Democratic (Party) Direction

a loose assemblage of beardos pwning Ben Shapiro all day long

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I feel you, jaymc, though on this board you're probably safer admitting a fondness for child porn than technocratic liberalism.

The main thing that is stopping me from identifying as a leftist is feeling like it requires me to shit on all of this, which I'm not (yet) willing to do.

It does?

Part of being a leftist is belonging to the last bastion of rugged individualism!

I do find it face-palmingly sad to see Hillary mocking Bernie in her book for promising everyone the moon. Setting aside the fact that much of what Sanders was promising was stuff that's taken for granted in other countries, she clearly refuses to admit the lesson from Trump's victory that Yes, You Can Promise People Anything You Fucking Want. Obama obviously understood that better than she did, and while I admit it was harder for her trying to compel people to keep the same party in the White House, there was clearly a wide lane for her to take on a whole host of issues that she just flat-out refused in exchange for compromise and incremental improvement.

belief in the power of government and other institutions to advance progressive causes and thereby create a more just society

does this include record numbers of deportations, massively expanding the surveillance state, drone bombing hospitals, exacerbating wealth inequality etc or nah

Hillary going after Bernie for running a mean campaign is fucking golden when you consider the tactics they tried to use on Obama (and also how O's campaign targeted her more ruthlessly than Bernie's did iirc)

She noted that Jake Sullivan, her top policy aide, told her that Sanders' campaign strategy reminded him of a scene from the movie "There's Something About Mary," where a hitchhiker says he has a plan to roll out seven-minute abs to top the famous eight-minute abs.

"Why, why not six-minutes abs?" Ben Stiller's character asks.

Clinton wrote: "That's what it was like in policy debates with Bernie. We would promise a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept promising four-minute abs, or even no-minutes abs. Magic abs!"

So Clinton is the crazy hitchhiker and Sanders is the reasonable Ben Stiller in this scenario?

"the lesson from Trump's victory that Yes, You Can Promise People Anything You Fucking Want"

But the lesson from him trying to govern is clearly that you can't.

Technocrati Liberalism is not about wonkishness to me. Every party needs wonks, I agree with that. But there's wonkishness, and then there's what could today be called Paul Ryan wonkishness, which is mostly about trying to hide effects and causes. Liberal policy making isn't really that hard: You tax the rich and you spend on the poor. It becomes bad when it becomes about 'incentives', 'testing', stuff like that.

I.. agree with fred

except that I don't think enough establishment Dems will commit to that whole taxing the rich thing

That's.... what establishment Democratic politics is! You don't think Tammy Baldwin wants to raise the top marginal rate?

Peter Daou should go back to music because when it comes to politics he is the dumbest motherfucker alive

Obamacare raised taxes on the rich as well, even though it was otherwise quite technocratic. And hopefully the Sanders single payer plan includes a good fat tax raise as well :) Keeping it 'fully costed' really worked for Corbyn, after all.

establishment democrats are mostly about damage control and trying to figure out what concessions republicans might want in proposed legislation, baking those concessions into the proposal, and then getting shot down or bargained down to nothing anyway. because you negotiate in committee or on the floor, not in some imaginary version of where the middle is in your head!

I swear, something gave nearly everyone in politics brain worms and they think they're doing whatever-dimensional chess is the metaphor of the day instead of determining how many dollars to allocate to paving roads

does this include record numbers of deportations, massively expanding the surveillance state, drone bombing hospitals, exacerbating wealth inequality etc or nah

nah

Technocrati Liberalism is not about wonkishness to me. Every party needs wonks, I agree with that. But there's wonkishness, and then there's what could today be called Paul Ryan wonkishness, which is mostly about trying to hide effects and causes. Liberal policy making isn't really that hard: You tax the rich and you spend on the poor. It becomes bad when it becomes about 'incentives', 'testing', stuff like that.

― Frederik B

there's a certain difficulty here, in that government axiomatically should be open and transparent, but actual governance involves a fair amount of arcane polity, and also the opposing party is intrinsically interested in distorting and misrepresenting everything you do and has a lot of money to spend on that project. people want "honest" candidates but the most effective politicians are doubletalking hypocrites.

ah, yes, let me add "wonk" to the list of words and phrases I detest. Fucking DC contempt for people who like data.

half the time I hear "policy wonk" it's degraded to the point where it means someone who has read the bill in question and has accumulated knowledge of past policy

FWIW, I voted for Clinton in both the primary and the general, but not to support Bill Clinton-style centrist political triangulation, corporatist economic policy, or hawkish foreign policy. My vote was essentially a vote for a third Obama term: technocratic pragmatism in the service of social progressivism, which I thought she stood the best chance of being able to implement.

