USPOL June 2016: Oh say can you Arzy?

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NoEyedSquareGuy: Mar 16, 2009; Just because Liquor's dead, doesn't mean you can just roll this bitch all over town with "The Freedoms."

Are there any career political pundits who are outright calling Trump a jabbering shithead or anything similar? It's kind of surreal seeing an adult playground bully running around unchecked and the most any of the usual crowd will say is that his comments are "disagreeable."

# ? Jun 7, 2016 00:32

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 08:06

Heck Yes! Loam!: Nov 15, 2004; a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

Luminous Obscurity posted:

What are the chances of the GOP losing control of the House if the Trumpenreich continues as is until November? It seems like he's fracturing the Right far harder than most people were expecting him to.

Furthermore, what are the chances the Dems would seize the opportunity to actually make laws if they actually got control of it?

Improbable, but not impossible.

Not possible.

Don't ever count on the democratic party to properly take advantage of an opportunity to do something. You'll be pleasantly surprised if they do, but not incredulous when the don't, which is much more common.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 00:33

FlamingLiberal: Jan 18, 2009; Would you like to play a game?

It appears that our esteemed Attorney General down here in FL solicited a donation for her re-election from Donald Trump at almost exactly the time she dropped a state suit regarding Trump University.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/e16a8223c24048d290883370dc6abe5b/florida-ag-asked-trump-donation-nixing-fraud-case

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:02

Leon Trotsky 2012: Aug 27, 2009; YOU CAN TRUST ME!*

_{*Israeli Government-affiliated poster}

Wellesley College just unearthed a never before released audio of Hillary (Rodham) giving the first student commencement speech. Her voice sounds totally different.

Also, pretty interesting / amazing that even back in 1969 her commencement speech is the most Hillary speech ever. You could seriously reuse about 99% of what she said as a current stump speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CAUOa5m5nY

Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jun 7, 2016

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:08

Apraxin: Feb 22, 2006; General-Admiral

Tom Cotton blocked the appointment of a new ambassador to the Bahamas on the very reasonable policy grounds that she was a personal friend of Obama and by blocking her he could 'cause (Obama) special pain'. She died of leukemia last month without ever being confirmed, after waiting two years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/opinion/an-obama-nominees-crushed-hopes.html?_r=0

Edit: realized on re-read that Cotton's personal hold was part of a general two-year block, not the whole thing

Apraxin fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jun 7, 2016

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:08

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

Apraxin posted:

Tom Cotton spent two years blocking the appointment of a new ambassador to the Bahamas on the very reasonable policy grounds that she was a personal friend of Obama and by blocking her he could 'cause (Obama) special pain'. She died of leukemia last month without ever being confirmed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/opinion/an-obama-nominees-crushed-hopes.html?_r=0

drat it Tom, this is disgusting, even for you.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:11

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Can we take a moment to recognize just how badly Trump has botched the last month of his 'campaign'? He's been the unopposed Republican presumptive nominee for over a month now. With Hillary still engaged with Bernie this was his shot to actually try and make up some ground. To try and get his campaign in order, to lay the much needed ground work for a general election. He saw his polling get better due to the Republicans coalescing around him even if it only amounted to a couple polls of him ahead and the rest with him still behind by a couple points. If he was ever going to even attempt to pivot this would have been the time when he had all the attention on him. But no, he does nothing during the entire month aside from spout of petty insults on twitter as usual. So over the last couple weeks we've seen his poll numbers start to dip as his honeymoon period as the presumptive nominee comes to and end and Hillary starts devoting attention toward the General Election. She lays down a massive smackdown with an incredible speech detailing just how awful he is in every way. And what does he do in response? He chooses to close the month out by disastrously going after a federal judge on purely racist grounds. He had a month to endear himself to someone outside his small racist base and he failed in every single way.

Well his time is over. Tomorrow Hillary wraps up the Democratic nomination. Obama and Elizabeth Warren will finally start to unleash a torrent of support for Hillary and attacks on Trump. Hillary herself will finally be able to direct her full attention toward Trump. Trump has absolutely no idea what's coming and he isn't prepared for it one bit.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:19

FlamingLiberal: Jan 18, 2009; Would you like to play a game?

