Remember last week when some folks were reassuring us that criticism of “identity politics” in the wake of the Democrats’ loss wasn’t code for throwing marginalized people under the bus? Here’s TPM’s report on a speech Bernie Sanders delivered in Boston yesterday:
In a speech Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) urged attendees to move away from “identity politics” and towards policies aimed at helping the working class.
Sanders spoke to a crowd of more than 1,000 mostly young people at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, according to a report from WBUR.
“The working class of this country is being decimated — that’s why Donald Trump won,” Sanders said, according to the same report. “And what we need now are candidates who stand with those working people, who understand that real median family income has gone down.”
Sanders also urged the crowd to move the party away from what he called “identity politics.”
“It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’ That is not good enough,” he said, according to the same report. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industries.”
Let’s unpack some of the insulting, revisionist implications that follow from this speech. My first “Go Fuck Yourself, Sanders” goes to the implication that Clinton ever asked anyone to vote for her just because she’s a woman. She didn’t, so fuck that bullshit, and fuck Sanders for implying that she did.
The second goes to the wholesale purchase of the cherished and increasingly accepted in some circles wingnut-fomented meme that the Democrats don’t represent “real America” and got what was coming to them for turning their back on the working class in favor of embracing the elites. That’s a lie we believe at our peril.
The DLC is dead, and good riddance. I agree there has been too little attention paid to those hurt by globalization, too much happy talk about the jobs that would flow in from that process, too much eagerness on the part of some Democrats to curry favor with big donors. We’ve debated that endlessly here throughout PBO’s two terms; it was debated endlessly in the primaries, and that message was incorporated into the Democratic Party platform. Sanders didn’t invent it, and he doesn’t own it now.
But since we’re the reality-based party, supposedly capable of handling nuance and complexity, we can — in theory — simultaneously acknowledge the accomplishments of a highly successful two-term Democratic president who pulled us from the brink of a second Great Depression, got an additional 20 million people access to health care coverage, helped make sure marriage equality became the law of the land, turned a catastrophically high flood of job losses into a stable, less than 5% unemployment economy, etc.
During the primary, Sanders shit all over that, as did Trump in the general. But it doesn’t follow that a Sanders-like message — from anyone, including Sanders — would have been a winner. For every one WWC vote an “everything sucks after eight years of Obama” platform might have pulled in, how many votes would be lost from Democrats who believe in this president and have supported his agenda? Greater than Trump’s margins in the Rust Belt, is my guess.
And finally, what I find most infuriating about Sanders’ take is that he’s ignoring the people who actually DID embrace identity politics in this election cycle: That would be Donald J. Trump and the millions of voters who embraced WHITE identity politics. The Democrats ran on an inclusive message. Trump did the opposite. Again, for every WWC vote we’d gain by embracing a very specific kind of identity politics to chase Trump voters, how many would Democrats lose? Well, mine, for one.
Two final thoughts: the first is that politicians are running around trying to pound the round peg of this election loss into the square hole of their own agenda. Yes, we need to examine the causes and learn the appropriate lessons, but they are myriad. Any simple solution, such as turning the party’s soul over to a man who couldn’t win the Democratic primary, would be compounding the problem rather than solving it, IMO. Yes to sharpening the economic message to more loudly broadcast an appeal to ALL voters. Yes to making sure future candidates’ messages — and arguably the candidates themselves — excite people since we seem to be in the reality TV era of politics. But not just “no” but “FUCK NO” to the idea that the Democrats lost because of “identity politics.”
Second, so much of this intramural squabbling is crab bucket politics. We’ve got an unhinged, pathological liar, authoritarian conman poised to take office, and he is shaking out the KKK bedsheets and emptying the armoires where the brown shirts are stored to fill his administration with the very worst pricks imaginable. A man who is openly setting up a kleptocracy to funnel loot to the pack of parasites who are accompanying him to DC. A man who will rage-tweet all night about perceived disrespect shown at a Broadway show to his beady-eyed, bible-humping VP and remain utterly silent about the hundreds of hate crimes psychos nationwide are perpetrating in his name.
Perhaps we have more important things to focus on, is what I’m saying. And it’s flat-out unseemly for a politician with standing in the Democratic Party to focus elsewhere, even if he does have a book to flog.
Msut77
Get a grip
Trentrunner
Sanders is not a Democrat. Until he is, what he says is meaningless. (And offensive.)
Thoroughly Pizzled
He helps produce the best Democratic platform I’ve seen then throws it under the bus and goes back to his corrupt DNC narrative as soon as the election is over. He’s not someone I want watching my back.
Major Major Major Major
Sanders has standing in the Democratic Party?
schrodinger's cat
My prediction: Sanders is the new McCain we will see him on all the Sunday Talk shows and he will criticize the Democrats from the left.
Marc
And yet another frontal attack on Sanders and Sanders supporters isn’t “intramural squabbling”?
The hate-on that people here had for Sanders was incredibly destructive during the primary season. If defeating Trump actually matters to people here, you might start by not taking every possible occasion to rile up that particular attack machine. And maybe, just maybe, listening to people on the same side of the aisle about what they think, instead of looking for ways to attack them.
Or, just get your outrage on. Which is what I bet this thread will be all about.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Not even Obama could do that.
Other than that, AMEN, sister.
John S.
Yes, and apparently the prevailing wisdom around here is that Bernie Sanders is right up at the top of the list.
germy
@schrodinger’s cat: So the MSM’s useful idiot?
Thoroughly Pizzled
@John S.: It’s important to talk about Bernie because he’s still around and still intent on shitting up the nest. It’s not like he went to Mars.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodinger’s cat: Hey, that new lakefront home won’t heat itself.
schrodinger's cat
@germy: Yes. Prediction#2: This thread will be swarming with Bernie apologists and will reach a count of 1000+
MaryL
RIghteous rant, Betty. I agree with everything you said.
WarMunchkin
Wow, Bernie might even be dumber than Trump. Yes, I said it.
Gin & Tonic
@Marc: Maybe the guy who lost the primaries shouldn’t be giving lessons in how to win.
schrodinger's cat
@WarMunchkin: What made you change your mind. If I am not mistaken, weren’t you a Bernie supporter in the primaries?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Democrats (and maybe Rs, I don’t know) always long for the one who, for whatever reason, didn’t run or didn’t win– Bobby Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Howard Dean, now some pine for a counterfactual Biden or Sanders… Most of those people keep quiet about whatever fantasy counter-factual presidencies live in their imagination, I don’t think St Bernard is going to be able to. He drank his own kool-aid till his teeth were floating.
I think the Clinton campaign over learned half the lessons of the Obama campaign, that it was all about data and demographics, I think that’s what Obama was saying when he talked about all the fish fries in Iowa (which to me is more a northern thing– MN and WI, I think in Iowa they do corn boils and steak dinners, but whatever). and they worked too hard to point out that Trump was such a aberration and a goon, and not enough talking about how he was a typical Republican. Matt Yglesias said she should have stuck with the “trumped-up trickle-down” thing, and maybe he’s right. Another instance of the Clintons overreacting to media and pop-culture criticism.
tobie
@Marc:
Oh, yeah, because we readers of a blog have so much power and our comments exert such influence on the American electorate. Puleeze…BS has been using his bullhorn to trash the Democratic Party and the fact that it offends us members of the loyal base, who contribute regularly to Dem candidates and the party and volunteer our time every cycle, is something he’ll just have to get used to, if he insists on being the media’s tool and shit on the Democrats every chance he gets.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodinger’s cat: Already I see one of the usual suspects.
JPL
Is this where we talk about TPM’s breaking news about Trump and another business dealing after the election?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/cashing-in-bigly-in-argentina
This is the third time that foreign press reported possible business dealings with Trump, since the election.
This is not normal.
What outrageous thing will Trump tweet about tonight?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Marc: would you like a cookie?
ETA: @JPL: MSNBC actually talking about this… unconfirmed, they’ve reached out to the transition team, no comment… but at least they’re talking about it
JPL
@schrodinger’s cat: I agree!
kindness
Oh no. Not another of these threads. I agree with Betty but don’t want BernieBros to leave in a huff. (politely says nothing more)
artem1s
Bernie is a tool of Russian propaganda just as much as Trump. He just sucked at his job and didn’t keep Hillary from winning the primary. Time to start ignoring this asshole once again. We need to start building state and local infrastructures/communities in the party to help people who are going to be devastated by the coming holocaust. He’s using the GOP bully pulpit to encourage people to turn a blind eye when their neighbors get hauled away or lose their houses or die destitute under a bridge. Bernie needs to read up on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller. That identity politics could save his ass soon. Bannon isn’t buying his good little German shtick.
Betty Cracker
@Marc: I’m not jockeying for the soul of the party; Sanders is. And he said something incredibly insulting and divisive, IMO. If you disagree, I’d be interested in hearing an alternate interpretation of his remarks as quoted above about voting for a woman just because she’s a woman.
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: If only! Fixed. :)
Major Major Major Major
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oh no we hate Howard Dean now remember?
trollhattan
I wouldn’t follow Sanders to a free pizza buffet, much less a deadly landscape feature. BTW, is it possible to have a fatal cliff fall in Florida? Am imagining a tall dune with a scattering of discarded walkers at its base and a gaggle of kvetching oldsters wondering where lunch is.
Marc
@Gin & Tonic: Which has approximately nothing to do with a front-page poster here yet again egging people on to engage in venomous infighting.
I’m in the mode where I’m trying to listen to people and to figure out the best way to fight what Trump represents. Firing up the five minute hate does nothing to serve that goal.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Why/how does Sanders “fix” a party to which he doesn’t belong? Can he be the next Jill Stein?
JPL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Josh is disappointed that he did not receive credit. Maggie Haberman retweeted this
Lanata is well respected. He uncovered political, financial scandal tied to #Kirchners that ended w/ biz associate in jail.
divf
@trollhattan:
No – not enough elevation. but wait a few more years, and tripping, falling, and drowning will be a possibility.
Nick
Perhaps, while going forward, it would be good for Democrats, liberals, leftists, and all possible allies to actually discuss what people said, and not what other people report them as saying. Here is one comment on the TPM article:
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/138888/no-bernie-sanders-didnt-ask-supporters-ditch-identity-politics
What’s the point of trying to stir up fights based on someone’s contentious interpretation of a perfectly acceptable liberal Senator?
And in regards to your original post, it’s quite ironic, given that we have spent this entire year following Clinton off the cliff. A real cliff.
JPL
@trollhattan: I thought that the democrats gave his a committee chair. Now I’m off to search google.
divf
@Marc:
Nor does Bernie validating white
identitysupremacy politics.kindness
@Marc: – Maybe Bernie ain’t the guy to do that? Just sayin’ Marc, just sayin’.
germy
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Major Major Major Major: Well, I’ve always been ambivalent about him, but from ’04 and well into Obama’s term there was a lot of pining around the left blogosphere. the fantasy might’ve been president I used to call Howard Rodham Kucinich, who was unbeatable if only the DNC/DLC/MSM had stayed out of the way and never would’ve sold out like Obama. I guess now we have Joe Sanders? Bernie Biden?
What the hell ever happened to Kucinich, anywa? I was never a fan, but I’m surprised at how completely he seems to have completed faded from politics.
Gin & Tonic
@germy: Co-opting and dividing the opposition is a very Russian tactic.
JPL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Now the Hill has the story..
http://thehill.com/policy/finance/307050-report-trump-pressed-foreign-building-project-in-congratulatory-phone-call
Marc
@Betty Cracker: If we look to be offended by people there is a good chance that we will be. I know that any mention of identity politics infuriates you. You might step back and ask people – without demonizing them – what they mean by that and why they brought it up.
I think that a lot of people, including me, associate it with extreme self-righteousness and intolerance of differing opinion. They associate it with assuming the worst about people by jumping right to the most bigoted explanation for whatever they did or said. They associate it with assuming that race and gender are the only things that matter in explaining what people do.
This doesn’t have to mean, at all, that there is no such thing as racism. It means in part that we’ve adopted tactics that demonstrably don’t work (e.g. Clinton either did worse or the same as Obama with women and minorities) or that actually backfire. Rather than ruling any possible critique out of bounds, it’s a lot more useful to ask people what they’re after than it is to project insulting explanations onto them.
Because sometimes they end up doing things like being antagonized or demoralized, and your well-meaning approach does the opposite of what you want.
Major Major Major Major
@Nick: That… is basically an extended version of what he is accurately reported as having said. The context adds nothing, if anything it hurts a little.
ETA: The thing about Sanders that really sticks in my craw is that he’s an unreconstructed Marxist, and classic Marxism is dumb. The full context just confirms that.
WarMunchkin
@schrodinger’s cat: I was comfortable with both, but lean team DFH in political views. I voted for Hillary, decided after the NYDN interview was released and volunteered for her as much as I could.
Sanders has lots of popularity right now, and I bet he’s secretly loving that Hillary lost. For some people, politics isn’t about making people’s lives better, it’s about the head rush of being right and dominant. He needs to be taken down (politically).
cokane
The thing is, alot of the supposed racist agenda of Trump is not likely to be acted on. He’ll have a helluva time with a Muslim registry, the wall isn’t getting built, and the federal government doesnt control policing. There’s reason for vigilance here, as there are things that he can do, but the worry should actually be focused on where he, Ryan and McConnell agree. And that’s tearing up the New Deal and Great Society and their descendants such as Obamacare.
This will create disaffected Trump voters, just as Bush & Co. created a wave election in 2006. And facts are facts, midterm elections do tend to be whiter, older and more conservative than general elections. No magic wand is going to change this. Time to suck it up and start engaging in some realpolitik.
Winnief
I’ve gotta say the recent rise in hate crimes and the coverage of people who received Medicaid expansion under Obama, but then voted against his chosen successor Hillary, and are NOW worried about losing their medical coverage makes me *extremely* skeptical about the “it’s all economics” theorizing.
It’s *possible* Bernie-or more likely Biden could have won instead of Hillary but for reasons that have nothing to do with policy.
Major Major Major Major
@WarMunchkin:
FTFY
jacy
Fuck the white working class. And fuck Bernie Sanders. I’m sure this thread will quickly be filled up with Sanders supporters, and so I say fuck them too. Sanders was never a Democrat — he was an opportunist.
