Matt Taibbi

feel like the lesson the democratic party hasn't learnt yet is how to get all yr constituents to go out to town halls over the summer and threaten to primary / vote out their congressmen if they refuse to pass the legislation that they want, or how to get them to come out in midterms to show that there's teeth behind that threat.

taibbi's point seems to be smugness above inhibits the rank and file. how to "ameliorate" that is a burning question

now, let's watch as morbs continues to condemn the lot of us as sniveling hillarybots.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, June 10, 2016 5:46 PM (17 minutes ago)

you know, you could do better not to bait him with every other post of yours

maybe he could, maybe he couldn't. hard to say.

yeah, i should just ignore it. it's hard when every third post in these political threads is him baiting the lot of us.

i shouldn't 'speak' for him but i think he's calling bullshit on self-styled enlightened egalitarians, not baiting people for the hell of it. sorry dr-m if i am misrepresenting you

i'm not speaking, so go ahead.

OTMx1000:

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

yep

no morbs but... they appoint Wall Street criminals to cabinet posts.. so not gonna happen

(sorry morbs)

no, because those interests bankroll the really fuckin' weird tv ads that speak to identity politics that motivate a fair number of voters

If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world

It's probably apocryphal, but there is a 'quote' out there along these lines: "I don't care who votes, so long as I choose the candidates." -- Boss Tweed --

The quote may be phony as a $3 bill, but the sentiment is correct enough and the rich and powerful endorse it through their actions in every election.

drag out the evil lesserism

The Democratic Party leaders have trained their followers to perceive everything in terms of one single end-game equation: If you don't support us, you're supporting Bush/Rove/Cheney/Palin/Insert Evil Republican Here.

That the monster of the moment, Donald Trump, is a lot more monstrous than usual will likely make this argument an even bigger part of the Democratic Party platform going forward....

Dissenting voices like this year's version of Nader, Bernie Sanders, are inevitably pitched as quixotic egotists who don't have the guts to do what it takes to win. They're described as just out for 15 minutes of fame, and maybe a few plaudits from teenagers and hippies who'll gush over their far-out idealism.

But that characterization isn't accurate. The primary difference between the Nader/Sanders platform and the Gore/Clinton platform isn't rooted in ideology at all, but money.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ralph-nader-bernie-sanders-lesser-evilism-20160620

It's a sound formula for making ballot-box decisions, but the people who push it never seem content to just use it to win elections. They're continually trying to make an ethical argument out of it, to prove people who defy The Equation are, whether they know it or not, morally wrong and in league with the other side. Beltway Democrats seem increasingly to believe that all people who fall within a certain broad range of liberal-ish beliefs owe their votes and their loyalty to the Democratic Party. That's why, as a socially liberal person who probably likes trees and wouldn't want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, Nader's decision to take votes from the party-blessed candidate Gore is viewed not as dissent, but as a kind of treason.

insane the amount of strawmanning here. no one is immoral or evil for voting for nader / jill stein. they're just dumb and make poor strategic decisions. and no one thinks they're treasonous. just dumb.

Once you get to the point where there is a general election for president your options for effective action for positive change have narrowed to whoever is on the ballot and has enough organization and support to win. Voting for someone who has no chance to win will not be an effective action for positive change.

If progressives are serious about changing the system, they must begin by organizing, raising money, identifying a candidate and what their winning issues are long before the first primary is held. It's pretty late in the day to do anything more than vote for a candidate who is on the ballot, preferably one who can win.

i don't disagree

and i stopped believing the Dems can be "changed from within" a long time ago

reminder from that great recent lemeiux post:

It is also worth noting that this is not an ideological dispute; it is not about FAILING TO RECOGNIZE THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE TO YOUR LEFT. Noam Chomsky believes that swing-state voters should support the leftmost viable candidate in general elections; Tom Friedman, conversely, shares Freddie’s view that there really needs to be a third-party candidate that agrees with him in every detail because coalition-building should be obsolete for today’s consumer.

has nothing to do w/ evil, or dissent, or the left. it has to do w/ childish atomistic consumerism replacing pragmatism. "lesser evilism" is the telling phrase. the so-called democratic liberals don't use the idiom when making their argument bc they aren't making an argument based in morality. it's the priority of a stunted morality that sees voting as an expression of their personal purity and views compromise as somehow contaminating said purity. don't vote for the lesser evil. vote for the option that best fits your issues. if one candidate fits 20% and the other fits 10%, vote for the 20% one. if both fit 0% (like let's say you're a one issue capitalism voter and the options this year are fascism and communism, or more practically if you're a one issue hardcore anti-imperialism voter and your options are interventionism and belligerence, and neither seem superior to the other) then don't vote. no one is asking anyone to vote for a candidate who they don't agree with on any issue. they're just saying that if you agree with one politician more than another, the only intelligent decision is to vote for the one you agree with more. the whole purity in politics thing is bizarre.

re treason, Taibbi is talking about the snotty, punchable attitude of DLC types, funny i can't think of an example just now.

taibbi feels bad about himself and he's projecting all kinds of /attitudes/ to DLC types that aren't being made. no one said anyone /owes/ Hillary their votes. what they said was that only stupid people don't vote for the best of the two candidates. it's the left-wing political fluoride hysterics (and their related versions throughout the political spectrum including tom friedman self-obsessed voters) who believe anyone is making a case about treason or evil or whatever. he admits himself that voting for the better candidate is a good way to make a decision at the ballot box. he can't quite bring himself to admit that it's the only logical way to make a decision but even he realizes that he's complaining about the demons in his head and not actually people.

