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With the election of Donald Trump, the Republican Party is now functioning in Crisis mode. The "small government which does nothing" Republicans have been pushed aside to make way for the crisis turning Republicans, those who want to use the power of government to do big things, to shape society and the world and solve what they see as America's problems.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is still entirely committed to its former Unraveling era politics. The 60s counterculture hippies' goal of smashing the establishment became the unraveling policies designed to eradicate all traces of the former 50s society. Whites must be disempowered to make way for minority races, men to make way for women, christianity to make way for other religions and beliefs. All of this is entirely unworkable in a Crisis, and can never be carried forward into the next High.
Democrats are now on track to be completely ignored for the the rest of the crisis and possibly much longer, as Republican control of the country becomes as much a fixture of society as Democractic control was during and beyond the last crisis.
The election of 1932 left the Democrats in control of the presidency and both houses of congress, and they kept it all until the crisis was over. More than that, other than two brief 2 year periods, democrats controlled both houses of congress until 1980, long long after the crisis was over. The democratic party of the 1930s pushed the New Deal policies which were intended to bring the country out of the great depression, while the republican party's goal was to stop the democrats from doing that.
Today, Donald Trump plans to "make America great again". He's going to secure our borders, build a 2000 mile wall, stand for law and order by possibly kicking out millions of illegal immigrants, reorder the world by forging new alliances and breaking old ones, renegotiate all our trade agreements, bring manufacturing back to this country, and no doubt much more. The democratic party's goal is to stop him from doing all of that, and the democrats' constant cries of "nazi" and "racist" are falling on deaf ears, much as the cries of "socialist" and "communist" were ignored by Americans suffering through the Great Depression.
Furthermore, Democrats are opposing all of this in entirely the wrong way, in ways which worked during the unraveling but which are doomed to failure today. Now is the time to bring people together, to focus on our commonalities, on what unifies us, but Democrats are still stuck in the politics of raising up minorities. The great protest marches which were organized to oppose Donald Trump becoming president? They were designed as a women's march, instead of as a people's march. Exactly the opposite of what should have been done.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/platforms.php Here is a link to the Republican and Democratic party platforms since 1840. The Democratic Party Platform of 2016 contains the term "LGBT" 19 times, "racial" 14 times, "people of color" 6 times, "black" 5 times, "African American" 6 times, "latino" 5 times, "minority" 7 times, "transgender" 5 times, "gender" 12 times. The term "white" appears 4 times, each occasion a complaint about some unfair advantage.
It should be no surprise that most of these terms don't appear at all in the Republican party platform. This is an Unraveling era document, a long list of oppressed minorities who must be raised up and taken care of. Look for any of this in the Democratic party platforms of the 1930s, you won't find it. (By 1940, both party platforms contain a brief and equal length paragraph opposing "Negro" discrimination)
What should the Democratic party be focusing on? An American liberal party in a crisis or a high should be paying attention to things that affect the average worker in this country. Replacing the mess of a way we manage and pay for health care in this country with some sort of tax supported single payer system, so that businesses and individuals are free from having to pay for or worry about medical expenses. The $15 per hour minimum wage is an excellent idea, although it needs to be sold as something which will raise the wages of a wide range of working Americans. If someone making $8 per hour is raised to $15, then someone making $15 today ought to be making $25 per hour. The general idea is that the U.S. is a wealthy, prosperous country, and this wealth need not all be concentrated to the top, leaving a few billionaires and millions of working people unable to afford a car or a doctor.
During an unraveling, when government is impotent and everyone, including billionaires and corporations, is supposed to be free to do what they want, the above seems impossible. The time has come where government can do things, where the vast imbalance in the allocation of wealth in this country can be changed. But Democrats will change nothing by wearing pink vagina hats and screaming "racist" at everyone politically right of center.
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02-04-2017, 11:02 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-04-2017, 11:03 AM by David Horn.)
I hate to admit it but there is a lot of truth in this first post. You don't start a movement, or continue one for that matter, by dividing your coalition. Dems need to learn that, and quick!
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(02-04-2017, 11:02 AM)David Horn Wrote: I hate to admit it but there is a lot of truth in this first post. You don't start a movement, or continue one for that matter, by dividing your coalition. Dems need to learn that, and quick!