I will say that Sanders was correct in that the major problem in this country is economic disparity, but he never understood all the things that prop economic disparity up. RACISM, SEXISM, XENOPHOBIA. He thinks recognizing this is “identity politics.”
There are myriad reasons we’re looking at a Trump administration, but I don’t think Sanders understands a single one of them.
ruckus
@Marc:
If Bernie had realistic policies in the first place and wasn’t trying to throw the person who beat him in the primary under the bus and wasn’t being an ass right now, you might have a point. But as he was and is still is doing all that, you don’t.
germy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I call it the Clear Channel syndrome. Sometimes I’ll wonder whatever happened to a band I used to listen to. “Whatever happened to them?? I never hear them anymore! Did they break up??” And then out of curiosity I check wikipedia and learn they’ve been putting album after album out, and touring the world, but they never get played on the radio.
The Moar You Know
Thanks for the thread, Betty, gave me a great opportunity to update the ol’ troll filter (Troll-B-Gone, it’s great). Looks like we got some new names, same faces.
Facebones
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
His seat got redistricted in 2010 and he lost the runoff against another Cleveland Democrat.
Ryan
To listen to Sanders, you’d almost thing that Clinton’s opponent in the general won the popular vote or something!
Lynn Dee
I agree completely, Betty.
And don’t we already know that “ditching identity politics” on a claim that economic justice will take care of concerns about civil rights and social justice doesn’t work out that way? Human nature being what it is, minorities just get stepped on if we don’t remain vigilant about civil rights.
So yeah, fuck Bernie Sanders. (And may I point out that, as per usual, he’s still not showing any real leadership — he’s just bellowing?)
gwangung
@Marc:
I think that says more about you, if anything.
jacy
@Marc:
The point is, Sanders is not helping figure out what to do about Trump. He’s pointing in all the wrong directions. Letting the narrative that he’s trying to get going stand without dissecting the problems in it is not going to help things.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
One of the things I’m looking forward to is seeing some new blood rise in the Democratic Party. I was deeply unimpressed with both of the two choices we had in the primary this year. I voted for Clinton, and I worked for her election, and I’m sorry she lost, since I think she would have done a fair to good job. But now that it’s done and I’m looking for bright spots, I can say I’m glad that the Clintons are gone from the top of the party. They always made so much trouble for themselves. I know that, if Hillary Clinton’s case, that might be unfair, since Republicans have been out for her for 25 years. But too often she hasn’t helped herself. And they both have had such bad judgement about the people they surround themselves with. It’s good on the whole that they can go off and retire now.
And I’m glad Sanders isn’t going to be the face of the party, either. He said some good things, but he was reckless at times, and I don’t know that he ever really cared about the fate of the Democratic Party over the long run. We only have two parties here, and, like it or not (and I’m happy, on the whole, with the Democrats), we have to choose one side or the other. He didn’t do that until he made his mind up that he could get something out of it.
So, now all we have to do is bring a whole new generation of liberal Democrats into their prime in four years–or two, if we want to have a shot at Congress. What fun!
Major Major Major Major
@cokane:
He can refuse to give federal funds to sanctuary cities and start going after the DACA kids on day one, off the top of my head. And he might not control policing but he’s got at least a significant portion of the FBI in his pocket.
cokane
@germy: his district was axed by Republicans in the great gerrymander of 2012. no joke!
http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/ohio-gerrymandering-costs-congress-lib
his district was mashed in with Toledo, forcing him to compete with Kaptur who was popular and had more of the district in her previous district
trollhattan
@Winnief:
Nicely put. Too bad the media won’t pick up on the nuance.
DCF
Yes, HRC won the popular vote. Yes, Republican voter suppression, James Comey and Russian interference in the election all contributed to the Democratic Party loss(es).
All that said, the level of vitriol and denial of facts that permeate this post and thread are, in a word, appalling. At some point, some percentage of the Balloon Juice commentariat will – I hope – accept that neoliberalism in the form of the DLC/Third Way is done. Voter turnout for Democratic candidates was down – way down – for several reasons, among them that in a ‘change’ election the DNC chose to select an establishment candidate who advocated for incrementalism (at best) and was disliked by almost as much of the electorate as the electoral college victor….
Hubris led to this defeat…overconfidence and a myopic refusal to acknowledge that every one of HRC’s weaknesses played to Trump’s (relative) strengths….
Let ‘post-truth’ be the exclusive/singular province of the Republican Party – and open your eyes (and mind) to the current American political environment to enable progressive Democrats to win the future.
Facebones
You know, we can talk about more than one thing. We can do more to reach out to working class white men while still coming out hard against discrimination and racism. It’s not either/or.
But when you phrase it with a thinly veiled attack on Hillary, it isn’t helpful. And I agree, it certainly sounds like Bernie is angling to become the Sunday morning lefty version of John McCain.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Major Major Major Major: and an attorney general whose JOD will not pay much attention to things like voter suppression and stop-and-frisk, and similar policies. And an increasingly partisan judiciary.
David Fud
It seems to me that what Democrats have, and have had most especially in every off year election, is a turnout problem. Fix that, and all of this angst goes away. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. I don’t know the solution. But we simply have to figure out how to get our voters consistently to the polls.
Yes, there are now going to be more structures in the way, voter ID, restricted times, suppression via completely awful media, who knows what else they cook up…
But if we just turned out at ~10% higher rate, which is well within the realm of possibility, this whole conversation would be different. I think this is why Obama is focusing post-presidency on this. Not on typical political issues, but the ballot box. He is getting rid of one set of impediments. Next a Democratic politician will have to make a better case to get the voters out. But, at least they will (given some Obama successes) be able to vote.
germy
@cokane:
And Cheney holds no elected office, but he was featured prominently on the morning villager talk shows, as was his losing daughter. The spotlight, like the heart, wants what it wants.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
More importantly, whatever happened to Mrs. Kucinich?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DCF: waiter, could I get some croutons and fresh pepper with that word salad?
Villago Delenda Est
I am so fucking done with Bernie. I invite him, cordially, to go find a fire to die in.
trollhattan
@germy:
Hate to say this but Lizard is now winner winner, chicken dinner and headed to DC.
cokane
@germy: was Kucinich ever on talk shows tho? outside of his prez runs, i mean
also i get your anger about Cheney, but, ehh.. they have plenty of liberals booked on those shows, your Krugmans and other columnists
Villago Delenda Est
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Seconded. Throwing a bunch of words at the wall hoping some will stick. Less vinegar, more oil, or vice versa.
ruemara
@Marc: Goddammit, fuck you. Fuck all of you Sanders worshippers. He is siding with white nationalists in saying my needs as a woman and black woman at that, do not deserve to be held at the same level as what aids white people. Fucking fuck you.
germy
@Facebones:
Something tells me they’ll have no interest in hiring him.
If HRC had won, they’d have him on every morning, just to let him criticize her. But since that mission is accomplished, why would they let him prattle on? The gameshow host won, why question it?
Villago Delenda Est
@jacy: Bernie’s blind spot on race is his undoing. He sees everything in terms of “economic anxiety” and misses a lot of the point. Racism is a tool used by the 1% to keep the 99% divided and distracted from what the 1% is doing.
tobie
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): I’m all for thinking about young promising people in the party. It occurred to me last night that the next gubernatorial race in Maryland will be in 2018, and one way Tom Perez could bump his name recognition is if he ran against Republican Gov. Hogan. It’s a long shot but it would be a great race.
(Had hopes for Deval Patrick’s future in the party but I see he’s gone on from the Mass governorship to work for Bain Capital. Sigh.)
msdc
@Marc:
Projection much? Sanders wouldn’t even concede until we were almost on the eve of the convention, and his rantings about the “corrupt” primary process (you know, the one that nominated his opponent by a solid majority) did lasting damage to Clinton well into the general. I still hear Sanders fans telling me to this day that the primary was rigged, and that attitude did a lot to damage Clinton’s turnout. So until I hear Sanders and his most inflexible supporters start admitting their complicity in this mess – instead of throwing the most reliable Democratic constituencies under the bus – I won’t be looking to them for guidance.
Alesis
I think that Sanders is grappling with this about as well as a 70ish man who spent his political career in Burlington, VT, USA can.
He has to rely on the rest of us to have a bit more sense. Donald Trump did not win because free trade hurt rural Wisconsin (especially because rural Wisconsin actually benefits from free trade)
He won because white Americans are for the first time truly being confronted with the knowledge that absolute dominance of the American political system may not be a permanent thing.
And it scares some of them.
msdc
And Betty, your point about Sanders shitting all over Obama’s accomplishments (and his coalition) is very well taken. As we rebuild the Democratic party I’m going to be paying attention to the folks who built those accomplishments, not those who derive their claims to moral authority from their inability to win a primary (and their inability to let it go).
D58826
And what are
other than a way to criticize with out actually naming any one. It’s like political; correctness – all in the eye of the beholder.
I’m From the Northeast and there has always been the Irish-american vote (hence politicians marching in the St. Pat’s day parade), Italian-American vote (wasn’t that Columbus day parade great), etc.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@tobie: I thought Patrick’s wife had some sort of chronic illness, and they don’t think the all-consuming nature of the presidency would work for them? I’ve heard something similar– family issues– about Susannah Martinez, FWIW.
Marc
@Ryan: Let’s say that someone is playing chess and they get checkmated. If they then proclaim that they’re the real winner, or the moral winner because they still have more pieces on the board then people would laugh at them. Because chess is a game with rules, and checkmate is the goal.
It’s the same way with elections. We know that you win with electoral college votes, and given how constitutional amendments work, there is roughly zero chance that this will change. Campaigns are not run to maximize popular vote and running up big lopsided margins in some places doesn’t change the outcome. This is by design. So using it as a sort of consolation prize is missing the point: Clinton lost in the contest that mattered; Democrats have been able to do better in that contest recently; and there is a real problem if a candidate like Trump gets even close.
Emma
@DCF: “Current American environment” if measured for the PRIMARY Democratic turnout, selected Hillary over Bernie. That pretty much means either that (1) progressives sat out the primaries because they didn’t care or (2) democratic voters aren’t as “progressive” as you’d like to think.
Now, as far as the GENERAL election, who do we appeal to first? The Millennials who bothered to vote went for Hillary but not enough bothered to show up. The real white working class actually also went for her. The people that voted Trump were, according to 538 (and others):
The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.
So how do we reach them?
Kay
WTF is this new horror? They’re coming up with a coordinated message?
What kills me is they don’t care at all about credibility. They’re a joke. Why would anyone in their right mind pay to watch them parrot Trump’s themes?
Betty Cracker
@Marc: I notice you didn’t address Sanders’ quote about a woman asking people to vote for her just because she’s a woman. Since Sanders isn’t here to tell us what he meant, I’m hoping someone who objects to my interpretation can tell me specifically what he meant by that remark. I’ve read it in context. Still don’t see an angle that isn’t incredibly insulting and divisive to more than 50% of the party, but I’ll admit I’ve found Sanders singularly unimpressive since around the time of his NYDN interview.
@David Fud: Turnout problem — that’s certainly a big part of it. Saw a clip of Keith Ellison addressing that AND pushing back on the notion that his own candidacy would exacerbate the so-called “identity politics” problem. At the moment, he sounds like someone worth hearing.
MaryL
@Facebones:
I want to believe this is true, but I have yet to see anyone put forth plausible practical suggestions for accomplishing this when any attempt to address discrimination and racism is immediately seen as something divisive that repels white voters.
tobie
@DCF:
The DLC is dead. HRC didn’t run on neoliberal/DLC/Third Way platform at all. This is a total straw man.
Bobby Thomson
Sanders never met a false narrative he wouldn’t reinforce in service of Trump.
I repeat, as many times as necessary, fuck that guy.
schrodinger's cat
@tobie: New Definition: Neoliberal – Anyone who Sanders and his supporters don’t like.
Emma
@Kay: We need to bypass them. We need to create an information system that doesn’t rely on the MSM, especially the television one. We need to support places that won’t lie to us. I am a lousy organizer and my health issues keep me fairly limited, but if there was a website that collected news from world newspapers, I would contribute — Spanish and Portuguese.
DCF
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
How does that crow taste? Feel free to spice that dish any way you want….
Good to know that in a tumultuous world, some things don’t change…it appears that a Rudy Giuliani-style (‘Noun, Verb, 9/11) of written discourse is still your preference….
Yoda Dog
Man, I loved Bernie before this election cycle. Voted for him in the primary. That, like so much else, is all gone now. This has been quite a tough year, to say the least.
germy
@Kay:
I stopped watching them sometime around the 9th of November. I was thinking about tuning in again, but… nahh, I think not.
jacy
@msdc:
I’ve had several Trump voters I know personally tell the that Sander’s was “cheated” out of the nomination and that they would have voted for him if he had been the nominee (not that I necessarily believe that). But how convenient that his story line dovetails with Trump’s? Sanders gives cover to racists and sexists — makes them feel good about their vote.
trollhattan
@Kay:
Holy shit, they’re all in with the new horrorshow. I suppose the Hamilton cast is next, trudging to Trump Tower to beg the czar’s forgiveness before it’s too late.
Chris
Okay, that right there was the last straw for me. Fuck this guy and the rat he rode in on.
trollhattan
@DCF:
You do understand that thing you’re gnawing on is the crow’s drumstick, yes?
Marc
@msdc: I’ve been in this community for a long time. In the past year it’s become downright vicious to people who do not toe the party line, in particular to people who are not zealous Clinton supporters. This reflects a broader problem of deep intolerance across the left-leaning side online, by which I mean specifically intolerance of disagreement.
When I see continuing attacks on Sanders and his supporters I wonder what the point is. A winning campaign isn’t owed support; it earns support and inspires support. If Clinton was such a weak general election candidate that primary campaign criticism crippled her, then maybe the problem was that nominating her was a mistake in the first place. It wouldn’t be the first time that a mainstream primary candidate with a lot of baggage beat back a challenger but struggled in the general election. I haven’t seen such a complete lack of enthusiasm for a general election candidate among Democrats that I know since Reagan-Carter in 1980. Blaming the people is only useful if you can elect a new people.
chromeagnomen
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): i agree with your comment, but take small issue with your assertion that the Clintons made trouble for themselves. it seems to me that HRC could have found the cure for cancer, but that somehow would have been twisted to become a scandal of some sort. it wasn’t so much they made trouble for themselves, as that the right made everything into trouble for them.