To be honest I do think with Trump there's more than a bit of him thinking in the back of his head now, "Oh crap, I actually have to run a campaign now, what do I do?" mixed with Trump being Trump and not having another mode besides that.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:21

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

Are there any career political pundits who are outright calling Trump a jabbering shithead or anything similar? It's kind of surreal seeing an adult playground bully running around unchecked and the most any of the usual crowd will say is that his comments are "disagreeable."

Does this count?

Texas Congressman to Trump: Shove Border Wall "Up Your rear end"

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:25

BI NOW GAY LATER: Jan 17, 2008; So people stop asking, the "Bi" in my username is a reference to my love for the two greatest collegiate sports programs in the world, the Virginia Tech Hokies and the Marshall Thundering Herd.

FlamingLiberal posted:

To be honest I do think with Trump there's more than a bit of him thinking in the back of his head now, "Oh crap, I actually have to run a campaign now, what do I do?" mixed with Trump being Trump and not having another mode besides that.

I don't think he's even had that conversation in his head.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:25

Boon: Jun 21, 2005; by R. Guyovich

The AP just declared Clinton the presumptive nominee according to Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:25

BI NOW GAY LATER: Jan 17, 2008; So people stop asking, the "Bi" in my username is a reference to my love for the two greatest collegiate sports programs in the world, the Virginia Tech Hokies and the Marshall Thundering Herd.

Boon posted:

The AP just declared Clinton the presumptive nominee according to Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

Based on Puerto Rico?

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:27

Boon: Jun 21, 2005; by R. Guyovich

No idea.

Standby for glorious meltdowns ahead of tomorrow.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:27

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Oh hey

https://twitter.com/AP/status/739975278483656705

Primary chat is now officially over.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:27

A Man With A Plan: Mar 29, 2010; Fallen Rib

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Primary chat is now officially over.

Thank loving christ

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:31

ComradeCosmobot: Dec 4, 2004; USPOL July

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Oh hey

https://twitter.com/AP/status/739975278483656705

Primary chat is now officially over.

Oh no, it's just starting. Brace for Bernouts to start tromping in here whining about super-delegates.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:33

smg77: Apr 27, 2007

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Oh hey

https://twitter.com/AP/status/739975278483656705

Primary chat is now officially over.

I feel empty inside.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:34

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

We all know by now that Hillary is having a huge event in New York tomorrow to celebrate the nomination. But at least one source reports that she will be accompanied by none other than B-Rock the Islamic Shock himself.

I can't loving wait.

I know it won't and probably constitutionally can't happen but lol forever if Hillary gives Obama the VP nod.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:35

Hollismason: Jun 30, 2007; An alright dude.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

We all know by now that Hillary is having a huge event in New York tomorrow to celebrate the nomination. But at least one source reports that she will be accompanied by none other than B-Rock the Islamic Shock himself.

I can't loving wait.

I know it won't and probably constitutionally can't happen but lol forever if Hillary gives Obama the VP nod.

I don't think that can actually legitimately happen.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:36

Fuck You And Diebold: Sep 15, 2004; by Athanatos

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

We all know by now that Hillary is having a huge event in New York tomorrow to celebrate the nomination. But at least one source reports that she will be accompanied by none other than B-Rock the Islamic Shock himself.

I can't loving wait.

I know it won't and probably constitutionally can't happen but lol forever if Hillary gives Obama the VP nod.

Oh she'll give Obama the VP nod alright, Michelle Obama

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:37

Luminous Obscurity: Jan 10, 2007; "The instrument you know as a piano was once called a pianoforte, because it can play both loud and quiet notes."

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

But at least one source reports that she will be accompanied by none other than B-Rock the Islamic Shock himself.

Which Obama? Because if its Campaign Obama I will lose my goddamn mind.

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Oh she'll give Obama the VP nod alright, Michelle Obama

Good god, the fallout of that would be incredible.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:39

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Hollismason posted:

I don't think that can actually legitimately happen.

It's time for Obama to rip up the Constitution and unleash a thousand generations of liberal darkness all across the land.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:40

Spiritus Nox: Sep 2, 2011

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Oh she'll give Obama the VP nod alright, Michelle Obama

I literally just loving gasped with glee at the notion.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:41

fknlo: Jul 6, 2009; Fun Shoe

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Oh she'll give Obama the VP nod alright, Michelle Obama

With a hint at Barack being her Supreme Court nominee

:allears:

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:43

Heck Yes! Loam!: Nov 15, 2004; a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

Spiritus Nox posted:

I literally just loving gasped with glee at the notion.

