Democratic (Party) Direction

Trump was the only one who used anti-Iraq-war language iirc

not saying he was credible but I think you're mistaken if you assume people didn't notice

The direction this party needs to move is forward, upward. Fuck this party into space

Trump's anti-Iraq-war language and people's response to it is 100% worth looking at - it was genuinely ear-catching when he said things, more during the primaries, like "we've been at war in Iraq for ten years and spent a trillion dollars and we haven't won AN-Y-THING!" But then he would also talk about how we should "get the oil" and "knock the hell out of them" and so on, so it's not as simple as him appealing to an anti-war sensibility that was waiting for a candidate. The core of his emotional appeal was grievance against Washington, against Clinton, against immigrants, against Muslims, etc., and sifting an anti-war appeal out of that while doing election postmortems is going to lead to missing the forest for the trees IMHO.

anti war yet waterboard, torture, you name 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?

this wasn't the point i was trying to make. sorry if i am confusing. the anti-war thing was mostly my personal bias. i think the Dems ignores the war as a phenomenon in itself, as something that has real costs. they further make this clear by not visiting those states and not even reconsidering the war stance.

this isn't something that just affects anti-war voters or veterans or families of veterans. if you reach out, the rest of us will see. also i don't think the electorate can be so easily and conveniently quantified and people are still stuck in the mode of mistaking the model for the real thing.

personally I find this stuff interesting only as trivia, I'd like to see them adopt a broad anti-interventionist policy principally because it's the right thing to do

are you arguing against appealing to rural veterans?

Adam, how many people do you think this applies to and do you think it's enough to swing any districts? In states that are competitive?

Oh hey look here's a story from last month, so you're completely off base anyway re: Democratic strategy

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dems-view-vets-as-strong-candidates-in-bid-to-retake-house/

Adam has a point: a candidate who voted for the Iraq War and is as supportive of Israel as Hillary Clinton would look suspicious. Stay home then! I don't understand thinking, "Hillary voted for Iraq, but Trump wants to bring back torture and bomb the shit out of ISIS, brb gonna vote for him."

the relationship that combat veterans have with war is really complicated, so again, assuming this imaginary huge bloc of war vets that don't vote Dem because Dems have been too hawkish, or not hawkish enough, or whatever, is just as dumb of a stereotype as any other you'd care to think of

idk what "anti-war" even means in a practical sense. does that mean no new wars? does that mean immediately pulling out of every country where there are US troops? I have a hard time believing that would help anything more than our own consciences. unless you really think that any military involvement by the US in a foreign country is always worse than non-involvement, and I don't know if that would be borne out in reality if we pursued that stance.

I mean, this is one of the phrases I truly hate but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube in a lot of these places.

Well, for one it seems Saudi Arabia would invade Qatar in a heartbeat.

I guess if there's anything you could find that almost all veterans, combat or just plain vanilla "they also serve who only stand and wait" types, would agree on, it's that isolationism is not a respectable or honest position

(I am allowed to stereotype my own group)

personally I would settle for no more dumb and bad new wars sold on phony premises

yes a lot of vets would agree with this too but hey man my buddy gave all in that war you think is dumb and bad are you saying he was dumb and bad?

no

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

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, July 6, 2017 9:08 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo go to hell adam

Trump's anti-Iraq-war language and people's response to it is 100% worth looking at - it was genuinely ear-catching when he said things, more during the primaries, like "we've been at war in Iraq for ten years and spent a trillion dollars and we haven't won AN-Y-THING!" But then he would also talk about how we should "get the oil" and "knock the hell out of them" and so on, so it's not as simple as him appealing to an anti-war sensibility that was waiting for a candidate. The core of his emotional appeal was grievance against Washington, against Clinton, against immigrants, against Muslims, etc., and sifting an anti-war appeal out of that while doing election postmortems is going to lead to missing the forest for the trees IMHO.

― ﴿→ ☺ (Doctor Casino), Thursday, July 6, 2017 12:41 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the fact that trump was able to trash the iraq war and still win the GOP primary suggests to me that there is some room for the democrats to move to the left on foreign policy. not to mention it's also just good policy

I missed that. Adam, go fuck yourself. Bet you liked Mark Penn's column today too. It never occurs to guys like him that "working class' includes women, blacks, gays, and the transgender. In an economy where no one who isn't working for Goldman Sachs can afford to live in Chicago or New York, we're all working class, baby.

i think re the iraq war + trump it was more like it was universally acknowledged as a failure in this particular instance and so trump kinda gave right-wing voters a way to repudiate the particular war without having to compromise the values that led to that war. he criticized it on grounds of incompetence (particularly in its failure to earn money for the US), not on ethical or moral grounds.

xp to Simon - I was just trying to illustrate the problems of communicating anti-war positions to vets
I am fortunate enough to not know anyone who went over and got hurt or worse

remember the democrats? lol. miss u, bb!