Kay
I’m proud of Clinton for not triangulating and moving closer to Trump. I don’t care if she lost because of that.
Frankly, Sanders buddying up with Trump and parroting Fox new pundits turns my stomach. I get that he sees some kind of opening here, but this might be an opening he wants to take a pass on. You don’t take every opening. Sometimes trade-offs exact too high a price. This is one of those times.
Bobby Thomson
And what Betty politely leaves out is that Minuteman Bernie has always been more comfortable with white identity politics.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodinger’s cat:
‘New’?
btown
@Betty Cracker: Well here is some comments by a woman who was at the event giving some actual context for the statement.
Gavin
I subscribe to Ring of Fire and Young Turks – more reality-based and unflinchingly progressive than MSM.
This wasn’t about identity politics — this was about jobs, plain and simple. Trump conned middle america into believing he could bring their dead communities back, full stop. That’s it. Racism is barely a rounding error on top of that.
Sure, it’s completely a lie.. Bring back coal? Please.. but he sold it.
The problem was that Hills didn’t realize that her messaging needed to emphasize how her policies were better for jobs and money for the people… which is the essence of not realizing how vastly wrong for America neoliberalism has been. Even here in Massachusetts I know a lot of people who voted for Trump because… they knew Hillary wasn’t going to help them, and Trump might.
In all the econ theory papers regarding free trade, there’s a transfer payment to the people whose jobs have left to the lower-wage country…. and we managed not to implement it. Or we did, but that transfer payment went to the CEO of the company that outsourced.
schrodinger's cat
@Major Major Major Major: OK you got me, not so new.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Also, the idea that said, or at least ‘implied’, woman didn’t “stand up” to Wall St, Big Pharma, etc. HRC stood up to them in the policies she proposed. You know who wasn’t confused about what mattered more, WALL STREET SPEECHES or financial regulation? Wall Street.
@DCF: you know, you can’t even steal someone else’s joke effectively.
cokane
@jacy: sadly this cheating thing still hasnt fucking died. i definitely blame the horserace loving media to some extent, it was basically a 55-44 race, i.e. not really close. but was covered as if a dead heat
Sab
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Kucinich lost his congressional seat when the Republican controlled Ohio government gerrymandered his district into a weirdly narrow strip that runs along the Lake Erie shore from Cleveland to Toledo. Marci Kaptur from Toledo beat him in the primary.
Marc
@Betty Cracker: He’s saying that you can’t rely on demographic appeals alone – why is that offensive? Do you disagree?
The Moar You Know
@Kay: They’re just formalizing the arrangement, something I like to refer to as “marrying the mistress”.
divf
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
If you think that the Clintons’ departure from the scene will cure the problem, you are mistaken. The GOP has swiftboating and two minutes of hate down to a fine art. Combine it with a compliant press and the dragging down of political discourse that suppresses turnout by the fastidious, and they can win. Obama didn’t have enough of a track record for them to get traction, particularly after the Bush43 debacle. However, the normalization of gays*, women and PoCs in positions of power, and the demographic changes are energizing the out-and-out bigots, and making the white middle class nervous. How we fight this, I don’t know. We need to be honest about the problem first.
*I conjecture that the blowback from Obergefell v. Hodges and the dominos that fell behind it, had a significant amount to do with the Rust Belt swing in the voting.
jacy
@Marc:
Fuck, if I never hear “earn their support” again, it’ll be too soon. IT’S CALLED BEING A FUCKING ADULT. Make the better choice, even if your unicorn didn’t come with extra sparkles.
chromeagnomen
@DCF: classic monday morning quarterbacking, and you’re not the only one. if only we’d…
Bobby Thomson
@Marc: a weak candidate who got more votes than any presidential candidate not named Obama. And she would have won easily if that asshole hadn’t campaigned for Trump for five months. You’re getting attacked because he and you deserve it.
Emma
@Gavin: This is exactly why you will never make a dent in the Democratic base. Because they have experienced exactly the opposite of what you describe and then don’t buy your take, no matter how progressive.
cokane
@Marc: more than that, an intellectual laziness has emerged here as well. Ad hominem arguments and arguments from authority rule the discourse.
DCF
@tobie:
What did she ‘…run on…’?
Two primary messages, neither of which was sufficient:
1) I’m not Trump; and
2) I’m a woman.
The electorate – right or wrong – was not looking for a blizzard of position papers and incrementalism. It wanted change – no matter what the (eventual) price might be in the long run….
It chose a rolling dumpster fire of a candidacy that we’ll be forced to endure for four (4) years – or more.
chromeagnomen
@David Fud: part of the problem in the past with off year elections has always boiled down to the fact that the left has simply never had the level of anger that defines the right. my hope is that this will not be the case going forward.
Marc
@jacy: Does insulting people persuade them? Evidence that I’ve seen points to “no”. People frequently have irrational things that matter a lot to them. Voting against people who go out of their way to antagonize you isn’t even strictly irrational.
Alesis
So I think the critique of neoliberalism is missing the fact that Trump’s rural surge does not jive with any coherent theory on harm from trade.
If anything Ioawans should be thrilled with NAFTA opening paths for cheap American maize.
The racism isn’t a rounding error. It’s the mean.
Chris
Also,
I realized in this election cycle that despite supposedly being on opposite political sides of the Democratic Party (one on its left and one on its right), the “professional left” and the “DLC” are really two sides of the same coin. They’re both disproportionately made up of white men, they’re both myopically focused on economics as our salvation, and despite having different brands of economics, they both end up being alarmingly Republican-curious and more interested in punching their own party than anyone on the outside.
Goodbye, Joe Lieberman types scolding us for not being like Reagan. Hello, Bernie Sanders types scolding us for not being like Trump. God help us.
Kay
@The Moar You Know:
The banana republic is rolling downhill faster now. North Carolina Republicans are losing so they may nullify the election and throw it to the legislature.
Wow. That’s radical.
Barbara
@Alesis: I think you are right. Sanders, like a lot of journalists as well, still has a conception of working class people that makes them, white, relatively uneducated, and working in construction or manufacturing. He doesn’t think of people like my sister, college educated who changed careers to become a teacher, and then after 15 years was laid off and started working as an aide for developmentally disabled adults. He also seems oblivious to the implications of the so-called sharing economy for his policies to help the working class, which is particularly disappointing because of his appeal to youthful voters. Stating that people voted for Clinton — or were asked to vote for Clinton — solely because she is a woman is just obnoxious. As Katha Pollitt wrote some time ago, Sanders is a leftist of the old school, for whom race and gender will always be distractions. By implication of his speech, apparently, only white people have the privilege of engaging in identity politics. I just wish he would do a little more introspection but that is clearly asking too much.
Emma
@DCF: That is a flat-out lie. She gave substantive speeches on issues which people like you ignored happily.
divf
@DCF:
Diversity. Inclusiveness. A positive message. Plus substantive policy positions that are as far left as any in a major party in the last century.
She was up against a drumbeat of hatehatehate. Hate, as @chromeagnomen commented, is a robust motivator. Look at 2000,2004,2010,2014.
Furthermore, the venom was coming from the left, as well as the right. Bernie didn’t run against her positions, he ran against her as corrupt and a liar,
evenespecially after he saw he was going to lose.dm
@schrodinger’s cat: From your keyboard to God’s browser. It would be great if someone was on weekly television offering criticisms from the left. Maybe it would give more Democrats room on the left to maneuver.
BDS (Bernie Derangement Syndrome) is pretty strong around here.
goblue72
Seriously, get a grip. The country did not hallucinate candidate Clinton showing up at the convention dressed as PoMo Suffragette. And there were most certainly “time to put a woman in charge” appeals. And for a goodly portion of the Democratic base, this was energizing. I personally found it gave me more of a reason to vote for her. Problem was, the Democratic base in and of itself is increasingly isolated in a handful of states, and within the major metro regions of those states. And outside those limited areas, that kind of stuff is off-putting to the voters who show up.
So yes, the left plays identity politics as much as the right. If you can’t see that, then YOU are part of the problem. In a country where whites are still the largest voting bloc – and still a majority of the country – and the racial voting bloc that out at the highest rates – you cannot run your politics in which you piss off whites too much. I’m sorry if that hurts your fee-fees, but this is about winning.
Because your script lost. To a complete kleptocratic buffoon in a bad spray tan on his third wife, who most likely was conspiring with the Ruskies. I don’t give a flying fart about Clinton running up the score in California.
But yeah, I get it. You’re butthurt over a 70+ year old Jewish socialist from Vermont puncturing your little balloon of self-righteousness.
Chris
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
And he embodies perfectly why Democrats are wary about following white populists’ lead in politics; because they’ve proven over and over that they’re not people you can rely on.
Villago Delenda Est
@chromeagnomen: If only Hillary hadn’t pissed off the Village something fierce by canning their best bud in the White House travel office back in ’93.
Mary Jo
@Betty Cracker: Great post, thank you!
Major Major Major Major
@Gavin:
I more or less generally subscribe to the theory and this is absolutely something we need to hammer free traders on. Half the implementation is missing.
ETA: And get that conversation started w.r.t. automation, too.
goblue72
@Marc: Its standard Betty Cracker. And AL is just as guilty of it. Rather get their outrage on than acknowledge how massively screwed the Democratic Party is – and that Clintonland was part of the problem.
Eljai
@The Moar You Know: Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg listed the names of those seen entering Trump Tower:
tobie
@DCF: Well in her first speech after the convention she emphasized: advanced manufacturing; job retraining; free community college; apprenticeships; debt-free college; family paid leave; childcare. That’s just a few things that immediately come to mind. Her positions on trade and reviving manufacturing as well as regulating shadow banking were without parallel in the Democratic field this year. Pretty lunch-bucket stuff. Too bad this couldn’t appeal to the white working class. Maybe she needed a penis.
DCF
@chromeagnomen:
Had you listened to the likes of Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur/The Young Turks and Thom Hartmann – all of whom predicted the danger(s) posed by Trump’s candidacy months before the election proper (June/July 2016), the outcome would have appeared less surprising….
This Writer Perfectly Predicted What Would Happen in a Clinton-Trump Race
http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/presidential-election-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders/
Unless the Democrats Run Sanders, A Trump Nomination Means a Trump Presidency
Democrats need to seriously and pragmatically assess their strategy for defeating Trump. A Clinton run would be disastrous; Bernie Sanders is their only hope.
http://static.currentaffairs.org/2016/02/unless-the-democrats-nominate-sanders-a-trump-nomination-means-a-trump-presidency
Kay
@goblue72:
“Plays identity politics”. Dear God. Do they “play the race card” too?
I defended Sanders all thru the primary but Lord is he off on the wrong track. Why doesn’t he go do his job as a Senator and introduce some bills or something? He’s not even a Democrat. His plan is to lecture Democrats for the next 4 years?
Villago Delenda Est
@goblue72: There MUST be a fire someplace you can go die in, asshole.
tobie
@DCF: Well in her first speech after the convention she emphasized: advanced manufacturing; job retraining; free community college; apprenticeships; debt-free college; family paid leave; childcare. That’s just a few things that immediately come to mind. Her positions on trade and reviving manufacturing as well as regulating shadow banking were without parallel in the Democratic field this year. Pretty lunch-bucket stuff. Too bad this couldn’t appeal to the white working class.
Alesis
@goblue72:
This is truly concerning and I share your concern.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@divf: and increased access to health insurance, and a higher minimum wage, and infrastructure and green energy jobs, and increased family leave, and addressing climate change, and protecting voting rights, and preserving Social Security and Medicare, but nothing that makes emo-progs* who listen to Cenk Ugyur feel radical, so fuck it.
*WP autocorrected ’emo-progs’ to ‘ego-prigs’, which works, too, also
If by “derangement” you mean the kind of self-indulgent jackasses who think that the precious and noble WCWs, college educated whites and ex-urban whites were jonesing to vote for a seventy year old Larry David impersonator shouting about raising their taxes for their own good, I agree.
Another Holocene Human
@germy: Gabbard hates all the right people, that is, Muslims.
Kay
@Eljai:
Ugh. They get worse every year. I wouldn’t care because I don’t watch but they set the frame for everyone else, including print journalists.
The propaganda will be amazing. Not to mention that every one of those folks is a big earner so every one will benefit a million a year from Trumpkins tax cuts.
divf
@DCF: Would Bernie have motivated blacks in the rust belt states that Hillary lost to stand in line for hours to vote? Because if he didn’t, he would have lost. And if you had replaced Hillary as the candidate after she had won with strong majorities with that demo, he would have lost them.
Matt McIrvin
@cokane:
There’s going to be another nominally Islamist terrorist attack sooner or later. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a 9/11 scale thing; a few attacks on the San Bernardino or Orlando Pulse level by some rando affiliating himself with ISIS could do it. You know Trump is going to demagogue any such thing to the hilt, because he’s already done that. I think a lot of people will just fall in line.
Chris
@germy:
Are you kidding? They love the “Democratic Party lost touch with the Wholesome Small Town Folksy People by being so high and might and elitist and arrogant” narrative, and they doubly love having a person from “the left” there to reinforce the narrative for them. Doesn’t matter if Hillary’s not running for anything anymore, they’ll be thrilled to have him on board to punch the party.
And he, bilthering idiot that he is, will think he’s getting attention because he and his ideas are becoming powerful, not because he’s a useful tool.
Villago Delenda Est
It is SO fucking unfair that white males have to compete on the basis of a skill set with blahs, mezzikens, and other mud people!
JMG
Prediction: Whomever is the 2020 Democratic nominee will espouse Sanders’ economic policies or even policies to its left. Therefore, we will be able to test the theory of the “Bernie woulda won” crowd once and for all.
goblue72
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): I don’t think Sanders is the future face of the party (despite what some of the nuttiest of the nuts at DailyKos think), but I do hope he continues to play the role of party critic and gadfly. Nobody cares about the criticisms that he’s “not really a Democrat”. There’s a goodly chunk of the Democratic base that thinks he better represents the core value of the Democratic Party than people who actually have a “D” after their name. I’m sorry, but Joe Manchin & Heidi Heitkamp are less of a progressive Democrat that Sanders.
Because there are still a number of elements within the Democratic Party leadership – *cough* Chuck Schumer *cough* – who care more about sucking up to the financial elite and shaking the loose change from their pockets than they actually care about working peoples issues.
