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The Saurus posted:In my eyes, the globalist neoliberalism that Obama and Clinton support is a far greater evil than Trump's nationalism. Rent-A-Cop posted:Who is the lesser evil is an entirely subjective thing. I think I'll make a thread in about 6 months to ask about how well this blind, accelerationist garbage works out for you guys.
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Jan 14, 2017 22:12
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The Saurus posted:Well considering I'm already working an insecure job with no healthcare that barely keeps me above water, and have already resigned myself to the endless oblivion that all humans face in death, I don't think things can get any worse. Trump is going to implement policies firmly squared in the Republican playbook and you'll find that, yes, things can actually get worse and those with privilege will just accrue more to the point that they will be even more difficult to dislodge by the end of his term. The best you can expect is that a marginal number of manufacturing jobs will be forced (or rather bribed) to remain in the rustbelt while Trump also expands the deportation programs that Obama made much use of and marvels that one of the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in the world is at his fingertips. If you guys think this will result in some kind of grand class awakening you are being taken for a loving ride, if anything the association of economic issues with white supremacist fury, deserved or not, is going to create major problems for creating a unified progressive movement in the future and I sincerely doubt that the Rudatrons or The Saurus's of the world are going to be very good at making an open, inclusive leftist movement that can mobilize the Democratic base. Its bad enough that for too many leftists nothing seemed to be learned from the primaries with little talk about how to reach out to various demographics, particularly ethnic minorities, but a lot of talk about conspiracy and how the system was rigged. White Rock posted:We can convene and compare how many secret police and concentration camps have been formed as well. My guess is that Trump will be very limited in his ability to implement his changes, even outside of things that are not his policies. He'll be limited in the sense that he can't act as a dictator to the rest of his party, so you can expect more of the same Republican policy what with their control on all three branches of the government, which has been so lovely in the past.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:30
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The Saurus posted:Lol. And what "should" we leftists have learnt from the primaries? Because what I learnt was that the field was cleared years ahead of time for Abuela because it was "her turn" and despite this a totally unknown senator from a tiny state was almost able to clinch the nomination from her with a single repeated speech about economic populism and she was such a terrible candidate that she went on to lose to orange cheeto hitler, a man who could not help but insult the majority of america almost constantly. First off, I don't care about Clinton and you can badmouth her to hell and back, it makes no difference to me, what I care about is what weaknesses Sanders had that she was able to exploit to grind him down and win the nomination handily. Since he was the most prominent leftist candidate in decades glazing over what hobbled him is loving idiotic and people like you will only be setting yourselves up for future disappointment if you do. You should know by now there's no prize for second place. He got drubbed, hard, when it came to minority votes, particularly African Americans. You can get angry about it if you want, but it ended up making the difference. Its doubly bad since Clinton had so many obvious weaknesses with black voters, her husband's association with eroding welfare and vastly increasing imprisonment, the 'Superpredators' comment, the idea of a wealthy white women having the audacity to claim to be the anointed successor of the first black president, all of these things could have been better used by Sanders but instead it came across that he couldn't adapt his rhetoric very well to talk about the specific concerns that afflicted African Americans and had a somewhat ignorant, sheltered reputation as a result. Its not just a question of notoriety, he still did poorly (albeit not as poorly as in earlier contests) in diverse states like New York or California late into the primary when him and his positions were much better known. By many accounts, his campaign had glaring weaknesses with black voters that had little to do with establishment skulduggery. From my own experience, talking to a lot of different people both in real life and on the internet there was a lot of misgivings about how seriously Bernie would take their issues compared to Clinton, there was also a lot of concern about the way that exclusive concentration on Economic issues tends to shove out minorities quickly blackguy32 has some interesting posts on this. You guys can bitch and moan about the pernicious effects of identity politics all you want. To be absolutely honest I would even have had a bit of sympathy before the election when the centrist liberal force were at their most obnoxious. But since then I think I've come a lot more receptive to the idea that identity politics is an important part of a leftist movement since its obviously not just going to go away because some internet Communists don't like it, and a lot of leftists, yourself especially, have glaring problems with Race, Gender and Religion that seemed to get broadcast all over the place since the election and ignoring those problems will just breed disillusionment and resentment. quote:Trump knocked 25 billion dollars off American Pharmaceutical companies' values the other day with provocative tweeting. Could you ever imagine Clinton standing up to the powers that be in that way? For someone who has been screwed so badly by neoliberal globalism, seeing the Pres poo poo-talk all these assholes is like music to my ears. Its all talk, his administration is going to be a loving orgy of regressive moneyed interests blowjobs. If you think he'll take a serious stance against corporate rapacity then you've been played hard, we'll see how things turn out in six months.
