Election 2020

[pbrower2a]

(11-13-2020, 09:21 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(11-13-2020, 12:51 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-11-2020, 10:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(11-11-2020, 09:14 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Who cares? Biden won. So, what's so great about Bumbling Biden? I didn't see anything great about Biden. So, what do you know about Biden? Was Biden ever great? Well, I have to say is he better be great because that's what the Democrats are going to keep the country and fulfill all of its obligations or find themselves being depleted and directly competing with America itself. We're going to win dude because nature always wins.

They said much the same of the governor of New York, FDR.  The reason FDR got elected in as decisive an election as Biden was because their predecessors went with the old values and did not address the primary problem the culture was facing.  Not a good idea in a crisis.  Yet, Hoover thought he shouldn’t try to regulate the economy or find jobs, and Trump aligned against solving the bug and racist violent policing.  For that matter, Buchanan was all in favor of slavery.

I figure that the time makes the man, not the other way around.  In a crisis the old values fail and are dumped on, but that cannot happen until they and the new values have been debated and a bad president who tries to implement the old values after their time is passing, and shows their weakness and failure.  At that point the grey champion steps in and oversees the new values.  He later gets the credit associated, perhaps not fully deserved.

I would not have picked Biden either, but right now he is set up in a good place.

Joe Biden will at the least recover some of the social virtues of the recent past, virtues that Donald Trump brushed off. Maybe he gets a chance to start anew what Obama started and take it further into real progress for more Americans. 

He has said that he wants to earn the trust of people who did not vote for him, and that will take not doing something that Donald Trump did to us: Trump stuck it to those who voted against him. To be sure there are toxic people, typically extremists, who demand what a sane leadership can never offer. Trump acted as if the fascistic Alt Right was a constituency worth cultivating. Such people are nothing but trouble. If a politician wants to cultivate people as a new part of the base, then seeking the votes of people whom the Other Side has taken for granted for decades but don't offend one's moral values is a good idea. That is how Dwight Eisenhower won over the Mormons. Don't fool yourself; we Democrats would love to have them on our side in partisan politics again. The Alt Right? Marxist-Leninists? Neo-Nazis? The Klan? Pedophilia advocates? They can get lost.

It's hard to see what the Republican Party has to offer unless it can sell out the ideology of Donald Trump. There will be a need for a Loyal Opposition.

What social virtues are you talking about? How is he going to earn the trust of the Trump supporters? Is he going to take on China? Is he going to put America First and piss off half his donors? The dude is a sell out you know and if you didn't know that then you heard it from me first.

For one thing, the Constitution is far more important than the will of the President. 

Maybe you neglect something. Utah was a solid D state during the New Deal Era. As late as 1948 it was more Democratic than the US as a whole, boing nearly 54-45 for Harry Truman in the 1948 Presidential election.  Until then it went D except in R landslides. Apparently R pols nationwide were slow to allow statehood to Utah. After 50 years that was no longer relevant, and Eisenhower found that he could appeal to the Mormon hierarchy in Utah to win it over. Oh, did he win it over! Only in the 1964 disaster of Barry Goldwater has it since voted for a Democratic nominee for President. 

I may not like Mormon theology, but Mormons aren't bad people. The social order that they have established in Utah is a social order that closely imitates liberal norms and gets good results. That Mormons do not drink or smoke keeps a big chunk of the government from being devoured in the treatment of smoking-related and alcohol-related pathologies  that prove expensive and difficult (if not futile) to treat. So Utah does fairly well at social welfare -- like a typical Blue state.  

I'm a Democrat. I would love to have Mormons on my political side. They wouldn't be trouble. I contrast them to some loathsome people that Donald Trump cultivated as if they could make a difference in the election: neo-Nazis. I hate them. They are a disgrace to a big part of my ancestry (German -- and German-Americans think of Nazis about like most Italian-Americans think of the Mafia). If I had to choose between being a Nazi and a Jew I would be a Jew, for such would cause me no fewer compromises of my ethical and cultural values. (In case you think that German-American families in rural  America listen to much Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt,  Schubert, Schumann, Bruckner, and Brahms, then you are wrong. It's mostly country music for adults and a surprising amount of rap (which I would not dignify with the description "music") among youth. Yuck!   

But back to the point: some people really are toxic in politics. Pedophile advocates are in that category. Do you think we liberals want them near us? Support for people that scummy would lose us far more votes than such would get us. If you are a conservative, then you would be wise to treat neo-Nazis who advocate at the most charitable a sort of Apartheid but suggest to me through their symbols and rhetoric the will to do mass murder, perhaps with some forced labor to wear people down first. 

Need I remind you that Ronald Reagan, he of undeniable conservative credentials, expressed unqualified disdain for Klansmen and neo-Nazis while President when those creeps emerged from the gutter? We have had mass killings, and Trump never took on the core beliefs that underpin neo-Nazi ideology. Nazis killed, and so have neo-Nazis.