What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

Funny because that is one of the core assumptions of neolibs.

Or they don't vote (which is the group I think is more important) in normal times.

We saw it in exit polling in the SC primary - most Biden voters supported Medicare For All but didn't trust Bernie Sanders (or anyone else) to deliver it so they voted for the safer centrist. That's not the result of propaganda, it's lived experience telling them good things won't be given to them (since the Democrats abandoned the transactional politics of the mid-20th century).

Likewise, the percentage of young men of color who switched to Trump in 2020 - their lives pre-COVID probably didn't get worse from Obama to Trump (because actually the decline in life expectancy, for one, reversed, unemployment held steady, etc.) and he at least promises things.

Or you can write them off as dumb and/or hateful in some way, rather than responding to the material conditions of their lives.

You go from "most people are pretty rational about their lives" to people voted for a lying conman cause he promises things

gyac OTM.

Of course things have become marginally better, in many respects. I'm weird white guy married to a weird brown guy, and I would have died last year without the ACA. These issues actually aren't abstract to me.

But we also spent years homeless, living out of a U-Haul truck parked under a freeway or next to our friends' warehouse, or later, on very isolated land projects in nowhere towns of rural California. We had jobs or gigs, but they were part-time and/or seasonal, always with side hustles, too. It was fucking awful in most respects, and it all happened during the Obama administration. Part of the reason I didn't post much here for years and years was because of unreliable access to internet! I bathed in a river for almost a year because we didn't have running water!

So things have gotten better, sure. But as the class of serfs continues to grow because of the way the economy works, the consequences of that growth are appearing more and more dire.

Incrementalism is the worst, literally telling people to be happy with scraps.

In my view, incrementalism is happily embraced only by those who fear change because it might be inconvenient to their present comfort. It is grudgingly accepted by those who only prefer scraps of progress when the alternative is no change at all or retrogression.

I, for one, would be ecstatic to discover there is a visible path within US politics that delivers even-handed justice and ensures FDR's Four Freedoms more rapidly than incrementalism. I'm open to anyone who can describe that path to me in such a way that I can see it and help to implement it. Please, someone, rescue me from this damnable creeping pace toward a just society. I'm as impatient for it as the rest of you.

Aimless, sarcasm isn't helping

table otm in the post above

both of these things can be true:

When positive changes do occur (ACA) you just mark them as total failures because they're not ideal changes

and

hungry and desperate people won’t continue to tolerate decline in their living conditions forever. It’ll spill out one way or another.

TF was sarcastic about Aimless's post?

I think incrementalism vs. radical change is largely an illusion, things happen slowly and then quickly without an immediately obvious cause in many cases. I'd love to see capitalism have a Berlin Wall moment but who knows when/how that will come, in the meantime I will continue to work for "pragmatic anarchism" as sarahell memorably put it

OL I really don't have to parse that post do I?

Please, someone, rescue me from this damnable creeping pace

this is his usual snide, superior centrist garbage FYI

I think incrementalism vs. radical change is largely an illusion, things happen slowly and then quickly without an immediately obvious cause in many cases

I believe a long-dead Russian guy might have said something like this once

xp to sleeve. So, do you not find this creeping pace to be damnable? Do you not ardently wish that a way could be found to speed it up? How the living FUCK is that thought "snide, superior centrist garbage"? Get out of my face, asshole.

I took Aimless' post as sincere.

And you can take the subsequent one as sincere, too.

If there's a shtick to Aimless, it's being very earnest

I'd love to see capitalism have a Berlin Wall moment

Capitalism works very well for other countries, thank you.

I took the post in question as sincere, Aimless, fwiw

Even where capitalism hasn’t consigned 20% of the populace to permanent misery, it’s boiling the seas. Depends on your definition of working.

imo milo’s point is that despite some good things happening, bad things also happened and those overwhelmingly dominate and therefore people who have lived through the last 30 years haven’t seen a net improvement in their lives; some people now make 15$ an hour or are now insured under medicaid, but they also lost their life savings in 2008

it’s an important point and worthwhile distinction to keep in mind. is policy (and other sources of increases in well being) outpacing the other countervailing forces making people’s lives worse?

in terms of post-tax income, i think the answer is yes. in fact, most people’s lives have improved. however, it’s very underwhelming for the bottom half of the income distribution. if you look at the distribution of pre-tax income 1980-2014, it declined by 25% for those in the bottom 20% of the income distribution. however, post-tax, it increases by 4%. so policy is outpacing the headwinds, but just barely. compare this to the previous period 1946-80, where income for this group doubled. for the next 30 percent, those in between the 20 and 50th percentile, income increased by 7% pre-tax and 26% post tax.

btw these numbers come from piketty saez and zucman distributional national accounts

I follow AOC on twitter, AMA

― jaymc, Monday, November 9, 2020 11:05 AM (one hour ago)

I follow her on Twitter too!

