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Who will you vote for in 2020? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Biden |
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425 | 18.06% |
| Trump |
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105 | 4.46% |
| whoever the Green Party runs |
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307 | 13.05% |
| GOOGLE RON PAUL |
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151 | 6.42% |
| Bernie Sanders |
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346 | 14.70% |
| Stalin |
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246 | 10.45% |
| Satan |
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300 | 12.75% |
| Nobody |
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202 | 8.58% |
| Jess Scarane |
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110 | 4.67% |
| mystery man Brian Carroll of the American Solidarity Party |
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61 | 2.59% |
| Dick Nixon |
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100 | 4.25% |
| Total: | 2089 votes | ||
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Somfin posted:Then why the gently caress have you spent so many posts arguing otherwise? The entire derail was based on someone saying Biden only cares about white votes and is a white supremacist. I fully admit it was a mistake to go down the rabbit hole with someone holding that position. Biden should add M4A and legal weed to his platform because it'll help get him elected and it's the morally right thing to do.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:38
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So you think Biden values black votes but doesn't hold any positions that benefit black people? I don't really think Biden still has the mental capacity to actively be a white supremacist, but his devotion to a white supremacist status quo seems like the same thing to me in practice.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:41
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E: Q not e
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Aug 2, 2020 20:41
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:I don't think anybody really believes that Biden is going to last the whole four years, his dementia is extremely obvious, he's even worse than Trump in that department since they don't seem willing to pump him full of amphetamines whenever he needs to show his face (which rarely happens anyways). Most of us don't have the level of faith in our own soothsaying abilities that you seem to.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:41
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I mean they might be able to keep his walking corpse in good enough condition for public appearances but he's just going to end up a puppet for someone else like second term Reagan was.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:43
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:The entire derail was based on someone saying Biden only cares about white votes and is a white supremacist. I fully admit it was a mistake to go down the rabbit hole with someone holding that position. It's not that he only cares about white votes, it's that he only cares about doing anything to win white votes. Black voters are just expected to vote Dem by default.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:43
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Flying-PCP posted:I disagree, I think it's reasonable, given what has been brought up over and over again about Obama and Biden admins, to read it as they are merely expecting that those issues will be ameliorated somewhat, not that they will be fixed entirely. The problems we have are too important for incremental "ameliorated somewhat" situations. That's been my position since the primaries. But I do agree that election chat in USPOL is rarely constructive.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:44
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Biden is reinvigorating classic presidential traditions by not actively campaigning.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:44
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:The problems we have are too important for incremental "ameliorated somewhat" situations. That's been my position since the primaries. A lot of people just really don't believe in direct action especially in a country as huge as the US, and are convinced that it's either incrementalism or just give up.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:51
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One thing I think is downplayed here is how much COVID changed how the public actually sees Democrats vs. Republicans. Like Trump has basically made "Let COVID murder America, also germs aren't real and tonic water cures everything" the GOP brand now - loudly and openly, every loving day, because he's an idiotic fuckman. It's so cartoonishly, outrageously evil and inept that it's made the Democrats look like an actual choice that means something. They've scared everyone so badly by trying to kill us all with disease that JUST MAKE PLAUGE PRESIDENT gently caress OFF is drowning out everything else. In that context having like 87% of Sanders's support move right over to Biden in polls is not a surprise at all, and it's not because they all decided that they actually love centrism and succdems. It's because Trump's COVID omnishambles makes everything else seem irrelevant. Socialist utopia is a hard sell when everyone is worried their family will be dead by February if that loving orange prick doesn't go away RIGHT GODDAMN NOW. Nonsense posted:Biden is reinvigorating classic presidential traditions by not actively campaigning. The plague makes this actually look good and smart, even if it's actually just "he's 600 years old and should stay home."
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Aug 2, 2020 20:54
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sean10mm posted:Socialist utopia is a hard sell when everyone is worried their family will be dead by February if that loving orange prick doesn't go away RIGHT GODDAMN NOW. Nobody's asking for "Socialist utopia". They're asking for popular policies like M4A and action on climate change, which require more patience to implement but help us down the road. Electing Biden makes liberals feel better in the short term but it doesn't solve the problems. It's like living in a house that's inundated from top to bottom in black mold and thinking that putting a fresh coat of paint on the exterior will spruce it up. e: Forgot to respond to Flying Flying-PCP posted:A lot of people just really don't believe in direct action especially in a country as huge as the US, and are convinced that it's either incrementalism or just give up. Direct action is hitting the streets; not electing a corporate Democrat.
