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The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy
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braces_for_impact
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Just as bad huh? I don't think so. There's an element of spin to every administration, every political party. People know this. They expect it. Some even keep that foremost in their minds and hold their skepticism even when "their side" is in power. Unfortunately, the GOP of the last 2 decades, along with FOX news, has made "narrative" more important than facts, and without those facts, a proper discussion cannot continue, much less begin. It's too easy and convenient to scream "just as bad" which is all the right can seem to do these days. Hell, they're still trying to get their fill of the Hillary fetish, for the next election! If you cannot see the difference between spin and outright lies. If you cannot see that the right decries "Fake news!" even as they construct and spread more of it - by far than anyone else, then you are part of the problem, despite your protestations.
The tax cut is a perfect example, or even better the mega-omnibus that was recently passed. Even when the right manages to get it's act together and pass something, it's a horrible Frankenstein monster that should have been aborted early. There are large problems with our democracy. Trump isn't a cure or even a bandage, he's euthanasia. While many of his followers claim to wish to watch the great burning, I suspect, like everything else, they are ignorant of what that actually means and will come to regret their decision. I agree that his small vocal base will not waiver. As long as Trump makes with the racism, they will remain loyal to him in lock-step, off the cliff.
No, no. Just because someone has a different viewpoint than you does not mean you are smarter or they are dumber. Smart people voted for Trump, Clinton, Stein, and Johnson. Dumb people voted for Trump, Clinton, Stein, and Johnson. The reasons people vote as they do are as varied as there are people. It is arrogant and snobbish to cast those who differ politically from you as stupid; no doubt, they view you the same way. I give you, Obama voters:
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
Actually, koy barely mentioned Clinton in his post, but you may be carrying over some baggage from previous interactions with him. The fact is that Clinton did win the popular vote by a narrow, but decisive, margin. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Russia did use trolls and bots in an attempt to swing the election to Donald Trump and that Trump used a lot of racist tropes during his campaign. There is plenty of objective evidence out there to support those facts. The fact that koy mentioned those things was not the same thing as saying that Clinton and the entire DNC were awesome.
Emily Lake
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That's a pretty good point. Now if we could only convince the politicians to put forth and pass a bill that makes campaigns publicly funded....
That's where I end up wanting to burn the whole thing down. There are several very simple, straightforward, pragmatic things that could be done to make the situation more palatable and make the government function better - changes to the voting system to eliminate FPTP, getting rid of gerrymandering, rebalancing the population element of House representation, making campaigns publicly funded, limiting the amount of time that can be spent campaigning for election... and many others I'm sure. But to get any of those to happen, they need to go through congress... and our congresscritters are unlikely to approve them because they all benefit from the current system.
Koyaanisqatsi
Veteran Member
Ad hominem.
Seriously? Would you like for me to tell you what your post “seems to essentially be”?
Elixir
Made in America
I think it would be more important to deal with Senate representation, where the 580,000 rednecks who live in Wyoming have as much representation as the 40,000,000 lib'ruls who live in California... THAT is why Trump is able to advance his idiot agenda, appoint car-salesmen to lifelong judicial positions etc.
braces_for_impact
Veteran Member
Where did you see I was calling Trump supporters stupid? I know calling people on the other side of the aisle elite snobs is part of your schtick, but that wasn't what I posted. Perhaps we should add "reading comprehension" along with the other problems I mentioned, like spreading fake news.
Emily Lake
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The Senate doesn't represent the interests of the citizens, it represents the interests of the States. The House of Representatives represents the interests of the citizens... at least, hypothetically.
Ya, neither of those groups actually represent your interests.
coloradoatheist
Veteran Member
Yeah and we're finding out if democracy can really work on the scale of 300+ million people and 50+ state interests. At the time it was only 13 states and our government was never meant to do much more than defense and make sure the states played nice in the sand box.
Jimmy Higgins
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The Senate represents the en masse citizens of a state. Senators are voted for, not appointed anymore.
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Trump supports thought the economy in 2016 was worse than 2008. There isn't a metric out there to support that unbelievably incorrect observation. That is an "opinion" that can only be caused via misinformation.
