[Discussion] The (likely) Depressing Road to the 2020 Election Thread

It's going to be a circus.

Will 45 get impeached or step down or challenged? All 3? MAYBE.

Will the democrats eat themselves alive and hobble literally every potential candidate before the primaries are done? PROBABLY.

Talk about that junk here.

Jacobin wrote:

Bernie Is Running, Thank God
BY
MEAGAN DAY
Bernie Sanders is running for president again. His message is simple: there's a class war raging and working people need to win it.

It’s finally happening. Bernie Sanders just announced that he’ll be running for president again.

Judging from its early entrants, the politics of this upcoming Democratic presidential primary will be the most progressive in decades. All of the confirmed contenders claim to support Medicare for All, for example — an idea that most in the party ignored or outright rejected as recently as three years ago. Some candidates are also running on ideas like universal child care and a Green New Deal, a notable departure from the pro-corporate politics that have characterized the party’s program for years.

That leftward shift is a positive development, and there’s a reason for it. The reason is Bernie Sanders.

Now Sanders has announced that he’s throwing his hat in the ring with them. Some progressive voters may want to gravitate toward another candidate in the crowded field. But don’t be fooled — if you seek economic and social justice, you should support Bernie Sanders for president.

Why? Because there’s a class war raging, and Sanders is the only one running who sees it, and who wants to build working-class forces to fight back.

For four decades, neoliberal politicians in both parties have shamelessly and relentlessly deregulated corporations, cut taxes on the rich, stymied unions, starved social services, privatized public goods, and bailed out economic elites while imposing austerity on everyone else. The result for ordinary working people has been stagnating wages and ballooning debt, heightened anxiety and lowered expectations. All the while, there’s been a tacit prohibition on making sense of all this using the language of class conflict.

In 2016, Sanders violated that taboo — and found the American people remarkably receptive.

It turned out that many people were tired of having to choose between conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism and liberal meritocratic elitism to explain the economic inequality and hardship they experience every day. They heard what Bernie had to say: that the economy is rigged, and that aggressive action to democratize it is necessary and achievable. And they agreed.

By making this pervasive exploitation and egregious inequality central to his campaign, Sanders came out of left field to garner thirteen million votes against the party front-runner. By continuing to use his platform to push for ambitious redistributive policies and highlight working-class struggles, he graduated from the campaign to become the most popular politician in the country. The rise of Sanders represents an American awakening — incomplete but significant — to the failures of liberal bipartisanship, corporate accommodationism, and capitalism itself.

Sanders doesn’t just acknowledge the constant churn of class conflict: he picks a side. While other politicians know which way the wind is blowing and strike various progressive poses accordingly, Sanders is a storm that generates that wind.

He does this by standing up consistently for working people against capitalist interests. No other candidate for the Democratic Party nomination will have a comparable track record of fighting to put people over profits.

For example, no other candidate has been pushing for single-payer health care in Congress, on the basis that “health care should be a right of all Americans regardless of their income,” for decades. No other candidate has antagonized the world’s wealthiest man into giving a quarter of a million employees an immediate pay raise. No other candidate dares question the superiority of capitalism — only Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist.

And while other candidates may pick and choose progressive proposals to run on, Sanders will present the most ambitious and comprehensive program to make the country more equal, more democratic, and more humane. Expect him to run not on a handful of zeitgeisty ideas, but on a detailed roadmap out of hell: Medicare for All, free college tuition, and student debt relief, a Green New Deal with an ambitious jobs program, strong climate-conscious environmental regulations, universal child care, massive investment in public housing and education, a national $15 minimum wage, expanding Social Security, banning predatory lending, strong pro-union legislation, ending corporate tax giveaways, mandatory paid sick and family leave and vacation, gender pay equity laws, dismantling private detention centers, demilitarizing the police, banning for-profit prisons, ending the War on Drugs, ending voter suppression, stopping illegal bombings, ending the War on Terror, non-interventionist foreign policy, and on and on.

In a race where progressivism is in vogue, his platform will be hard to run against without changing the conversation. Other candidates and their proxies will argue that Sanders can’t represent the interests of women and people of color because he’s an old white guy. But whatever the importance of symbolic representation, the social-democratic reforms Sanders proposes would do incomparably more to materially transform the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary women and people of color.

