Adar posted:

Bottom line:

Within the first year of a Trump presidency with a Congress exactly the same as today, I expect to see:

-a massive, unprecedented crash of the US dollar. This is guaranteed on Election Night regardless of anything else that happens in the following four years, so I hope you budget for this if you like being able to buy things or if you're poor just kinda deal with it or starve I guess.
-a massive stock market crash. This is also guaranteed but the poor don't care. The olds and pension plans do though! Also, unlike Brexit where the foreigners flooded back in the next day looking to buy distressed international-facing assets because the government itself is still a stable democracy, we're gonna have President Trump to deal with. Russian oligarchs are fine with that level of risk, Europeans and Japanese not so much.
-a complete ban on immigration from Muslim countries, including the relatives of anyone already here
-a repeal of Obamacare that he won't give a gently caress about so he'll farm its replacement out to Paul Ryan
-one or two new conservative SCOTUS justices that he won't give a gently caress about so he'll farm their selection out to Pence
-lots of reversion of all types of civil rights
-lots of President Trump incoherently rambling about lots of things
-lots of progressives impotently marching and rallying in major cities while the cops in the redder states start beating them (harder)

if this excites you and you think the result after four years is a wonderful left wing socially progressive democracy led by TurboBernie 2.0, please do vote for Trump

A Winner is Jew posted:

Look at Hillary vs Trump as Gore vs Bush, but this time with hindsight.

Princess Di posted:

Keep Autism Wired posted:

Wasn't it the Bush Presidency that allowed for the Democratic takeover of congress and the election of the first black president in US history?

Mrit posted:

lol, you can watch the self-delusion forming, like dew on a beer

Keep Autism Wired posted:

it seems to me that with a Hillary Clinton presidency, the republican congress will continue their exact same obstructionism like under Obama, except with even further hysteria because she's a WOMAN.

this will result in Clinton making "pragmatic" shifts to the right, ceding ground, and ultimately enacting right-wing policies that benefit the ruling class in the name of "getting things done", effectively what one would expect under a Republican president.

The difference is that the media will be so enamored by The First Woman President to criticize her, similar to Chris Hedges explains that the media ignored Obama's expansion of drone warfare and executive kill lists because of the historical nature of his presidency.



Is there logic to accelerationism? is this what those crazy LFers were talking about when they talked about "dialectical movement of history"?

Keep Autism Wired posted:

Wasn't it the Bush Presidency that allowed for the Democratic takeover of congress and the election of the first black president in US history?

Keep Autism Wired posted:

it seems to me that with a Hillary Clinton presidency, the republican congress will continue their exact same obstructionism like under Obama, except with even further hysteria because she's a WOMAN.

this will result in Clinton making "pragmatic" shifts to the right, ceding ground, and ultimately enacting right-wing policies that benefit the ruling class in the name of "getting things done", effectively what one would expect under a Republican president.

The difference is that the media will be so enamored by The First Woman President to criticize her, similar to Chris Hedges explains that the media ignored Obama's expansion of drone warfare and executive kill lists because of the historical nature of his presidency.



Is there logic to accelerationism? is this what those crazy LFers were talking about when they talked about "dialectical movement of history"?

Keep Autism Wired posted:

but wouldn't this more likely result in a berniecrat congressional takeover in 2018, instead of the certain Tea Party 2.0 that will rise up if Hillary Clinton is president? that's what i gather from accelerationist logic

Keep Autism Wired posted:

it seems to me that with a Hillary Clinton presidency, the republican congress will continue their exact same obstructionism like under Obama, except with even further hysteria because she's a WOMAN.

this will result in Clinton making "pragmatic" shifts to the right, ceding ground, and ultimately enacting right-wing policies that benefit the ruling class in the name of "getting things done", effectively what one would expect under a Republican president.

quote:

Is there logic to accelerationism? is this what those crazy LFers were talking about when they talked about "dialectical movement of history"?

Keep Autism Wired posted:

Wasn't it the Bush Presidency that allowed for the Democratic takeover of congress and the election of the first black president in US history?

The Ninth Layer posted:

Well, for any big tipping point to happen there has to be something to tip over. This year the tipping point may be Donald Trump. I know a few conservatives who won't even talk to me about Trump, they just get quiet when he's brought up. So this year you could actually see a shift in electoral voting that could send a real message to Republicans, as their electoral bulwark stays home or perhaps switches sides. All that rethinking about Romney's losses didn't translate into a clear shift from the immigration and "makers/takers" rhetoric but the R establishment candidates at least didn't emphasize that rhetoric in the primaries. So electoral losses did make the difference.

I don't think you should think of it as "wasting your vote." Just because your state isn't electorally viable doesn't mean your vote and people like you who vote in Oklahoma don't matter. Individually you may not make a big difference but even your individual vote contributes to the share of voters who also share your values in Oklahoma. In that respect you're better off voting. The difference between the Republicans getting 66.6% of the voter share vs 66.5% is negligible, but there may be a year where that 66.6% turns into 56.6% and suddenly the Republicans no longer have the same share of voters.

Put another way, if you're not going to win your state anyway and your vote isn't going to contribute anything whether you vote Clinton or Green Party or not at all, you may as well vote Clinton to run up the score against the party that wants to build walls and repeal health care reform.