Come on in, Dave, the water's fine! 
I am largely in agreement with this post, but it remains to be seen whether Trump et al will be able to consolidate the enormous victory they won in 2016. It's early days, yet.
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Yes, a thoughtful first post, though I would remind everyone how quickly the political pendulum can swing. The Republicans were similarly demoralized after Obama's election in 2008 when he had a virtual supermajority in Congress to back his agenda.
Here is an excerpt from the transcript of the recent two-part Frontline series on PBS, "The Divided States of America."
NARRATOR: As the president celebrated, he had no idea that across town, new battle lines were being drawn. A group of Republicans quietly gathered to develop plans for taking on the new president.
ROBERT DRAPER, The New York Times Magazine: A meeting, a dinner, took place in a famous steakhouse in downtown Washington, with Newt Gingrich as sort of the emcee, as it were.
Rep. NEWT GINGRICH (R-GA), Fmr. Speaker of the House: The thing I found disturbing this week was the─
NARRATOR: At the gathering of top GOP luminaries─ conservative congressmen Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, Senate power brokers Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn and event organizer Frank Luntz.
FRANK LUNTZ, Republican Pollster: The room was filled. It was a who’s who of ranking members who had at one point been committee chairmen, or in the majority, who now wondered out loud whether they were in the permanent minority.
ROBERT DRAPER: Many of them had attended Obama’s inauguration. They had seen that breath-taking spectacle of a million-and-a-half people on the Mall, and it felt like a wholesale repudiation of the Republican Party.
FRANK LUNTZ: They walked into that dining room as depressed as I’ve seen any elected members of Congress. They lost every Senate seat they could lose. They lost all these House seats. The numbers were so great that they thought that they weren’t coming back again, not for an election or two, but maybe a generation or two.
NARRATOR: They came and went. But as the night wore on, those who stayed began to talk about the future.
FRANK LUNTZ: Three hours, some of the brightest minds in the Republican Party debated how to be relevant.
NEWT GINGRICH: The point I made was that we had to be prepared, in the tradition of Wooden at UCLA, to run a full-court press. And we had to see how Obama behaved and to offer an alternative to what he wanted to do.
NARRATOR: The Republicans agreed on a tough new strategy, to block the president, fight his agenda.
NEWT GINGRICH: And he could be defeated partly by his own ideology and by his own behaviors.
FRANK LUNTZ: The feeling was that if that group could cooperate and if that group could lead, that the wilderness might not be a generation away.
NEWT GINGRICH: By the end of the evening, you began to reorient and realize, “Wait a second. You got Nancy Pelosi as an opponent. You got─ you know, you have a clear choice of ideologies. We have a tremendous amount of hard work to do, but it’s doable.”
ROBERT DRAPER: They all talked about this, and they began to get more and more optimistic, and they left feeling practically exuberant.
I would agree that, if the Democrats don't pick themselves off the mat and unite around an economic vision for working families, they best resign themselves to a long, dark [4T] winter.
By the way, when Trump has promised to "make America great again," can anyone tell me if he ever mentioned the "good ol' days" to which he was referring? The Eisenhower 50s? The Reagan 80s? I ask because the answer--if there is one--may tie in to a new book that's out now.
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Yes, it remains to be seen whether the Republicans can consolidate their victory and if the Dems can formulate an effective response.
I also think this whole "What decade is he trying to take us back to thing" reflects liberal prejudices about what alternatives to the status-quo mean more than they reflect any real desire on the part of conservatives to recreate any particular year.
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The first post is total nonsense from top to bottom. Trump is never going to enact single-payer or raise the minimum wage. What delusional crap! The Trump admin is a fascist corporate takeover. Any Trumpian rhetoric to the contrary was clever during the campaign, but it was all a ruse to get white working class support. The Trump admin has not the slightest intention of doing anything for workers.
The Democrats cannot win without the 60s coalition of people or color, women and gays. Republican strategy is to divide and conquer, so that whites blame their fellow victims of corporate malfeasance and power-grabbing, instead of the real cause. It worked in 2016, by 77,700 votes only. It can be reversed, unless Trump is allowed to rig the system so thoroughly that democracy is effectively killed.