Antiracists should embrace the politician with the most serious plan to end problems like unemployment, low wages, underinsurance, student debt, underfunded public education, and housing disinvestment, given that these problems disproportionately affect people of color and are the material basis for the lived experience of racism. Similarly, feminists should back whichever politician, regardless of their gender, is most likely to guarantee quality universal health care, child care, and education — the social reproductive work that often falls uncompensated to women if it isn’t adequately provided by society — as well as general proposals for a more equitable economy in which women can flourish.

When it comes to US foreign policy, the other candidates in the Democratic Party presidential primary will, as usual, run the gamut from hawkish to oblivious. Sanders has an imperfect anti-imperialist track record, but is the only presidential candidate who suggests any hope of a new American foreign policy paradigm.

As a young man, Sanders applied to be a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He arranged a delegation from Burlington to visit the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, attended the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and visited Cuba. At times he toed the establishment line on foreign policy in Congress, but he has made a concerted effort to revisit and develop his approach in advance of the 2020 race. Last year, he even authored legislation to end US support for the war in Yemen — which, if it passes, will be the first ever successful invocation of the War Powers Resolution.

And then there’s climate change. The earth is on the brink of catastrophe, and time is running out. The primary obstacle to beating the clock is not individual consumption habits or insufficient ecological consciousness — it’s capitalism itself, which not only incentivizes humans to destroy the earth for profit, but empowers society’s wealthiest to control politics and shield themselves from interference or consequences.

To save the planet, we need a movement against capitalism that can force lawmakers’ hands with disruptive mass action. This task will be infinitely easier if the president sees one of his primary tasks as bringing the private sector to heel, and is willing to anger and alienate the most powerful people in the world because he recognizes that sustainability can only be achieved at the expense of profits.

Sanders is also our best shot at beating the Right. No one is better capable of defeating Donald Trump than a politician who speaks to the diverse working-class majority’s real needs in concrete terms, who meets their desire for change not with platitudes but with a positive vision for a radically fairer society.

Anyone skittish about a strong left-wing candidate’s chances against Trump need only remember 2016: running a centrist, corporate-friendly Democrat was justified because presumably only a moderate could defeat Trump. This turned out to be very wrong. For decades, establishment liberals have tried to persuade us that pragmatism means subordinating what’s right to what’s feasible. What we learned in 2016, or ought to have learned, is that compromise is no longer a winning strategy.

It appears that the sun is rising on working-class politics in the United States. But there are no guarantees. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary is a referendum and a test: have Americans finally awoken from our long neoliberal slumber? Are we ready to dispense with violence, scarcity, and greed, and build a new world on a foundation of solidarity and equality?

If you’re not ready for that new world, no problem — there are many more moderate candidates for you to choose from. But if you are, you have to back Bernie Sanders.

The only way this winds up a repeat of 2016 because someone ran again who shouldn't have, well, it'll have nothing to do with Candidate Sanders ; D

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

The only way this winds up a repeat of 2016 because someone ran again who shouldn't have, well, it'll have nothing to do with Candidate Sanders ; D

Oh dear god don’t jinx us.

ruhk wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

The only way this winds up a repeat of 2016 because someone ran again who shouldn't have, well, it'll have nothing to do with Candidate Sanders ; D

Oh dear god don’t jinx us.

: D

Ya know, if Sanders' biggest weakness does turn out to be Virginia, Tim Kaine for VP is still available...

Oh FFS Sanders is running! Just what we need, another gross old man as President. No thanks!

I’d love to see AOC run, similar platform, less creepy. But she’s too young, right?

Docjoe wrote:

Oh FFS Sanders is running! Just what we need, another gross old man as President. No thanks!

I’d love to see AOC run, similar platform, less creepy. But she’s too young, right?

We have 12 years to make the changes necessary to keep the Earth habitable. I'll take Sanders if he's electable enough to win and drive real change.

DSGamer wrote:

We have 12 years to make the changes necessary to keep the Earth habitable. I'll take Sanders if he's electable enough to win and drive real change.

My parents are two years older than Sanders and it's rapidly becoming clear that moderately complex tasks like managing investments, doing taxes, and choosing insurance are quickly slipping beyond their capabilities. Today I found out that they've spent the past year driving around in cars with the wrong vehicle registration stickers.