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Aug 2, 2020 20:58
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I’ll have everyone know I made up my mind to vote for the right-wing Democrat senile rapist corporate shill long before things went bad with COVID, so, yeah...
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Aug 2, 2020 21:03
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GreyjoyBastard posted:From what I've heard and read (I'm not trying to speak for black folks, just parroting what I've heard from some), you inadvertently stumbled upon a decidedly non-shallow-idpol reason for a chunk of Biden's black support: Joe Biden, longtime senator and noted old white man, willingly and apparently-enthusiastically spent eight years subservient to a black man and following his lead. I'm not sure how this is relevant? It sounds like you're trying to somehow oppose the point without actually articulating a coherent argument against it. There's not really any benefit to raising unfalsifiable counter-points in favor of a harmful position. Flying-PCP posted:You not caring about the differences, or deciding that they don't matter, is not the same as there factually being no difference. The difference exists but is unquestionably marginal, and something is deeply wrong if someone focuses most of their attention on it. In most cases people have the excuse that they get most of their information from their partisan media of choice, which is going to only focus on the subset of differences, but people in discussions like this one don't have that excuse. I understand why many people get upset and angry about the left attacking the Democratic Party - it seems bizarre and wrong to them that people are giving more focus to the Democratic Party when the Republican Party exists. But the more accurate description of what's happening is "the other people (and most liberals in general) are either ignoring the harm of the bipartisan consensus or wrongly attributing such harm on a partisan basis." Seeing that sort of attitude is pretty depressing, because a "we need to beat Republicans" perspective on US politics is a fundamentally hopeless one that basically accepts as a given the vast majority of harm within our country and caused by it abroad.
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Aug 2, 2020 21:16
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The vast majority of Bernie Sanders voters were always going to vote for whoever the democrat was because they’re democratic primary voters and those people usually vote for the democratic candidate. If the election is close enough that the fraction that don’t are decisive, than it was a coin flip anyway and there’s dozens of different things that could have also tipped the balance. The only really notable defection of primary voters in the general in recent history was ironically enough Clinton voters in 2008, for a reason that likely starts with R and rhymes with space prism.
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Aug 2, 2020 21:20
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:It's like living in a house that's inundated from top to bottom in black mold and thinking that putting a fresh coat of paint on the exterior will spruce it up. To use your metaphor, people actually think the house is on fire (this is COVID) and it's overwhelming their ability to think about much else because Trump says water isn't real and keeps sending gasoline.
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Aug 2, 2020 21:24
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Classon Ave. Robot posted:So you think Biden values black votes but doesn't hold any positions that benefit black people? Not about Biden in particular, but you could replace his name with basically any modern Republican presidential candidate and the answer would be yes. The votes have value; whether you want to do anything for them is a separate matter entirely.
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Aug 2, 2020 21:31
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sean10mm posted:To use your metaphor, people actually think the house is on fire (this is COVID) and it's overwhelming their ability to think about much else because Trump says water isn't real and keeps sending gasoline. It just seems like the stated solution is to water the plants in the living room instead of turning a hose on the house.
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Aug 2, 2020 21:33
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:e: Forgot to respond to Flying Yes I know, that's what I'm saying a lot of people don't believe in.
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Aug 2, 2020 21:33
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Flying-PCP posted:Yes I know, that's what I'm saying a lot of people don't believe in. Do you think that's still true now, after all the protests (many of which are ongoing and have drawn concessions)?
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Aug 2, 2020 21:41
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Somfin posted:Do you think that's still true now, after all the protests (many of which are ongoing and have drawn concessions)? I don't know how many have been convinced of its potential efficacy because of that, but it's far from everyone. It's still going on after all, it remains to be seen how much will be accomplished in the end and how much of that they won't try to quietly walk back. But overall yeah, a strong case has been made that it can work. Flying-PCP fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 22:13
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:The entire derail was based on someone saying Biden only cares about white votes and is a white supremacist. I fully admit it was a mistake to go down the rabbit hole with someone holding that position. Just read the loving article in the post I was replying to. Just read it. I've done a bajillion things today, and you are still here arguing. If you read the article and disagree, please go ahead and post what part of the article you disagree with. Or how it's not racist. We can actually engage, but not if you are not even going to read what we are talking about. The mods are trying to encourage substantive debate and discussion and you've spent all day being dismissive of poo poo you didn't even read.