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Jan 15, 2017 04:00
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rudatron posted:Hey Koala March, you didn't answer my question before: do you still think Paven Stan 'knows what's up'? You seemed pretty happy to loudspeaker him before. quote:I don't like The Saurus, but if your reaction to him is that 'idpol is here to stay', then the left is doomed. Idpol won't win, it's incapable of winning, because it's fundamentally about dividing people. The 'fear' that Sanders was going to shove minority voters out in the cold was 100% fiction that the clinton campaign used to try and win the primary. The fact that it worked, that apparently nothing Sanders said or did was ever considered "good enough" to allay these constantly voiced concerns (usually made by people in the media), is proof of that. Clinton had weaknesses, but she had a history of working with minority groups that meant they trusted her - turns out, that trust was completely misplaced, because she just loving lost the easiest election of all time. Idpol is not going away, definitely not anytime soon while Trump and the kind of movement he represents are so prominent.To be honest I find raging against Idpol utterly futile because people having an allegiance to a group quite separate from class has been around for as long as humans have been and while its useful and straightforward to interpret history as that of class struggle no leftist movement in history has been able to stamp that out. Clinton used it to win the Primary, but in all honesty Sanders was as much to blame for letting her use it. He needed to co-opt it, he needed to reach out to minority voters and show them that they would absolutely not be ignored and that he really had their best interests at hearth. This is not a defense of Clinton, frankly I think the fact that she could present herself as the minority candidate and it worked to be one of the most embarrassing things about the election but it probably rubbed off more negatively on Sanders since he failed to get that cross demographic support a populist, leftist candidate desperately needs. And it wasn't some impossible task, read that Fusion article I linked, his campaign seemed to be dogged by poor use of resources and unwillingness to engage with outlets that might have better disseminated his message among such minorities. It was farcical. None of the people I know who are in the social justice circuit have felt particular reason to reexamine their beliefs WRT what gets called identity politics and from their arguments I don't think I have any great counter arguments. Feminist groups know they need to gear up their activism to fight for things like women's health, abortion rights and protection from pay discrimination. People who are active in things like BLM know that they have an incoming Republican administration with the president pitching himself as on the side of 'law and order' with police organisations slavering all over him. People talk about how poor white mid-westerners react negatively at the idea that they are privileged in society, fair enough, but equally have you tried telling people like those I just mentioned to tone it down because they're alienating white America? That sure doesn't work, especially right now since there's a widespread perception that White America just told everyone else to gently caress off in the crudest way possible. As it is right now Economic populism in America has a bit of problem in the sense that it doesn't appeal as much to non-white people. This is my problem with a lot of the stuff I've been reading in threads like this because they seem much more interested in recapturing White working class voters and I hear comparatively little about selling such policies and people to minority voters. Things like voter ID laws, which might have had a big impact on the election, aren't given much time while we act like whatever shenanigans is going on in college campuses is super important (it isn't). Sanders could have done a lot more, the left in general will need to do a lot more in the future if they expect to grab control, and it is absolutely loving infuriating to me that people aren't taking this more seriously. White Rock posted:I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that identity politics have a major role to play after Hillary Clinton, who built much of her campaign on identity politics, who's victory was predicted to be a give due to the nature of demographics, lost the election. Hell, she lost white women while brandishing the slogan "I'm With Her". 29% of Latinos voted Trump, which is a big number considering. The thing is though, Clinton didn't even do that much to really present herself as the champion of identity politics when it got right down to it. What were her big Feminist proposals to get all women on side beyond simply being elected? Why had she been so apprehensive in the past on issues concerning sexual orientation? She made weak overtures to BLM, but overall seemed to be more interested in courting moderate Republicans and advertising how much more classy she was to be president than Trump to people who were concerned about such things. A lot of progressives had trouble perceiving her as sincere. Identity politics in this case sounded more like treating minority voters as captive voters simply by virtue of having D beside your name rather than something she would have to work to bring out. There's also the fact that identity politics did work, but for Trump. All that Clinton really ended up doing was being better at exploiting identity politics than Sanders, but she still wasn't very good at it, at all, and thus lost the election. Call Me Charlie posted:Clinton stomped him in the south and states with closed primaries but he was actually able to pull out Trump like upsets in states that ended up giving Trump the election. MaxxBot posted:
He didn't perform as well with Black millenials as you guys are suggesting, going off that article it was a difference of only 5%, Sanders won overall millennials much more thoroughly than just that. He also wasn't able to mobilize them to get out and vote very well either. Either way he still lost Black voters on the whole very hard, and those voters aren't going away anytime soon, they need to be wooed if leftists expect much of a future in the States. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 07:01