They get that climate change is bad, but can't explain what it actually is yet alone have the wherewithal to organize an effective society-level response to it.

No one in their late 70s/early 80s is capable of effectively managing what is basically a $3.5 trillion business that directly employs about two million people and indirectly employs tens of millions more.

OG_slinger wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

We have 12 years to make the changes necessary to keep the Earth habitable. I'll take Sanders if he's electable enough to win and drive real change.

My parents are two years older than Sanders and it's rapidly becoming clear that moderately complex tasks like managing investments, doing taxes, and choosing insurance are quickly slipping beyond their capabilities. Today I found out that they've spent the past year driving around in cars with the wrong vehicle registration stickers.

They get that climate change is bad, but can't explain what it actually is yet alone have the wherewithal to organize an effective society-level response to it.

No one in their late 70s/early 80s is capable of effectively managing what is basically a $3.5 trillion business that directly employs about two million people and indirectly employs tens of millions more.

Trump is proving that early 70s probably isn't capable either. I still can't believe he's not at least 77.

Isn't Pelosi a year older? She's sure doing fine. Ginsburg is 85. Funny how the knives come out for Bernie...

Look, every case is an individual case. The people who dedicate their lives to something the way these people do and rise as high as they do, they're not like you and I. The last thing we should be doing is judging them based on what 'normal' people are like. They're not normal--if they were normal, they wouldn't have gotten this far in the first place.

And if your older relatives are declining, make sure it's not their medication. Especially digoxin.

Too clarify, they have more reliable access to healthcare and resources than most normal people, and have an occupation that requires persistence and dedication, they aren’t superhuman.

But anyway, people here have seriously been talking about Biden running and he’s like barely a year younger than Sanders.

There are many people in their 70's, 80's, and 90's on up who are perfectly fine when it comes to mental and even physical capacity, and Bernie has shown no evidence of any such decline. It's fine to not like someone or choose not to vote for someone, but can we please not use ageism as an excuse to put people out to pasture before their time simply because they've reached a certain age and no other reason? There are plenty of incompetent people of all ages.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Isn't Pelosi a year older? She's sure doing fine. Ginsburg is 85. Funny how the knives come out for Bernie...

Pelosi got Trump, a self-proclaimed master negotiator, to back down on an issue that he insisted was critical to the future of the country within day of regaining power.

What the f*ck did Bernie do? Not just since January 2019, but since he's been in office? f*cking nothing.

OG_slinger wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Isn't Pelosi a year older? She's sure doing fine. Ginsburg is 85. Funny how the knives come out for Bernie...

Pelosi got Trump, a self-proclaimed master negotiator, to back down on an issue that he insisted was critical to the future of the country within day of regaining power.

What the f*ck did Bernie do? Not just since January 2019, but since he's been in office? f*cking nothing.

You could ask this question of literally every other senator running for president. They have limited power. Especially in the minority.

Docjoe wrote:

I’d love to see AOC run, similar platform, less creepy. But she’s too young, right?

Correct. You need to be 35 years old to be President (or Vice President, since they have the same requirements). The first election she'll be eligible for is 2028.

.

OG_slinger wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Isn't Pelosi a year older? She's sure doing fine. Ginsburg is 85. Funny how the knives come out for Bernie...

Pelosi got Trump, a self-proclaimed master negotiator, to back down on an issue that he insisted was critical to the future of the country within day of regaining power.

What the f*ck did Bernie do? Not just since January 2019, but since he's been in office? f*cking nothing.

I don't know about you, but in my book pressuring Amazon into raising wages, while holding significantly less power than Pelosi does seems way more significant than claiming the victory of striking airport workers for yourself and then giving a billion dollars instead of five to a racist moron.

Keldar wrote:
Docjoe wrote:

I’d love to see AOC run, similar platform, less creepy. But she’s too young, right?

Correct. You need to be 35 years old to be President (or Vice President, since they have the same requirements). The first election she'll be eligible for is 2028.

2024 (born October 13, 1989).

When it comes to the Overton Window, Bernie is the Atlas of the Left.