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Aug 2, 2020 23:17
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Didn't some goon post that the olds turned up at like 200% of normal In SC 65+ was 222% of turnout in '16. In the Super Tuesday states (for the states where primaries were also held in '16) 65+ was 183% of turnout in '16. Edit: As far as the racial and gender makeup in S.C. goes the change from 2016 was: pre:White: +112% Non-white: +10% Male: +58% Female: +37% Pingui fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Aug 2, 2020 |
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Aug 2, 2020 23:19
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Zerilan posted:It's not that he only cares about white votes, it's that he only cares about doing anything to win white votes. Black voters are just expected to vote Dem by default. this is it and i don’t get what is so controversial about it. many presidents have done this. minorities are a large voting bloc but they have no where else to go. it also illustrates why going on strike even in politics is successful and a better alternative than saying “well okay since i guess i don’t have an alternative.” you end up in a position where you are marginalized because... you don’t have an alternative.
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Aug 2, 2020 23:49
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Genuine question: why do Democrats seem to think that support is a zero-sum game, as though if you lifted a finger to attract the left (obviously, this is purely hypothetical) you would somehow lose moderates? It seems to me that when a majority of Americans support things like M4A and legal weed, those are planks you can put in your platform to attract both leftists and moderates and be the "big tent" Democrats claim to be. Instead, the establishment has chosen to focus almost entirely on suburban Panera moms, which is baffling to me. That's because that literally happened. The modern history of the Democratic party - up until 2008 or so, when it started realigning leftwards again - is the history of the Reagan Democrats, of Bill Clinton, of the DLC and of the New Democrats. The Democratic coalition fell apart in the 80s as liberal candidates suffered shocking electoral defeats and as conservative and moderate whites increasingly migrated to the Republicans as part of the Southern Strategy & the Great Realignment. In this new reality - the Boomer reality - liberal candidates simply could not assemble a broad enough coalition to win nationwide. The Democratic party largely stumbled on purely on inertia and the advantage of incumbency. It's difficult to underestimate the extent to which Republicans had become dominant on a national level at the time. The narrative was heavily in their favor with former Democratic voters having abandoned the party in droves. In 1992, there had only been one Democratic president since 1969, and that was Jimmy Carter - history's greatest monster and widely regarded as a failure, in part because of his lefty kookiness. Running straight up Southern Democrats in an attempt to appeal to the Reagan Democrats was increasingly unacceptable to the liberal wing of the party - part of the pressures and contradictions that drove the realignment. Into this environment enter Bill Clinton and the DLC. The Great Triangulator proposed a third way of politics, embracing the 80s zeitgest of free markets and greed but theoretically using it to drive liberal ends. Thus we got market-based health care proposals, privatization mitigated by worker retraining programs, widespread broadband installation by means of simply giving telecoms huge piles of money - all of it sufficient to onboard the liberal wing via its aims, but corporate friendly enough to keep businesses comfortable. This also entailed specific repudiation of the left wing of the party, most famously with Clinton's 'Sister Souljah moment' - but ritualistic hippy punching was common thereafter as Clinton's methods proved electorally successful. This earned him and his methods massive credibility with the party, and eventually its acolytes became synonymous with the party rather than revolutionaries. Running to the center while explicitly repudiating the left to win became entrenched as not just conventional wisdom, but the only path to victory. This only even began reversing in 2008, as Obama's surprise victory outside the aegis of the New Democrats opened a wedge for new ideas and methods for winning elections that wern't beholden to corrupt neoliberalism.
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Aug 3, 2020 00:14
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:That's because that literally happened. The modern history of the Democratic party - up until 2008 or so, when it started realigning leftwards again - is the history of the Reagan Democrats, of Bill Clinton, of the DLC and of the New Democrats. The Democratic coalition fell apart in the 80s as liberal candidates suffered shocking electoral defeats and as conservative and moderate whites increasingly migrated to the Republicans as part of the Southern Strategy & the Great Realignment. In this new reality - the Boomer reality - liberal candidates simply could not assemble a broad enough coalition to win nationwide. The Democratic party largely stumbled on purely on inertia and the advantage of incumbency. That confirms what I've long suspected: that the neoliberalism of the '80s and '90s was a reaction to Democrats losing three major elections (1980, 1984 and 1988; I think they did well in '80s midterms) and interpreting those losses as a repudiation of leftism. 1988 must have been a hell of a dispiriting year. I have no memory of the election itself (I was four) but Democrats probably thought they had the election in the bag: a fairly feckless vice president who thought supermarket scanners were a wondrous new technology (?) being offered up as a candidate after eight years of Ronnie "Star Wars" Reagan, plus Quayle. Then Gary Hart and the infamous Dukakis tank incident happened. The party decided to tack to the right in 1992, and that got them the White House for eight years but they had to stab the left in the back in order to do it.
