10-12-2016, 08:13 AM
(10-11-2016, 03:05 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Um folks, the only way 2016 would be significant is if Trump won. If Hillary wins, it will just be supporting evidence for a critical election (analogous to 1968) in 2008. In the 1968 the dominant party was the Democratic party (having controlled the presidency 78% of the time since 1932; the Senate 89%, and the House 89% for an average value of 83%) yet a Republican was elected who had pioneered a strategy to welcome disaffected Democratic cultural conservatives into the GOP, which had traditionally been the culturally progressive party. Although Nixon in many ways ruled as a moderate and even a liberal on occasion, his electoral innovations helped pave the way for future conservative dominance--as the Democratic coalition began to fray. I believe that had there been no Watergate, Reagan would have been elected president in 1976 and overseen the implementation of the Nixon Revolution. Instead he had to start the revolution and it was left to a Democrat, Bill Clinton, to implement the Reagan Revolution.
The Presidential election will really change things if Donald Trump should be elected while the Republicans hold both Houses of Congress. Gridlock would become lockstep barring a schism within the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton as President and the Republicans holding one or both Houses of Congress would imply either the political gridlock that the American political system had between 2011 and 2015 or the lockstep that the system has known since 2015. Political gridlock in the most dangerous phase of a Crisis practically ensures an inadequate response to the menace of a time, whether an economic downturn or an apocalyptic war. Utter defeat in a war in which about half of America sees an international rival as a demonic enemy and the other sees the rival as a potential liberator. Just think of France in 1940; many of the French saw Hitler as a liberator from cultural trends and religious minorities that they despised.
This is a Crisis Era. We need be reminded that we are headed toward a cliff -- fast -- and we can still change direction or hit the brakes.
Quote:Forty years after 1968 the dominant party was the Republican (having controlled the presidency 70%, the Senate 43%, and the House 30% of the time for an average value of 53%), yet a Democrat was elected. If Clinton wins and the Senate goes Democratic it will begin a 10 year era in which the Dems will have held the presidency for 100% of the time, the Senate 80% of the time, and the House 20%, for an average value of 75% (this is better than the 53% value they had over 1991-2000.)
The Republicans have their vision for a new America -- an economic order in which multitudes suffer for the rapacious, powerful Few and are expected to show consent lest they be damned to hunger and homelessness. It's the inequality of the Gilded Age without the means of self-reliance or the open frontier for the masses, and with a nasty government. America might get a brain drain.
Quote:In other words, if Clinton wins she is just a continuation of a process begun under Obama, not the start of anything of herself. And I think this suits her. By all accounts she is a workhorse. If you think of Clinton as Sisyphus in Camus's Myth of Sisyphus, the presidency will be her rock.
The President is no all-powerful dictator. Congress matters just as much, as we have seen for the (almost) so that there can last six years. Ideally the judiciary doesn't mean that much in people's lives, but just imagine what happens if Donald Trump gets to nominate Supreme Court justices who accept a corporatist view of American life -- that economic power must be represented in the name of prosperity be prosperity. Maybe employers would get the right to control the votes of their employees. But such would result from an abusive Executive branch.
Well, it looks as if Hillary Clinton is now up high single digits or just above 10% a month before the election. A Trump collapse seems underway. Early voting is heavy, and that usually bodes ill for Republicans. So now how go the Senate and the House?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.