[Debate] Election 2020 Side Discussions

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a place to have in-depth discussions of topics related to the 2020 U.S. Elections, so the main thread doesn't derail

for now, I think the scope of discussion says it all: a place to have in-depth discussions of topics related to the 2020 U.S. Elections, so the main thread doesn't derail.

Here for the multi party system solution.

First step to a multi party system is doing something about FPTP voting

What organizations are folks joining or donating to further progressive or leftist causes?

We've donated to Reverend Barber's organization, Repairers of the Breach, and Stacy Abram's Fair Fight.

This is fine, so long as all side derails from the main thread end up here and further requests in the main thread to go elsewhere are taken here and only here. Any further Election 2020 split off threads created will be locked and directed to this thread or deleted. If you folks tussle and get this thread locked, you do not get to make more. I do not want our video games forums littered with multiple 2020 election-based threads. Two is more than enough. Thanks!

Badferret wrote:

What organizations are folks joining or donating to further progressive or leftist causes?

We've donated to Reverend Barber's organization, Repairers of the Breach, and Stacy Abram's Fair Fight.

In the past I have donated to the ACLU, EFF, and DCCC. Currently just some podcasts that do good work and GWJ. I will probably donate directly to Biden's campaign soon.

Stele wrote:

Here for the multi party system solution.

I'm sending my thoughts and prayers.

Obama didn't radicalize anyone. The IRA troll farm started in 2014, and was designed to hurt Obama. They flooded social media with negative Obama stuff, disguised as Sanders supporters. It worked.

That doesn't mean you have to like Obama. But there is a reason that the dislike went to an absurd level.

This is important, because they are doing it again.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...

According to Mueller’s report, the IRA began creating fake Facebook accounts and small groups as early as 2014.

“IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences,” the report reads. “These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists."

Last spring, Tumblr announced that it had uncovered and terminated 84 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency. According to findings from researcher Jonathan Albright and BuzzFeed News, trolls were using Tumblr in similar ways as other platforms. They posed as black activists and generated hundreds of thousands of interactions for content that ranged from calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” to supporting Bernie Sanders and decrying racial injustice and police violence in the US.

Russian trolls had some of the best luck on Instagram, based on the report. IRA Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of US followers. Russia was controlling 170 Instagram accounts that posted 120,000 pieces of content during a two-year period.

“Collectively, the IRA's social media accounts reached tens of millions of U.S. persons,” the report reads.

The IRA built Facebook communities across the political spectrum, but targeted Clinton in all of them. Mueller’s report lists conservative groups like "Being Patriotic," "Stop All Immigrants," "Secured Borders," and "Tea Party News”; black social justice groups like "Black Matters," "Blacktivist," and "Don't Shoot Us”; LGBTQ groups like "LGBT United”; and religious groups “United Muslims of America.”

“Main idea: Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them),” IRA operators told specialists.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/05/russi...

Similarly, we now know that Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign wasn’t just an attempt to push Hillary Clinton to the left that rapidly took on a life of its own. Nor was Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign merely an effort to offer a left-wing alternative to Trump in the general election. Rather, these, too, were tools of Russian aggression, tacitly supported by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Russian troll farm allegedly used by the Kremlin to sow chaos in 2016 and beyond. MSNBC was able to reveal the truth to its audience earlier this year, lest they be tricked into backing either politician in the future.

The good news is that now, with Congress releasing the more than 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads made by the IRA over the past few years, the voting public finally has the information it needs to protect against future Russian attacks.

“Ultimately, by exposing these advertisements, we hope to better protect legitimate political expression and discussions and better safeguard Americans from having their information ecosystem polluted by foreign adversaries,” Rep. Adam Schiff said in a statement marking the ads’ release.

thrawn82 wrote:

First step to a multi party system is doing something about FPTP voting

Ranked Choice Voting is a thing you could try to get enacted in your states. It's worked well for Maine so far.

Jayhawker wrote:

Obama didn't radicalize anyone. The IRA troll farm started in 2014, and was designed to hurt Obama. They flooded social media with negative Obama stuff, disguised as Sanders supporters. It worked.