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Aug 3, 2020 00:26
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it bears mentioning that the left had been steadily losing ground for decades at that point. how much say you get in the compromises that make up a two-party platform depends entirely on power in various forms, and the institutions of the american working class were under constant attack from the sixties onwards at the latest if you can't swing a lot of voters, money or volunteers on a regular basis and you're not willing to play pretty rough, you're not getting anything in politics. it's almost entirely about power - every major policy has been fought over bitterly unless there's basically no opposition if you watched mrs. america it actually portrays this pretty well - schlafly basically defeated the women's liberation movement when she demonstrated her ability to seriously mobilise a large and untapped demographic, because the libbers had nowhere to go and mostly spoke for a rather narrow pool of already committed voters. the republicans couldn't afford to ignore schlafly, but the dems could (and did!) ignore the steinem set, because they had no obvious leverage
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Aug 3, 2020 00:39
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Notably: if you ask americans what socialism is now, you'll likely get about half of the people mentioning something about universal health care or taxing the rich, a few who don't really know, and the rest who think it's 'cominism' or whatever. In 1980 if you asked random americans about socialism, you'd just hear about communism, internationalism, 'drug addicts arguing about marx,' the weather underground, the viet kong, etc. Frankly, given all that it's impressive that leftism survived at all. It wasn't even fringe then, it was almost explicitly underground with a handful of exceptions. In the 1980s even just basic environmental clubs (eg sierra club, audobon society) were considered threateningly far to the left. Literally, thinking that we shouldn't just clear cut every last thousand year old grove of trees was considered radical leftism if not outright communism. It's hard to describe how far right just every aspect of american society was at the time.
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Aug 3, 2020 00:48
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like poo poo was so hosed that 'gently caress the police' as a song title scandalized americans because how could anyone possibly feel that way about the police that protect us??? I wish that was hyperbole.
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Aug 3, 2020 00:49
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:That's because that literally happened. The modern history of the Democratic party - up until 2008 or so, when it started realigning leftwards again - is the history of the Reagan Democrats, of Bill Clinton, of the DLC and of the New Democrats. The Democratic coalition fell apart in the 80s as liberal candidates suffered shocking electoral defeats and as conservative and moderate whites increasingly migrated to the Republicans as part of the Southern Strategy & the Great Realignment. In this new reality - the Boomer reality - liberal candidates simply could not assemble a broad enough coalition to win nationwide. The Democratic party largely stumbled on purely on inertia and the advantage of incumbency. This is nonsensical and ahistorical. It's self justification after the fact. It is so unbelievably wrong that it is hard to know where to begin. First of all, no, Carter wasn't seen as a failure because of his "lefty kookiness." This is just plain ignorance. Carter was the first neoliberal democrat. His first state of the union address emphasized deregulation. His three main accomplishments where the Airline Deregulation Act, the Staggers Rail act and the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, where he deregulated airlines, railroads and trucking. He deregulated the beer industry. He passed the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, which allowed more banks to merge and removed caps from the interest rates that banks charged and paid. He broke the backs of unions like the teamsters. On top of it all, he named Volcker to the Federal Reserve, and the real reason he lost is because Volcker created a recession to fight inflation, raising fed rates to fight inflation. Second, the idea that the sort of embracing free markets was a new Clinton thing is ridiculous. One of the main policy proposals Dukakis had was balancing the budget. The idea that democrats had to more right to win elections is patently false, and you won't find a single serious historian who believes that. It's as much a myth as the myth of the democrats moving left after Obama.
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Aug 3, 2020 01:27
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I know his economics advisor Larry summers is a pedophile, but are any other members of Biden’s team Epstein associates?
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Aug 3, 2020 02:50
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:That's because that literally happened. The modern history of the Democratic party - up until 2008 or so, when it started realigning leftwards again - is the history of the Reagan Democrats, of Bill Clinton, of the DLC and of the New Democrats. The Democratic coalition fell apart in the 80s as liberal candidates suffered shocking electoral defeats and as conservative and moderate whites increasingly migrated to the Republicans as part of the Southern Strategy & the Great Realignment. In this new reality - the Boomer reality - liberal candidates simply could not assemble a broad enough coalition to win nationwide. The Democratic party largely stumbled on purely on inertia and the advantage of incumbency. Large parts of the Democratic party have wanted to move right, to abandon the working class to instead cater to the Professional class, and have used every defeat to argue for this, no matter how true or untrue this was. This isn't a conspiracy theory: we've got 50 years of their own words to prove it. Every time they'd present a boring neoliberal and lsoe, they'd say he was too lefty and go harder right. Every time they won, they'd HAPPILY proclaim the end of the New Deal and the dawn of a new age. So the rot is old is what I'm saying.
