People don't even know what they are talking about when Socialism gets mentioned in political contexts anymore. One person thinks Communism qua Mao/Stalin, another thinks USSR during Regan, another Norway, another some vague memory of the German Ideology they read 15 years ago.

The "socialism" that resembles social programs qua Norway seems like a pretty reasonable way to constrain some of the market's shittier aspects. That's not unreasonable if the messaging can be made effectively.

Also, Trump won with a minority of votes, what, 80k, over three states. He remains largely unpopular even with a strong economy. I'm not convinced he can win again without it being another fluke.

Scandinavian countries don't see themselves as socialist. They have social nets which provide for free education and healthcare but they have high taxes to pay for those. And on top of that, they are incredibly capitalist.

When AOC sounds off about socialism, I don't think she is always talking about the same model that those countries use and she does advocate for a level of control in government I'm uncomfortable with.

These are all the same takes given to justify hillary over bernie. Rather than try to appeal to a large, young, generally politically left-leaning segment of the population the dem party is still oh so thirsty for republican voters or are afraid of losing the voters who are generally center-right.

If the dems are to lose, they will lose because they end up doing the exact same thing they did in 2016, which is pushing an awful candidate like biden on potential voters, who based on his political history has no actual appeal to anyone who isn't a rightwinger, and the right will always go for trump.

In going to the left, politically, they can at least have actual policies and praxis that are distinct from their republican counterparts and offer actual solutions to the myriad crises we face in this day and age that don't have to result in elimination capitalism.

PS: youre an idiot, brawndo, fuck you

sane policies regarding economics

har har

Focusing all your effort on winning the vote of the demographic historically proven over and over to be impossible to please and worthless as far as voter turnout goes doesn't sound like a winning strategy.

I would tend to agree with the Baron here, as I think that a lot of people might be persuaded to vote for a Dem who promised substantive change, but there's a case to be made that a more traditional Dem might be able to capture some voters who are simply tired of Trump's antics and would like somebody who could behave themselves more or less normally in the Oval Office. Not Biden, but somebody. It's a question of how deep his support really is.

Also, I think that people underestimate how deeply capitalist both sides of the political divide tend to be in the United States: nominate somebody too far left and see yourself red-baited into oblivion. That's won a lot of elections in the United States in the last sixty years or so, so it's a risk. Of course, Trump would do that to any Dem nominated, so maybe that shouldn't even enter into the calculation. It's something I haven't resolved.

haha

"Why doesn't the Demoractic leadership learn from their mistake in 2016?!!!"

- Protest voters asleep during 2000, 2004, 2010, and 2016 elections

I don't think Hillary lost because of where she stood politically. She made a LOT of key mistakes in how she approached the public. She was problematic from the start. She didn't have charisma, and she was also Obama's henchman in many ways. She towed the line of old money and corporate influence. The difference between her and Trump is she tried to deny it and deflect from it by using social justice as some sort of shield that made her supposedly immune from all standards. She came across as fake and what it comes down to is that people wanted jobs and Trump was WAY better at addressing the needs of the non coast populace that saw more economic disparity under Obama that the Dems tried to sweep under the carpet. They oversaw a huge dip in manufacturing as China absorbed more jobs and the jobs that came in to replace those jobs was often low skill, low pay service industry work. Hillary spent the majority of her time addressing the needs of minorities because she thought middle American white swing voters and Dems would automatically flock to her and she saw no need to go out of her way to court them. Even if it wasn't for Comey being wildly incompetent and announcing his investigation, she probably would not have won.

Bernie had momentum and may have won over Trump because he managed to really push a message of unity and togetherness in the way Obama did. So even though he's a socialist, people might have chosen him over Trump. Polls suggested as much but polls can be wrong.

We've seen enough economic rise, just enough, for Trump to establish himself as responsible for that rise. I don't think anyone outside of Biden really has a chance to defeat him because of this. An election is about perception. If enough people see Biden as being able to economically provide Americans with better jobs and opportunities, and if they aren't dissuaded by any of his dealings with China and Ukraine, he could get in. He's number one in the polls so far because enough of a majority of Dems is conservative enough to not want to risk or chance a more left leaning candidate. That will determine who gets to run against Trump even if you add up all the other candidates numbers together and see that the people would prefer someone further left. Because Biden will use his charm and his time to work on that problem the same way Obama did.