That doesn't mean you have to like Obama. But there is a reason that the dislike went to an absurd level.

For me it started in the first two years of his presidency, when the Dems essentially had the reigns of the country and they squandered it trying to get the GOP to play ball, giving up on or not even trying to do certain things (such as closing Gitmo) and severely comprising others (healthcare reform). That’s when I realized that Republican politicians are focused on winning and will bend the rules to the point of breaking to do so and the Democrats don’t know how to cope with that because they’re more concerned with the performative aspects of politics than actually getting anything done. If anything that aspect of Dem politics has only gotten worse under Trump.

I love Obama the man. But he (and the rest of the Democrats) could have done so much more his first term when they controlled everything. And while we might get the Senate back, it won’t be a super majority so likelihood of getting big stuff done is even less.

ruhk wrote:

That’s when I realized that Republican politicians are focused on winning and will bend the rules to the point of breaking to do so and the Democrats don’t know how to cope with that because they’re more concerned with the performative aspects of politics than actually getting anything done.

Interestingly, I'm reading Reaganland right now, and this is brought up fairly early on. Discussing The New Right and the Young Americans for Freedom of the 60s.

Reaganland wrote:

Viguerie's story would be told and re-told many times in the decades to come, like right-wing holy writ. It began in 1961, when the twenty-eight-year-old was hired as a fundraiser by the right's P.T. Barnum, Marvin Liebman, the middle-age man who ran Young Americans for Freedom. The first thing Liebman told him was that YAF actually had two tousand paid members, but that he should always claim that there were twenty-five thousand. That was another secret to the New Right's success: an eagerness to accept that their end -the survival of Western civilization- most decidedly justified nearly any means.

Docjoe wrote:

I love Obama the man. But he (and the rest of the Democrats) could have done so much more his first term when they controlled everything. And while we might get the Senate back, it won’t be a super majority so likelihood of getting big stuff done is even less.

Yeah, Obama the person I like, and I still like to listen to him speak even though our politics have diverged, but Obama the politician leaves a lot to be desired.

Moving convo over here from main election thread:

DSGamer wrote:

So not only do you have the temerity to scold "the left" for not being organized enough, when it was supporters of capital who made doing so much more difficult, but your "solution" is we spend all of our spare time trying to individually claw our way back to the status our grandparents held a century ago.

I am the embodiment of the left so I feel comfortable with a little self criticism

All I'm saying is that the Republicans got organized enough to sweep through local elections on past decades, Progressives can do it to. Listen to the podcast I linked to. She's a progressive lefty left who spent decades helping workers organize to get their needs met. She knows what needs to be done and how hard it is to do.

And yes, we should all spend more of our spare time fighting this fight, because we're armchair jockeys at the end of the day and we have the privileged time to do so. I myself could and should be doing better at that.

The thing that sucks about politics is that it has become a zero sum game. There is no common ground between the left and right, no areas where there can be room for compromise. As much as we view Republicans as evil people, I think most Republicans also view progressives as evil. My wife and I have decided that anyone who supports Trump has a belief system so far from ours that we don’t want them in our lives and have chosen to cut ties with any friends or family who back him.

I think what it means is that each side has to push for complete government control. When they get it, they must unilaterally change as much as possible towards their belief system without any discussion or input from the other side. And then hope that when the backlash comes, the other side doesn’t get complete control.

In a sense, both Obama and Trump blew their chances. The former because he was not bold enough (or progressive enough). The latter because he is utterly incompetent.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

I am the embodiment of the left so I feel comfortable with a little self criticism :)

not to mention a fan of Long Marches ; D

Docjoe wrote:

In a sense, both Obama and Trump blew their chances. The former because he was not bold enough (or progressive enough). The latter because he is utterly incompetent.

That’s why I’m constantly reiterating how Trump is merely an extension of where Republican politics has gone, not a novel aberration. If anything we got lucky with how hamfisted and ignorant Trump is and now that the GOP knows what’s possible the next Republican in office with even a modicum of political savvy will make Trump look like nice.
I think the only path back are things like free healthcare, wealth redistribution, et al- we need to change the material conditions of the Republican base, make people’s lives better to erode the efficacy of Republican fearmongering and force the Republican politicians to move away from the precipice of full-on white christian ethnostatism that they’re standing on.
Will it be possible? No. Definitely not. But we should still try.