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Aug 3, 2020 04:40
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Notably: if you ask americans what socialism is now, you'll likely get about half of the people mentioning something about universal health care or taxing the rich, a few who don't really know, and the rest who think it's 'cominism' or whatever. In 1980 if you asked random americans about socialism, you'd just hear about communism, internationalism, 'drug addicts arguing about marx,' the weather underground, the viet kong, etc. Frankly, given all that it's impressive that leftism survived at all. It wasn't even fringe then, it was almost explicitly underground with a handful of exceptions. This difference occurred solely because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it was never a particularly meaningful difference (basically the difference between "this is evil/traitorous" and "this is laughable/ignorable"). The left still had virtually zero presence in the media (and thus broader society) until Occupy Wall Street, and even that was pretty limited and media coverage mostly disappeared afterwards until Bernie Sanders' 2016 primary campaign. You're looking at the state of rhetoric/culture to determine "how right/left American society is," which is not a good or accurate way to determine that. The thing to look at it is the actual policies and material state of the American people. When one looks at that, things are absolutely not less right-wing in most respects. The only way in which this is somewhat true is that liberals mostly won the culture war, but the gains of this (like gay marriage or increased acceptance of LGBT people in general) are offset by some pretty huge losses (a good example is abortion become de facto illegal in many states - like Mississippi going from having 13 abortion clinics in 1980 to having just 1 now). Not to mention other social justice issues that have essentially gone ignored and haven't ever really been addressed (like the criminal justice system and de facto segregation). joepinetree posted:This is nonsensical and ahistorical. The post you're replying to is basically a good summary of "the way your average American liberal views late 20th century to present political history." And in some ways it's hard to blame them, since they've seen this stuff repeated over and over again by the media and other people, to the extent that stuff like "Carter did lefty kookiness" just became common sense. The main thing guiding that sort of perspective (outside of just regurgitating what they've heard elsewhere) is a perception of things like "moving left" as a matter of rhetoric shifting, and liberal-aligned media carefully focuses on a handful of "culture war" issues where these shifts occur.
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Aug 3, 2020 04:55
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https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/1290136860237291520?s=19
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Aug 3, 2020 05:23
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Rainbow Knight fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 05:56
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Politics is not downstream from culture. That is a reactionary idea that liberals have uncritically accepted and the evidence is in this very thread that we still have a lot of deprogramming to do. Nothing is upstream from capitalism. It defines the basis of all relations within our political system, and almost all within our cultural system. Look to material conditions: watch their feet, don’t listen to their words.
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Aug 3, 2020 08:11
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selec posted:Politics is not downstream from culture. Yes! Andrew Breitbart was an rear end in a top hat cokehead who died on the can, not some profound loving genius into human nature and politics, and it annoyes me that so many people think that quote represents a shattering insight. I don't think anything is generally "downstream" of anything else because society and people are complicated and establishing causality for limited and specific things alone is hard enough. Pat grand theories of How It Really Works usually fall apart very quickly even if they're put together by very smart and diligent people rather than some sleazy tabloid hack. All that being said, if you had to really pick one, I think the argument that culture is "downstream" of politics is far stronger than the reverse.
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Aug 3, 2020 10:56
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Nonsense posted:https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1289261513937522688?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/Louisgodd/status/1289264608683765760
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Aug 3, 2020 11:06
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Wicked Them Beats posted:https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1289331104806080513?s=20 Is this the worst thing they could bring out? Some blandly supporting speech given to a local powerful association, about being nice Scientology is obvi terrible but this doesn't make me blink at all Kamala gleefully feasts on the tears of the misfortunate
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Aug 3, 2020 11:09
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:. It sucks the olds in charge of the Dem party still have ptsd from this
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Aug 3, 2020 11:18
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selec posted:Politics is not downstream from culture. That is a reactionary idea that liberals have uncritically accepted and the evidence is in this very thread that we still have a lot of deprogramming to do. Yeah, material conditions will always be the first thing the majority of people will base their votes and actions on.
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Aug 3, 2020 11:42
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