Only a continuing movement like we saw in the women's marches and at airports against visa and refugee bans will revitalize the Democrats. It must be broad-based and emphasize working class issues, no doubt. But they can't ditch their allies in the 60s movements. They must debunk the divide and conquer strategy instead. The 99% are all in the same boat; we need to unite and change the captains. Are we the people ruling this country, or only the wealthy and powerful who want to take away health insurance and keep wages low? It's your choice, folks.
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(02-04-2017, 02:37 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The first post is total nonsense from top to bottom. Trump is never going to enact single-payer or raise the minimum wage. What delusional crap! The Trump admin is a fascist corporate takeover. Any Trumpian rhetoric to the contrary was clever during the campaign, but it was all a ruse to get white working class support. The Trump admin has not the slightest intention of doing anything for workers.
The Democrats cannot win without the 60s coalition of people or color, women and gays. Republican strategy is to divide and conquer, so that whites blame their fellow victims of corporate malfeasance and power-grabbing, instead of the real cause. It worked in 2016, by 77,700 votes only. It can be reversed, unless Trump is allowed to rig the system so thoroughly that democracy is effectively killed.
Only a continuing movement like we saw in the women's marches and at airports against visa and refugee bans will revitalize the Democrats. It must be broad-based and emphasize working class issues, no doubt. But they can't ditch their allies in the 60s movements. They must debunk the divide and conquer strategy instead. The 99% are all in the same boat; we need to unite and change the captains. Are we the people ruling this country, or only the wealthy and powerful who want to take away health insurance and keep wages low? It's your choice, folks.
Learn how to read, Eric. It's a really useful skill, not least when participating on an online forum.
From the original post:
Quote:What should the Democratic party be focusing on? An American liberal party in a crisis or a high should be paying attention to things that affect the average worker in this country. Replacing the mess of a way we manage and pay for health care in this country with some sort of tax supported single payer system, so that businesses and individuals are free from having to pay for or worry about medical expenses. The $15 per hour minimum wage is an excellent idea, although it needs to be sold as something which will raise the wages of a wide range of working Americans. If someone making $8 per hour is raised to $15, then someone making $15 today ought to be making $25 per hour. The general idea is that the U.S. is a wealthy, prosperous country, and this wealth need not all be concentrated to the top, leaving a few billionaires and millions of working people unable to afford a car or a doctor.
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(02-04-2017, 01:19 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: By the way, when Trump has promised to "make America great again," can anyone tell me if he ever mentioned the "good ol' days" to which he was referring? The Eisenhower 50s? The Reagan 80s? I ask because the answer--if there is one--may tie in to a new book that's out now.
Same old good ol' days. Not so good for women, gays, people of color. Drump may promise the better times for white workers from the 30s through the 70s, but his policies are Reaganomics-- which DESTROYED those good times.
If making America great again means blaming people of color, women and gays for the not-so-great America of today, then this is the America that will be ripe for the same revolution all over again by people of color, women and gays. And we just continue in the same vicious circle beating each other and the same dead horses.
If you want a prosperous America for the future, it must embrace and enact the 60s ideals and visions. Rights and opportunities for all groups, revitalizing our environment and climate, and making peace and love instead of unnecessary war. And it must Dump Drump and the counter-revolution of Reaganomics so that the people can rise above poverty and wage-slavery. It's all of a piece.
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02-04-2017, 03:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-04-2017, 03:34 PM by Eric the Green.)
(02-04-2017, 02:42 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: (02-04-2017, 02:37 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The first post is total nonsense from top to bottom. Trump is never going to enact single-payer or raise the minimum wage. What delusional crap! The Trump admin is a fascist corporate takeover. Any Trumpian rhetoric to the contrary was clever during the campaign, but it was all a ruse to get white working class support. The Trump admin has not the slightest intention of doing anything for workers.
The Democrats cannot win without the 60s coalition of people or color, women and gays. Republican strategy is to divide and conquer, so that whites blame their fellow victims of corporate malfeasance and power-grabbing, instead of the real cause. It worked in 2016, by 77,700 votes only. It can be reversed, unless Trump is allowed to rig the system so thoroughly that democracy is effectively killed.