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Jebus! Will you wake up? Firefly is not coming back...
... I mean Bernie Sanders is not getting elected President. For better or worse (for the worse!) if given an option between Leftist verses Asshole, America is morely likely to elect the asshole. Also, Sanders is very old.
Jimmy Higgins
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Clinton didn't lose because of Sanders. Sanders stayed in because he was winning primaries. Not enough to win the nomination, but enough to finally give the left wing an illusion of a voice (illusion of a sound?). He did drop out, he did back her fully after getting a good deal of his platform into the DNC platform.
Hillary Clinton was hounded by 30 years of anti-Clinton propaganda that finally gave the GOP the mother of all payoffs and by getting burned in the only gamble she has taken politically... going to Georgia and Arizona for the landslide victory. Had she stuck with Virginia and Florida as the most exotic states and campaigned WI, PA, and MI more, she probably would have won. She nominated white bread to be her running mate which had very limited benefits. Also, the FBI really did her no favors, from the fake Clinton Fndn "indictment" story and Comey needing to come out twice about the email investigation due to shady shenanigans from the right.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
No, the House doesn't. By your logic, it actually represents the interests of a myriad of small congressional districts, a great many of which are gerrymandered to represent Republican interests.
Elixir
Made in America
...and the population was relatively evenly distributed between the "colonies" at the time, at least compared to Wyo vs CA.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
Historically, Hamilton worried that truly democratic elections could easily result in the uneducated, poorly-informed masses voting a demagogue or incompetent into office. So he came up with the idea of elite "electors" as representatives appointed by the people to make a more rational decision. And representative state governments were empowered to install senators so that, again, there would be a buffer between uninformed voters and their senators. Over time, the system evolved to take the decision away from electors. Most states automatically assign all of their electoral votes to the candidate whose political party dominates in a statewide election, even when the candidate fails to win an outright majority. Ironically, the electoral college system ended up choosing the incompetent demagogue over experience and competence in 2016. And states now routinely elect senators by popular election rather than appointments by state officials. Although nothing in the Constitution suggested that the Senate should have filibusters or that political parties should be able to game the system, those are aspects of our political reality today.
My point is that it is inaccurate to think that the modern US system works in the way it was originally envisioned. What we have is a mutated version of that vision, and it produces abominations like the makeup of the current federal government in Washington.
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coloradoatheist
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But the compromise they came up with the division of government was to make she concetrated areas didn't completely overrule less ones. They never believed in a full democracy.
bilby
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'Full democracy' is, like all purely ideological systems of government, shit.
The assumption that 'more democracy' is synonymous with 'a nicer place to live' has generally been true throughout history; but only because democracy to any degree was rare.
There are lots of things that should be decided by expert bodies, or even by individual experts, where replacing that decision making process with democracy leads to bad outcomes. The election of judges, district attorneys, and other specialist roles in government, is one such instance.
Democracy is what you do when all other options are even worse than asking idiots their opinions, and taking the average. Doing it any more than is necessary to avoid dictatorship is generally a poor idea.
But many people in the west (and particularly in the USA) seem to take the very simplistic view that if a little democracy is good, more must be better. Indeed that assumption is so common and widespread that it's very rare to see it questioned at all. Usually it is just assumed that more democracy is automatically a good and desirable end, and that the only discussion should be on the details of how to achieve it.
That the founders of the US strongly felt otherwise is clear. It's a shame that people today seem less inclined to think long and hard about just how widely it is wise to apply democratic ideals.
Elixir
Made in America
Seems to me that you're advocating for some kind of hybrid democracy/aristocracy, and I think that's roughly what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Problem is that today, the less populated states are generally full of uneducated redneck racists (the FF didn't worry about racism, since everyone knew at the time, that blacks were not human), not intellectually and educationally privileged "aristocrats" as was the case when the Union was founded.
Koyaanisqatsi
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I would argue differently. Without Sanders’ zombie campaign, there would have been more than enough time, resources and focus to address the actual enemy and most of what led to Clinton not being President. Two primary factors—racism and sexism among white Democrats—would have still been an issue difficult to surmount, but a unified party would have had an additional six months to address them in stark relief against Trump.