(edit to add) all this conversation makes me realize: I don't see any of these candidates as capable of carrying forth the enthusiasm of the remarkable 2017 and '18 elections. Like, does anyone even remember when Elizabeth Warren 'persisted'? Has she been able to capitalize (no pun intended) on that at *all*? Corey Booker like, ran into a burning building and saved someone I think, but is that translating into the enthusiasm it should? Does Beto's gift for creating enthusiasm have a shelf life?

I don't know if it's about 'unity' exactly. It's that the success of the Democratic party over these past two years didn't come from the top down. It came out of mass action that translated into political engagement. That makes it hard for a leader to step in and act like they are now the 'boss' of all that energy.

Maybe rather than looking for the usual candidate who will lead, it should be about the candidate that can best help unleash all that energy. The one who won't stand in the way of it, and especially the one who won't fumble this chance. Maybe it's less about a candidate who will win it, and more about a candidate who won't lose it.

Followed a link in another thread to this author, and found this piece by them: this passage is probably worth quoting (LINK):

People — yes, even you — do not make decisions on an entirely rational basis. An audience is more easily won over with a one-liner that inspires applause or laughter than a five-minute explanation of a complicated phenomenon. A false statistic repeated confidently will be more convincing than a truth stated haltingly by some guy you’ve never heard of, and who you’ve already decided you don’t like because he’s arguing against the guy you came to see. Massively complex ideologies with hundreds of years of scholarship behind them are reduced to a couple of fast-talking egos in Dockers thinking about the best way to make their opponent look like a dumbass. Debate is not politics. It’s theater.

If debate is theater, an American Presidential campaign is a tentpole release at the multiplex.

Reagan beat Carter. He then beat Mondale. Bush Sr. beat Dukakis. He then lost to Clinton. Clinton beat Dole. Bush Jr. beat Gore. He then beat Kerry. Obama beat McCain. He then beat Romney. Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

It's not One Weird Trick to winning the Presidency, but that history does suggests we shouldn't overlook charisma--even dark charisma--as a factor. The ability to deliver the hotter take means something when it comes to getting people on your side.

Now, Trump should lose to a ham sandwich given his numbers, but, don't discount the importance of someone who can deliver some 'sizzle' whatever the policy 'steak'.

The question is whether Bernie has enough charisma and better framing to convince the Rural Racists of the midwest to vote for their own interests, even if it means helping some black people, instead of voting for kleptocratic pre-feudalism.

You have to tell the white people it will benefit them more, then tell the minorities that it will benefit them more. The two groups don't talk that much to each other anyway.

I am not optimistic.

I think the test of Bernie's charisma on that issue comes down to whether he makes them feel like a vote for Bernie is another poke of the populist pitchfork in the tenderloins of the 'elites'. Not even self-interest in a rational, long term sense. Self-interest in the short-term, 'feels good to punch somebody' sense.

Can Bernie get them punching up instead of down? That, I think, is the question.

Bernie can do it. But the question isn't whether he can do it. It is whether he can do it enough to edge Trump. I think he can. Especially since it seems healthcare will be the lynchpin issue. It worked in 2018 and I don't see it going away in 2020. Bernie can credibly carry the torch for healthcare for sure and get both sides to listen.

Note, I still support Harris. It will take a lot to overturn the experience of seeing her stump for Obama in SF 2007-2008. I liked her then. I wanted her to run after she won in 2016. I want her to run now.

I too wish Sanders had chosen not to run for all the reasons previously stated: age, his convenient switching from independent to democrat when it suits him, his now "old" ideas of socialism that have been taken up by those younger than him, his challenges with minorities, and the fact that he is an old (yes I already mentioned that but he is OLD) white male. I think Democrats would be better served if he had instead chosen not to run and instead played a role of king maker, throwing his support to someone younger and more viable.

I hope he has learned from the last time and will seek to unite the party instead of what he did with Clinton.

I know Oily doesn't want this to become another 2016 rehash, so I'll just say that what happened in 2016 may have made possible the victories of 2017 and '18. I don't think a Democratic party with top-down Clinton leadership is a party that makes the historic gains of the past two years. The fracturing of that party 'unity' may have been the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats.

JC wrote:

white male.

This is something I want to talk about. Bernie Sanders is Jewish. He isn't white. I kind of feel like this is a new tactic of anti-Semites to separate people and make them easier to divide and conquer. Do you think white supremacists will see him as anything other then Jewish? They won't. The Jewish people are historically one of the, if not the most, persecuted groups in the world.