Only a continuing movement like we saw in the women's marches and at airports against visa and refugee bans will revitalize the Democrats. It must be broad-based and emphasize working class issues, no doubt. But they can't ditch their allies in the 60s movements. They must debunk the divide and conquer strategy instead. The 99% are all in the same boat; we need to unite and change the captains. Are we the people ruling this country, or only the wealthy and powerful who want to take away health insurance and keep wages low? It's your choice, folks.
Learn how to read, Eric. It's a really useful skill, not least when participating on an online forum.
From the original post:
Quote:What should the Democratic party be focusing on? An American liberal party in a crisis or a high should be paying attention to things that affect the average worker in this country. Replacing the mess of a way we manage and pay for health care in this country with some sort of tax supported single payer system, so that businesses and individuals are free from having to pay for or worry about medical expenses. The $15 per hour minimum wage is an excellent idea, although it needs to be sold as something which will raise the wages of a wide range of working Americans. If someone making $8 per hour is raised to $15, then someone making $15 today ought to be making $25 per hour. The general idea is that the U.S. is a wealthy, prosperous country, and this wealth need not all be concentrated to the top, leaving a few billionaires and millions of working people unable to afford a car or a doctor.
You have a point, but the direction of the argument is that the Democrats have ceded the worker and economic issues to Trump. That's not so, and won't be so.
And the post #1 here by Mickey claims that the problem is that Democrats, people of color and women say that " Whites must be disempowered to make way for minority races, men to make way for women, christianity to make way for other religions and beliefs."
NO, it's the Republicans who are saying the opposite: other races must be disempowered to make way for whites, women must be put back in their place, Christianity must be the dominant religion, and discrimination against those who don't follow fundamentalist preaching should be allowed.
Republican strategy is divide and conquer. Meanwhile Hillary and the Democrats were saying we must fight for all our rights, and specifically mentioned workers' rights; and that our society must work for all the people, not just those at the top. She talked about making America whole again by revitalizing hollowed-out areas like the Rust Belt and Appalachia. I heard those things many times from her. I posted her saying those things here, and you guys ignored her. If she wasn't as good a communicator as the TV star and celebrity mogul, that's too bad; and if she is also rightfully interested in new energy sources we need, that may be inconvenient for the coal barons; but it's simply not true that Democrats are not interested in white workers, or that Republicans are interested in them. Quite the opposite remains the case, and people were deceived into believing otherwise, quite often by appealing to their fears and prejudices.
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02-04-2017, 03:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-04-2017, 03:32 PM by Eric the Green.)
(02-04-2017, 02:21 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Yes, it remains to be seen whether the Republicans can consolidate their victory and if the Dems can formulate an effective response.
I also think this whole "What decade is he trying to take us back to thing" reflects liberal prejudices about what alternatives to the status-quo mean more than they reflect any real desire on the part of conservatives to recreate any particular year.
Alternatives to the status quo mean that the people have more opportunity to rise above poverty or avoid sinking into it.
Alternatives to the status quo mean that women and people of color can rise above the discrimination and profiling that still keeps them down.
Alternatives to the status quo mean that we preserve and revitalize our biosphere and environment instead of trashing it.
The status quo which Drump upholds and extends is to pollute our rivers and climate, discriminate against and ban religions and peoples, allow sickos and criminals to have machine guns, and give huge breaks and deregulation to corporations so they can screw us over with impunity, cause more great recessions and keep society firmly in the hands of the 1% forever.
What year does that belong to? To some extent the 1950s, but even more the 1920s, or the Gilded Age, or medieval society; some mixture. Drump and Co. have no idea what the slogan means. It just appeals to super-patriotism and the feeling that things aren't as good anymore, so that Drump can do much more of exactly what made things not as good anymore.
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(02-04-2017, 02:21 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Yes, it remains to be seen whether the Republicans can consolidate their victory and if the Dems can formulate an effective response.
I also think this whole "What decade is he trying to take us back to thing" reflects liberal prejudices about what alternatives to the status-quo mean more than they reflect any real desire on the part of conservatives to recreate any particular year.
