Trump being elected as the goddamn President of the United States wasn't on the table either, so I'd take any and all recieved wisdom about what's politically possible and what's not with a big grain of salt.
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Dec 3, 2016 22:52
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JeffersonClay posted:The alternative is a dictatorship of the proletariat and that hasn't produced a lot of enviable outcomes either. Yes, I too agree that there are only two options in the world and it's absolutely impossible to figure out something new and better.
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Dec 3, 2016 22:58
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MiddleOne posted:The combination of state ownership and redistribution are explicitly socialist ideas that cannot be separated from what the role of the state is in the economy. This is precisely what I meant earlier when I said that the two of you are making a no true scotsman argument, these semantical distinctions are meaningless outside of philosophical arguments. Socialism is the idea that the workers should own the means of production, as opposed to capitalism which is the idea that the means of production should be owned by private actors. It's explicitly a theory about ownership. While it has historically gone hand in hand with state ownership and redistribution on account of those things being good for the working class these are not the defining ideas of socialism or even explicitly socialist ideas, as demonstrated by the fact that a whole lot of other political movements are also big on state ownership and redistribution for varous reasons, and some of them even were big on these things before socialism was even invented. DeusExMachinima posted:Judging from the way planned economies turned out last century (spoiler: they turned out capitalist of one stripe or another) you seem to laboring under the belief that the people in charge of The Party/economies under communism don't do the same thing. Cerebral Bore posted:Yes, I too agree that there are only two options in the world and it's absolutely impossible to figure out something new and better.
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Dec 4, 2016 11:56
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JeffersonClay posted:Searching for data regarding Obama's approval, I found this exit polling: Sure, if we discount the fact that the guy running on a populist economic platform managed to win the goddamn election by squaeking out wins in the states where economic populism enjoys the greatest amount of support. And also if we discount that the polls showed Bernie completely burying Trump while Hillary had a few points on him. Or all the other objective evidence.
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Dec 5, 2016 11:04
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Khisanth Magus posted:I love how much the GOP managed to get the left to turn on Obama after 8 years of obstruction. And people wonder why we don't have many good leftist politicians. I think it was less about GOP dark magic mindcontol and more about that your political idols managed to utterly blow the most important election of the century that caused the left to turn on Obama, hth. JeffersonClay posted:There's no inherent contradiction in a populist, conservative economic message. As we are all aware, there were significant discrepancies between the pre-election polling and the electorate that showed up at the polls. And even if the polls showing Bernie would have outperformed Hillary against trump are accurate, can we necessarily conclude that represents a groundswell of support for socialism? It could be that he was simply more likeable-- which is how people are explaining Hillary's underperforming Obama despite her similar (and maybe a bit more liberal) policy positions. "More people liked the socialist candidate and the polls showed massive support for his positions so how can we say that people support socialism?" - An ostensible adult in the year twenty-loving-sixteen. Like, do you even know what you're arguing yourself at this point? Cerebral Bore fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Dec 5, 2016 |
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Dec 5, 2016 20:48
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JeffersonClay posted:. You're literally reversing yourself within two sentences here. Also there's a slight difference between showing a Clinton landslide where she was winning by a few percentage points and the Bernie-Trump polls where Bernie was up over +10 points in the polling averages. One is a good result, the other is Reagan-Mondale territory, and you and your brave compatriots have not provided any argument as for how Trump was going to get himself out of that particular hole or indeed how, assuming the polling was flawed somehow, how it is mathematically possible to even arrive at such a result by mistake.
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Dec 5, 2016 21:23
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:That guy is dumb as hell but Sanders didn't appeal to people because he was a socialist, he appealed to people because he was the anti-status-quo figure who wasn't Donald Trump. Had he been President to oversee the economic crash we'll be having in the near future, the backlash would have been tremendous. For the record, I was mainly making fun of the poster in question for contradicting themselves within the same paragraph rather than making a serious analysis of the appeal of socialism in the US.
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Dec 5, 2016 21:26
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JeffersonClay posted:No, I'm not. Why don't you quote the contradictory statements. You're literally calling the polling inaccurate before basing your argument on exit polls in the next sentence with no explanation for why the polls that show things you like are good and the onthers are bad. This is either indicative of a monumental lack of intellectual honesty or a bad trolling attempt.
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Dec 5, 2016 21:34
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Oxxidation posted:What Americans want, always and only, is to make the people they hate suffer while feeling righteous about it. Everyone's lives will continue to degrade under Trump's presidency, but it won't matter to a majority of the electorate because they'll finally, finally have the Powers That Be supplying them with fresh scapegoats again. And nothing will matter, and nothing will change, and no one will notice or care. Ah yes, this totally explains why McCain won the election in 2008 by promising to keep foreverfucking those terrorist fuckers in the middle east.
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Dec 6, 2016 23:13
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The problem was that the neoliberals in the Democratic party chose to run somebody who was seen as a less credible proponent for a populist economic message than a literal New York billionaire.
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Dec 8, 2016 16:54
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Hobologist posted:I've never seen the Democratic platform as particularly populist. Progressive, yes; populist no. And that's why they lost to a two-bit orange conman.
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Dec 8, 2016 16:58
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theflyingorc posted:She surged after every debate. And at that point any fucker with half a brain in the Clinton campaign should have stopped and questioned whether the data was accurate or not.
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Dec 8, 2016 17:04
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theflyingorc posted:lol OK buddy You don't get to call yourself data-driven when you're unable to critically analyze your results. The idea that Texas would turn purple was so clearly preposterous that only a bunch of idiots without the ability to think critically about their own model could have entertained it. And what do you know, this turned out to be the case.
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Dec 8, 2016 17:14
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theflyingorc posted:"surprising results should be immediately discounted as wrong" is anathema to what statistics is as a discipline. You literally couldn't be saying a wronger thing The idea that running a political campaign can be reduced to an exercise in statistics is pretty loving dumb, hth. Hobologist posted:It's also why we passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and why, if Trump is to be believed, we may pass another one. Economic populism may win votes but its record at producing credible plans is mixed. In case you didn't notice,  also managed to win an election.Besides that, it's obvious that a proper left-wing economic platform is necessary to get out of the mess that over three decades of neoliberalism has landed us all into.
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Dec 8, 2016 17:20
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