There would have been no bitterly divisive civil war that both the Trump camp and the Russians fostered, manipulated and benefitted from; no false equivalancy nonsense; no “Hillary didn’t have a message” bullshit (since there would have been no slightly left of Hillary opponent pulling the Price is Right strategy); and, perhaps most important of all, no “Comey effect” as the reason it was arguably the single largest impactful event on her taking the Oval was due to the unusually large percentage of undecideds voting last minute. More than enough, in fact, to have single-handedly caused the minuscule percentage shift in PA, MI and WI that cost her the Oval.
Then he should have got out of the race. Winning the nomination is the only purpose of the primaries. I’ll repeat that. Winning the nomination is the ONLY purpose of the primaries.
Nonsense. Sanders only “voice” was promising unicorns out of one side of his mouth while stating categorically out of the other side that he knew it wasn’t possible for him to deliver any unicorns. It was, at best, the same old fringe radical nonsense that is in every Democratic primary, only before social media—which only promotes negativity effectively—no one ever pays it any attention except the irrelevant radical fringe.
Both parties have radical fringes. In this election, it was those fringes that were shifted to Center stage due exclusively to the weaponization of the new mainstream media source (i.e., social media), which had never before been utilized in this manner. Obama’s campaign was the first modern day campaign in this regard, but the medium was in its genesis. It wasn’t until Putin, in fact, realized its potential in Russia that he hit upon its use in America. And the irony is, he got the theory from us; he just put into practice.
He most certainly did not. He stayed all the way to the bitter end, escalating his attacks, while being a knowing puppet of the Russians. But more importantly, he stayed knowing that he never—at any point past March—could have won. It served no purpose other than his overinflated ego. There never was a “revolution.” That was a completely fabricated political narrative that preyed upon a liberal messiah ideal that in turn only appealed to an otherwise insignificant minority of primarily young college-educated kids just awakening into the body politic. Political virgins, if you will, who were easily swayed by fantasy rhetoric that allowed them to ignore the fact that Sanders’ policies—at least those that even he would admit had any hope of being implemented—were essentially the same as Hillary’s, only just slightly to her left.
Hence the “Price is Right” strategy. Hillary wanted a $12 min wage, so Bernie said $15. Thank kind of thing. By bidding a dollar more than whatever Hillary argued for, Sanders could positing himself in the center, but still take advantage of the rhetoric of pretending to be the more “progressive” candidate and the irony is that it wasn’t Hillary that moved farther right; it was Sanders who has moved farther and farther right his whole career, culminating in where he stands now; to the right of Hillary advocating that the Democratic Party abandon its anti-abortion and minority focus and instead go after white working class.
Way too little too late and definitely not “fully.” He skated a fine line between all-in with a wink and a nod to say he’s really not all-in.
By “good deal” you mean slight modifications to what was already the DNC platform.
A commonly asserted hindsight trope that is disproved by simple logic and the available information at the time.
But also no detriments, which is what she was going for more than anything else.
Agreed, but again, had Sanders bailed when he should have—when it was clearly mathematically impossible for him to win—then the impact of those events would have been severely negated, because it was the late voting undecideds that were the most impacted by such ploys. And the only reason they would be undecided that late in the game would have had to have been due to the lasting damage done during the primary civil war, that not only wasted time, resources and focus but also had Democrats fighting Democrats and Democrats fostering the same false equivalency lies insisting—VERY LOUDLY AND ANGRILY—to their friends and family all of the lies the GOP manufactured and the Russians pushed.
You had both barrels of the shotgun firing at Clinton for months leading up to the general—and then a repeat of everything the Russians/Sanders camp had been attacking her with (and more, of course as a result of the responses to what they had attacked her with) in the general—and one side of that barrel was being gleefully fired by Democrats.
Again, what happened was the normally and rightfully dismissed radical left suddenly being moved center stage and given the loudest megaphone. After all the smoke cleared in the primaries, Sanders only managed to move about 5% of registered Democrats. That’s it. That’s what it was all along. But due to the new medium, that 5% mole hill became a mountain.