You deftly deflected the question. But I should mention that the answer goes to the heart of the premise of The Fractured Republic, published recently by conservative Yuval Levin. He contends that it is nostalgia that explains the polarization inflicting our body politic. According to Levin, liberals long for the social welfare programs and expansion of civil rights that characterized much of the 50s and 60s while, on the other hand, conservatives want to hark back to the decentralization of the Reagan 80s. So there is a profound difference in what constitutes the "good ol' days," depending on your tribal affiliation--and by now most Boomers and Xers have one. (I'm old enough to remember both epochs.)
Levin maintains that both camps are looking backward to old approaches to governance and solutions to problems that may have worked well for the most part in the past, and in a bipartisan sense moreover. But those competing nostalgias, beginning with the 90s and into the 21st century (the Unraveling), explain our polarization today. I don't particularly agree with Levin's "solution" to our polarization, but he may be on to something. So the question of what time period Trump is referring to when he says "make America great again" would seem to matter, at least in the context of Levin's thesis. If Trump and his (older) supporters are looking to warmed-over Reaganism to solve our crisis, Levin seems to suggest we are headed for further tensions in the body politic. We see evidence of that already on our streets and campuses. In just one week's time, Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos ran pell-mell into the antithetical nostalgia of progressives, liberals, what have you, with the Women's March and the Berkeley riot, respectively. It certainly doesn't bode well for Trump's call for unity, not that he necessarily requires that to accomplish a paradigm shift in American politics.
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Blah, blah, Republicans are all that is evil, blah, blah. 
Quote:You have a point, but the direction of the argument is that the Democrats have ceded the worker and economic issues to Trump. That's not so, and won't be so.
So you're admitting that you're wrong, but not really WRONG?
You said that he was claiming that Trump would do some things that he was suggesting the Democrats do. There's really not a lot of wriggle room there, Eric. You're just wrong.
Trump shifted some states over from the Democratic column that hadn't gone the other way in 30 years or so. He did this in part by seizing some issues that had once been core Democratic ones (trade, manufacturing, etc.). He suggested that the Democrats follow suit by shifting their emphasis on certain issues, if they wish to remain competitive.
Quote:And the post #1 here by Mickey claims that the problem is that Democrats, people of color and women say that "Whites must be disempowered to make way for minority races, men to make way for women, christianity to make way for other religions and beliefs."
See Rags for a whole slew of video evidence for this conclusion.
Quote:NO, it's the Republicans who are saying the opposite: other races must be disempowered to make way for whites, women must be put back in their place, Christianity must be the dominant religion, and discrimination against those who don't follow fundamentalist preaching should be allowed.
Do you actually have a citation of a Republican recently saying any of those things, or is this just hate speech on your part?
Quote:Republican strategy is divide and conquer. Meanwhile Hillary and the Democrats were saying we must fight for all our rights, and specifically mentioned workers' rights; and that our society must work for all the people, not just those at the top. She talked about making America whole again by revitalizing hollowed-out areas like the Rust Belt and Appalachia. I heard those things many times from her. If she wasn't as good a communicator as the TV star and celebrity mogul, that's too bad; and if she is also rightfully interested in new energy sources we need, that may be inconvenient for the coal barons; but it's simply not true that Democrats are not interested in white workers, or that Republicans are interested in them. Quite the opposite remains the case, and people were deceived into believing otherwise, quite often by appealing to their fears and prejudices.
She also said that it was important to have a public position, and a private one. In any event, Hillary is finished, and he was making a suggestion for the Democrats going forward.
In spite of your claims to the contrary.
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(02-04-2017, 03:40 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: (02-04-2017, 02:21 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Yes, it remains to be seen whether the Republicans can consolidate their victory and if the Dems can formulate an effective response.
I also think this whole "What decade is he trying to take us back to thing" reflects liberal prejudices about what alternatives to the status-quo mean more than they reflect any real desire on the part of conservatives to recreate any particular year.
You deftly deflected the question. But I should mention that the answer goes to the heart of the premise of The Fractured Republic, published recently by conservative Yuval Levin. He contends that it is nostalgia that explains the polarization inflicting our body politic. According to Levin, liberals long for the social welfare programs and expansion of civil rights that characterized much of the 50s and 60s while, on the other hand, conservatives want to hark back to the decentralization of the Reagan 80s. So there is a profound difference in what constitutes the "good ol' days," depending on your tribal affiliation--and by now most Boomers and Xers have one. (I'm old enough to remember both epochs.)
