Election 2020

D

DannyL

Wild Horses
blissblogger said:
"the difference between him and Trump is nonetheless quite substantial"?? vast, yawning gulf more like. to be understating the immensity of it, the deliverance of it - even as the current occupant is enforcing a delusional counterfactual reality of his own dreaming on the country, while allowing coronavirus to rage completely unchecked across the country... I just don't get it. No, we won't be getting our wish list of progressive policies this time round, truth is they were never likely to be got, with this gerrymandered, gridlocked system. America is, I'd say, a good half-century, if not longer, from adopting standard Euro-style soft-socialism. A little less than half the country is INSANE. People should be dancing in the streets that someone who represents the non-insane portion of the country is going to be in charge soon, bringing sanity, stability, and competence. They WERE dancing in the streets at the weekend.

It was absolutely predictable, and yet even so, disheartening, to see all the people trotting out their carefully thought-out and worded insta-critiques ON THE VERY DAY the joyous news came through. Critiques outlining their policy differences with Biden and all the reasons to be disappointed in advance. Can you imagine being such a lefter-than-thou sourpuss to go to the trouble of doing that, in the midst of a worldwide party of celebration? I'm not even in any of the minority populations targeted by Trump and I felt like a boot had been lifted from across my windpipe.
Click to expand...

Well said. I was surprised at how moved I felt. The psychic stress that is Trump in the White House is emblematic of all the other cunts, liars and demagogues who've been unleased over the last couple of years - Johnson, Cummings, Tommy "not even my real name" Robinson, Putin and the parade of second tier Twitter bottomfeeders who amplify them. All the pucker mouthed racist shitbags. It was great, for a second, to see this tide pushed backed.

And this:
Can you imagine being such a lefter-than-thou sourpuss to go to the trouble of doing that, in the midst of a worldwide party of celebration?
Absolutley I can. This is a (large?) part of the Left, this is what they do.

I was getting at this earlier this thread with John and Padraig. Been trying to boil down my complaint to a simple statement since then, it's something like the focus on critique of power that the Left has seems to leave them so uncomfortable with power, that they're never poised to seize it or assume it convincingly.
 
version

version

Well-known member
DannyL said:
I was getting at this earlier this thread with John and Padraig. Been trying to boil down my complaint to a simple statement since then, it's something like the focus on critique of power that the Left has seems to leave them so uncomfortable with power, that they're never poised to seize it or assume it convincingly.
Click to expand...
That's what Adam Curtis says too.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
DannyL said:
Well said. I was surprised at how moved I felt. The psychic stress that is Trump in the White House is emblematic of all the other cunts, liars and demagogues who've been unleased over the last couple of years - Johnson, Cummings, Tommy "not even my real name" Robinson, Putin and the parade of second tier Twitter bottomfeeders who amplify them. All the pucker mouthed racist shitbags. It was great, for a second, to see this tide pushed backed.
Click to expand...
Yeah this is it. It's important for someone who lies all the time, who thinks it's a good thing to bully those weaker than yourself... who embodies these vices and tries to make them a virtue. It's important he gets kicked the fuck out and that that is rejected. People who can't see that I have little time for to be honest.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
john eden said:
He isn't our friend. You need to be as wary of the good cop as the bad cop
Click to expand...
guys, John is - unsurprisingly - right

Biden has been a centrist corporate shill for 50 years. Delaware is almost literally a corporate fiefdom. For decades he was at the center of bankruptcy "reform" making it easier for predatory credit card companies to both drive people into debt and pursue debtors, which makes sense if you know that the credit card company MBNA basically owned him as a senator. He fought hard to deregulate the banking industry, including the destruction of the Glass-Steagall restrictions, which many ppl see as a direct cause of the financial crisis.

And it's not like it's a thing of the past. His OMB - the people who make the President's budget proposal i.e. decide how resources should be allocated - transition team includes executives from Lyft, Airbnb, and Amazon. Seth Harris - anti-labor lawyer and former acting Secretary of Labor under O, currently a corporate lobbyist (that's how these things work) - and one of the main intellectual authors of the anti-labor California Prop 22, which Uber/Lyft/DoorDash/Postmates just spent $200m+ getting passed, is on his labor transition team and is a likely candidate for Secretary of Labor in this administration. His VP is even more of a corporate shill than he is, not to mention her vicious law + order combined with corporate favoritism approach as CA Attorney General.