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rudatron posted:Sanders already did literally everything you ask of him here, but it was never enough. He literally hired BLM people to help his outreach. Did he ever stop getting poo poo on for 'not getting it'? No. You know why? Because it was too valuable for Clinton to ever let up. He has not ever asked them to 'give up' their concerns, nor has anyone else in this thread. No one's asked BLM to stop protesting police brutality, far from it, they should keep it up. But they should do it in a way that's actually going to achieve some tangible goal, and not undermining potential allies. Eg- I'm still disgusted at the way they stole that mic from Bernie, that was like a critical loving moment that showed their true colors as far as I'm concerned. Holy gently caress you are completely shameless aren't you? I didn't say economic populism can't work, or that it will never appeal to non-whites, I'm saying so far a platform that's 90% economic issues didn't make nearly as much of a splash among ethnic minorities as would be expected, so for the future its obvious that building a coalition for the far left is going to involve making more overtures to *shudder* identity politics. Have you read anything I posted? Will I link this article again? Here are some choice quotes to show how he could have done better but didn't: quote:It takes outreach. But several former members of Sanders’ black outreach team told me the campaign didn’t believe pulling black voters from Clinton was a real possibility; the white vote, the staffers said, was the campaign’s priority. So here we are, you're still stuck in this 'poor Bernie!' poo poo where he couldn't have changed anything about his campaign and did the absolute best he could but those intractable identity politic types ruined everything. Its pointless, and wrong, a lot of things could have and need to be improved to reach out to minority interests among economic leftists and resorting to the idea that, no, nothing went wrong, Bernie did EVERYTHING POSSIBLE, but the shadowy conspiracy of the DNC, Clinton and Black Lives Matter (???, you do know they did the same thing to Clinton don't you? But of course when they say boo to Bernie that's when they 'show their true colors') ruined him through no fault of his own is a really bad idea. If that's the attitude you're going to take you might as well give up now, because you aren't going to make much headway by whinging about how the system is rigged if you want to make meaningful change. White Rock posted:Okay i'm gonna stop you right there: How did identity politics work for Trump? What does the words Identity politics mean to you? He appealed to white identity politics, worried about Terrorism, worried about unchecked Hispanic immigration and, yes, worried about the end of a way of life represented by the nine to five manufacturing job down at the plant. He pushed the right buttons on issues like guns, he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the first Black president and he had an aggressive, confrontational position on law enforcement and the police, he didn't even seem that bothered when the Klan fell for him. The alt right declared him their champion. What are we missing here? His first foray into politics was the loving birther controversy, if he didn't play to white identity politics in your eyes, what would he need to have done differently to do so? Look at some the differences between Clinton and Trump voters here. In addition to worries about free trade and the economy Trump voters were much more inclined to say that Muslims in the US needed to be under more scrutiny, that Terrorism was a serious issue, that multiculturalism didn't make the country any better and that racial discrimination was no longer really a thing. We can and should talk about economics but a lot of people were prompted to vote for Trump for reasons that weren't particularly economic. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 15:58
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Call Me Charlie posted:You seem to be conflating 'Bernie lost the primary' with 'Bernie lost the primary because he's bad at identity politics'. Which, even if that was true, Clinton lost the general despite leaning on that as hard as any candidate possibly could. There's no way she could have done identity politics 'better' No, she did not lean on it as hard as any candidate possibly could, she was much weaker there than people are giving her credit for, she treated Obama's coalition as something that was guaranteed to show up and win the election for her without much effort on her part. Instead she spent most of her time courting the elusive (non-existent?) moderate republicans while denigrating how unpresidential Trump was. She was a person who was associated with welfare reform and mass imprisonment as a result of her husband's administration, she was anti gay marriage for the longest time until it became politically expedient for her the reverse positions, she had lots of thorny questions about how she treated women who had accused her husband of sexually abusing them, most leftists I know gagged at the thought of voting for a person like that to keep out Trump. Her policies to actually help a lot of the different elements of the Democrat base weren't very well communicated, it often seemed to get reduced to 'look at my website!' when she could have been laying down this stuff as clearly as possible in her speeches. At best it seemed like more of the same and considering the disappointment of the Obama years as well as the prospect of the Republicans maintaining control of Congress she probably wouldn't be to change things significantly and that didn't help turnout. But she still had the political skills to appeal better to the interest groups that make up the Democratic base than Sanders did. Once again I am not defending Clinton, I'm saying that Sanders and to a lesser extent the movement he represented dropped the ball badly and if the lesson is that identity politics of those various groups is the problem rather than something that needs to be accepted and appealed to by leftists in the future I think it won't have very positive results. Regarding your last paragraph, I think thats kind of crude, the author of the piece, Terrell Jermaine Starr, is no Clinton acolyte and has been fairly critical of both her and the wider party. He's written a fair bit on Sander's movement and its attempt to reach out to black voters, he's definitely critical of his failings but far from condemnatory of him or his principles. White Rock posted:
I do agree, but I worry that what people consider too much focus on race or what have you and whether that can result in minorities being sidelined. Trump was able to fuse his economic policies with a flavor of aggressive nationalism that probably only made him more appealing to big segments of the Republican base. Just the phrase 'Make America Great Again', you could write whole books on that slogan and its hearkening back to a time when America was the undisputed most powerful nation on earth, when jobs were numerous, regulation wasn't strangling companies (gently caress me, he said as much in his speeches), law enforcement was respected, production was happening in America and terrorism was barely an issue. I think its interesting to look at a couple of his speeches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfN0mXsOlbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3HPuBHe3NA The way he frames isn't just 'those jobs are gone', its 'those jobs are gone because the Chinese and the Mexicans stole 'em'. He creates a zero sum game where other countries gaining industry and economic growth is happening at the expense of the United States. In one of the speeches he says America needs to 'declare economic independence' and he goes on to talk about how he plans to force the Chinese to bend. The point is he's offloading a lot of the blame of America's problem onto perfidious foreigners vamping off of great American ingenuity and industry and outfoxing the leaders of the country. He was playing to peoples fears about China or Mexico and even Japan to lay a lot of the economic problems the country faces at their feet, something he'll sort out of course. I don't think that was an accident, he knows that kind of aggressive 'America will flex its muscles and everyone else will fall in line' will play better than simply talking about how jobs are gone and he'll bring them back with spending much time rattling on about the Chinese devaluing their currency and stealing American patents. It shifts focus to outside actors and is almost a textbook example of nationalism playing into economics, I consider nationalism to be an incredibly powerful form of Identity Politics, so that's one of the reasons why I will say that Trump won by exploiting Identity Politics. Anyway I think I've said all I can say on these issues for now, so I'll probably bow out for the moment. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 21:26
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White Rock posted:____________ Are you serious? Dictionary definition of Identity Politics: "political activity or movements based on or catering to the cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, or social interests that characterize a group identity." If that somehow doesn't include every Nationalist movement ever then the term has no meaning anymore. quote:Your second video has NOTHING to do with identity politics. He is literally suggesting economic policies that will help his voterbase. Here i'm just gonna post an exceprt: They are economic issues... refracted through the lens of nationalism which is coloring what Trump's policies are and as such are also examples of identity politics.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:05
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rudatron posted:Populism is directly opposed to idpol, you have to make a choice. Again, no one's asking for and end to combating racism, or whatever other strawman you want to deploy, that you think is going to make you look sympathetic here. Link that article as much as you want, whose only sources are a bunch of anonymous 'staffers', it has an axe to grind and it does that from the start. It, like a lot of smears against Bernie, uses the reparations deflection to try and make him look racist "oh, so you support measures against income inequality but not reparatiosn?!?! Don't you know they're both pie in the sky ideas, according to my beliefs about what is achievable, which happen to exactly coincide with neoliberal idpol dogma?!?! Guess bernie was racist!". You know, there's a popular Politico article that has been linked a million times in various threads concerning the Clinton campaign's failures during the election that been the source of a lot of astonishment and amusement for people here. It also uses some anonymous staffer sources, it also arguably has 'an axe to grind' but its an invaluable source of information on what not to do in the future for creating a successful political movement and I think it would useful if folks like you could learn from the other political disappointment last year rather than sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending like nothing could have been changed. Why the gently caress are you here, totally ignoring the actual real life named people constantly referred to in the article like Roy Tatum and Danny Glover who offered open and valuable insight into what was going on during the campaign trail? Why are you here pretending like the article is trying to scream racist when the worst it says is suggesting that a 70 something old Jewish guy from Vermont might have been a bit ignorant of black people and their plight (their words, not mine)? Why are you acting like its playing into the neoliberal agenda when the author repeatedly talks about how most of Bernie's policies would have helped Black people and they could have been a natural allies? Christ, even the reparation thing was more about how Sanders was willing to be extremely radical, by American standards, on a lot of stuff (and lets face it, even if he was elected he probably wouldn't have had great ability to implement most of his platform if the Republicans still had control of Congress) but erred uncharacteristically onto political reality whenever that idea was raised. And this 'fair shake' crap is its own kind of dodge. The Sanders campaign knew the realities of what it was up against, we all know that the Democratic establishment was vigorously opposed to him but that's just the reality of it. Politics is never fair, you achieve nothing by moping about it and that's all I'm getting out of you. He was able to break through with White voters, with younger voters, with equally powerful forces arrayed against him, but on the whole Black voters eluded him and Sanders was wrong-footed constantly, and honestly I think he was more to blame than anyone else in letting that happen. If all the hard left is going to take out of this going into the future is conspiracies and resentment towards other radical movements like BLM (God, you really are furiously salty about that still, aren't you? Did you already forget about this?) then they are well and truly hosed.
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Jan 16, 2017 07:27
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