The only thing is Biden isn't as smooth as Obama. And if he chooses the wrong running mate (Warren would be a disaster, he won't go with Bernie out of pride, Kamala Harris is too unlikeable and Buttigieg might actually make it as a dark horse and Biden won't choose Tulsi Gabbard because she would upstage him...for the record she is the only candidate I think people should go with here and she is the only one I would trust as President) he can kiss it goodbye. Hillary was stupid not to join forces with Bernie. She could have won if she hadn't been so fucking stupid as to think people would warm up to Tim Kaine.

It's about strategy. The Dems could win but they are too divided right now. Remember when the Tea Party came onto the scene and fucked things up for the Republicans? They are united now. The disunity in the GOP was one major factor in why they lost to Obama. The Dems are experiencing roughly the same growing pains right now and it will bite them in the ass until they are on the same page as to what platform they really want to go with and how liberal a platform they want to push onto the American public.

:Robert Downey Jr. rolling his eyes .gif:

"When AOC sounds off about socialism, I don't think she is always talking about the same model that those countries use and she does advocate for a level of control in government I'm uncomfortable with."
She's pretty much argued for pre-Reagan tax rates along with catching up to all the actual sane/liveable countries in terms of public health/social welfare and environmental reform. There isn't anything at all radical there.

For the past 10 years, the bulk of Democrats have been terrified of being anything but milquetoast centrists who stand for nothing because they think they can't win by being "socialists," and for those ten years Republicans have been defining everything Democrats do as "socialism" anyway, and beating them.

Republicans keep electing increasingly far-right fanatic, and meanwhile Dems are so terrified of their own principals that everytime a candidate proposes spending more than five dollars to help a non-rich person, a used kleenex in human form shows up to announce that "b-b-b-but working class voters* will never vote for something s-s-s-so extreme! Th-th-this is why Trump won, you guys! Ideas are bad!"

So we choose the "safe," "electable" options, the John Kerrys and the Hillary Clintons and the Al Gores, and golly, it sure is funny how those "electable" types never with their "reasonable" centrist proposals seem to never fucking get elected, isn't it?

Look, whoever wins the nomination will be branded a socialist even if they spend the entire campaign doing nothing but denouncing socialism. The Republicans have a massive media apparatus devoted to defining ANY Democrat that way, and it fucking works. Quit being scared of the label, because this party is going to be stuck with it no matter what. So we may as well not alienate the people who AREN'T scared of the "s" word, because they're all we've got, and there's enough of them to win this election - if we actually give them someone worth voting for.

I am actually for a free educational system if it was restructured to really help younger people get work after graduation. I would be for a free healthcare system if they left the HMOs the fuck out of it.

The problem is all of the Dems solutions have been half assed for years. AOC has a LOT of bad ideas. The Green New Deal wanted 90 trillion dollars and she wanted to restructure every building in the US? No. There's no way in hell that's going to happen. Dems keep pushing for black people to get reparations now. That's a good way of saying you'll pay bribes for black votes. The Dems keep pushing to let migrants from Central America in so they can work low wage, low paying, low skill jobs but most of those jobs are going to be replaced by robotics within the next ten years. And they know it. If we let in millions of people who will compete for jobs with no plan and no anticipation of the problems that will bring, it's shortsighted and would wind up in disaster. There are hundreds of millions of people that want to come here. We can't absorb the sheer numbers of people from the Third World that want to and the Dems don't ever respond about immigration statistics or facts anymore. They tell us everything will be find no matter what if we just clap our hands for Tinker Bell. The Dems passed an abortion law in NY that says you can kill a nine month old fetus. That's just as radical as the Alabama law. They're both horrible ideas. Cash for Clunkers was a disaster and fucked with small businesses. That was a proto socialist plan that failed horribly. Neither party ever did anything about outsourcing. The Dems had 8 years to contain the Chinese siphoning off our manufacturing jobs and they did NOTHING to stop it. Obama did not improve the jobs situation. The fact is 8 million people came in legally and his touted 11 million jobs that were created, well the numbers drop when you include immigration and the number of people that stopped looking for work. Not to mention the number of people who are way underpaid. Trump also skews unemployment stats but they have improved somewhat. The Dems want us to believe Muslims want to integrate into our society instead of changing it into a sharia law based one and the majority do. Both parties lie about different things. Trump lies about climate change. The Dems lie and say it's possible to prevent it.