So, as long as Sanders keeps pointing out that you can’t serve both capital and labor, he is welcome to stick around.
DCF
@Emma:
The ‘message(s)’ were lost – again, for a smorgasbord of reasons…what good does it do to advocate ‘staying the course’ when the socioeconomic well-being (read: deterioration) of the lower ninety percent (90%) of the population is being ignored by both parties?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Eljai: in fairness, I think every president does this, but Obama’s list would’ve included (and IIRC did) Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes and one point I’m pretty sure… old Eddie Schultz
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: This is absolutely going to happen, because one it will (these things happen) and two with their incompetence it will happen more often.
Right now though I’m wondering how he’s going to screw over Ryan. Probably in a couple years when things start to fall apart he’ll say “i didn’t want to sign his budget. i didn’t want to but we needed to fund the military, so i said go ahead, and we’ll fix this later. all these old people who can’t afford their medicine? i said, i told him, you’re going to have old people who can’t afford their medicine. but did he go back and fix it? no, he was too busy making him and his buddies rich…”
glory b
@Ryan: Interestingly enough, I heard a caller to the Stephanie Miller radio show claim that Bernie won the popular vote in the primary.
He was very insistent, and backed down only reluctantly.
Bernie and Jeff Weaver said the African American votes in the South didn’t count, so maybe some of his supporters took that literally.
By the way, I remember reading somewhere that he lost the under 30 vote of people of color 55% to 45%, so he didn’t do too badly there.
Capri
@DCF: The DNC didn’t chose any candidate any more than the RNC chose Trump. Hilary won the primary on her merits – there are no smoke-filled back rooms and no manipulative power brokers. All the other things given as evidence that the fix was in for Hilary have been debunked over and over.
Despite that, griping over Saunders does nothing and diverts our attention away from where it should be focused . There are two sides in my world right now – left and right. Saunders is on the correct side of the divide.
FlipYrWhig
Where does Bernie Sanders get off lecturing people about working-class anything anyway? He’s a former student radical whose base of support was college students. Working-class people hate both of those.
Cacti
@goblue72:
Thank goodness we have you here to keep those uppity broads in check. ;-)
Major Major Major Major
@DCF: The economic status of the lower x% of the population was going up for the first time in decades. Staying the course would have been marvelous.
Another Holocene Human
@DCF: B… I… G… why yes, “neoliberalism” — BINGO! I win!
Villago Delenda Est
@tobie: The white working class is too busy hating on the blahs to worry about fixes for economic issues that are frankly beyond their ability to comprehend. The coal mining jobs are NEVER coming back, yet the people who voted for the lying shitgibbon who said he’d bring them back admired him for “telling it like it is!” when Hillary actually fucking did that, without sugarcoating and without making promises that will never, ever be kept.
And these ignorant hicks lapped up the lies.
Matt
Sanders has been an absolute wet dream for Republicans from the beginning. After a while you have to wonder what’s up.
divf
@goblue72: @DCF: Okay, if you’re so smart, what would you change from the 2016 platform, to make it a winner in 2020? If it involves large tax increases, you have to say why they would be a winner.
Put up, or shut up.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So let’s see, for all her faults Hillary wins the popular vote, only loses because of that screwed up relic the Electoral Collage, so it’s the end progressivism and Trump is the new Reagan? Did I miss anything?
I mean I agree that the DLC has to go for the simple fact that they think actual politics is icky and are obsessed with the presidency at the expense of everything else. But seriously, for all the racism everyone is so afraid of, a black man with a suspect name got elected twice and is quite popular. Maybe the question should be; what did Obama do that other Democrats like Hillary didn’t?
DCF
@divf:
Review the turnout (and percentage breakdowns) of 1) white women, college-educated and non and 2) millenials for HRC and Trump.
BTW – where was the tsunami of ‘minority’ voters that were to carry HRC to victory? Somewhere other than the polls on November 8….
Marc
@tobie: I live in Ohio, which is one reason why this election loss hits so hard. It wasn’t even close here. If Clinton had been communicating that message she’d have done better. Virtually every single ad she sent, virtually every one of the many many many pieces of mail that we got, the robocalls, they were all about Trump being a pig and a menace. True, but we’re not the audience that they were looking for, and the negative message was the only one that people heard.
FlipYrWhig
@tobie: I wrote somewhere else that the biggest insult in all of this posturing is that it validates the notion that Democrats are so preoccupied with culture-war issues (a/k/a whiners and freaks) that they just plain forgot to do anything to help normal hardworking white people. Democrats didn’t forget to help hardworking white people. Republicans ACTIVELY PREVENTED THEM FROM IT.
Also, have I mentioned how horrible Bernie Sanders is, always has been, and will continue to be? Well, just in case, Bernie Sanders is, has been, and will continue to be horrible.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep.
divf
@DCF: That wasn’t the question, The question is whether Bernie would have been able to win, after a hostile takeover of the Democratic nomination.
FlipYrWhig
@Villago Delenda Est:
And it’s been going on for FIFTY FUCKING YEARS. This is asking why Republicans vote for the Republican. It’s because they’re Republicans.
Emma
@DCF: Really? The “white working class” makes more money than any group of “non-white working class”. Why should they be catered to specially?
goblue72
@ruemara: He is doing nothing of the sort. But as long as Democrats like you absolutely refuse to get off your island when ANY criticism is immediately met with charges of racism/xenophobia/sexism – you are going to continue lose. And lose good and hard.
FlipYrWhig
@divf: Bernie Sanders would not have won, and his loss would be attributed to his failure to galvanize women and people of color, and pundits would say, Jeez, maybe the Democrats should have nominated the person who was popular with those groups.
Another Holocene Human
@Bobby Thomson: Is that like a Waltham minuteman, who musters after the battle is over?
goblue72
@Emma: For their votes.
Alesis
@goblue72:
Boy this continues to be sooo concerning. Is that the sounds of hooves on a bridge I hear over yonder?
Kay
Trump is putting out A VIDEO to “speak to the American people about his priorities”
He’s such a coward. He’s been hiding out since he won the election. I don’t think he can do normal President’in. They have to “present” his new Presidential persona- they’re all busy packaging. That’s why they invited the “news” anchors.
It’s weirdly fascinating to watch this descend into LITERALLY show biz. It’s like they are determined to create the impression that institutions aren’t failing all over the place. It’s hard to get your head around. You realize they’re MUCH more invested in this illusion than regular people are.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: Trump = Max Headroom
Emma
@goblue72: And what do you say to the actual, real Democrats? Sorry, you have to take a back seat because we need those whites to vote for us? Don’t worry, we’ll keep our word to you when we can?
Screw that. You’d see a massive proportion of POC, women, and LGBT people sitting the election out.
Nick
These are the weirdest threads . . . kind of like watching a crowd of people who, with the Titanic sink under them, having a huge fight about whether they got ripped off when they bought their ticket. The best part is that most of the people in the crowd are insisting that they got a great deal . . .
divf
@goblue72: I challenged you above, and I will continue to do so on this thread. The 2016 election is over, Bernie is gone, Clinton is gone. What do you want to change from what we proposed in the 2016 platform?
divf
@Nick: Actually, this is an important argument. If we are to succeed in the future, we need to understand what we did wrong, and how to fix it. And no, herding women and PoC to the back of the bus is not an acceptable answer.
Nick
And, apropos of ‘identity politics’ vs. ‘class politics’, which is a false choice if I have ever seen a false choice, Kevin Drum finds that about 5% fewer millenials voted for Clinton than for Obama; and that about 8% fewer working-class blacks and Latinos voted for her than for Obama. It seems as if the drop-off was greatest among the working class . . . White women voted for Trump . . . Maybe a less-identity-based approach would be good across the board.
Pogonip
@Emma: Well, I’m a white working lass, and I could use more money!
The white working Class, I don’t know about.
And you win Best Typo of the Day.
Nick
@divf:
This isn’t an argument, really, it’s a distorted quote from a Sanders’ speech being used as the foundation for a lot of cosplaying from commenters.
trollhattan
@divf:
Shhh, ix-nay on the inorities-may. So very inconvenient to a particular narrative.
Alesis
@Nick:
All politics is identity. Class is an identity. White is an identity which better explains this election.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Even the other hippies on his commune thought he was self-righteous do-nothing in love with the sound of his own voice.
DCF
@divf: @divf:
I wouldn’t change the platform. I would put forward a candidate who invokes passion and communicates genuine authenticity among the left-leaning electorate.
Large tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations is not a difficult sell. Sanders advocated for that tack repeatedly – and won twenty-two (22) states doing so….
FlipYrWhig
@Nick: Yeah, taken together, the election of Donald Trump and the media’s various postmortem analyses devoted to the culture and mores of the white working class constitute a real repudiation of “identity politics.”
geg6
Fuck Bernie. I wouldn’t cross the street for that mother fucker. He’s been all over the tv, slamming Obama and claiming the mantle of champion of the Democratic base all while talking about his eagerness to work with Trump to help white, racist men. I’ve caught some of several recent appearances and that is his basic message. Minorities and women need to just shut up, support what white men want and forget their petty concerns about their personal issues because the suffering of the unfairly maligned white middle class man is unbearable and at a level of cruelty never before seen in American history. Yesterday, a Trumper screamed at me that we libtards are in for it now. Which we deserve because we are all uneducated, unemployed c**ts. He’s a barber, renting a chair in a local barber shop who lives in a rundown trailer court with his mom and girlfriend. Told me what a loser I am and how he could buy and sell me, he makes so much money.
Yeah, I guess there’s a case this guy suffers from economic anxiety. But I’m not sure that is anyone’s fault but his own. But it would seem to me that the more salient fact is that he’s a raging misogynist and bigot who lives in his own little bubble of stupid, which he sticks with even when he knows the facts don’t bear it out. For instance, I know for a fact that he is well aware that I have a graduate degree and a good job at a major university. But that a woman, especially a liberal woman, would be doing better than he is is deeply threatening to him. He was completely foaming at the mouth. Oh, and did I mention that he voted Bernie in the PA primary?
Yeah, so fuck Bernie for propping up the delusions of assholes like barber boy (yes, a millennial Berniebro turned Trumpster!).
Kay
@Marc:
But why are you doing this now, Marc? Clinton is gone. It’s over. What do you want? A concession that she lost? Absolutely. You got it. Is Bernie Sanders interested in running a populist candidate in 2020? Great! Who would that be? Why does everyone in the Democratic Party have to work on that right now, this minute?
You’re never going to get some kind of commitment from Democrats that they will now become more Sanders-like. It’s not that command and control, that coordinated, that cohesive. This idea people seem to have that The Democrats are an organization with a rigid structure where “national” is on top and then there are affiliates is just not how this works.
Villago Delenda Est
@goblue72: To do that effectively, it is necessary to write of the survival off the species.
Not going to do that.
jacy
@Marc:
I’m not trying to persuade anyone. And I’m not running for office. Maybe this is your problem. I can tell you to go fuck yourself all day long — and that should have no relevance on your vote. People need to stop basing their votes or their advocacy on their “feelings.”
FlipYrWhig
@DCF: Hillary Clinton advocated for that too, you stupid motherfucker.
Cacti
@goblue72:
By “like you” do you mean “not white”?
dm
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: No, I mean that for months now pretty standard politics gets read as betrayal. It’s the same thing as happened to Clinton (only it happened to her on a larger scale). Yes, I agree that Bernie whiners were another feather on the scales of negative propaganda that made “emails” a “major issue”. No, I don’t think Bernie would have survived the Republican puke-funnel, either (I thought Clinton’s fauxtroversies were mined out, but I guess I was wrong). But Jesus Christ, you people sound like Fox News discussing Obama whenever Bernie gets quoted or misquoted.
glory b
@Marc: We could say the same about you.
divf
@Nick: The “identity-based approach” = treating women, PoC, and gays as equals was baked into the last four years. We either could have embraced Obergefell or repudiate it. Obama could have skipped the Pickney funeral after the Charlestown massacre, and ignored the killings of blacks by police. I think they were the correct choices, but they are part of what built the feeling by whites of the walls closing in.
Nick
@Alesis:
I agree with that — my gripe about this argument is that it’s taking place in a space without reference. Who cares about litigating the primary again? The election that was lost was the general, and Clinton lost it — figure out why, without reference to Saunders. Then talk about how to fix that. Arguing about Saunders is like arguing about a historical hypothetical.
And to FLipYrWhig — yes, it’s stupid. Perhaps if the media is obsessed with the ‘white working class’, one response by Democrats could be to insist on the ‘working class’ — and make sure that non-whites are represented in that debate. Maybe some Democrats will do that and not others; that doesn’t mean that the two-minute hate needs to be turned on them.
Suzanne
Bernie is not getting it. The “WWC” are the ones who are all about identity and respectability politics. And now I am supposed to listen to the poor downtrodden WWC and accept that the Dems didn’t give them enough?! Fuck that. They traded their own security away because they are pissed at the lack of respect they receive. I’m happy to help the working class. I’m not happy to help the WHITE working class. Bernie needs to get real here.
I said it before months ago and I think Betty or someone else scoffed at me, but rural/Southern white people have seen an erosion in their cultural position. Their lifestyle used to be portrayed as aspirational or at least upstanding and moral and respectable. That has changed over the last 25 years or so, and now they are represented almost exclusively as dumb or trashy or at least very provincial (think Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty and Friday Night Lights). They resent this, and understandably so. This is the deep story that left them vulnerable to a charlatan like Trump. There’s a piece in the WSJ today about how ad agencies are shitting their pants, because they have been positioning urban life as aspirational for so long that they didn’t realize that a shit-ton of people do not want that lifestyle and thus, are not being advertised at.
But I think that we have to be real that much of what made that lifestyle work well in the post-war period is gone. Not coming back. I have sympathy for them up to and until they want to start trade wars and shit all over immigrants and POC in order to protect it and get their respect back. Coal is over, move to a city and get a different job. We do not owe coal and steel country people exactly the kind of lifestyles they want in perpetuity.
divf
@DCF: Not enough – we have to find a way to win off-year elections that is a comparable motivator to the hate- and fear-mongering that wins them for the GOP. Obama was the best candidate that we could possibly have fielded, but the Dems took it on the chin in 2010 and 2014.
