Democratic (Party) Direction

I fundamentally don't get anybody who is looking at what the right has turned into and goes 'let's do that'. They got trumped and now they can't even pass central parts of their agenda. And that's without getting into the lies and the racism and the misogyny and the moral bankruptcy.

I want the moral bankruptcy without the racism and misogyny

But what do you think keeps those things out?

Btw, as much as I have problems with Bernie Sanders, what Bill Moyers is asking for is someone like Bernie Sanders, and he is already there. So... why don't he join and begin the intellectual groundwork to enact single payer?

Help us, Third Eye Blind, you're our only hope.

Wait, it's not Bill Moyers who wrote that, right? Åh fugl it.

it's not bill moyers -- it's bruce bartlett, rightwing apostate ~

"As much as I hate what the conservative movement has become, it rose to power through some strategies that are easily duplicable by progressives. One is putting as much effort into marketing ideas as originating them. Another is coordinating efforts among disparate groups on the right — you support my cause and in return I’ll support yours. And all these efforts are continuously repeated throughout the right-wing echo chamber.

"It took decades for conservatives to set up the institutional infrastructure that supports and nourishes the GOP today. And fundraising was a big part of it. One thing conservatives learned is to share donors with each other through groups such as the Council for National Policy. I don’t know of any similar group on the left.

"Progressives always complain about a lack of funds, but clearly there is plenty of money available. Hillary Clinton did not lose because she had less money than Trump; she had considerably more. The congressional race Georgia’s 6th District attracted tens of millions of dollars for the Democratic candidate. He lost, but not because he was underfunded."

hooooo boy

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/opinion/center-democrats-identity-politics.html

these clueless motherfuckers are really going to blow it in 2020 again aren't they

these days Mark Penn doesn't even get cable news slots.

can I be the 10000000th person to wonder aloud what in the ever-living fuck is going on at the NYT these days

click$

That column and Bret Stephens' shit would've run in 2008 too. Remember when Bill Kristol had a regular column?

http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/clinton-because-communities/

just reading the summary of the paper it seems to me like they're overlooking something?

The study… found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.”

trump won among veterans/military over hillary by something like 2:1 (some places online say 3:1 but it's a lot either way). a community's rate of military service will necessarily have a positive correlation to its rate of military sacrifice. to assume it's the sacrifice that moved them towards trump and not the service is i think a pretty ahistorical view of the relationship between the republican party and the military / military families.

the NYT is in full self-hating urban elite mode & also hatereads like that probably generate more traffic than anything reasonable that Charles M. Blow writes (as Alfred tersely alluded to)

thread of advice for liberal billionaires:

Just copy the Kochs, you godforsaken idiots.

— Annie Lowrey (@AnnieLowrey) July 6, 2017

Mordy that's a reductive view that doesn't take into account a lot of other factors

1. how many communities with a high rate of military service/sacrifice have shit job opportunities for people w/o college degrees?
2. how did officers and officers' families vote, vs. enlisted (i.e. with a degree vs. generally without a degree)?
3. what's the ethnic makeup of the military vs the general population?
4. how did that break down along generational lines?

like any member of any minority, I guess, I would recommend you avoid thinking of "military members and veterans" as a monolith

Heh. I was just interviewed by a State Department dude who once did Secret Service campaign detail for Reagan, both Bushes, and the Clintons. His loathing for HRC was based on what he called her "nastiness" to the Secret Service: Bill would throw wads of French fries on limo floors, HRC would sneer if you opened doors for her. He got wistful over Reagan, whom he only met once but was the only president to say good morning to him.

dare I ask why the State Department is interviewing you...

I have a State Dept Security guy for an in-law, he loved working for both Dr. Rice and Hillz and was a big Obama booster (also a career military guy w multiple tours in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan)

former student who listed me as a contact

I knew things were going awry when he said, "Oh, Twitter. The president's on that a lot. He's amazing, isn't he?" I realized in 10 seconds he wasn't sarcastic.

Mordy that's a reductive view that doesn't take into account a lot of other factors

my only point is that probably the reason communities with most sacrifices voted trump is similar to the reasons military families + military voters voted trump period. they'd have to do more careful work (like separating out casualty rates by community vs. rate of service + seeing if isolating that particular variable made a difference) bc afaict from reading the summaries they're missing the major correlation here.

^great article.

America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans seem to notice. This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from combat. Increasingly, a divide is emerging between communities whose young people are dying to defend the country, and those communities whose young people are not.

this ties into the rural/urban divide. this is a realm where the elitism of city dwellers is very real. they can afford to send their kids to college while their poorer rural cousins send their kids off to war. Democrats need to seriously reconsider their hawkishness and win that anti-war vote.