Docjoe wrote:

The thing that sucks about politics is that it has become a zero sum game. There is no common ground between the left and right, no areas where there can be room for compromise. As much as we view Republicans as evil people, I think most Republicans also view progressives as evil. My wife and I have decided that anyone who supports Trump has a belief system so far from ours that we don’t want them in our lives and have chosen to cut ties with any friends or family who back him.

I think what it means is that each side has to push for complete government control. When they get it, they must unilaterally change as much as possible towards their belief system without any discussion or input from the other side. And then hope that when the backlash comes, the other side doesn’t get complete control.

In a sense, both Obama and Trump blew their chances. The former because he was not bold enough (or progressive enough). The latter because he is utterly incompetent.

How much hope do folks hold out for two potentially game-changing moves by the Democrats; the end to the filibuster and the potential of permanently adding two or even four more Senate seats?

I think at least in the near term, that Doc is right and either or both of these could go a long way to securing the space that Democrats need to not worry about the Republican Minority-Rule Industrial Complex.

0 hope. I have my "Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown" comics ready to go. The nice thing is they do double duty. I can use them when the Democrats trust Republicans to act in good faith, and when voters trust Democrats to make real change.

I think if they get at least 51 seats in the Senate they'll spend some time preforming kabuki theater before killing the filibuster. I have no doubt they'll make a show of how reluctant they are to do it, and how golly gee these obstructions republicans are just making them, but I expect it to die.

PR statehood probably comes down to the referendum results. D.C on if they think they have a way around the Twenty-third Amendment.

Taxation without representation kicked off this whole thing. The citizens of DC have been living that long enough. Way past time for statehood.

It seems more than a little ridiculous to give 700,000 people two Senators.

Yes, Wyoming is smaller in terms of population, but it is an enormous state, and in the future could grow to be far larger. DC is pretty packed.

It at least wasn't obvious that Wyoming voters would get such a disproportionate voice in the US.... knowingly repeating that mistake doesn't strike me as a good idea.

What if Republicans buy out all the residential housing in DC? That's within reach if a few of the mega-wealthy decided to cooperate. Even if they don't get it all, they could swing it decisively and permanently Republican just by throwing money at the problem.

Trying to stack the Senate by granting statehood to a place that shouldn't be a state sounds like something Republicans would do.

Malor wrote:

It seems more than a little ridiculous to give 700,000 people two Senators.

700,000 is around 200,000 people more than the population of Wyoming, and 70% of the population of Montana. Those were just off the top of my head, I’m sure there’s probably a few more comparable states. I bet Alaska and Hawaii aren’t super populous, either.

Maybe the issue is just that we need to rethink the Senate.

Malor wrote:

It seems more than a little ridiculous to give 700,000 people two Senators.

Yes, Wyoming is smaller in terms of population, but it is an enormous state, and in the future could grow to be far larger. DC is pretty packed.

It at least wasn't obvious that Wyoming voters would get such a disproportionate voice in the US.... knowingly repeating that mistake doesn't strike me as a good idea.

What if Republicans buy out all the residential housing in DC? That's within reach if a few of the mega-wealthy decided to cooperate. Even if they don't get it all, they could swing it decisively and permanently Republican just by throwing money at the problem.

Trying to stack the Senate by granting statehood to a place that shouldn't be a state sounds like something Republicans would do.

DC has a larger population then Vermont and Wyoming, and is only slightly behind Alaska (30k less). It's also only half as dense as NYC, so it's not like the population can't keep growing. There is no reason it shouldn't be a state. The main republican argument against it boils down to "They would never vote for us", which sounds like a them problem.

Malor wrote:

What if Republicans buy out all the residential housing in DC? That's within reach if a few of the mega-wealthy decided to cooperate. Even if they don't get it all, they could swing it decisively and permanently Republican just by throwing money at the problem.