DCF
@FlipYrWhig:
Trump = Joe Isuzu
FlipYrWhig
@divf: The ascent of Trump is entirely based on this: “my life sucks but you don’t see anyone doing shit for me, and meanwhile the president I thought would be cool is knocking himself out to celebrate homos, illegals, and thugs who fight with cops.” That’s how “economic anxiety” and racism mix.
Major Major Major Major
@Nick: Yeah, if there’s one thing millennials are known for it’s hating identity politics.
trollhattan
@FlipYrWhig:
Breath. You should save it. This one is that delicious combination of has feelings and is thick.
DCF
@divf:
You’ll have to ask Debbie Wasserman Schultz – and Howard (fifty state strategy) Dean about the answer(s) to that question.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Oh, you really are as stupid as your comments make you appear. Try not to pick up any adult scissors. Or do so, and go for a jog.
Betty Cracker
@Marc: I don’t disagree, and if that’s what he’d said, I wouldn’t be pissed off about it. But there’s a big difference. Imagine if PBO had lost the 2008 election to a racist goober, and right after that loss, Sanders gave a speech in which he said, “It’s not good enough to say, ‘I’m black, vote for me.'” Would that strike you as tone deaf at best?
Alesis
@Nick:
I think the point of referencing Sanders (other thank riling people up) it that he is stuck in a 1960’s era dem way of addressing the loss. Russ Feingold didn’t do any better than Hillary Clinton on election night. Hillary co-opted Sanders’ platform and ran on the most economically populist liberal platform in decades.
White voters could not possibly have cared less. Obama Term 1 said to many of them “we are nice look we let him in the front door”. Term 2: “Now wait just a minute we turned on him and he still won?”
Hillary ran as term 3 and by that time the “racially anxious” had gotten their act together and moved to put the lessers in their place.
FlipYrWhig
@Nick: Democrats have said exactly that for 50 consecutive years. During that time the “white working class” has spat in their faces to an increasing degree. I say it’s time to admit that they’re Republicans and as such motivated by spite and resentment at modernity and diversity, write them off, and work on picking off votes elsewhere.
Kay
@Marc:
I thought Sanders was going to work on running a slate of populist candidates? That’s how you “change” the Democratic Party. You change it. You don’t demand a change in headquarters philosophy. It just doesn’t work like that. It would be great if it did, because that’s much easier.
We ran a populist labor candidate here in 2011. We asked no one for permission. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to demand Nancy Pelosi approve the candidate because it doesn’t matter. If our candidate had won we would have “changed the Democratic Party”. He didn’t so we didn’t.
How does Sanders change the Democrats? He runs as a populist and wins or finds someone else to run as a populist and that person wins. It reminds me of their ridiculous focus on the “platform”. No one cares about the platform. I can DEFY the platform! I don’t get called into headquarters and fired.
dww44
@Kay: I saw some of them entering the gilded Trump Tower. The optics of that view were so telling. The guardians of the free press going to meet with the emperor in his gilded cage to kiss his ring to comply with the wishes of their bosses and to make sure they’re not gonna be the ones first cut off.
I don’t know how any half educated and observant American citizen could not look at this and immediately glean that we are heading for a totally compliant and fawning media, which will never fulfill its intended role in our democracy.
Cacti
Another problem with Sanders white-splaining of the electoral result is that it’s premised on the ennobling lie of Trump winning the working class vote.
Trump was voted in by the white middle and upper middle class. Clinton won the $30,000-$50,000 household income vote.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah but she wasn’t authentic about it. She couldn’t be seen as an outsider, not like Bernie who’d only been in congress for 26 years.
Chris
@geg6:
If what he was trying to say was “I am economically anxious,” he sure as hell buried the lede. I’m not even sure where.
les
@Marc:
But we should all look to Sanders who’s never won a campaign outside Vermont? Sorry to be so vicious, but you Bernistas ain’t all that bright, among other things.
DCF
@FlipYrWhig:
Back to the mofo line, huh?
HRC talked about tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations. She did it quietly and infrequently – and only as a response to Sanders’ position(s).
HRC was perceived to be as authentic as a three dollar bill. When the electorate perceives a candidate as expedient rather than authentic, that candidate loses….
Nick
@Alesis:
You could argue the same thing about Trump — that his frame of reference is 60s (or earlier), from a Republican (or jerk) perspective, of course.
I’m not sure that Feingold is a good reference, since he’s a one-state candidate being compared to a national candidate. You could also argue that Warren won Massachusetts, from the other side, but it wouldn’t be valid either.
Look, I don’t have answers either — but I do think that punching Sanders is not a particularly exciting way forward. Suppose the problem was simply that Clinton is not a very effective or nimble politician (on the stumps)?
Or, maybe there aren’t going to be answers that come out of this analysis? After all, Clinton lost by very little — it’s like getting T-boned, where you identify the quarter-second that you slowed down to look at a squirrel as the ’cause’, instead of every other small choice you made on the road that led you to be in that intersection at that precise instant.
Emma
@Pogonip: Which I corrected when I saw it. But yeah, it was good.
Alesis
@Nick:
I think Sanders punching Clinton is also less than constructive. I think we all need to stop punching each other and go punch the imminently punchable douche headed for the White House and the white nationalist trolls he has enabled.
DCF
@les:
This is exactly the hubris-laden, dismissive and diminishing attitude that alienated voters – both left and right-leaning – from the ‘anointed’ candidate of the Democratic Party. Thanks for illustrating it so well….
Chris
@Nick:
You, and everyone else running the “let it go” theme, seems to be ignoring the fact that Sanders is the one who is right now relitigating the primary and trying to use that to influence the direction the party should go in in the future, and in the process flipping a middle finger up to every nonwhite, non-male voter in the party.
We’re not relitigating the primary. We’re reacting to what Sanders is saying today. About what we should do for the next four years.
Marc
@Kay: I want us to develop tactics that work. I want us to be able to elect Democrats in Ohio again. And, on a personal level, I’d really like to have us cultivate the idea that we’re in this together. We can’t change the global culture, but a lot of us are going to need a refuge of some sort from what is coming our way, and we can change the local one.
As a part of this we really do need to look at what we did that worked and what we did that didn’t work. That requires listening more than it requires boundary policing. Some critiques won’t have merit, and that’s also fair.
FlipYrWhig
@DCF: You do realize that the people who won in the vaunted 50-state strategy of 2006 included a whole lot of Blue Dogs and other “neoliberals,” right? Gabby Giffords (AZ), Tim Mahoney (FL), Melissa Bean (IL), Nancy Boyda (KS), Mike Arcuri (NY), Heath Shuler (NC), Zack Space (OH), Jason Altmire (PA), Patrick Murphy (PA), Nick Lampson (TX), etc.
divf
@DCF: They’re gone too.
You want change, you have to say what the change is.
Suzanne
@Cacti: The problem with the term “white working class” is that it is imprecise. We are really talking about rural/small-town and southern white people, mostly without college degrees, at a range of income levels, who typically have high levels of church attendance.
I have less-than-zero interest in turning the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their concerns in order to keep them in the coalition, if their concerns really are what they appear to be.
I think the coalition needs to focus its energies elsewhere, like on Millenials, who lean more urban in their cultural makeup, and want a more sustainable future.
Marc
@les: And, again with the insults. Calling someone stupid for pointing out that insults piss people off is certainly something, but somehow I doubt that the first word that comes to mind is “intelligent.”
FlipYrWhig
@DCF: You said that the key would be running on a certain economic agenda. Clinton explicitly ran on that economic agenda and did so from the start. You then WHOOOSHed the goalposts over to “authenticity.” Because your point was untenable, most likely. Or else because you are stupid.
les
@cokane:
Do you pretenders to intelligentsia even own dictionaries? People don’t attack Sanders’ statements because he’s a pretentious old windbag with bad hair, even tho it’s true. It’s because he has a narrow view of the problem that excludes anything particular to any group except white men, because he couldn’t show he had any plan to implement any of his narrow solutions to his chosen issues, because he couldn’t show he even understood his own definition of the problem (which big bank??? uh, geeze, uh, I don’t know, the big ones, you know?), because as he lost steadily from the beginning among the Democrats he claimed to want to represent he attacked them instead of listening, and for months he joined Trump in whining about rigging and corruption and bs and helped elect a wholly unqualified asshole to the presidency. That, my unsophisticated gnome, is not ad hominem, it’s attacking the argument. What a bunch of fucking WATB’s.
FlipYrWhig
@Suzanne: Exactly. “Why are all these cranky resentful Republicans voting for the Republican?” doesn’t require a very detailed explanation. Let ’em stew and find other people to replace them with.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Exactly. The problem, again, still, after almost a year, isn’t people pointing out that Sanders is pissing in the pool. The problem is the delusional, self-righteous (and it’s those qualities, along with the bitterness, that make him the McCain of the Left) old coot doing the pissing.
dww44
@Eljai: Where was MSNBC? They don’t deserve a seat at the table? Guess the Trump team’s been watching their prime time lineup.
artem1s
sorry, someone needs to tell the truth here. dropping identity politics will also mean, giving up reproductive rights and the right to have sex with whomever you choose. Too many elites want their gay family members and abortions to stay in the closet where they don’t ever have to talk about them. When I hear this shit, I don’t hear dog whistles about minorities. I hear dog whistles about sexual equality. Bernie is just advocating the same pity party for the white male heterosexual voter as the GOP and the media is. It isn’t populism if it ignores half the population and favors the half of the demographic who has always held power.
DCF
@FlipYrWhig:
In contrast to the swamp monsters who now infest Congress and the White House? Yes, I do….
les
@Marc:
Why cant you tell the difference between not accepting your evidence and logic free arguments, and insulting you?
Thank you for admitting that seeing Bernie f’n Sanders as some kind of hero savior is, at best, irrational.
DCF
@Major Major Major Major:
Jon Stewart On Hillary Clinton; 5-9-2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp_gIWAaQVI
Chris
@DCF:
If by “anointed” you mean “by the voters of a majority of states who chose her to be the winner despite having Sanders as an alternative all the way to the end and simply choosing not to pick him,” then I would say you’ve got her fair and square.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: and even then, 2006 had more to do with traditional voting patterns (the President’s party losing seats in the off-year) and even more with the extraordinary fuck-ups of Bush and Congressional Rs (Mark Foley and Jack Abramoff, to name just two) than Howard Dean’s magic words.
divf
@artem1s:
QFT.
jaygee
you mean the “white” working class, right? Because that’s only one slice of the “working class,” which let’s be real, includes probably 80% of the country (just a guess, but I’m excluding retirees and the super-rich who don’t work, but including the children of the “working class” because they have a pretty big stake in “working class” issues).
So yet again, we are being force-fed “the concerns of the WHITE working class” and being told that their needs are more important than the needs of the rest of America’s workers. And considering how deeply they have stuck their heads in the sand and voted their “values” and their ignorance, they are WAY DOWN on my list of things to worry about. Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps as their right-wing lovers are fond of saying.
Raphael Kearns
@germy: Personally, I would be happy for Gabbard to join the Trump administration. Maybe then we could get a real Democrat to take her place.
jacy
@Suzanne:
I think you have it exactly right. We’re fighting a war that they (this perceived “white working class”) are losing, and will lose. But they’ve won this particular battle, because they’re fighting so damn hard right now. It’s an extended last gasp. Now they’re screaming because we’re not catering to them. Catering to them will not change the future, and it’s going to hurt a hell of a lot of other people. They’ll either adapt of they won’t, but we can’t base our actions or strategies ON THEM.
Alesis
@artem1s:
Quoted for Truth
Suzanne
@FlipYrWhig:
We need to get off the idea that they will vote for us if we give them policies they want. This is much more about “restoring respect” for their identity and lifestyle at a base emotional level. The deep story. Not about positions or policies. People are emotional.
Major Major Major Major
@Alesis:
Speaking only for myself, the only Bernie-punching I’ve been doing the last two weeks is in the form of punching back.
FlipYrWhig
@DCF: Dude, what you’re (characteristically) failing to realize is that the last Democratic Congressional majority was built on the election of a new crop of… center-right Democrats. It completely vitiates your idea that “neoliberalism” is a losing strategy. “Neoliberalism” and the 50-state strategy go hand in glove. You can think “neoliberalism” SUCKS, but you can’t with any integrity maintain that it’s a guaranteed loser electorally.
Onihanzo
@Marc: Your sensitive fee-fees are immaterial. My goddamn problem is the backseat whining from Berniebros and new voters who only show up (and maybe not then) when it’s time to vote for prom king and queen. You want to relitigate the past? Let’s relitigate the past.
Where the fuck were you when we needed you in 2010? Or 2012? or 2014? What are the odds that you were probably pissed off that Obama wasn’t “doing enough” that you either stayed out of the mid-terms altogether or voted GOP as a “protest vote”?
As Kay eloquently nails it, this game STARTS locally and REQUIRES constant involvement. Ask yourself, what are your plans for 2016? Will you or Bernie or any number of progressives who refuse to do the due diligence still be bitching that Hillary rigged the system in her favor?
This electorate is one of the laziest and least informed of all time and now we’ve got the government to prove it.
Marc
…and, since we’re now in full attack mode among the true believers, I’m stepping out. I just don’t have the energy to engage with aggressive bullies right now. According to the messages I just read I’m stupid, I’m irrational, I’m some sort of Sanders deadender because I’m arguing that promoting infighting between Democrats is a bad idea.
Too bad – a few of us were actually trying to have a conversation.
Chris
@jacy:
Yep. A campaign centered on “white working class populism” will find itself shut off from the elites AND from the growing nonwhite demographics of the country, and it probably still won’t win a lot of white people, because most of them have become so completely invested in the Fox News noise machine that they won’t vote for a genuine populist even if he’s white as snow.
DCF
@FlipYrWhig:
You never tire of ad hominem attacks, do you? HRC’s ‘economic agenda’ was to continue favoring the ‘professional class’ (read: top ten percent) of the population. Her lack of authenticity is directly related to that policy preference; she said that she favored greater socioeconomic equality, while behaving in a manner that undercut that message….
However, it’s clear to me that nothing said/written here will alter your perception(s). You repeatedly insult and dismiss others here, while insisting that the Emperor is, in fact, wearing new clothes. S/he has none – that’s why, in a ‘macro’ sense, she lost the 2016 election.