MaxSpeak had a pretty great run on LGM front page the other day. One of about eight posts of his - http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/confessions-of-a-bernie-bro

Some on the left seem to make it their mission to invite the contempt of others. I’m always reminded of an appearance by the late Harvey Pekar on David Letterman’s show, decades ago. Pekar’s message could be boiled down to, I’m the left, and you all suck. Ah, politics. Winning friends and influencing people! His hatred was pure! Some on the left fall prey to this, if only occasionally.

lots of good responses in the comments imo - he does come off as smug and repetitive (like someone points out - it's as if he thinks no one has heard the case for bernie yet, maybe bc he still can't believe that someone heard the case and didn't sign on), but i thought this was a gracious way to end the run:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/kumbaya

Absolutely. Also I can't imagine how he wrote all of those in one day but for all I know he did, which is pretty amazing.

he said somewhere in the comments that he started prepping them a week ago

someone else who doesn't understand Harvey Pekar

anyway, Debs was right, I do not want what i do not want (Or was that Morrissey?)

the weird thing about you isn't that you don't have a strong grasp of how our political system works (most americans don't) but that you think anyone cares to hear yr personal preference stated over and over again. you'd make a good fit on the nyt op-ed pages next to maureen dowd.

btw every winning presidential candidate has been elected mostly by stupid people, it's just how the math works

i don't give a flying fucking shit what anyone cares to hear

it's a messageboard, your time can be wasted any which way

incrementalism is good imo

'things are bad, only swift and wide-sweeping changes can make them better' seems like some kind of logical fallacy

but perhaps less so when humanity is going to drown/starve very soon

morbs mordy unity ticket

maybe i should have said 'underrated' instead of good, it depends on context

if Hillary wins and gets public option into ACA that would be 'incremental' but better than trying and failing to get single-payer during obama's first term would have been

So, there's this:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-reaction-to-brexit-is-the-reason-brexit-happened-20160627

can't wait for the Neoliberal Hot Takes

Neoliberal Hot Take:

Democracy in the US hit a roadblock when one of the two main political parties decided it was no longer a good idea to pass legislation

In "How American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:

"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around."

Rauch's audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan's clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine ("Democracies end when they are too democratic"), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-response-to-trump-another-dangerous-movement-appears-20160630

Yeah I feel like with that one Taibbi is back in good form.

one of the candidates would nominate supreme court judges that would overturn citizen's united. the other candidate would nominate supreme court judges that would not. but i'm supposed to believe that the supporters of the latter candidate are angry bc there's too much money in politics? it strains credulity.

People are angry because they feel helpless and disenfranchised. Are you trying not to understand this?

maybe if they didn't vote for republicans over and over and over they wouldn't be so helpless and disenfranchised. you don't get to set your house on fire and then complain that it's burning. esp if you won't let the firefighters put it out.

Sorry for the snark. It just seems like there is this impulse to paint everyone who doesn't support Hillary in this race as a racist idiot. I'm no USA-apologist (and I'm going to vote for stupid Hillary), but I don't think that 45% of the country are racist idiots. People feel fed up with feeling fucked-over, and they are trying to find anyone who they think will bust shit up.

I'd like to think that if dems were in charge of the presidency and congress, things would get better, but I can also envision a world where they just keep the politics of fear thing going, and continue spending half their time dialing up their rich donors and begging for money.

except that we know that while dems are in power things do get better bc they have a track record we can look at. and when the republicans are in charge regulations are loosened, unions are cracked down on, welfare is cut, etc. clinton's supreme court nominees voted against citizens united, as did obama's. reagan's, gwb's, and ghwb's voted for it. this isn't a big secret.

what taibbi is saying is that you can argue against the positions held by voters, saying they are in error, irrational or based in ignorance, but it is another thing altogether to argue that because you think other voters are irrational, we should take away their vote or render their votes meaningless. This is bad because a society which chooses that direction must simultaneously deal with enforcing its will upon an unwilling and disenfranchised population, which quickly devolves in taking political prisoners and creating a violent despotism.

right, that part i agree w/ - democracy is a v important ideology that i support. i'm just saying that his view of the electorate - when he gets to the question of 'why' - is not based in reality.

it's cut from the same cloth as bernie claiming that the republicans have a natural constituency of 15% of the electorate. the false consciousness arguments are not compelling from the get-go but especially when they've had decades and decades to know what the republicans are about. the republicans not only don't make a secret of it - they campaign on these things. they campaign on cutting government programs and drowning the government in a bath tub and campaign on starting new wars and removing regulations on industries. their voters aren't confused. they're republicans themselves and this is what they want.

Dems were happy to loosen banking regulations, and Clinton presided over the destruction of welfare.

If the dems weren't basically offering a lite version of the same policies, maybe they would be more successful.

they weren't "happy." after having no power in washington for decades the democrats finally won the WH w/ a compromising centrist who was forced to deal w/ a gingrich congress whose republican revolution was predicated primarily on the argument that clinton was not a New Democrat (aka the moderate he campaigned as) but a "tax and spend" liberal. and even still it was clinton's supreme court choices who voted against citizens united. dem policies are different enough that republicans have painted obama and clinton as secret muslims + marxists.

i don't know why you think they'd be more successful offering an even more explicitly left-wing vision of government when it is precisely their left-wingness that makes them unpalatable to a large percentage of the electorate. i get that this is a version of the tea party argument that the dems just haven't run a sufficiently left-wing pol yet but i don't think this is true to reality.