I get the fear, but it's not like they couldn't do that in other states too. It'd probably be a lot cheaper too, as the DC area has one of the highest median home values in the country.

Even of you didnt make it a state on it’s own it seems a bit unreasonable if they couldnt at least become part of another state, so they got a vote?

(To clarify; meant for congress of course)

They get to vote in Presidential elections, so they're not completely disenfranchised. They get electors based on their population like states do. And I'm pretty sure they have city elections. But I'm not sure how the stuff works that's normally handled by states, like drivers' licenses.

I do know that they have no votes in Congress at all. That's not ideal, but the whole point was that we were situating the capital in a place that explicitly was not a state, so that no state would get preferential treatment, or be more important than any other state. That's maybe not as important as it was, but it still seems like a good idea to me.

Making it a state purely because it would be two Senate votes is totally wrongheaded, I think. That is exactly the wrong reason to do that.

Meanwhile, I'm in favor of Puerto Rico statehood if that's what they want. I also think we should let them secede if that's how they vote. It's about 3.5 million people in a definite, bounded geographical area, so making it a state seems absolutely appropriate. Letting it be a teeny-tiny nation would also be okay. Personally, I think they'd be foolish to do that, and would be better off as the 51st state, but they haven't asked my opinion.

But, like with DC, make the decision based on what makes sense, not because you're trying to stack the Senate.

Malor wrote:

They get to vote in Presidential elections, so they're not completely disenfranchised. They get electors based on their population like states do. And I'm pretty sure they have city elections. But I'm not sure how the stuff works that's normally handled by states, like drivers' licenses.

I do know that they have no votes in Congress at all. That's not ideal, but the whole point was that we were situating the capital in a place that explicitly was not a state, so that no state would get preferential treatment, or be more important than any other state. That's maybe not as important as it was, but it still seems like a good idea to me.

Making it a state purely because it would be two Senate votes is totally wrongheaded, I think. That is exactly the wrong reason to do that.

D.C. residents don't have federal elected representation and, locally, they don't control their own taxes and finances. These are literally the same things that kicked off the Declaration of Independence.

The federal district can easily be shrunk down to cover the Mall, Congress, the White House, etc. and you'd still have the capital situated in a place that didn't give preferential treatment to any state.

People aren't saying make it a state to give Democrats two Senate votes. They're saying make D.C. a state because its 700,000 residents deserve actual representation and local control like every other American enjoys.

fangblackbone wrote:
I'm hopeful that progressive politics isn't going away, it's just evolving into something...a little less direct, but overall sufficiently good.

People who have made that transition already are being called centrists...

Yup. But don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

But anyways, we are going to be in a battle for at least 3 presidential terms. That is how long we have to keep Trump, his enablers, and appeasers out of anything other than the %30 percent max representation they warrant. That means every mid term too which goes against precedent and human nature but we have to suck it up and do it.

That precedent may have been overruled by Negative Partisanship. The 2018 Blue Wave didn't happen *because* Republican turnout went down, it actually *went up*. So we know modern electorates can be triggered into enthusiasm even when they 'won' the last presidential election.

Trump triggered Democrats in 2018, it looks like 2020, and maybe even in midterms. Especially if party leadership doesn't foul up the job of inclusion.

fangblackbone wrote:

I never said it was a win for the Democratic party or even a Democratic party movement. You said that Democratic party leadership passes over progress like BLM and it sure seems to me they are genuinely embracing it and criminal justice reform. Kamala Harris's core presidential campaign issue was criminal justice reform.
It is reasonable to be skeptical of that though. But I choose to hold Biden/Harris and the Democratic party to it.

I think it's that they *have* to--without the clear-as-day demonstration of importance in Clyburn bringing Biden back, I don't know if that happens.

I think it's that they *have* to--without the clear-as-day demonstration of importance in Clyburn bringing Biden back, I don't know if that happens.

I think you are right that they HAVE to. The Clyburn moment certainly added fuel but I think BLM couldn't have been ignored regardless. I mean you couldn't have had a WTF litmus test call to action clearer than Floyd's murder.

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