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, November 9, 2020 11:08 AM (one hour ago)

story checks out:

AOC is cool and smart

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, April 17, 2020 1:21 AM (six months ago)

re: post-tax income, how does that correlate with costs of living?

Between 2010 and 2016, my rent for a below average 1 bedroom in a flyover state city increased by a bit more than 50% from $600 to $950 (and presumably has kept climbing, I lucked into renting a house that's been stable), after being pretty steady from 2000-10. When I enrolled in college in 2000 vs. enrolled in 2010, tuition had roughly tripled IIRC.

tuition & fees*

And in populous cities, the sorts of numbers you're citing are even more wild.

i don’t have a citation off the top of my head; ill look into it and get back to you with some numbers. that’s the best data in the world for national stuff but it’s not available at any subnational levels yet. they use gdp deflators in that paper so rent is accounted for relative to its share of gdp

one reason why rent likely won’t overturn those results is incomes in expensive cities rose far more than for the country as a whole. many of the poorest people in the country, those who have *really* been left behind, live in places like the rust belt where rent is low but incomes decreased by even more

this is interesting discussion. i don't have anything but more personal anecdata - seeing the same massive increases in rent etc, way outpacing increases in wages. i just assume it's the same everywhere, which it sounds like it .. basically is?

i also really feel like i see a lot more people out there living out of their cars etc. than i did four years ago. i'm in a mountain west city.

i feel like it would be a good idea to tax rich people more and use that to give poor people more money.

Social housing is something that needs to gain more traction, even within the progressives, I see it as an emergency on par with health-care.

otm

(also feel compelled to say I'm not disaffected, I do believe in change, just generally not via the Democratic Party)

Americans spend far less on clothing and housing than in the past, but more on housing and healthcare. I see health insurance companies as an unnecessary middleman, but they are responding to prices set by pharma and hospital/doctor companies/orgs.

Americans spend far less on ... housing than in the past, but more on housing...

You may want to correct that.

probably meant clothing and food?

Yes meant clothing and food

many xps but thanks for that Jemison post sleeve; they're so OTM partic

Bitch, no, everybody loves salt, some of us just moderate.

Put some fucking Republicans in jail.

And totally fair point on not seeing Dem as a entity to deliver needed change. I don't think anyone here is too thrilled about 2 party system.

Very worthwhile thread that fits well alongside her NYT article:

The comments @aoc is making about Democratic ground-game weakness are being dismissed. I have seen, up close, exactly what she is talking about.

— Richard Cooke (@rgcooke) November 9, 2020

holy fuck at

More senior staff (when people knew who they were) were AWOL, not on the trail but at home or on leave. I kept being told a particular individual "knew everything"; when I finally found him (it took several days), he was a backpacker volunteer who had been living in Spain.

— Richard Cooke (@rgcooke) November 9, 2020

The backpacker is Morgan, correct? Nice guy. I'm from the UK now living in Miami and thought I was losing my mind when trying to understand how the democratic party - and politics in general - worked here. Glad to have my experiences confirmed!

— Phil C (@SunWuTzu) November 9, 2020

Morgan sounds pretty chill tbh

actually, Morgan is his last name

https://images.app.goo.gl/HLyR9VwSRh5ZLmNM7

Expected The Captain

#onethread but that excellent twitterstring by the man from The Monthly probably fits on the Dem Party Direction or main US pol thread

I can confirm Cooke's tweet thread anecdotally. Three Thursdays ago, I drove to what I thought was Daniella Levine Cava's Coral Gables office. It wasn't -- it was an unfurnished office of a state senators. Taken aback, I asked the college-aged volunteer (the only person in the office) for correct directions. It took five minutes of her thumbing through her phone.

I'm a 78-year-old white man who favors radical police reform and hopes you in particular get everything you want from politics and life. But I'm also a veteran editor who knows an unfortunate turn of phrase when he sees one. "Defund the police" does more harm than good. Period. https://t.co/dIwyiUDwX8

— Robert Christgau (@rxgau) November 11, 2020

Gausplaining

He’s so old you can’t even OK Boomer him.

Cool, Silent Generationer

I think the messaging is a reasonable argument to have, I've gone back and forth on it myself. But of course like everything else Xgau's pompous old ass doesn't express opinions but rather Conveys Truths From On High

guys i don't think 'defund the police' is going to win people over. how about this: 'de-milkshake the police'

Glomp the police