Kamala and Tulsi have actually done the smart thing in advocating to stop our presence in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern hellholes. That would save us some money so I'll give them credit for that. Biden wouldn't give a shit. He's sort of a Band Aid of feel good ism but he represents old money just as much as Trump.

I know you guys want to believe that the Dems will eventually get their shit together and come up with a coherent plan to deal with topics of wealth inequality, healthcare, social justice, education and pollution. But they haven't. They just pretend to be the good guys that care about you, and they convince a lot of people of this. It's just not the case. Most of them are corrupt and take money from horrible corporations like Monsanto, etc. Pelosi is big with all those corporate monsters. She's a whore for them.

They have spent tremendous time and energy on impeachment and zero time on improving our economy. The Dems bitch and moan about Russia constantly but it was Obama who did nothing in 2014 when they FIRST started meddling with our elections. He wanted them to help us with his Iran deal, and he secretly worked to try to get Argentina to give them nuclear materials. Hillary gave Russia our uranium by a huge percentage. The invasion of Libya destabilized the entire Middle East and that the Dems creating more fucking disasters that the media barely reported on. Because none of that is treasonous.

I could go on. I voted for Gary Johnson because it was the right thing to do and I don't regret it. The Dems are mostly hypocrites but who cares about that if you feel good because your emotions have been manipulated?

Reminder that MB rooted for Trump and the Republicans through the whole 2018 election. Now he's playing 'I wish I could be a Democrat if it weren't for those EVIL CLOSE-MINDED LIBERALS' while reciting all the Trump campaign's talking points.

He's full of shit, is the point I'm making.

How wrong you were 🤣🤣

Obama was pretty conservative for a Democrat and it's why he won. He knew he couldn't go too far, and he advocated for some fairly socialist policies before he gave up and let the HMOs have our healthcare system on a silver platter.

The real way centrists fucked up was supporting the MIC and the wars. That fucked them in my opinion. It gave the socialists and far left the momentum and backing to get as far as they have. Of course, now you have complete attacks on free speech and a shitton of social justice catchphrases and mean diddly squat getting thrown around like they are Bible verses from Jesus himself and the left eats it up because they are desperate to be good people.

Everyone wants to be good. No one wants to admit the other side could also want to be good.

Yay America

the problem here is that generally speaking, the left has been losing ground since the 1950's. so in a country that has two political parties, one generally center-right and feckless; the other far FAR F A R right, advocates for corporate colonialism and mass murder of those who resist. within the power structures of this empire we call a republic there are no good sides. And generally this kind of madness begins with a destruction of the left as a viable political force.

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist"

PS: I will drag race your bitch ass at the wawa, brawndo

I'm going to have to disagree with Brawndo here. Trump's election and continued popularity (more or less) poses the question, "what if a large percentage of the US electorate did not want to be good?" What he shares in common with his supporters is a sense of resentment and blamelessness. I hardly think that most Trump voters voted for him for reasons having to do with virtue. The man is an obvious rogue and his willingness to cede the moral high ground on just about everything has been saddening, if not exactly shocking.

While there's a lot of unfamiliar and suspect language being thrown around the left, I think the "words-of-Jesus" references can be left to the other side too, these days. Somebody in the United States is engaging in unfettered big-man authoritarian populism and it's not the Dems.

I don't know who you once knew on the Left, but I have a feeling you hung out with some far-left activist types that are not representative of the party as a whole. Most Democrats are as self-interested as Republicans, they just consider their personal interests to be served better by what they see as a fairer, more equitable society. The Democratic Party is not by and large made up of self-sacrificing altruists.

Miss Henson, to that I would say that yes, I was actually around a lot of socialists at one point in my younger years. Lots of activist types. A lot of my friends now are still leftist activists. But I think most people get tired of that after a while and just want to live a life that is moderately comfortable and as you approach middle age, all you want is a decent job that allows you to be able to afford a lifestyle that just isn't poor. A lot of people settle for that after a while.

