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Pants Donkey posted:This is incredibly short-sighted and dangerous. The only thing right now keeping Trump from doing whatever he wants is the election, and second term of Trump means there's literally nothing holding him back since it's been proven time and time again that the safeguards against abuse are a complete joke. He's already delusional enough to think he beat Hilary in a landslide, so whatever the actual numbers are he will just interpret it as getting 538 Electoral Votes and septuple-down on his worse impulses. The only possible way to counter that is if Democrats take the Senate, which requires the low odds of Dems taking the Senate and actually pushing back. Yeah, any future leftist president would be incredibly hamstrung by the kind of power structure they inherit from all this. Even if Sanders were to be president in 2021, most of the change I'd expect would come from letting blue states get away with things like interstate compacts to promote progressive agendas. Lifting Trump's attacks on blue-state vehicle standards for example. I'm really pessimistic about the Senate at the best of times though, so I tend to be a wet blanket. The example of Virginia does show that you can push left-wing policy through a relatively conservative Democrat at the executive level if you've actually got the numbers in the legislature. I was so god damned angry about Northam winning the primary in 2017, but now I'm just burnt out and glad that some states are improving.
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Mar 20, 2020 20:01
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Shinji2015 posted:I think that there's definitely some value to the Tea Party option, mostly because it worked for the Tea Party. Obama became president, they freaked out, organized, started enforcing their will on the GOP, and then they took it over. Hell, Trump is the Tea Party President, and it only took eight years for that to happen. Eight years! It's definitely possible! Local Democrats I interact with on a day-by-day basis are all blue dogs who embraced the party's leftward shift on social issues, but are still lagging behind urban Democrats. A few like me are former Republicans who converted under Obama and then radicalized after 2016. The legacy Dems that didn't go GOP over the last two decades are more or less okay with Sanders' platform, could be made to support Medicare 4 All pretty easily and most were even excited for him when he seemed to be the front runner. They're pretty stereotypical Biden supporters though. They're a lot more left wing than they were 10, or even four years ago, and on some level a lot of them feel guilty about previously "normal" conservative views.They're shifting left, but they're paranoid about it. A lot of that comes down to being a minority surrounded by enemies, and the older ones have Nixon-Reagan PTSD. Still, they don't flip their poo poo over the idea of trans people and helped push back against local harassment of our Hispanic community. I could maybe get five people into a DSA group where I live, but those five people could probably do a whole lot more good as precinct committee leaders or convention delegates for the local Democrats. We'll be lucky to actually get even a few Democrats elected to county government, but we're fighting against a huge coal project right now that's forcing a new alliance of NIMBY businesses, regional environmental groups and public health advocates, so a commissioner or two actually means a lot in that context. It's also forcing several new converts to radicalize on climate policy, or at least accept that it's an issue. That's actually pretty heartening if you're like me and the only leftists you know are online somewhere.
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Mar 22, 2020 08:48
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