I could go on but I don't feel like I should have to

it's absolutely simultaneously possible to breathe a huge sigh of relief that Trump is (probably) gone and be bitterly disappointed that what's replacing him is uninspired, pro-corporate, anti-American worker "centrism", especially when progressive candidates did well running on progressive issues - the exact thing the Democratic establishment never has the guts to do. and frankly to write that off as lefter-than-thou sourpuss whinging, danny and @blissblogger, is bullshit.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
@sufi - I can't speak for anyone else, but that's definitely not what I said - that an illegal retention of power can't/won't happen. I said it's unlikely.

specifically to "manufacture a foreign crisis" - bc he is so deeply mistrusted by a majority of the country, and bc people are so vigilant rn, that it's hard to see the start a war gambit working as well as it normally does. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. another issue, smaller but still real, is that it would directly contradict his "I don't start wars" image, which I'm sure wouldn't bother him in an ethical sense but undermines his appeal as being different from the normal run of things. also, his best path to success is to muck up the court of public opinion for the next 2 months and then roll that into procedural bullshit (i.e. how electors are actually chosen) to pull of a narrow legalistic "victory". a war might or might not help w/public opinion, but it definitely won't help w/electoral procedure minutiae.

having said that, should we all remain hypervigilant until he is actually out of office? absolutely. this attempt to steal the election has to be actively opposed on all fronts. and he will certainly try to wreck as much as he can on the way out, both in an attempt to hang on at all costs and out of childish spite. but while remaining vigilant it's reasonable to assess his actual chances of success, which are existent but slim.
 
version

version

Well-known member
Would his supporters care if he started a war? I get the impression they just use that line because they can and they'd make a bunch of excuses for him if he did ever start one.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
version said:
Would his supporters care if he started a war?
Click to expand...
his base, I seriously doubt it. they'd just, as you say, make excuses for why his war, unlike all the other wars, is justified.

it's more in terms of his legacy I guess. as I intimated it's really a secondary concern. the main one is that I don't think it would work.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
DannyL said:
I was getting at this earlier this thread with John and Padraig. Been trying to boil down my complaint to a simple statement since then, it's something like the focus on critique of power that the Left has seems to leave them so uncomfortable with power, that they're never poised to seize it or assume it convincingly.
Click to expand...

I’d be well up for seizing power but it seems that to do that I would have to jettison my core values and become a caricature of myself so instead I am having a stab at building up counter power that will change this situation.

It’s fine if people don’t find that convincing and think I am politically irrelevant. But I’m not just pissing on the Biden party out of some holier than thou contrarianism. I did this in 1997 too and woo look what happened there.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
DannyL said:
it's something like the focus on critique of power that the Left has seems to leave them so uncomfortable with power, that they're never poised to seize it or assume it convincingly
Click to expand...
if you have a critique of power you're always going to operate at a disadvantage in trying to take power, it just comes with the territory

whenever this comes up it's always back to the same question, what you are and aren't willing to compromise to achieve that

you quickly run up against the limits of what's possible in mass electoral politics overwhelmingly dominated by corporate and/or right-wing $
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
john eden said:
I’d be well up for seizing power but it seems that to do that I would have to jettison my core values and become a caricature of myself so instead I am having a stab at building up counter power that will change this situation.

It’s fine if people don’t find that convincing and think I am politically irrelevant. But I’m not just pissing on the Biden party out of some holier than thou contrarianism. I did this in 1997 too and woo look what happened there.
Click to expand...
nvm, John said it better

one thing I'll note is that an actual Left - by U.S. standards, at least - has been actively trying to assume power - Sanders/Warren/etc and the younger AOC generation - for at least the last 2 election cycles and they have been bitterly opposed at every turn by the pro-corporate Democratic establishment, so it feels pretty reasonable to push back against both that establishment and the idea that the left hasn't been trying to get into power.

in fact, that establishment is at this very moment viciously turning on the left and blaming it for electoral failures despite the wealth of evidence that progressives running on progressive issues - most of which are hugely popular - did much better in this election than the Donna Shalalas of the world. of course what that Dem establishment has in common w/the GOP/right-wing propaganda machine (yr Coors, Koch, Bradley etc foundations and the huge network of think tanks and right-wing causes that they fund) is exactly that pro-corporate line, and ingrained opposition to legislation that works against it i.e. most progressive politics.
 
Last edited:
luka

luka

Well-known member
And that the distance between Biden and what we want is a large enough as to register as genuine tragedy
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top