To be clear, I am less attached to the Democratic Party establishment (after all, I voted for Nader in 2000) than I am to Obama. I suppose the question is whether there is a meaningful difference between the two.

I mean, I now recognize the shortcomings of "Obama third term" as a blueprint for the future, but I'm not ready to light a match and throw it behind me.

Have you seen a wonk's tears? Well, look at mine.

'policy wonk' means someone who either can exploit the fearsomely boring tools of data and rules to appear to win arguments for your ideological side, or someone with a more or less known ideological affiliation who seems to regularly threaten to lose the plot and support offside positions because of their zeal for the dangerously neutral-sounding data and rules

i.e. matt bruenig, ezra klein and other contemporary crypto-neoliberal datajournalists, and uh whoever the right-wing version of the data rizard would be

Clinton's entire campaign did nothing other than pitch her proposed presidency as more of the same as the Obama term!

That was actually a stupid motel room conversation with Bill that was "controversial" -- the entire pitch re: healthcare was "there are small things to change and the ACA is good" instead of actually saying "ok we got fucked on some implementation details by the supreme court and real action is needed" and he was talking about it being kind of a mess.

as if admitting anything wasn't going perfectly was going to sink the campaign. you don't campaign on the status quo, especially as a _progressive_, you give goals to actually strive toward

bruenig is p explicitly not a neoliberal (though he is a wonk, obviously)

republicans have the whole Heritage foundation among wonkage

mh starting to sound like it stands for Matt cHristman

xp no rite i was putting him as my example of the first, sorry, should have done more to insult ezra klein somehow for emphasis

that's part of the problem, the republicans have partisan think tanks, and most of the ones cited by or supported by democrats are pointedly non-partisan or much smaller in scope than, say, Heritage

plus we're so honest and their think tanks are just like, lie tanks

WE NEED LIE TANKS

we can't even agree on our liedeology though

i.e. matt bruenig, ezra klein and other contemporary crypto-neoliberal datajournalists, and uh whoever the right-wing version of the data rizard would be

lol I don't know who Matt Bruenig was, but I was about to POST earlier "I STILL READ VOX."

oops, didn't mean to capitalize "POST"

fwiw the funniest, saddest thing about the ACA being relatively close to the model Heritage proposed 20 years earlier, was their need to say "Yeah, we don't supposed any of that shit NOW"
http://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform/commentary/dont-blame-heritage-obamacare-mandate

which is true: the mandate model was their counter-proposal to something like single-payer. it's just they moved the dialogue so far away from single-payer in the next twenty years they were cool with disavowing any compromise whatsoever

btw guys I actually read some crap from that Verrit site

other than its primary business as being a tautology (this quote has a Verrit code so it's a real quote, and it's a real quote because it's on Verrit), there's nothing there

like, Daou has an entire article with sources about how gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement are issues, and... that's it. There are proposals to bring back the Voting Rights Act, or even propose an amendment enshrining it, along with some states with decent local regulations.... and the article mentions none of it. What's the takeaway here, I read it and say "mm yes, disenfranchisement is bad and also is happening"

give people some fucking action items, Daou

not ready to go live, an old interweb story

I bet Verrit's a money laundering operation, and a reward to Daou for his loyal service.

lol no

It's totally half assed. It's like one of those store fronts where everything's expired and covered in an inch of dust.

Status quo was all a Dem could promise in 2016, what with GOP running congress, and I still think campaigning on anything more than that would have led to disappointment and backlash, and hurt progressive priorities in the long run. Though it would obviously have been better than Trump.

I think the Clinton campaign/wing of the party very happily thought that Trump was a gift that enabled them to straddle their Wall Street donors and their base without having to go too far left. I really think they thought it was ideal, at least at first.

So many people thought Trump was the easiest to beat.

He had sky high unfavorables, low party support and extremist views. Turns out that didn't matter. And man, imagine how dangerous a demagogue would have been in this environment if he wasn't a lazy idiot like Trump.

Yeah, it definitely crosses my mind a lot that he has all the intentions of a fascist dictator, he's just too lazy and incompetent to become one.

Fred, Dems could have promised anything they wanted to. That's the one thing Trump understood better than Clinton. Worrying about putting big ideas out there because of partisan obstacles just makes it seem like you have no big ideas.