You think the military vote is anti-war?

that's what the story is implying but i think that's probably a misreading of the data

this is a realm where the elitism of city dwellers is very real. they can afford to send their kids to college

America, where there are no poor people in our cities.

no. just that the continual avoidance of the anti-war vote has led Democrats to ignore the very real costs of lives lost to military intervention. this is part of why they lost, they refused to look at Clinton's war stance, to even address it. instead they were considered "deplorables", unreachable racists that we should ignore.

usually the cities are where homeless veterans end up i wonder if they are anti war or pro war

you seem confused on p much every point there

do you really think Democrats aren't doing well enough in cities because they are losing the homeless vet anti-war vote, for ex.

or that the "deplorables" (an insult that was specifically linked to identity politics and not military policy) were all really concerned with Hillary's pro-war votes? I mean wtf

how so? rural citizens sacrifice themselves to US military campaigns more than city dwellers. this is a fact. you guys believe in facts right?

yet the official Democratic position, as stated by their presidential candidate, is that these people are unreachable deplorables. maybe let's rethink that?

the left goes on and on about being unable to reach rural voters. here is a real issue where they can easily use it to both differ from Republicans and appeal to rural voters. but no. let's attack Adam for saying some things he never said. i am not saying people that live in the city have no problems ever. christ.

do republicans win military families bc they're more anti-war than democrats and military families are sensitive to the costs of war, or because they're normally more hawkish, have conservative values and religious etc than democrats and those resonate with those voters? like there's a policy prescription being made in this study - if hillary were more anti-war maybe she would've won more military votes and won the election. i think it's reasonable to ask if that has it exactly backwards about reality.

that was not an "official Democratic position", you are drawing a bunch of scattershot connections that are not necessarily related

xp

thx Mordy

^^^^^

Not that I want pro-war candidates, but being anti-war wouldn't have won Clinton a single rural vote, because being anti-war is DISRESPECTIN' OUR TROOPS.

rural US military families not generally anti-war, kinda a key thing to remember

playing to generalizations just seems like a losing stategy. going with that over and over again is dumb. are you arguing against appealing to rural veterans? because of what, because you have already decided how they think and believe and they won't vote for you anyways or for any good policies because of the boogeyman because they are scary unknowable monsters because all these fake fucking tired cliches you should be working AGAINST. we are fucking doomed.

I feel like the strategy of trying to win back groups of middle aged people who are now republicans (by shifting/moderating the dems' message) is futile.

this is why identity politics is shit. they are on the path to lose again.

afaict the biggest problem w/ identity politics is you can argue all you want that "it's ok for me to support my identity group but it's wrong for you to support yours" but ppl see it as hypocritical and there are ppl who we don't want identifying hard w/ the interests of their racial/gender groups.

appealing to "swing voters" in general is a losing strategy, the focus should be on broadening the electorate to encompass and empower groups whose interests are aligned with Democratic goals. that's it.

AB doesn't seem to actually read others' posts so not gonna bother w a point by point refutation

Clinton specifically said some were deplorables, some not, btw.

When I lived in San Diego my roommates were former marines, who stuck around to go to college afterwards. As it was a mid-term year, we talked quite a bit about politics. They didn't strike me as being particularly anti-war. And neither did the homeless veterans I sometimes met in the bus to the university hospital, btw.

Mordy, Shakey and dare i say it Fred seem closer to the mark than Adam regarding the nuances of American politics on this one imho. AB, there is a pretty big leap buried in your argument as i read it - even if non-urban dwellers do bear the bulk of the hardships brought by war, can we conclude from that they are politically more inclined to vote for anti-war candidates? the last many decades of US political history suggests otherwise. you could explain that any number of ways but just assuming that the heartland yearns for a candidate who will come out swinging against all war is really dubious, and is also "playing to generalizations."

in addition to all the reasons of emotional and ideological identification with the military that might lead some communities to identify with hawkish candidates (e.g.: the world is dangerous, and/or the world is full of dangerous people that don't look like me, we need tough protection, we are proud of making tough sacrifices, military service made me a better person) we should also consider the economics at various levels. campaigning on, say, slashing military budgets won't just be read as being "weak" against the dangerous world of terrorists and the ~teeming masses that want our american freedoms~ - it also might mean shuttering the one big employment opportunity around, whether that means going into the service, or steady work at a pork-barrel defense plant. there are a lot of reasons why the military and war are popular even if the deaths brought by individual wars are, obviously, not. it's worth treating that as a very complex problem, and not as a gordian knot that the democrats could easily solve if they only looked at it without past baggage or whatever.

America, where there are no poor people in our cities.

It's official. Here are some actual words from the second stanza of 'America the Beautiful':

"Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."

i believe its from the America Is Already Great theme song