Levin maintains that both camps are looking backward to old approaches to governance and solutions to problems that may have worked well for the most part in the past, and in a bipartisan sense moreover. But those competing nostalgias, beginning with the 90s and into the 21st century (the Unraveling), explain our polarization today. I don't particularly agree with Levin's "solution" to our polarization, but he may be on to something. So the question of what time period Trump is referring to when he says "make America great again" would seem to matter, at least in the context of Levin's thesis. If Trump and his (older) supporters are looking to warmed-over Reaganism to solve our crisis, Levin seems to suggest we are headed for further tensions in the body politic. We see evidence of that already on our streets and campuses. In just one week's time, Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos ran pell-mell into the antithetical nostalgia of progressives, liberals, what have you, with the Women's March and the Berkeley riot, respectively. It certainly doesn't bode well for Trump's call for unity, not that he necessarily requires that to accomplish a paradigm shift in American politics.
I "deftly deflected" the question in the sense that I don't think anyone on that side has actually announced that they are trying to take America back to <Year X>, and that you are basically putting words in people's mouth.
And I think Levin's thesis is again flawed (weren't you warning me about him earlier?). Both sides like and dislike particular periods of particular eras, and while I agree that there is little consensus on the right way forward, this "competing nostalgias" bit seems a little forced to me.
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Therein lies the problem. We are in the 21st century now. 20th century wishful thinking won't solve anything
 my 2 yr old Niece/yr old Nephew 2020
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(02-04-2017, 03:55 PM)Marypoza Wrote: Therein lies the problem. We are in the 21st century now. 20th century wishful thinking won't solve anything
Which is why it remains to be seen who actually consolidates and sets the terms of the next party system. The 6th one is getting long in the tooth.
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(02-04-2017, 04:00 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: (02-04-2017, 03:55 PM)Marypoza Wrote: Therein lies the problem. We are in the 21st century now. 20th century wishful thinking won't solve anything
Which is why it remains to be seen who actually consolidates and sets the terms of the next party system. The 6th one is getting long in the tooth.
-- yup, but that's 4Ts do
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02-04-2017, 04:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-04-2017, 04:07 PM by Eric the Green.)
(02-04-2017, 03:41 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: You said that he was claiming that Trump would do some things that he was suggesting the Democrats do. There's really not a lot of wriggle room there, Eric. You're just wrong.
I may be reading this into Mickey's post, but the thrust of arguments like this is that Trump moved in on policy territory abandoned by the Democrats. Just as you claim below. The fact is that the Democrats did not abandon the working class, and Trump is offering them false promises.
Quote:Trump shifted some states over from the Democratic column that hadn't gone the other way in 30 years or so. He did this in part by seizing some issues that had once been core Democratic ones (trade, manufacturing, etc.). He suggested that the Democrats follow suit by shifting their emphasis on certain issues, if they wish to remain competitive.
He's right that the Democrats must emphasize workers and economic issues, but NO shift is necessary. Only a better candidate on the stump than Trump. They should pay attention to my scoring system. I know, fat chance.
Quote:Quote:And the post #1 here by Mickey claims that the problem is that Democrats, people of color and women say that "Whites must be disempowered to make way for minority races, men to make way for women, christianity to make way for other religions and beliefs."
See Rags for a whole slew of video evidence for this conclusion.
I doubt they are Democratic politicians saying such things.
Quote:Quote:NO, it's the Republicans who are saying the opposite: other races must be disempowered to make way for whites, women must be put back in their place, Christianity must be the dominant religion, and discrimination against those who don't follow fundamentalist preaching should be allowed.
Do you actually have a citation of a Republican recently saying any of those things, or is this just hate speech on your part?
That's what they are doing and saying. Do you remember the things Trump said, or not? Or Sessions? The attack on voting rights? Attacks on Planned Parenthood funding? Bans on other nations and religions entering the USA? And complaints like this here that somehow these issues are not important anymore?