Yeah, except that she despises politics and wants to leave DC as soon as her kids are out of school.

It really should just be Biden. Why change what's working.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:44

Dr Christmas: Apr 24, 2010; Berninating the one percent,
Berninating the Wall St.
Berninating all the people
In their high rise penthouses!
🔥😱🔥🔫👴🏻

Why would you wish that on Michelle, you monsters.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:44

Crowsbeak: Oct 9, 2012; by Azathoth; Lipstick Apathy

So this article originally appeared in the Nation, arguing that this election is a turning point in many ways as the actual system that we have in place now is directly being questioned. I think it does give the new left to much of a pass but it also makes some good arguments about why it was successful, and why it no longer is meeting the success it did.

http://www.thenation.com/article/liberalism-is-under-attack-from-the-left-and-the-right/

Steve Fraser in The Nation posted:

Liberalism Is Under Attack From the Left and the Right
From feeling the Bern to cheering The Donald, Americans are done with acquiescing to the political establishment.
By Steve Fraser
June 2, 2016

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Trump makes a point as he formally announces his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination at Trump Tower in New York

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. (Reuters / Brendan McDermid, AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Arising from the shadows of the American repressed, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been sending chills through the corridors of establishment power. Who would have thunk it? Two men, both outliers, though in starkly different ways, seem to be leading rebellions against the masters of our fate in both parties; this, after decades in which even imagining such a possibility would have been seen as na�ve at best, delusional at worst. Their larger-than-life presence on the national stage may be the most improbable political development of the last American half-century. It suggests that we are entering a new phase in our public life.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

A year ago, in my book The Age of Acquiescence, I attempted to resolve a mystery hinted at in its subtitle: �The rise and fall of American resistance to organized wealth and power.� Simply stated, that mystery was: Why do people rebel at certain moments and acquiesce in others?

Resisting all the hurts, insults, threats to material well-being, exclusions, degradations, systematic inequalities, overlordship, indignities, and powerlessness that are the essence of everyday life for millions would seem natural enough, even inescapable, if not inevitable. Why put up with all that?

Historically speaking, however, the impulse to give in has proven no less natural. After all, to resist is often to risk yourself, your means of livelihood, and your way of life. To rise up means to silence those intimidating internal voices warning that the overlords have the right to rule by virtue of their wisdom, wealth, and everything that immemorial custom decrees. Fear naturally closes in.

In our context, then, why at certain historical moments have Americans shown a striking ability to rise up, at other times to submit?

To answer that question, I explored those years in the first gilded age of the 19th century when millions of Americans took to the streets to protest, often in the face of the armed might of the state, and the period in the latter part of the 20th century and the first years of this one when the label �the age of acquiescence� seemed eminently reasonable�until, in 2016, it suddenly didn�t.

So consider this essay a postscript to that work, my perhaps belated realization that the age of acquiescence has indeed come to an end. Millions are now, of course, feeling the Bern and cheering The Donald. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the first signs of what was to come as I was finishing my book: the Tea Party on the right, and on the left Occupy Wall Street, strikes by low-wage workers, minimum- and living-wage movements, electoral victories for urban progressives, a surge of environmental activism, and the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement just on the eve of publication.

But when you live for so long in the shade of acquiescence where hope goes to die or at least grows sickly, you miss such things. After all, if history has a logic, it can remain so deeply hidden as to be indecipherable� until it bites. So, for example, if someone had X-rayed American society in 1932, in the depth of the Great Depression, that image would have revealed a body politic overrun with despair, cynicism, fatalism, and fear�in a word, acquiescence, a mood that had shadowed the land since �Black Tuesday� and the collapse of the stock market in 1929.

Yet that same X-ray taken in 1934, just two years later, would have revealed a firestorm of mass strikes, general strikes, sit-down strikes, rent strikes, seizures of shuttered coal mines and utilities by people who were cold and lightless, marches of the unemployed, and a general urge to unseat the ancien r�gime; in a word, rebellion. In this way, the equilibrium of a society can shift phases in the blink of an eye and without apparent warning (although in hindsight historians and others will explore all the reasons everybody should have seen it coming).
Liberalism v. Liberalism

Anticipated or not, a new age of rebellion has begun, one that threatens the status quo from the left and the right. Perhaps its most shocking aspect: people are up in arms against liberalism.