FlipYrWhig
@Suzanne:
Agreed. But I also don’t particularly care about respecting their ways. They’re not the Amish or something.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
O, Precious to the whimpering end, are ye?
DCF
@Marc:
Amen, brother…I’m off to make dinner and walk the dogs…more preferable companions by far….
Ksmiami
@Kay: @Suzanne: if I may, these same people bought into the anti-union propaganda perpetuated by the motus and it’s a fact that the quality of life for working class people goes up when unions are represented at the table. When unions are weak, the lives of the Wc go down. But to be honest, I have nfltg for the rural white ppl who voted Trump.
S Teacher
Screw Bernie. He is still an Independent. Was never a Democrat. He had no plans to pay for all his goodies.
If we follow him over the cliff, the coyote will not soften the landing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DCF: I suspect they also find you an idiot, albeit for them a useful one.
FlipYrWhig
@DCF:
Complete, unadulterated falsehood. You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Not the slightest whisper of a haze of a shadow of an idea what you’re talking about. And yet you think you’re bursting with brilliant insights. Which, invariably, you pasted from other blinkered, insufferable idiots.
DCF
@FlipYrWhig:
It just did – miserably….
This is the second decade of the twenty-first century – and a new/fresh reality. Evolve or….
les
@FlipYrWhig:
Reminds me of the poor white worker somewhere in the deep South bitching because people seem to care about poor blacks or immigrants getting help, but “I was on welfare and food stamps and nobody helped me!”
The Sanders’ gang doesn’t get it: Dem policies already help the white working class–that’s not what they care about. They care about not helping them others what don’t think the Confederate battle flag was the height of American culture.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I do believe that was TV’s Craig T Nelson
Suzanne
@DCF: You are…..not correct. It was not HRC planning to repeal and replace the law that makes it possible for lots of those people to have health insurance. It was not HRC proposing to cut taxes on the rich. It was HRC with a proposal to make college affordable. All these things that would genuinely help out working class people…..and yet they voted for the other dude, the orange one.
What did he offer that she did not? Balm for their frazzled (white) nerves, and the (empty) promise that respect they used to command would be restored. It was all a con, of course.
Matt McIrvin
@FlipYrWhig:
Just got into a Facebook argument about this with a Republican who agreed with this but nevertheless insisted that Obama could have gotten more infrastructure stimulus if he had really, really wanted it.
divf
@Marc:
@DCF:
I’m sorry, folks, but none of you have come up with a single suggestion of what we should do going forward, even after being asked specifically for them. I noticed goblue72 ditched the discussion after I asked him/her twice.
If you want to affect the outcome, you have to come with something substantive.
FlipYrWhig
@les: I absolutely agree, and I am frankly appalled to see the supposed champion of the left, Disheveled Homunculus Bernie Sanders, abetting the narrative that Democrats just refused to do anything for people. It’s a foul and self-serving thing to do, of the sort that he specializes in, and as far as I can tell, that he’s specialized in for his entire career. Fuck him in any orifice and out any other.
Chris
@Marc:
Dude:
What the fuck do you think “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’ That is not good enough,” is, if not promoting infighting between Democrats?
Relitigating the primary long after it’s over? Check. Grossly insulting the majority of Democrats who actually voted for her by misrepresenting her campaign? Check. Misrepresenting her campaign in a way that minimizes and belittles the concerns of anyone who has more to worry about than his precious, precious pet single issue? Check.
I mean, I probably would’ve had a lot more sympathy for your “guys, be nice to Berners” shtick during the actual primary (hell, I did). But if your main concern really is not promoting infighting among Democrats, then you need to recognize that the main person doing that right now is the person Betty is criticizing, and that there is no goddamn reason we should be ignoring it.
Suzanne
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, agreed. More people need to live in cities, not fewer, for a sustainable future. Everyone gets equal rights. Higher education is a good thing, even if it doesn’t directly impact your career goals. These are things I believe and I do not want the party to compromise on.
We don’t need these people in the coalition. If we did, it wasn’t much of a coalition.
FlipYrWhig
@Matt McIrvin: This has gone completely down the memory hole: American Jobs Act, 2011.
les
@Nick:
Look, I don’t have answers either — but I do think that…Sanders is not …any way forward.
Therefor, I’m willing to say he should shut up and stop getting in the way. He couldn’t win the Dem primary, and he can’t win a national anything. His ideas are half baked, and his solutions are fairy dust. I really wouldn’t go out of my way to hurt your fee fees, because I don’t care. I will go out of my way to say Sanders should shut up and get out of the way of trying to formulate a successful progressive politics, because parroting the orange shitgibbon isn’t going to do it.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Drex at LGM:
FlipYrWhig
@les: It frankly sounds to me like Sanders is articulating a compelling vision for what the _Republican_ Party should stand for.
les
@Marc: Look, you push arguments that are ridiculous on their face–the guy that lost the Dem primary ans spent the last half of that primary calling Dems corrupt and arguing that Dems should ignore the votes of the Dems that voted and acclaim him the candidate, was not winning a national election–and when called on it, whine that you’re being insulted. And then go on to say that the only salvation of the Dem party is to pay attention to that guy, while he joins the orange shitgibbon in saying we have to stop ignoring white workers. You made an argument that contradicts itself on its face. Sorry, that ain’t bright. Learn to be contradicted without 70 posts on how awful it is that you’ve been insulted. And then trying to tell me that progressivism can’t go forward if you feel insulted.
Jebus. Piss off.
FlipYrWhig
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: I know that in a way this is unfair, but I don’t think Bernie Sanders HAS a white working-class background, either personally or politically. From everything I’ve ever seen, he was a student protester and utopian socialist who moved to Vermont because of what it represented to him. He’s not a product of the labor movement and doesn’t represent an industrial state. He’s basically a slightly pre-hippie intellectual radical. His whole act is a pose based on theory.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
The thing that pisses me off is that between the Affordable Care Act, Occupy Wall Street, the rise of Elizabeth Warren and her message, the Fight for Fifteen and the like, the economic left was probably more on the rise than it had been in decades. Sanders had an opportunity to capitalize on that and start a real conversation on the need for more of it.
Instead, he pissed it all away on an incoherent whine about the Democratic Party nomination process. And ever since election night he’s been doubling down on the Democrat-punching, and telling his followers to chase a mirage. He’s worse than useless, he’s doing real damage not just to the party but to the economic-justice cause and completely destroying any potential they might have to make a difference.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@FlipYrWhig: Agree.
Gravenstone
I see the BernieBros are out in good force today. Your man is 1) a back bench rabble rouser of no significant legislative accomplishment and pipe dream ambitions; and 2) not a Democrat – he has reiterated his intent to serve as an Independent until his current term expires. Should he wish to formally change his affiliation to Democrat, he may do so at his earliest opportunity. So for the present time, he (and you) can kindly shut the fuck up and go back to being a peon of no consequence.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Marc:
Fuck Bernie Sanders. I’m donated to any D that runs against him, and as we’re in the minority for the foreseeable future, I’m donating to his Republican opponent.
Fuck him and his “corrupt Democrats” narrative.
japa21
@DCF: You do realize it was the Democratic voters that selected Clinton, not the DNC. And you would hard pressed to show that she represented either a neoliberalism or Third Way approach.
Msut77
@Bobby Thomson:
You people are sounding crazy. Sanders campaigned for hillary did everything in his power. She did not help herself when she said things like not supporting free tuition for Trumps kids , it was patonizingly stupid.
Villago Delenda Est
@les: THIS
It’s about making sure the mudpeople stay in the mud.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Sanders annoys me because I feel like I recognize his type from a mile away, but IMHO he’s genuinely appalled by Wall Street, corporations, and financialized “late capitalism.” But I really don’t find that the “white working class” is particularly worked up about that cluster of ideas. Just think of the relative status of Walmart to Occupy participants (probably second only to Goldman Sachs among designated enemies), vs. among the white working class (practically a point of pride).
Peale
Spend too much time becoming the working class voice you will find that the working class is very tiny, indeed. Most people consider themselves to be “middle class” regardless of what they do. The self described “working class” is probably 10% of the population.
Also, too. Reading what WWC Trump voters say about their vote in post election reports, while “screw the bankers” might be there, they aren’t using the words of inequality that Bernie would like them to use. I still think he’s talking more to the college educated people who have had stunted starts to their careers during the recession, not the actual WWC voters.
Also, he really needs to define working class to include all poor people and all types of occupations. The rust belt focus on those high paying assembly line jobs is only a sliver of what that encompasses. He may not like the rise of the service economy, but it is a fact of life. Those service workers are actually who he needs to champion. Otherwise, he’s just going to lead us off a cliff, feeling sorry for the types of jobs that people have, promising the types of jobs that aren’t there. People who work want to their voice to be valued. A candidate who still thinks that it is a tragedy that someone has a particular jobs will be seen as another form of snob.
Mike in dc
Build the base, pump up base turnout, THEN do some outreach. But don’t pander at the expense of the interests of the base. If you do that, the base will stay home.
Kay
@Marc:
But you’re acting as if there some central authority that is preventing you from developing tactics that work. Tactics that work, work. So you run a candidate like Zephr Teachout and she wins. That’s what “works” means.
You have my permission to drop identity politics and field candidates. When you win a few the Democratic Party will be changed and it will be changed whether the neoliberals or whomever like it or not because it will be literally a different group of people. This concession to your argument isn’t a necessary precondition to doing that.
There’s no clearinghouse, no central authority, no chain of command. I wish there was! It would be easier! But there isn’t.
That’s why I think it’s ABOUT getting the concession rather than developing winning tactics- it’s about “I told you so” and no one likes that. If it was about tactics Bernie Sanders would be looking for a slate of candidates for 2018 and some of them would win and then he would say “see? economic populism works to get people elected” and everyone would agree.
rikyrah
UH HUH
UH HUH
PHUCK BERNIE
NR
@Gravenstone:
What comments are you reading? The vast majority of comments here are a giant circlejerk about how horrible and evil Bernie Sanders is.
I’m just going to say two things:
1. Hillary did, in fact, say that people should vote for her because she’s a woman. It was not her only message by any means (her message was mostly “Vote for me because Trump is an asshole,” which, while undoubtedly true, was not persuasive enough), but it was there.
2. This is what the country looked like in 2009.
This is what it looks like today.
You can’t blame that on Bernie Sanders, no matter how much you might want to. You really have two choices. You can start listening to Bernie Sanders and the people like him who have been saying we need a return to policies that benefit the working class instead of the Democratic party’s corporate donors. Or, you can keep listening to the neoliberal leadership that has lost the entire country to the Republicans.
You’d think that after so many lost elections, you guys would figure out that maybe a new approach is needed. You can go with one, or you can keep losing elections until you figure it out.
It’s really up to you.
FlipYrWhig
@Peale:
I was reading something in a recent Harper’s about how the kind of job that’s _newly_ gone from the Rust Belt and Midwest is retail. And that made far more sense to me than all this angst about manufacturing and industry. Those jobs have been declining for 40 years. I feel like it’s kind of late for that to be affecting a presidential election.
Anyway, for Sanders the industrial worker is a figure of romanticism and fascination because he’s been pushing the square peg of Marxism into a round hole of American society for 55 years.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay: The catch of course is that the economic populism must be coupled with fucking over the rest of the Dem base to work, ala Drumpf. Bernie DOES NOT GET THAT. Nor does Michael Moore. They seem to think that white male racists are the only group worth appealing to. Fuck both of them. This is what is fundamentally flawed with both of them and their outlooks…they ignore huge swaths of the Dem base to appeal to fuckheads who vote color of skin and genitalia over their own economic interests.
Kay
@Marc:
Medicare is a populist issue and Bernie Sanders is positioned to lead on that. If he wins on Medicare with a populist argument he’s a hero and he’s hugely advanced the idea that Lefty populism wins. No one will argue with him. The tactic will have worked.
Applejinx
@Marc:
Speaks for me, so I don’t have to.
I am more and more regretting even having voted for Clinton. If this is what she was, I was a damned fool, and our American experiment is fucked. You people are blind, crazy, and lazy (by which I mean: Clintonistas). You will have a lot of convincing to get me to trust you again. This is not working.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: You are a damned fool for many, many, MANY reasons.
Kay
@Villago Delenda Est:
I don’t know that is HAS to but starting out by dismissing the whole thing by labeling it “identity politics” isn’t at all appealing to me. I’m not joining that. I don’t know what they want. I’m completely open to populists winning elections. I don’t know how Nancy Pelosi is standing in the way of that.
It just isn’t like that. Here’s what it’s like.Someone expresses interest in running in a House race. In this district. We’re thrilled that anyone is willing to do this, and then they tell us why they’re running. Often it’s populism and I say “great! welcome aboard!” No one says “we’ll have to check with leadership because Democrats are neoliberals and they hate populists”.
Go forth and be populists. There’s no precondition, no negotiation, no concession necessary.
Applejinx
@Barbara:
That’s insane. ‘The sharing economy’ is the obliteration of creatives’ revenue through things like mp3s and google, and Uber fooling people into externalizing the cost of their vehicle maintenance. ‘The sharing economy’ is the crab bucket writ large, with an extra dose of ‘go to college again in hopes of getting a totally different job!’ that won’t be there when you get out. It is a straight up con job.
You’ll notice Trump lied rather than try to convince anyone of a sharing economy. Why? Because some lies are too stupid even for Donald Trump!
There are good and interesting things about modern business, such as the stuff Elon Musk is doing to bring self-sufficient energy generation to people. If that’s driven down to where the general populace can have it and things like it, it’ll help a lot. ‘The sharing economy’ is not a helping thing, it’s rich and powerful technocrats working out how best to con people into acting against their own longterm interests. It’s like the Mob: the pension plan truly sucks.
Kay
@Villago Delenda Est:
We had a Lefty minister run for Congress once. Really smart woman. She didn’t waste any time demanding I endorse the idea that Lefty religious is a good thing to be. It’s what she was. She doesn’t need my permission. If she had won I would have said “wow, there’s really something to Lefty religious winning elections”.
The doing is the THING. Nothing else is required.
glory b
@Msut77: Maybe late here, but free tuition/ college debt forgiveness is the LEAST PROGRESSIVE AND MOST REGRESSIVE thing you can do. The benefit of it goes more to the richer and well educated and it si financed by people who won’t get a chance to go to college.