"fuck identity politics" is not a tenable position. "convincingly and simply draw connections between economic, social, and environmental justice" is.

yeah agreed w/ Mordy - plus trump's big strongman pitch was that he was better at things, whatever the things are. so asserting that iraq was fought dumbly/incompetently was just another version of how he built a great company and is great at running stuff, these bozos in office are bad at everything! helped that there is a lively fiction on the right that iraq somehow only turned bad after obama took office (and clinton became SOS) - they didn't let the surge work, we were just about to win, etc. this is obviously nonsense but the chronology of a long war is a VERY easy thing for people to get fuzzy in their minds, so if you were already with trump it'd be easy to just adopt this garbled narrative along with the strongman smarts, and none of it requires you to be (or think of yourself as) against war or even against this particular war.

trump kinda gave right-wing voters a way to repudiate the particular war without having to compromise the values that led to that war.

otm

plus he's not a chick

some good stuff in here for Democrats to think about

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n14/william-davies/reasons-for-corbyn

Amid all the noise, slogans and smears of the campaign, it seems that Labour’s simple, eye-catching policies (free university tuition, more bank holidays, free school meals for all, more NHS funding, no tax rises for 95 per cent of earners) had the ability to cut through. These policies were crafted to produce a left-populist platform, with the idea in mind that policies can influence voters, but only if they are sufficiently straightforward to be able to hold their shape as they travel around an increasingly complex, chaotic public sphere. New Labour had two sets of experts: one to run its technocratic policy-making machine, the other to handle the media, which it believed could be tamed. But once editorial bottlenecks no longer determine the flow of news, and neurotic control of image is no longer realistic, policies must be designed to spread of their own accord, like internet memes. Trump’s ‘Build a wall!’ did this. Less propitiously, once the phrase ‘dementia tax’ had attached itself to the Tory campaign, it couldn’t be dislodged.

always thought that the absurd abundance of right wing echo chamber outlets and "think" tanks was just a bald-faced grift operation designed to take money from swiss cheese-brained trust fund racists, but shit maybe Bartlett has a point.

https://m.facebook.com/notes/bruce-bartlett/what-progressives-could-learn-from-conservatives/10154956380912832/

also, to anyone plugged in to this scene: does this bit ring true?

smart but non-ideological young people simply looking for a way to make a living in politics are much more inclined to go right than left. After a while, they become true believers and are often among the best and brightest of the right

seems like he might be conflating shamelessness and greed with "smart"

Well, the friends who began as centrists/Republicans (one dual citizen started by working for a Tory MP, the other worked for Rep. Fred Grandy) circa '90 are now left as fuck, through the magic of disability rights, the NSF and LGBT activism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/advice-for-the-left-on-achieving-a-more-perfect-union/531054

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

By contrast, the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

I've felt like abandoning the melting-pot has been a blunder but Rorty at least seems to think that it could potentially be replaced by a new unifying source of commonality. nb at least it seems like there's hostility to the very notion of national commonality - that there should be no discrete unified nation separate/distinct from other nations, or that politics should remain in an antagonistic form this kind of openly schmittian conflict. neither of those seems particularly productive for regaining any kind of power.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0233/9503/products/WebMerch_DGAS-shirt1.jpg?v=1491603436

Support Samantha Bee & Planned Parenthood & buy a Nasty Woman t-shirt!https://t.co/I9qd3M3cFq pic.twitter.com/XDpBcFqF7k

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 11, 2017

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0233/9503/products/WebMerch_VoteDemChill1.png?v=1465242918

daily kos (i know!) but silver linings or at least filaments are brightening

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/11/1679869/-Don-t-look-now-but-Democrats-just-flipped-two-more-seats-from-red-to-blue-tonight

Unchange you can’t believe in: “Dems' rising star meets with Clinton inner circle in Hamptons” https://t.co/qpX4eyYlsD

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) July 16, 2017

already doing the GOP's work for 'em (yet again) eh

and working together

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/17/with-new-d-c-policy-group-dems-continue-to-rehabilitate-and-unify-with-bush-era-neocons/

do you read the whole thing before you link to it or do you just cackle as you imagine me trying to cope with an entire GG piece without losing my breakfast

anyway I loved these two bits

As this new policy group illustrates, the union is grounded in widespread ideological agreement on a broad array of foreign policy debates: from Israel to Syria to the Gulf States to Ukraine to Russia. And the narrow differences that exist between the two groups — on the wisdom of the Iran deal, the nobility of the Iraq War, the justifiability of torture — are more relics of past debates than current, live controversies. These two groups have found common cause because, with rare and limited exception, they share common policy beliefs and foreign policy mentalities.

yes that very narrow difference between Dems and the GOP on torture, Iran and the Iraq war

also this is hilarious

What we see instead are leading Democratic foreign policy experts joining hands with the world’s worst neocons to form new, broad-based policy advocacy groups to re-shape U.S. foreign policy toward a more hostile, belligerent and hawkish posture.

re-shape it into a more bad, bad and bad and worse thing than it already is!! because the only thing worse than Rex Tillerson running the State Department and the DoD running itself would be a Democrat in charge of anything. Yours truly, Glenn Greenwald

I mean the policy group he's flipping out about is another fly-by-night beltway special that all these usual suspects glom on to in case it goes anywhere, and then it never does - Chertoff has to have been associated with like 50 of these things by now - and the whole piece goes on and on and on without making a single specific point other than guilt by association and the usual self-congratulatory confirmation bias that must be catnip for wont-be-fooled-again megacynics like Morbs

guilt by association

^^^this

Kamala also has a big dem donor class sewn up - she's a former AG of CA and her husband is head of the west LA office for Venable LLP. Big law firms were Hillary's #1 source of cash in 2016. (too lazy to google. if it wasnt #1 it was top 3 for sure.) xp

Relevant to GG.

The folks who sold Trump as a non-interventionist would rather talk about this Russia stuff than Trump's death toll. https://t.co/IIgDClIpRx

— Charles Davis (@charliearchy) July 17, 2017

yr losing yr breakfast is just gravy, T

ew

I don't understand who would eat "gravy."