That makes no sense, right? How can it, when come November the queen of liberalism will face off against the billionaire standard bearer of Republicanism? In the end, the same old same old, yes? Liberal v. conservative.

Well, not really. If you think of Hillary as the �limousine liberal� of this election season and The Donald as the right-wing �populist in pinstripes,� and consider how each of them shimmied their way to the top of the heap and who they had to fend off to get there, a different picture emerges. Clinton inherits the mantle of a liberalism that has hollowed out the American economy and metastasized the national security state. It has confined the remnants of any genuine egalitarianism to the attic of the Democratic Party so as to protect the vested interests of the oligarchy that runs things. That elite has no quarrel with racial and gender equality as long as they don�t damage the bottom line, which is after all the defining characteristic of the limousine liberalism Hillary champions. Trump channels the hostility generated by that neoliberal indifference to the well-being of working people and its scarcely concealed cultural contempt for heartland America into a racially inflected anti-establishmentarianism. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders targets Clintonian liberalism from the other shore. Liberalism is, in other words, besieged.

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The Sixties Take on Liberalism

How odd! For decades �progressives� have found themselves defending the achievements of liberal reform from the pitiless assault of an ascendant conservatism. It�s hard to remember that the liberal v. conservative equation didn�t always apply (and so may not again).

Go back half a century to the 1960s, however, and the battlefield seems not dissimilar to today�s terrain. That was a period when the Vietnam antiwar movement indicted liberalism for its imperialism in the name of democracy, while the civil-rights and Black Power movements called it out for its political alliance with segregationists in the South.

In those years, the New Left set up outposts in urban badlands where liberalism�s boast about the United States� being an �affluent society� seemed like a cruel joke. Students occupied campus buildings to say no to the bureaucratization of higher education and the university�s servitude to another liberal offspring, the military-industrial complex. Women severed the knot tying the liberal ideal of the nuclear family to its gendered hierarchy. The counterculture exhibited its contempt for liberalism�s sense of propriety in a thousand ways. No hairstyle conventions, marriage contracts, sexual inhibitions, career ambitions, religious orthodoxies, clothing protocols, racial taboos, or chemical prohibitions escaped unscathed.

Liberalism adjusted, however. It has since taken credit for most of the reforms associated with that time. Civil-rights laws, the war on poverty (including Medicare and Medicaid), women�s rights, affirmative action, and the erasure of cultural discrimination are now a de rigueur part of the CVs of Democratic presidents and the party�s top politicians, those running the mainstream media, the chairmen of leading liberal foundations, Ivy League college presidents, high-end Protestant theologians and clerics, and so many others who proudly display the banner of liberalism. And they do deserve some of the credit. They may have genuinely felt that �Bern� of yesteryear, the one crying out for equal rights before the law.

More importantly, those liberal elites were wise enough or malleable enough, or both, to surf the waves of rebellion of that time. Wisdom and flexibility, however, are only part of the answer to this riddle: Why did mid-20th-century liberalism manage to reform itself instead of cracking up under the pressure of that sixties moment? The deeper explanation may be that the uprisings of those years assaulted liberalism�but largely on behalf of liberalism. Explicitly at times, as in �The Port Huron Statement,� that founding document of the ur�New Left group Students for a Democratic Society, at other times by implication, the rebellions of that moment demanded that the liberal order live up to its own sacred credo of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.

The demand to open the system up became the heart and soul of the next phase of liberalism, of the urge to empower the free individual. Today, we might recognize this as the classic Clintonista desire to let all-comers join �the race to the top.�

Looking back, it�s been customary to treat the �60s as an era of youth rebellion. While more than that, it certainly could be understood, in part, as an American version of fathers and sons (not to speak of mothers and daughters). An older generation had created the New Deal order, itself an act of historic rebellion. As it happened, that creation didn�t fit well with a Democratic Party whose Southern wing, embedded in the segregationist former Confederacy, rested on Jim Crow laws and beliefs. Nor did New Deal social-welfare reforms that presumed a male breadwinner/head of household, while excluding underclasses, especially (but not only) those of the wrong complexion from its protections, square with a yearning for equality.

Moreover, the New Deal saved a capitalist economy laid low in the Great Depression by installing a new political economy of mass consumption. While a wondrous material accomplishment, that was also a socially disabling development, nourishing a culture of status-seeking individualism and so undermining the sense of social solidarity that had made the New Deal possible. Finally, in the Cold War years, it became clear that prosperity and democracy at home depended on an imperial relationship with the rest of the world and the garrisoning of the planet. In the famed phrase of Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, an �American Century� was born.