Quote:Quote:Republican strategy is divide and conquer. Meanwhile Hillary and the Democrats were saying we must fight for all our rights, and specifically mentioned workers' rights; and that our society must work for all the people, not just those at the top. She talked about making America whole again by revitalizing hollowed-out areas like the Rust Belt and Appalachia. I heard those things many times from her. If she wasn't as good a communicator as the TV star and celebrity mogul, that's too bad; and if she is also rightfully interested in new energy sources we need, that may be inconvenient for the coal barons; but it's simply not true that Democrats are not interested in white workers, or that Republicans are interested in them. Quite the opposite remains the case, and people were deceived into believing otherwise, quite often by appealing to their fears and prejudices.
She also said that it was important to have a public position, and a private one. In any event, Hillary is finished, and he was making a suggestion for the Democrats going forward.
In spite of your claims to the contrary.
His suggestion is incorrect. Democrats abandon people of color and women at their severe peril. Hillary may be finished, but she can't be blamed for any erroneous Democratic Party policy strategy, assuming there was one. It can be said she was a weak candidate for various reasons.
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(02-04-2017, 04:03 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (02-04-2017, 03:41 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: You said that he was claiming that Trump would do some things that he was suggesting the Democrats do. There's really not a lot of wriggle room there, Eric. You're just wrong.
I may be reading this into Mickey's post, but the thrust of arguments like this is that Trump moved in on policy territory abandoned by the Democrats. The fact is that the Democrats did not abandon the working class, and Trump is offering them false promises.
Quote:Trump shifted some states over from the Democratic column that hadn't gone the other way in 30 years or so. He did this in part by seizing some issues that had once been core Democratic ones (trade, manufacturing, etc.). He suggested that the Democrats follow suit by shifting their emphasis on certain issues, if they wish to remain competitive.
He's right that the Democrats must emphasize workers and economic issues, but NO shift is necessary. Only a better candidate on the stump than Trump. They should pay attention to my scoring system. I know, fat chance.
Quote:Quote:And the post #1 here by Mickey claims that the problem is that Democrats, people of color and women say that "Whites must be disempowered to make way for minority races, men to make way for women, christianity to make way for other religions and beliefs."
See Rags for a whole slew of video evidence for this conclusion.
I doubt they are Democratic politicians saying such things.
Quote:Quote:NO, it's the Republicans who are saying the opposite: other races must be disempowered to make way for whites, women must be put back in their place, Christianity must be the dominant religion, and discrimination against those who don't follow fundamentalist preaching should be allowed.
Do you actually have a citation of a Republican recently saying any of those things, or is this just hate speech on your part?
That's what they are doing and saying. Do you remember the things Trump said, or not? Or Sessions? The attack on voting rights? Attacks on Planned Parenthood funding? Bans on other nations and religions entering the USA? And complaints like this here that somehow these issues are not important anymore?
Quote:Quote:Republican strategy is divide and conquer. Meanwhile Hillary and the Democrats were saying we must fight for all our rights, and specifically mentioned workers' rights; and that our society must work for all the people, not just those at the top. She talked about making America whole again by revitalizing hollowed-out areas like the Rust Belt and Appalachia. I heard those things many times from her. If she wasn't as good a communicator as the TV star and celebrity mogul, that's too bad; and if she is also rightfully interested in new energy sources we need, that may be inconvenient for the coal barons; but it's simply not true that Democrats are not interested in white workers, or that Republicans are interested in them. Quite the opposite remains the case, and people were deceived into believing otherwise, quite often by appealing to their fears and prejudices.
She also said that it was important to have a public position, and a private one. In any event, Hillary is finished, and he was making a suggestion for the Democrats going forward.
In spite of your claims to the contrary.
His suggestion is incorrect. Hillary may be finished, but she can't be blamed for any erroneous Democratic Party policy strategy, assuming there was one. It can be said she was a weak candidate for various reasons.
-- oh 4 Christ's sake Eric read the goddam emails. Why you insist on trying to exonrate this bitch is beyond me
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02-04-2017, 04:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-04-2017, 04:15 PM by TeacherinExile.
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(02-04-2017, 03:45 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: (02-04-2017, 03:40 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: (02-04-2017, 02:21 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Yes, it remains to be seen whether the Republicans can consolidate their victory and if the Dems can formulate an effective response.