Venom Snake posted:

"Globalization" (I loving hate this word so much) is ultimately inevitable as movement of labor/capital gets easier. The struggle of modern left based ideologies is that it's becoming increasingly apparent that we have more than enough resources to allow for comfortable living for all workers while still having "rich" people.

Condiv posted:

by voting and voting third party i still decrease the total republican vote share though. the only added benefit is it increases dem vote share, and i'm still pretty pissed at the DNC at the moment so what benefit is there to voting hillary? if i was in a swing state i'd very grudgingly vote hillary cause i don't want trump, but since i'm not, why should i support a party that was playing favorites during the primary?

meristem posted:

It's pretty simple, isn't it? You vote Hillary to give her a strong mandate, and then you work within your local structures to continue pushing the party left and possibly influence the midterms. In other words, you do exactly what Hillary did when she became Obama's SoS. Behave like an adult.

Condiv posted:

imo, if we're going to have free trade deals, we should only allow tariff free imports of goods if the company in question is obeying our labor laws at minimum (minimum wage of $7.25, lgbt protections, etc. etc.) so that free trade isn't just used as a way to dismantle worker rights.

Wikkheiser posted:

So Dr. Jill Stein reminds me why I don't trust medical doctors, like engineers and business executives, to be politicians. They are generally authoritarians. And Stein is incredibly authoritarian and just plain deranged.

In 2015 she gave an interview to TeleSUR saying her model for a Green Revolution in America should be modeled on Cuba's transition to an "organic" economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And she was, also in 2015, praising Venezuela as an example of making "amazing improvements in health, food security, and the use of critical public resources for public goods" and that was something she took inspiration from. Venezuela is an across-the-board disaster.

Al! posted:

Leftists accusing liberals of not putting their revolution where their mouth is has got to be the funniest post itt

Fullhouse posted:

third party voters are short-sighted morons with no convictions and the candidates that recruit them are cynical, opportunistic shitheads. people have four years in between every election to actually promote progressive local candidates and policies and third party voters decide to instead use their only moment of political action to signal their virtue and put the country in the trash out of spite.

MrChupon posted:

All of this blaming 3rd party voters for the failures of the major parties to earn their vote in this thread reminds me of the time my buddy tried to argue that the US wouldn't rank so badly on lists of things like obesity, violence if we just ignored all of the minorities when comparing ourselves to say, Sweden.

Which is to say, there may be a kernel of truth there, but his argument served no purpose at all since he was creating a fantasy-world to prove his point, and at the same time being greatly offensive to real people who exist in the actual real world by dismissing them.

Keep Autism Wired posted:

but wouldn't this more likely result in a berniecrat congressional takeover in 2018, instead of the certain Tea Party 2.0 that will rise up if Hillary Clinton is president? that's what i gather from accelerationist logic

MrChupon posted:

I hear this bullshit all of the time, but I never had a progressive local candidate to vote for until I moved to the center of a large urban area. If these people ever appeared on a goddamn ballot for local trash collector I'd sure as hell vote for them too.

Fullhouse posted:

third party voters are short-sighted morons with no convictions and the candidates that recruit them are cynical, opportunistic shitheads. people have four years in between every election to actually promote progressive local candidates and policies and third party voters decide to instead use their only moment of political action to signal their virtue and put the country in the trash out of spite.

evilweasel posted:

bush won florida by 537 votes, and 97,488 people voted for nader

nader was not the only reason that bush won in 2000 (all of the other people who didn't vote or voted for bush helped!), but without nader acting as a spoiler bush would not have won, period, a person who voted for nader in florida helped to elect president bush

this is unquestionably true and the eight years of bush made it abundantly clear that voting third party and spoiling the election, suprise suprise, moves the country towards the guy who won because he becomes president and implements his policies

evilweasel posted:

take me seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeriously or i'll punish you by not voting for the democrats just like i was never going to do in the first place!!!!!!!!

MrChupon posted:

So how exactly did Nader swing the 2000 election if his supporters were not going to vote for Democrats in the first place?

Condiv posted:

this would carry a little more weight if the dnc wasn't recently shown to have been working to torpedo progressive candidates

evilweasel posted:

sorry you lost, that's part of a democratic process, if not enough people agree with you you lose and your only option is a coalition where you don't get everything you want

evilweasel posted:

sorry you lost, that's part of a democratic process, if not enough people agree with you you lose and your only option is a coalition where you don't get everything you want

Condiv posted:

this would carry a little more weight if the dnc wasn't recently shown to have been working to torpedo progressive candidates

Condiv posted:

losing wouldn't be a problem if the party was neutral during the contest

Grognan posted:

The American democratic process. Some other countries manage to have voting that doesn't shut out everything but centrists with a nice veneer.

Grognan posted:

The American democratic process. Some other countries manage to have voting that doesn't shut out everything but centrists with a nice veneer.

Fullhouse posted:

also, progressives exist besides Bernie Sanders. he didn't invent it. many of them are running for Congress!

Mooseontheloose posted:

Those same countries have a growing number of far right parties forming and winning seats in their government. I never understand why people insist that 3rd parties will lead to a more liberal America. We have plenty of examples of why it doesn't work like that.