Debt forgiveness/free tuition to the ivies, for example, will flow to the richest of us. It will, in large part, be paid for by people whose high school experience gives them no chance to go.
Half of all young African Americans don’t go to college. Their tax dollars would pay for this also. Sheeeesh.
And I say that as the mother of two young people who are racking up tuition payments as I speak.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Uh, Barbara wasn’t saying the “sharing economy” was a good thing.
FlipYrWhig
@glory b: Yes, but Bernie Sanders proposed it, ergo it is the alpha and omega of progressivism. Things that Hillary Clinton proposes are “neoliberal” because, well, look who’s proposing them, amirite? :P
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay: None at all. No one is imposing a “neoliberal” ideology check on anyone. Economic populism is fine, but it needs to be an inclusive populism that addresses the entire base. That acknowledges that for some people, “identity politics” are about defense, not offense. As in not being gunned down by cops because you’ve got the wrong color of skin to be walking down the street or driving, because that is PRECISELY what he have been seeing. And it needs to stop. If one of us, any off us, lives in fear of being taken down by cops just for having high melanin, none of us are safe at all.
Applejinx
@tobie:
Some of these things are fine. There’s a reason she had me there for a while. I would ask, do you believe she was serious?
Advanced manufacturing: oh yeah, I believe that. But it puts America out of work while it makes ‘America’ money: and that’s globalized money, not really ours. There are great things about it, but there’s a hell of a catch.
Job retraining: the worker’s problem. Also, define any job better suited to humans once manufacturing gets sufficiently advanced: and to what extent is this training people to pile into the FIRE sector, which is a toxic sector that’s hurting us competitively relative to other countries?
Free community college: that’s fine. Is it useful, or is it just ‘shit college’ that won’t get you into anything desirable? Very good but no silver bullet for a workforce competing for diminishing jobs. The ‘middle class’ of work is going away.
Apprenticeships: for what? Trades? As competitiveness increases, apprenticeships and intern positions become free for the employer: there’s so much competition that you pick from people who are able to pay their way while interning or apprenticing.
Debt-free college: again, we talking Harvard and MIT here? Does this not just define a shit tier of college that won’t get you anything useful? I know from my corporate programmer brother (who did not vote, but wanted to vote for Trump) that applicants can turn up with college degrees and still not be able to think. Some advanced trades and careers are just hard to do at a competitive level and most people still won’t be able to do them even after college.
Family paid leave and childcare: all for it, if she’d been hammering that the whole time it would have been inspiring. I even believe it, but I wonder how she meant to pay for it and how far she was willing to take it. Margaret Thatcher famously insisted that there was no such thing as society, and made it happen. I’d like to see a really stark contrast between her and Clinton, but even the rightwing thugs make some idle promises and then get right back to demonizing the chosen enemy. And sure enough, if it ain’t Trump it’s Sanders or who knows who else.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx:
Maybe she could have put her various plans on this place called “the Internet.” Christ almighty, man, you are hopeless.
ETA: And the very idea of a hopeless Bernie Sanders maniac faulting SOMEONE ELSE for unspecific PLANS just serves as the icing on the shit cake of Applejinx. Jesus. It never ends.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, that worked
Ithink
@goblue72:
And as a person of color that actually voted for him in the primary and is frankly anxious to the point of hallucinating about what an impending Trump administration is trying and will more than likely do to this country and the world at large: F.U. and Bernie’s self-righteousness, as well as any Bernie or Buster that is still more concerned about your abstract principles in the most reactionary Republican dominated presidency & legislature since pretty much f***-ing ever!
Its one thing to say you don’t like Hillary or prefer a wider palette of candidates and the like. But now what is at stake for the most vulnerable populations in the nation and all of the phenomenal progress Obama had made over the last eight years is in the toilet ready for the Cheeto dust hands of Combover Mussolini to push down the lever seems the most important damn thing to worry about for now besides your precious egos!
He lost the damn primary fair and square. Why? Primarily because P.O.C and women (in virtually all.the Southern states preferred her to him whatever other reasons, frivolous or otherwise, you can come up with. You can chastise the fellow people who share your beliefs and worldview and continue a no-resolve arrogance that he could have won the general election (which only God knows) or we can make more legitimate corrections to our message, platform, campaigning and posture without compromising egalitarianism and populist appeals to the BETTER angels of the American electorate, not.the neo-fascistic know-nohingism that is now Trump president-elect and the authoritarian populist revolt of the WWC that auctioned off the White House to the most unqualified ass to ever consider running for the office.
I’m all for contrary opinions based in reality and well-founded assumptions based on differing opinions of the professional class, but if your goj g to turn this into a pissing match that everybody should just bow to King Sanders because he can never be wrong or not know what the hell he’s talking about, then the Democratic Party frankly doesn’t need you or his ilk if he’s not willing to listen. Hillary Clinton had her problems, but nobody ever had any issue criticizing her for any damn thing from across the political spectrum, nor did the ever-lasring talk show drama s***-storm that is so much mainstream press nowadays that is in the both siderism cilul-de-sac to the detriment of a healthy democracy.
I like Sanders and his record of social justice and governance more than anything during the primary process, but if he’s gonna take this kind of smugness against any criticism of him or engage in rhetorical tantrums than he is frankly no better or more qualified to be a President than Trump is. And this is FROM MEMEBERS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY he needs/needed to be relevant and elected!
What would you Sanders Stans had done if he had overtaken Hillary somehow in delegate count during the primary or convention and the general election had STILL been a disaster in the Electoral College and popular vote tally anyways because you conveniently ignore the white-hot red-baiting Republican playbook that Trump and his so-foul ilk had yet to play against him? What about the fact that the general American voter is more antagonistic about socialism and communism than anything else besides Atheism as an ideology or ‘un-American’ political belief? And how in the hell can you and him criticize Democrats’ mostly legitimate recognition and support of positive identity politics while saying appealing to the most collectively influential (as well as frankly ethnocentric, nativist, misogynistic and homophobic) voting bloc is what will solve all the Democrats’ electoral woes? Mews flash: wealth redistribution and civil liberties/rights legislation will make most of these said voters MORE an aagonistic to Left-wing appeals and candidates, NOT less!
People on both sides of the damnaile have been saying and studying why that same voting bloc votes DIRECTLY against their so-called most important interests for years and have yet to get the most basic facts around it down pat.
We can try as we might to woo a few million at most, but most if.them will simply not vote or participate in npoltica movement or party where there are too many (I.e. more.than 1 or a neglectable handful) blacks, browns, women, LGBT peeps, atheists, etc. as fellow members or in constant positions of power. They are scared and antagonistic towards them all for the most bizarre and fact-free reasons most of the time. And you ignoring that notion, as well as Bernie’s age and inability to moderate any of his still frankly radical positions in ANY context or expand beyond his working to upper middle class white working Stans is why he’s driving straight to novelty demagoflgic status instead of the idealistic standard bearer that’d be most useful to Democrats going forward. I’m so done talking and screaming at people who are supposedly on my side and have my best interests at heart about all this. We have enough damn problems and potential disasters to avert than this damn circular firing squad you wanna start everytime somebody wants to throw the most negligible and often legitimate shade at Sanders about his self-indulgent stump speeching he’s doing cross country right now. When he’s right he’s just that, but when he’s otherwise, JESUS! Just get off.the damned high horse for a minute and propose a thinking man’s alternative, m’kay?
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Ya know, the fact that you don’t know very many things, and that many of the ones you think you know are outright false, just might suggest something about YOU, rather than of the world’s failure to spoon-feed you the things you might benefit from understanding.
Chris
@Applejinx:
Judas fucking Priest.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Keep in mind that Applejinx last week was bemoaning that the Democrats didn’t have Bernie Sanders campaign in swing states, which he would have loved to do, which was such a sad lost opportunity. This, despite the fact that Bernie Sanders campaigned in swing states for a month right up to Election Day.
Luther
BC: We need to be inclusive!
BJ commentators: FUCK YOU, TROLLS!!!!!! Die in a fire!
Ithink
P.S. to the ever-growing bayou of Sanders Stans-say whatever else you will aboit Hillary but she knows how to take blind rage of hatred towards her and criticism better than just about damn near any political candidate of my lifetime active and otherwise, including President Obama in some instances. Trump and Sanders need a damn lollipop, new diaper and safe space to be temperamental after they realize that they too are just human and not all encompassing Gods of Political Solutions themselves. Unthinkable it is for them both that anybody could dare dislike or not be smitten with their messianic appeals to an America that never really existed or one that is still firmly in a fantasy vision squarely between the Land of Oz and Middle Earth!
Villago Delenda Est
@FlipYrWhig: It’s like trying to tell WVA coal miners that they’re being fucked over by fracking. They don’t care what reality is, they know that some blah person somewhere is responsible for their job loss, and they’re going to stick it to them.
Applejinx
@Villago Delenda Est: Hillary was all for fracking. It is, after all, American big business being exported globally, and she’s absolutely right about fracking benefiting the American economy in a number of ways.
It’s also a soulless fucking way to scorch your own earth, and not okay, and not okay to try to sell to other countries.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: Also, the only campaign Sanders really engaged in, Zephyr Teachout (and seriously, if you were Carl Hiassen’s editor, and he wrote that name for a character like that, you’d tell him it was too on-the-nose) lost by ten points, and Hillary Clinton (I believe) outperformed the Bernie-est Senate candidate in the country, Russ Feingold.
ETA: got that wrong, Feingold got about 50K more votes than HRC
Peale
@Applejinx: O.K. But now you’re being a bit negative to the point that we might as well offer nothing because there’s drawbacks to everything.
Starfish
@Marc, I voted for Hillary Clinton, and I understand where you are coming from on identity politics issues, and it seems more nuanced than where I felt Bernie Sanders was coming from during the campaign.
@artem1s: I think that someone above pointed out that the term “identity politics” is vague, and I think that is right. It seems to me that you are worried that the women and gays are going to be thrown out to appease a bunch of people who will never be appeased. Some people are worried about the rate at which we can absorb various new identities if those identities are all pulling and pushing at each other. I think that slowing down so we can incorporate the identities that we have recently absorbed is reasonable. We don’t have to recognize asexual non-binary people yet. There is no competition to determine if asexual non-binary people are more oppressed than gay people. There have been more and more identities trying to control the conversation of the Democratic Party, and we need those identities to work together (unlike the comments in this thread.)
I thought it was interesting that Clinton was visibly reaching out to people with disabilities. There are identities currently being built up about the inclusion of people with disabilities, and some of these have been interesting to watch. But I don’t think that appealing more to people with visible disabilities would have necessarily won this election.
Barbara
@Applejinx: I think it’s pretty obvious that what I am saying is that Sanders’ ideas for helping workers is stuck in time such that a lot of what he would propose would not help an increasing number of workers who are trying to grapple with contract work, temporary work, Uber and all the rest of it.
Applejinx
@Peale: My point is that Hillary intended to offer nothing because she was far too aware of the tradeoffs of everything. Good luck reforming finance without breaking it—good luck reforming healthcare without breaking insurance—good luck promising shitty little podunk towns they’re not going to die when you’re not willing to take the massive handicap of carrying them. She had to promise very carefully to avoid talking total bullshit, as Trump happily did.
This caution reads as ‘I’m not going to do a fucking thing for you, and my rich cronies will get richer, thus boosting America’s economy’.
I voted for her anyway because Trump is substantially worse and I knew he was lying, but yes there’s drawbacks to everything, if you must preserve a whole bunch of status quos that have bipartisan support among the rich and powerful.
Or, the drawback could be ‘oh noes, the rich are ruined and global capital doesn’t love us any more!’ and that would be the price of saving human beings from what we now do. But nobody wants that but people. I think MOST people knew good and well that Trump could not deliver on that promise. If they thought either side could really do that, we’d have seen turnout.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: You know who else likes fracking? People who want their local industrial jobs back.
Peale
@Barbara: Yes. The weakness on focusing almost exclusively on “education and training” as a way out of the mess is that it doesn’t address why people think their jobs might suck. The jobs they have. Bernie and Trump I think are offering memories of another type of job that will be very difficult to recreate. Even if, say, Apple lifts up manufacture of the iPhone from China and puts it down in Tennessee, it isn’t going to do so if it has to pay the same high salaries and health insurance costs and retirement benefits with a UAW contract. It will pay better than MacDonald’s, sure, but they aren’t going to build a plant to put 5,000 workers to work making 60,000 per year unless the state agrees to pick up 45,000 of that salary. But hey, that would be something. On the other hand, proposing things to make the jobs people currently have suck less might be a better focus.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: You have this little morality play constantly running in your simple mind. I don’t know where it came from. But it’s not real, Apple, the Hillary Monster is just your imagination.
FlipYrWhig
@Peale: Plus, what the fuck does Bernie Sanders know about industrial jobs, apart from what he saw on a WPA mural?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: Bernie-ism isn’t about knowing, it’s about feeling and wanting.
And shouting.
Applejinx
@Barbara:
I wouldn’t vote for Sanders for President again. Back when I could cast my vote, it was still a protest vote. I’m not sure I would have voted for him after Nevada, but that was long after I did my bit.
And yes, Sanders’ ideas are no more modern than Trump’s promises: excepting that he’s got that radical left thing going on, with which I have every sympathy. I think it would be easy to persuade him that Uber is a titanic multinational corporation trying to exploit workers, and it’d be similarly easy to persuade him to support unionization for Uber drivers, and for ‘on-call flexible shift workers’ (you know, where you have to hang by your phone because computers can run scheduling and make your McJob run like you’re a fireman, swinging into action only during emergencies and not paid for any normal or predictable hours).
I don’t know if unionization is a practical answer to all this, but it or something like it is the ONLY line of defense against total exploitation.
Villago Delenda Est
@Luther: The trolls don’t want to be inclusive. They don’t want to go forward. They want to cry a bit more about how Bernie utterly failed to reach into the parts of the base that they themselves do not care for much at all.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: It genuinely worries me that you can’t come up with practical or real-world arguments and have to whip out constant, vituperative ad hominem stuff. I’d be a lot happier if things WEREN’T as bad as I see ’em, but you never seem to have anything practical to say, only that I suck as bad as Bernie and Donald Trump and I’m a big dum-dum.