I'm tired of seeing people call Jewish people white, especially other minorities, to downplay their suffering and historic persecution. It is honestly insulting to have people dismiss the massive historical and ongoing persecution suffered by Jewish people that are white passing. It just isn't good and only further sows division among people that have every reason to unite.

I see this all the time when people call my boyfriend white even though he is ethnically Jewish. People should not be downplaying it at all. When literally almost half of the Jewish population of the world was slaughtered less than a hundred years ago, NO ONE gets to act like Jewish people are just other white people. If they were, they wouldn't have been treated as they have for thousands upon thousands of years.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I know Oily doesn't want this to become another 2016 rehash, so I'll just say that what happened in 2016 may have made possible the victories of 2017 and '18. I don't think a Democratic party with top-down Clinton leadership is a party that makes the historic gains of the past two years. The fracturing of that party 'unity' may have been the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats.

/hug

BoogtehWoog wrote:
JC wrote:

white male.

This is something I want to talk about. Bernie Sanders is Jewish. He isn't white. I kind of feel like this is a new tactic of anti-Semites to separate people and make them easier to divide and conquer. Do you think white supremacists will see him as anything other then Jewish? They won't. The Jewish people are historically one of the, if not the most, persecuted groups in the world.

I'm tired of seeing people call Jewish people white, especially other minorities, to downplay their suffering and historic persecution. It is honestly insulting to have people dismiss the massive historical and ongoing persecution suffered by Jewish people that are white passing. It just isn't good and only further sows division among people that have every reason to unite.

I see this all the time when people call my boyfriend white even though he is ethnically Jewish. People should not be downplaying it at all. When literally almost half of the Jewish population of the world was slaughtered less than a hundred years ago, NO ONE gets to act like Jewish people are just other white people. If they were, they wouldn't have been treated as they have for thousands upon thousands of years.

Boog- This is an interesting bias of mine that I wasn't aware of, thanks for bringing it up. I view the term Jewish as referencing the religion that has been chosen by an individual, not the ethnicity/skin color. I've never considered that using the term white could be used to try to marginalize/normalize someone or a group (how's that for white privilege in action). I still think that Bernie is too close to the mold of all of the previous presidents we've had.

Also, for those that might be interested in exploring the topic:
The Atlantic: Are Jews White?

I doubt Bernie has any fears about getting pulled over.

I don't want to diminish the Jewish minority status, but aren't there some fairly stark differences here?

Nomad wrote:

I doubt Bernie has any fears about getting pulled over.

I don't want to diminish the Jewish minority status, but aren't there some fairly stark differences here?

Being a member of a minority that has faced hate literally worldwide and has had a sizable percentage of its total population murdered in recent history by an ideology that is regaining contemporary power and popularity isn’t enough? Is there some official measure to how much oppression a minority group must face before it counts that we can reference?

Nomad wrote:

I doubt Bernie has any fears about getting pulled over.

I don't want to diminish the Jewish minority status, but aren't there some fairly stark differences here?

Definitely some differences. Jewish people are far less distinguishable from non-minorities at a glance. In the past antisemitics have gotten around this by doing things like vandalizing their property to mark them out for violent actions to people that can't conveniently identify them, or force them to wear symbols like stars. In modern times there are (((shorthands))) so that Jewish people can be identified and that identity spread so that other perpetrators can plan accordingly.

Yonder wrote:
Nomad wrote:

I doubt Bernie has any fears about getting pulled over.

I don't want to diminish the Jewish minority status, but aren't there some fairly stark differences here?

Definitely some differences. Jewish people are far less distinguishable from non-minorities at a glance. In the past antisemitics have gotten around this by doing things like vandalizing their property to mark them out for violent actions to people that can't conveniently identify them, or force them to wear symbols like stars. In modern times there are (((shorthands))) so that Jewish people can be identified and that identity spread so that other perpetrators can plan accordingly.

Its certainly a position that heavily skews depending on your role.. to your average black person living in America a white Jewish person seems to enjoy most of the benefits of white privilege.. But for sure I would imagine knowing how much the KKK and Nazi's have infiltrated local police forces around the country I would be worried as a Jewish person even of white skin color if a police person pulled me over.