And a lot of people on both sides think that the person they support is good. Most Republicans see Trump as a guy who does the right thing but says the wrong thing. They see him as impolite but they justify the "rough edges" because he cares about them. His personality cult is very strong in that sense and he is a LOT better at convincing people that he does care than Hillary did. The question is, can he do it again? Biden is more formidable in that sense, in relating to the common everyday man - or at least appearing to.

People who voted for Obama and Bush definitely saw them as moral, good men who were doing the right thing and it was why they got re elected as opposed to being just one term presidents. When all the Dems have is Russia to use, it comes across as weak and pathetic to the other side. And the ratings drop for CNN and MSNBC is an indication that swing voters and independents and some of the Dems that switched sides or are on the fence think so, too.

I think the GOP will win the next election. Hickenlooper is actually a decent, smart man and he realizes what full on socialism means. A lot of Americans have begun to equate socialism with fairness. But is that the answer? It's one thing to have a social democracy but a full on socialist revolution would tank our economy. If enough people don't understand the difference or they do understand socialism/communism and want to embrace it anyway because they don't care and Biden gets in, that could mean another Green party candidate could come in and take support. Jill Stein got over a million votes last time. If she ran again, she could get maybe twice or three times that by siphoning off the far left voters from the Democrats.

I certainly agree with your assessment of far-left activists: it takes a certain ascetic personality to stick with it over a lifetime. I grew up in South America, where some sort of communist phase is essentially a step in upper/middle class life development. But by reading your posts I think you think of the people you hang/hung with as more representative of the left as a whole than it really is. Compared to most places, the US has no organized left at all. I think that that might change if the current dysfunction continues, and it's unclear what people say when they mean "socialism" I tend to think it refers to something more like the Scandinavian model, but it's always been an ill-defined term in American politics. Someone should hurry up and define it before Trump gets re-elected.

I'd like to say that even as a liberal I'm pretty sure that George W. Bush was generally, well-intentioned. He wasn's smart enough to be president and pretty much overmatched by some of the personalities on his staff, but I wouldn't call him a bad man. Jury's still out on Cheney and Rumsfeld, though.

Having said that, I think that Trump's in another category. He doesn't know the first thing about most things, but he does know who hates who in America and how he can exploit that. Most Americans, especially white Americans, are optimists, but we've never seen a president so willing to play on people's animosities. I think that this is one of the big reasons people react to him: without it, I'm not sure where he'd be, politically.

And I'm not sure I'm willing to accept his voter's motives at face value, either. I still think the common denominator is resentment: Donald Trump resents the world for not thinking as well of himself as he does, his voters have a lot of racial and economic anxieties that can't be addressed in traditional, polite politics. The fact that he lives in a literal gold house and is one of the most obviously self-centered people you could ever hope to meet doesn't seem to matter to them, and that confuses and amazes me. But I think the emotional connection is what makes him possible. Maybe you can excuse a lot of these people by saying that they've been fooled, but that hardly speaks well of them.

Americans have always played the "Nazi collaborator" game with each other: most Americans didn't get a chance to collaborate with the Nazis in the 1940s, but that's a historical accident, mostly. I think that some of them probably would have if they'd gotten the chance, and I'm not the only one who does. We're never gong to have real answer to that sort of hypothetical, but as far as I'm concerned, every single American who voted for that orange motherfucker gets put on my own "potential collaborator" list. I can't imagine voting for Trump because of his experience, his ideas, or his abilities: he's not shy about basically demonstrating that he has none. Something else is going on, and it's not fascism, but it isn't miles away from it, either. These are people you cannot, fundamentally, trust in anything like a democracy. I suppose that's a harsh way to judge 45 million Americans, but there's a limit to everything, and that limit might as well be Donald Trump in populist-authoritarian drag. I don't suppose this attitude wins the DNC any votes, but I'm not the chairman of that organization, so whatev: as far as I'm concerned, Trump voters are forever under suspicion of being closet authoritarians, bad Americans, and shitty people. Fuck them all, they deserve whatever they get from him.

Reminder that MB rooted for Trump and the Republicans through the whole 2018 election. Now he's playing 'I wish I could be a Democrat if it weren't for those EVIL CLOSE-MINDED LIBERALS' while reciting all the Trump campaign's talking points.

He's full of shit, is the point I'm making.

Is MB EvilHomer? His antics in 2016 up and pissed me off.

hard to say
that personality is totally identikit internet idiot