Uprisings against that ossifying version of New Deal liberalism made the �60s �The Sixties.� Political emotions were at a fever pitch as rebels faced off against a liberal �establishment.� Matters sometimes became so overheated they threatened to melt the surface of public life. And yet here was a question that, no matter the temperature, was tough to raise at the time: What if liberalism wasn�t the problem? Admittedly, that thought was in the air then, raised not just by new and old lefties, but by Martin Luther King Jr., who famously enunciated his second thoughts about capitalism, poverty, race, and war in speeches like �Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.�

Most of the rebels of that moment, however, clung to the ancestral faith. In the end, they were convinced that once equilibrium was restored, a more modern liberalism, shorn of its imperfections, could become a safe haven by excluding nobody. Indicted in those years for its hypocrisy and bad faith, it would be cleansed.

Thanks to those mass rebellions and the persistent if less fiery efforts that followed for decades, the hypocrisy of exclusion, whether of blacks, women, gays, or others, would indeed largely be ended. Or so it seemed. The liberalism inherited from the New Deal had been cleansed�not entirely to be sure and not without fierce resistance, but then again, nothing�s perfect, is it? End of hypocrisy. End of story.
The Missing Link

Yet at the dawning of the new millennium a paradox began to emerge. Liberal society had proved compatible with justice for all and an equal shot at the end zone. Strangely, however, in its ensuing glorious new world, the one Bill Clinton presided over, liberty, justice, and equality all seemed to be on short rations.

If not the liberal order, then something else was spoiling things. After all, the everyday lives of so many ordinary Americans were increasingly constrained by economic anxiety and a vertiginous sense of social freefall. They experienced feelings of being shut out and scorned, of suffering from a hard-to-define political disenfranchisement, of being surveilled at work (if they had it) and probably elsewhere if not, of fearing the future rather than hoping for what it might bring their way.

Brave and audacious as they were, rarely had the rebel movements of the fabled �60s or those that followed explicitly challenged the underlying distribution of property and power in American society. And yet if liberalism had proved compatible enough with liberty, equality, and democracy, capitalism was another matter.

The liberal elite that took credit for opening up that race to the top had also at times presided over a neoliberal capitalism which had, for decades, been damaging the lives of working people of all colors. (Indeed, nowadays Hillary expends a lot of effort trying to live down the legacy of mass incarceration bequeathed by her husband.) But Republicans have more than shared in this; they have, in fact, often taken the lead in implanting a market- and finance-driven economic system that has produced a few �winners� and legions of losers. Both parties heralded a deregulated marketplace, global free trade, the outsourcing of manufacturing and other industries, the privatization of public services, and the shrink-wrapping of the social safety net. All of these together gutted towns and cities as well as whole regions (think: Rust Belt America) and ways of life.

In the process, the New Deal Democratic Party�s tradition of resisting economic exploitation and inequality vaporized, while the �new Democrats� of the Clinton era and beyond, as well as many in the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 and in hedge-fund America, continued to champion equal rights for all. They excoriated conservative attempts to rollback protections against racial, gender, and sexual discrimination; but the one thing they didn�t do�none of them�was disturb the equanimity of the 1 percent.

And what does freedom and equality amount to in the face of that? For some who could�thanks to those breakthroughs�participate in the �race to the top,� it amounted to a lot. For many millions more, however, who have either been riding the down escalator or already lived near or at the bottom of society, it has been a mockery, a hollow promise, something (as George Carlin once noted) we still call the American Dream because �you have to be asleep to believe in it.�

Given their hand in abetting this painful dilemma, the new Democrats seemed made for the already existing sobriquet�a kind of curse invented by the populist right��limousine liberal.� An emblem of hypocrisy, it was conceived and first used in 1969 not by the left but by figures in that then-nascent right-wing movement. The image of a silk-stocking crowd to-the-manner born, bred and educated to rule, networked into the circuits of power and wealth, professing a concern for the downtrodden but not about to surrender any privileges to alleviate their plight (yet prepared to demand that everyone else pony up) has lodged at the heart of American politics ever since. In our time, it has been the magnetic North of right-wing populism.
Class Struggle, American Style

In 1969, President Richard Nixon invoked the �silent majority� to do battle with those who would soon come to be known as �limousine liberals.� He hoped to mobilize a broad swath of the white working class and lower middle class for the Republican Party. This group had been the loyalists of the New Deal Democratic Party, but were then feeling increasingly abandoned by it and disturbed by the rebelliousness of the era.