I’ve been profoundly influenced by people who correctly predicted Brexit and Trump’s victory even when I thought these things really implausible, and so I’m leaning much more heavily on what I learned from those who saw what was really happening.
What’s your excuse?
Bitter Scribe
Apparently it IS good enough for someone to say, “I’m a Democrat now. Vote for me.”
Matt McIrvin
Credit to Sanders– his statement about working with Trump on infrastructure seems to have been setup for bashing Trump’s actual proposal as a fraud. Nicely done.
Timmeh
At some point you guys are gonna come to grips with the fact that Clinton was a bad candidate, right? Gore was a bad candidate. Kerry was a bad candidate. The people who keep losing don’t need to be defended. The candidate is bad, the argument is bad. We hired Clinton for a job and she didn’t get it done. We’re moving on now.
Applejinx
@Matt McIrvin: Of course. Trump’s proposal IS a fraud. It’s fine to say ‘if he does decent things I will of course support him’ if you know he’s not going to do any decent things.
It’s a wedge. It’s intended to pry Trump away from the Republican economic policy makers. Tax breaks to corporations are not going to help and shouldn’t be called a ‘trillion dollar plan’ in the first place. Now, actually budgeting for infrastructure, no matter HOW racistly you implemented that it would at least help in the sense of putting money into circulation.
But Trump wasn’t suggesting that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
No question. Also no question, in my mind, that Sanders made her a worse candidate in an unhinged and self-indulgent (and dishonest) quest to be an even worse candidate.
Also, Sanders wasn’t saying we shouldn’t renominate Clinton, and I don’t think anyone is arguing we should. He’s arguing that he knows which way we should move as we move on. Some of us think he’s not someone we should listen to.
gwangung
However, I think it was done inartfully enough to split away folks in our own coalition.
In that respect, I think that a fair criticism.
Betty Cracker
@Timmeh: Sanders lost. Then Clinton lost. And yeah, we have to move on. I’m afraid we’re learning the wrong lesson, moving on to the wrong thing, though. I’m speaking up because I don’t want to lose AGAIN.
I think Kay has it right above when she says run your candidate and see what message wins. Assuming Trump hasn’t transformed America into an authoritarian state that has show-elections to keep the current single-party ruling class in power, we’ll have more data to make a decision in a couple of years.
gwangung
That;s kind of a grassroots approach to doing things, as it were….
oygevalt
Yeah, because Democrats don’t need to rethink anything. Nothing. Everything is going just great! We’re going extinct at the state level. We hold a few guv seats. We’re on track to go below 40 Senators in 2018. Yeah, we won the popular vote, and could have won the EC if the party hadn’t abandoned rural Dems. At least show the fuck up in states like PA, MI, and WI. Because what Obama said is very true: losing some of these rural counties 60-40 is a lot different than losing 80-20. He never should have replaced Dean as DNC chair. The results that followed were a disaster.
The smartest people in the room? And we can’t come up with new ideas or new strategies for how to go forward?
Enjoy the political fucking wilderness. Because, in all likelihood, our chance to tame the anti-globalistation anger tiger passed by about 8-10 years ago after we upended the party by getting Dean as DNC chair, recapturing the House and Senate, and getting Obama elected. How is it that libs can get their entire cultural infrastructure up in arms over transgender bathroom use but couldn’t do shit to advocate for the President’s infrastructure plan? Or put pressure on a Republican Congress the last six years? Why don’t we show up in mid-terms, like 2010 when we had hard lefties telling people to punish Dems by not voting? I mean, we fucking let Republicans have it because we’re TOO STUPID to realize when things like re-districting are on the line. From top to bottom this party is a mess.
Maybe at some point you’ll realize that the way to mitigate a lot of social ills is by advancing something akin to social democracy so we don’t get pigeonholed on identity politics. Because when people feel secure economically, they’re less likely to look for scapegoats. But, like I said, right now it seems like that opportunity passed us by years ago. All the in-fighting and back-biting won’t change a thing. Find a new way forward, try some new ideas and appeals, or go home and forget about it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ll leave this here and let someone else drag The Fight up to a new thread.
WarMunchkin
Ok, so the full excerpt that Vox posted is not as egregiously bad, but is still bad. I don’t understand the insinuation that Dems are running candidates just because of their identity. That is demonstrably not true – which candidate was it again that had proposals for regulating Wall Street? Which candidate couldn’t manage to name anything he would do about his signature issue?
Msut77
@glory b:
Hey I don’t know what to tell you but it matters to lots of people who vote and organize. If you think what you stated was a worthwhile argument that’s fine. But she literally came up that slimy no doubt tested by focus group stain of a response
Barbara
@Peale: I have one advantage over a lot of people, and that is, I actually used to work in a factory. Not for long, mind you, but my brother was able to get me summer jobs in a factory that he worked in while we were both attending college. Without a union, the starting wage was just a bit better than minimum wage, but you did get benefits if you worked there for more than six months. The level of skill required to do a job, and the margin per good sold, is what allows manufacturers to keep manufacturing in the U.S. (or anywhere — I am told that certain types of goods now cannot be made in China as wages have gone up there). You can find things made in the U.S., they tend to be higher end versions of things that are usually manufactured elsewhere.
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “Only whites get to engage in identity politics.” On this, Kellyanne Conway, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump all seem to agree. I respect that Bernie Sanders votes the right way on civil rights and other matters that are important to women and minorities, but he seems not to have internalized the role of racial and gender politics in dividing members of the working class against each other. That just infuriates me.
Raven Onthill
Marshall has a long history of deceptive quotes of Sanders; this is more of it. I suggest the Boston University’s student paper’s reporting as more useful. Here’s a sample:
The primaries are over. And of Trump’s opponents in the Senate, I expect it will turn out that Sanders is one of the strongest. He has no reservations, no wealthy backers to offend. In a world where it seems even the New York Times is bowing to Trump, we would do well to support him, rather than tear him down.
J R in WV
@Marc:
That means a lot of us will be voting against you, Marc. Where did you come from? Where do you vote? You are a troll, and I’m ashamed to be ranting about your BS.
cokane
@les: I’m not a Sanders diehard, good effort at false characterization though
Mary G
I can’t bring myself to read these comments, because I am back to very fragile again, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I believe that “abandoning identity politics” is code for “ignore the black and brown people to make America white again,” but I don’t want to fight Bernie either. Thank him for sharing and guide him back to raising the minimum wage.
DCF
@NR:
Well said…the Balloon Juice commentariat – despite all that has happened since the election, and for that matter during the primary – continues to be an echo chamber for false narratives and neoliberal rationalizations.
Such irony here…that Sanders supporters, who advocate for a return to true Democratic principles and policies, are pilloried as ‘false’ Democrats (and worse) while the Third Way adherents view themselves as ‘holier than thou’ and above reproach, still questioning how it all came to be….
DCF
@japa21:
HRC was/is the very embodiment of pay-for-play establishment politics. Triangulation, anyone?
Good Lord…do you truly believe what you have written here?….
Betty Cracker
Here’s a guy who’s worth listening to:
Barbara
@Betty Cracker: I love Al Franken. I wish he would run for president.
eemom
I haven’t read any of the comments, though if I were a betting man, I suspect the smart money would be on 300+ of the same old lame ass shit from the same old lame ass trolls.
Just popped in to say you go, Betty.
#fuckbernie #fucktrolls
LAC
That reminds me… I better get my “black woman” costume back to the rental shop. Jaysus… we continue to learn the wrong lessons here. Same group of Berniebro assholes circle jerking each other about cleansing a party of so called identity politics for “the good of the country”. Looks like the alt right bigots have their counterparts. You guys should do lunch. Maggianos in DC might be interested.
J R in WV
@divf:
“… Obama could have skipped the Pickney funeral after the Charlestown massacre, and ignored the killings of blacks by police. I think they were the correct choices, but they are part of what built the feeling by
whitesbigots of the walls closing in. ”Fixed that for you. Fuck bigots, and fuck you.
Ruckus
@ruemara:
Ahhh! You said it much better than I did.
Jack the Cold Warrior
Jesus. Everyone stop browbeating each other, and concentrate on keeping Trump from turning the US into a autocracy. Hillary is gone- into the sunset to be a grandma and give the occasional paid speech. Bernie is useful because of his senate seat and trying to hold Trump to the few good things he promised. He’s not going to run for President again. We need to concentrate on 18 and 20 and epmaking gains to fix the gerrymandering. We need better campaigns.
Hillary ran a bad campaign in 2008, and her dead ender followers became PUMA’s and constantly attacked Obama, some even after he won the general. I see the same attitude here in the trashing of Bernie as “why our queen Hillary lost”. Bullshit. She ran a bad campaign.
This article spells it out:
Well, isn’t this special! Instead of a juggernaut, Hillary’s campaign was obsessed in computers, big data, and TV ads and the themes and GOTV sucked.
Best quote:
…one union staffer told me: “What they seem to have missed is that the way to reach blacks, Latinos, and women is the same way you reach the white working class: progressive economics, and knock on their doors. And guess what? The allegedly ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ white working class is cool with a multicultural coalition as long as you give them the progressive economics. On the other hand, it turns out that downplaying the progressive economics loses everyone except the skillled professionals.”….
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/clinton-campaign-gotv-unions-voters-rust-belt/
feckless
FUCK YOUR BASELESS INSINUATION THAT BERNIE SANDERS IS RACIST OR SEXIST.
“My first “Go Fuck Yourself, Sanders” goes to the implication that Clinton ever asked anyone to vote for her just because she’s a woman. She didn’t, so fuck that bullshit, and fuck Sanders for implying that she did.”
Betty are you talking about election 2016?
I saw lots of deplorable TV commercials, and lots of girl power commercials, but not a single TV ad, NOT ONE about policy, none about her campaign promises, no future vision at all. I watched the entire convention, and at the end could not tell you what it was about, except I knew Hillary’s resume (Excluding her time on the Walmart Board, or when she sponsored an anti-flag burning amendment to the constitution, her attendance at Trump’s wedding, or cited war criminal Kissinger as a supporter).
Prove me wrong, show me an Ad where Hillary talked about her policy proposals. She promised the country nothing but being ‘not-Trump’ and more of the same, and NO ONE HAS GOTTEN A RAISE IN 10 YEARS, so 53% of women backed Trump… who seemed evil, but promised to do things for them. Hillary couldn’t even carry HER OWN demographic.
So yes maybe appealing just to women, and just to minorities to the exclusion of everyone else, is not a successful campaign strategy.
I could as easily claim that your post is some kind of crypto-anti-semitism, as bona fide as your claim that Bernie is clamoring for the democratic party to reach out to racists.
Believe whatever fantasy you want about the election but stop using your blog to try to shut people up by smearing them as bigots, you and Hillary already lost the country to the real racists doing just that.
LAC
@Jack the Cold Warrior: keep telling yourself that. It must be nice to think that things are all equal.
Timmeh
I mean, he’s blatantly saying abandon identity politics and embrace class politics. We’re in a class war and trying to fight it with the wrong strategy. It’s been losing ground for a couple generations at the local, state, and now finally the federal government. Cling to your idols all you want, the plutocracy is pillaging our birthright while y’all squabble in your camps. The message is right and y’all are shooting the messenger. Foolishness.
Ella in New Mexico
@NR:
Y
Oh, yes they can. Yes they will. And it’s just one more way they’re wasting all of our time. .
Berto
I love that people think “Sanders isn’t a Democrat” is an insult, and not an asset for Sanders.
This is as clueless as insulting the liberals Bill Clinton triangulated out of the Democratic Party for not supporting Hillary during the primaries.
OGLiberal
We lost because we didn’t turn out enough, especially where it mattered. Their side always votes and votes for their side no matter who the candidate because the only thing that matters to them is that we lose. We need to be romanced, to be enthralled, to be inspired…if we’re not, we stay home or if we get our lazy asses up to vote but we want a purity pony, we vote for Jill Fucking Stein. And, yes, third party votes mattered. Look at where we lost but should have won….the firewall. Look at how many votes Johnson and Stein got there. Then think about how many of those folks, given only two choices, would have voted Trump.
The folks we rely on to win tight races like this are either too lazy to bother when the candidate is some boring, uninspiring old lady or WATBs who stomp their feet and say “no!” when their purity pony doesn’t get delivered
As I’ve said before, this is on us. Until those shitty white people die, and they live longer these days, they will vote….always. There are more of us….we just need to vote, always. Until we do there will be more Trumps when the candidate isn’t Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, and neither can run again. (And take Perot out of the mix and I’ll bet Bill loses twice…he definitely would have list to GHWB without Perot and that would finished him politically)
OGLiberal
@Timmeh: She was experienced, able, qualified, presidential. Was she inspiring? Not much. Was she “electric”? No. But she would have been a good president, much better than this buffoon. But a lot of folks on our side couldn’t be bothered to vote because we didn’t nominate a rock star. Their side would vote for a moss covered rock simply to beat our side…and they’d come out in droves for that rock We need to adopt that mindset.
HelloRochester
@DCF: amen
videobill
@Betty Cracker you seem to have based your post on a small article/post from TPM but did you actually read Mr. Sanders full comments?
(TPM updated their original post.) Everyone I know is upset/angry over the results from this election but in order to effectively analyze why we lost and correct the mistakes that contributed to this loss – I am open to listening to a wide range of others thoughts and opinions.
Niko
At last count, looks like the number of self-satisfied Clinton dead-enders confidently predicting Bernie supporters would flood this post outweighs Bernie supporters flooding this post by at least a 6-1 factor. So maybe get over yourselves and let’s move forward. Not happy with Sanders’ direction for the Democratic Party, well, Clinton hasn’t really provided much of a direction to go from near nor is she really in a position to be offering the advice. If you’re angry at Bernie and think he made Clinton a bad candidate, remember what her campaign did to Obama in 2008, how Obama overcame that and then move forward and support the vision for the party from whoever it is that you feel best represents the next steps. This type of crap post is getting us nowhere and maybe even pushing the goals of the party backwards.
Loneoak
Betty, you’re a better thinker than this. How about an apology for thoroughly mischaracterizing Sander’s remarks on the basis of a headline and maybe a follow-up thread about the actual issues at hand for the party? It’s pretty insulting to a bunch of us longtime readers/participators who did and still support Sanders to shitpost like this.