I also think this whole "What decade is he trying to take us back to thing" reflects liberal prejudices about what alternatives to the status-quo mean more than they reflect any real desire on the part of conservatives to recreate any particular year.
You deftly deflected the question. But I should mention that the answer goes to the heart of the premise of The Fractured Republic, published recently by conservative Yuval Levin. He contends that it is nostalgia that explains the polarization inflicting our body politic. According to Levin, liberals long for the social welfare programs and expansion of civil rights that characterized much of the 50s and 60s while, on the other hand, conservatives want to hark back to the decentralization of the Reagan 80s. So there is a profound difference in what constitutes the "good ol' days," depending on your tribal affiliation--and by now most Boomers and Xers have one. (I'm old enough to remember both epochs.)
Levin maintains that both camps are looking backward to old approaches to governance and solutions to problems that may have worked well for the most part in the past, and in a bipartisan sense moreover. But those competing nostalgias, beginning with the 90s and into the 21st century (the Unraveling), explain our polarization today. I don't particularly agree with Levin's "solution" to our polarization, but he may be on to something. So the question of what time period Trump is referring to when he says "make America great again" would seem to matter, at least in the context of Levin's thesis. If Trump and his (older) supporters are looking to warmed-over Reaganism to solve our crisis, Levin seems to suggest we are headed for further tensions in the body politic. We see evidence of that already on our streets and campuses. In just one week's time, Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos ran pell-mell into the antithetical nostalgia of progressives, liberals, what have you, with the Women's March and the Berkeley riot, respectively. It certainly doesn't bode well for Trump's call for unity, not that he necessarily requires that to accomplish a paradigm shift in American politics.
I "deftly deflected" the question in the sense that I don't think anyone on that side has actually announced that they are trying to take America back to <Year X>, and that you are basically putting words in people's mouth.
And I think Levin's thesis is again flawed (weren't you warning me about him earlier?). Both sides like and dislike particular periods of particular eras, and while I agree that there is little consensus on the right way forward, this "competing nostalgias" bit seems a little forced to me.
Actually, the real flaw of Levin's "competing nostalgias," if you think about it for not too long, is this: He's basically describing the political longing of the Silents, Boomers, and Xers. What can the Millennials (the largest generational cohort) possibly be nostalgic for, politically speaking? All they've known is one long, rolling crisis: Clinton impeachment, Columbine shooting, Bush 43 election by "judicial appointment," the 9-11 attacks, the Global War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina fiasco, Crash of 2008. Millennials don't really have the lived experience of the Reagan era, and obviously not the 50s and 60s either.
I didn't particularly care for Levin's prescription either, a concept he called "subsidiarity." But he did crystallize my thinking a bit on 4T theory, the way he approached the problem of polarization as kind of a "tripod" (my characterization, not his)--cultural, economic, and political--unraveling in that order in this turning.
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(02-04-2017, 03:55 PM)Marypoza Wrote: Therein lies the problem. We are in the 21st century now. 20th century wishful thinking won't solve anything
I hear from various people that the Democrats are stuck on old policies, but I never see anything different proposed that is progressive. Usually it amounts to the Democrats caving into or compromising with the 20th century (really 19th/18th century) Reaganomics' dried-up policies and thus being "less partisan." That is the most worn out policy for Democrats of all. That's the Clinton approach you don't like.
Just like Democrats may need new leadership; but OK, new leaders have to stand up and run. Not the same old compromisers with Reaganomics or bashers of the 60s movements and ideals. That's just caving in to reaction. That's not what Democrats need to do.
The issues are not unclear at all, nor are the policy answers. Accusations of nostalgia and old thinking are irrelevant. The only problem is that Republicans have been allowed to block progress for 40 years. The issues are inequality and ecological issues, and the answers in every case are to do the opposite of what Drump is doing and/or Reagan did.
Yeah, so the Democrats' ideas seem old. But if you have been blocked for 40 years from doing what needs to be done, and our country has been stuck in reaction for that long, that's not their fault. The fault lies with the voters, and with the superior rigging ability of the reactionaries. And the luck of the stars regarding particular candidates.
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