In the decades that followed, the limousine liberal would prove a perfect pi�ata for absorbing their resentments about racial upheaval, as well as deindustrialization and decline, and their grief over the fading away of the �traditional family� and its supposed moral certitudes. In this way, the Republican Party won a substantial white working-class vote. It�s clear enough in retrospect that this confrontation between the silent majority and limousine liberalism was always a form of American class struggle.

Nixon proved something of a political genius and his gambit worked stunningly well� until, of course, in our own moment it didn�t. Following his lead, the Republican high command soon understood that waving the red flag of �limousine liberalism� excited passions and elicited votes. They never, however, had the slightest intention of doing anything to truly address the deteriorating circumstances of that silent majority. The party�s leading figures were far too committed to defending the interests of corporate America and the upper classes.

Their gestures, the red meat they tossed to their followers in the �culture wars,� only increased the passions of the era until, in the aftermath of the 2007 financial meltdown and Great Recession, they exploded in a fashion the Republican elite had no way to deal with. What began as their creature, formed in cynicism and out of the festering jealousies and dark feelings of Nixon himself over the way the liberal establishment had held him in contempt, ended up turning on its fabricators.

A �silent majority� would no longer remain conveniently silent. The Tea Party howled about every kind of political establishment in bed with Wall Street, crony capitalists, cultural and sexual deviants, free-traders who scarcely blinked at the jobs they incinerated, anti-taxers who had never met a tax shelter they didn�t love, and decriers of big government who lived off state subsidies. In a zip code far, far away, a privileged sliver of Americans who had gamed the system, who had indeed made gaming the system into the system, looked down on the mass of the previously credulous, now outraged, incredulously.

In the process, the Republican Party was dismembered and it was The Donald who magically rode that Trump Tower escalator down to the ground floor to pick up the pieces. His irreverence for established authority worked. His racist and misogynist phobias worked. His billions worked for millions who had grown infatuated with all the celebrated Wall Street conquistadors of the second Gilded Age. His way of gingerly tiptoeing around Social Security worked with those whose neediness and emotional logic was captured by the person who memorably told a Republican congressman, �Keep your government hands off my Medicare.� Most of all, his muscle-flexing bombast worked for millions fed up with demoralization, paralysis, and powerlessness. They felt The Donald.

In the face-off between right-wing populism and neoliberalism, Tea Party legions and Trumpists now find Fortune 500 CEOs morally obnoxious and an economic threat, grow irate at Federal Reserve bail-outs, and are fired up by the multiple crises set off by global free trade and the treaties that go with it. And underlying such positions is a fantasy of an older capitalism, one friendlier to the way they think America used to be. They might be called anti-capitalists on behalf of capitalism.

Others�often their neighbors in communities emptying of good jobs and seemingly under assault�are feeling the Bern. This represents yet another attack on neoliberalism of the limousine variety. Bernie Sanders proudly classifies himself as a socialist, even if his programmatic ideas echo a mildly left version of the New Deal. Yet even to utter the verboten word �socialism� in public, no less insistently run on it and get away with it, exciting the fervent commitment of millions, is stunning�in fact, beyond imagining in any recent America.

The Sanders campaign had made its stand against the liberalism of the Clinton elite. It has resonated so deeply because the candidate, with all his grandfatherly charisma and integrity, repeatedly insists that Americans should look beneath the surface of a liberal capitalism that is economically and ethically bankrupt and running a political confidence game, even as it condescends to �the forgotten man.�

To a degree then, Trump and Sanders are competing for the same constituencies, which should surprise no one given how far the collateral damage of neoliberal capitalism has spread. Don�t forget that, in the Great Depression era as the Nazis grew more powerful, their party, the National Socialists, not only incorporated that word��socialism��but competed with the Socialist and Communist parties among the distressed workers of Germany for members and voters. There were even times (when they weren�t killing each other in the streets) that they held joint demonstrations.

Trump is, of course, a conscienceless demagogue, serial liar, and nihilist with a belief in nothing save himself. Sanders, on the other hand, means what he says. On the issue of economic justice, he has been a broken record for more than a quarter-century, even if no one beyond the boundaries of Vermont paid much attention until recently. He is now widely trusted and applauded for his views.

Hillary Clinton is broadly distrusted. Sanders has consistently outpolled her against potential Republican opponents for president because she is indeed a limousine liberal whose career has burned through trust at an astonishing rate. And more important than that, the rebellion that has carried Sanders aloft is not afraid to put capitalism in the dock. Trump is hardly about to do that, but the diseased state of the neoliberal status quo has made him, too, a force to be reckoned with. However you look at it, the age of acquiescence is passing away.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:47

Rhesus Pieces: Jun 27, 2005

lololol

https://twitter.com/huffpostpol/status/739972920701792256

He just doesn't know when to shut up does he.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:47

Cythereal: Nov 8, 2009; I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Luminous Obscurity posted:

Good god, the fallout of that would be incredible.

I mean, Michelle would murder her for keeping them in DC, Michelle famously hates living there, but still.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:48

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Rhesus Pieces posted:

lololol

https://twitter.com/huffpostpol/status/739972920701792256

He just doesn't know when to shut up does he.

ha

hahaha

So that's Hispanic judges, Mulsim judges, and now Women judges. All he has to do is denounce Black and Asian judges and he'll have the complete set.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:48

BI NOW GAY LATER: Jan 17, 2008; So people stop asking, the "Bi" in my username is a reference to my love for the two greatest collegiate sports programs in the world, the Virginia Tech Hokies and the Marshall Thundering Herd.

Rhesus Pieces posted:

lololol

https://twitter.com/huffpostpol/status/739972920701792256

He just doesn't know when to shut up does he.

Keep doing Donald, we're almost there.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:49

Fuck You And Diebold: Sep 15, 2004; by Athanatos

ComradeCosmobot posted:

Oh no, it's just starting. Brace for Bernouts to start tromping in here whining about super-delegates.

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/739982136497872896

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:49

Wicked Them Beats: Apr 1, 2007; Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded.

Rhesus Pieces posted:

lololol

https://twitter.com/huffpostpol/status/739972920701792256

He just doesn't know when to shut up does he.

He actually instructed his campaign spokespeople to double down on this. That is a thing he did.

It's only June. Dear god.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:52

Dexo: Aug 15, 2009; A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.

That would be awesome, especially the part where Michelle cusses Hillary out for even asking her to stay in Washington.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:52

Dexo: Aug 15, 2009; A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.

Yeah, Trump totally loving wants out of this nomination. The logic part of my brain won't allow me to accept otherwise.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 01:53

NoEyedSquareGuy: Mar 16, 2009; Just because Liquor's dead, doesn't mean you can just roll this bitch all over town with "The Freedoms."

Dexo posted:

Yeah, Trump totally loving wants out of this nomination. The logic part of my brain won't allow me to accept otherwise.

Rich kids don't need to have filters.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 02:01

Spiritus Nox: Sep 2, 2011

Sword of Chomsky posted:

Yeah, except that she despises politics and wants to leave DC as soon as her kids are out of school.

It really should just be Biden. Why change what's working.

Dr Christmas posted:

Why would you wish that on Michelle, you monsters.

Yeah, I know, I wouldn't. Hell, I don't think I'd wish more of Washington D.C. on somebody I actually disliked.

But it was worth entertaining the thought long enough to imagine all of Freep having simultaneous coronaries.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 02:01

Goatse James Bond: Mar 28, 2010; If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

Rhesus Pieces posted:

lololol

https://twitter.com/huffpostpol/status/739972920701792256

He just doesn't know when to shut up does he.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 02:01

VikingofRock: Aug 24, 2008

So wait, does Clinton actually have an outright majority of the possible pledged delegates at this point? If not, what changed about her situation today vs. any time in the last couple months when it was clear she would eventually get a majority?

# ? Jun 7, 2016 02:03

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 08:06

ComradeCosmobot: Dec 4, 2004; USPOL July

VikingofRock posted:

So wait, does Clinton actually have an outright majority of the possible pledged delegates at this point? If not, what changed about her situation today vs. any time in the last couple months when it was clear she would eventually get a majority?

She does not have a pledged delegate majority. AP's counts include superdelegates who have endorsed Hillary.

# ? Jun 7, 2016 02:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > USPOL June 2016: Oh say can you Arzy?

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