What If? 2020

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Binger
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by Binger »

Xenophon wrote:
Fri Jul 29, 2022 3:28 pm
...... I'd probably quibble over the sincerity of Trump vs Sanders and who has the actual chops/legacy to back being a populist for real and which one is a pure opportunist. I just think that regardless of some ineffable leadership qualities the office of president only has so much it is capable of doing. Sanders would have even less support from his party than Biden does and would likely face even more resistance from the Right.
No. You would not and could not quibble on your first point. It is not possible or allowed. Why? BECAUSE WE AGREE ON THAT POINT! I do not know how I could possibly be more clear on that. In fact, I voted for Bernie in 2016 and did not vote for Trump largely because of this very point. I agree with you!!!!!!! Trump was and is an opportunist. Trump had a fraction of the sincerity in his campaign that Sanders had. It was not even close. There is no quibbling to be done. Trump was a symptom of a growing populist movement (that he did not design) and he also benefited from Clinton fatigue and from the motivation she gave with a campaign against Americans (a.k.a. degenerates.)

As President, Trump was as bad of an employer, or hiring manager, as any leader we have ever seen. He was a train wreck. That train continue to wreck with endorsements like what he gave to Dr. Oz. Christamighty. He is part of the big show. He is a grifter in the populist movement, not the architect. Sanders is exactly the opposite of that with regard to his place as a leader in liberal populism.

Leading from the left and right is a suckers game. It is why Biden looks like a dumbass every day and why he can't get out of his own way. He is trying to lead while deferring and deflecting from the left and the right. Leaders do NOT do that. They do not do that in business. They do not do that in politics. Suckers and fools and shysters do that. Leaders lead from the top and they serve a base or foundation. Resistance from the feigned right spenders and swamp and the feigned left jailers, word-makers and swamp is just noise. The people are the base and the people are on the ground, at work, buying groceries, paying for gas, and being called racist and sexist for eating tacos and Swiss cheese.

The big opportunity for Sanders - he could have taken on the Baby Boomers grift better and bigger. He should have.
honorentheos
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by honorentheos »

Hawkeye wrote:
Fri Jul 29, 2022 12:25 pm
Biden isn't with us and hasn't been with us for a long time. But Biden's poor messaging and frailty isn't the reason for the recession, gas prices doubling, inflation, and losing in foreign policy that's been going on. These failures are the result of Democrat policy.
Recessions happen because exuberance exceeded value. You blaming that on Biden?

Gas prices doubling is largely a function of supply of a tightly controlled, monopolized resource being outstripped by demand. You blaming that on Biden?

Inflation is a response to money supply excesses and labor scarcity. You blaming that on Biden?

We checked the most aggressive antagonistic geopolitical foe at the door of their attempt to reverse to post-WW2 order and saw a wedge driven between them and our closest ascending geopolitical rival. Trump alienated our allies and appeased those who long to see us fall.

Edited to remove the one PG13 allowed F-bomb because SP is celestial, Celestial is spam, and dogs are sleeping with cats.
honorentheos
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by honorentheos »

Hey Xeno -
Xenophon wrote:
Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:26 pm
I think we are very much on the same page Honor but I wanted to dig a bit deeper on this:
honorentheos wrote:
Fri Jul 29, 2022 4:41 am
I wanted to raise the question as a way of examining how much we really think the person occupying the White House matters, where it matters, and to what degree.
I think who is in the chair matters quite a bit in many ways but that influence doesn't exist in a vacuum. Every administration is limited by the work and decisions of previous admins, even those of the same party. I'm hard pressed to imagine Sanders existing in the same place as Biden and having a much different result. But I can easily see Sanders (or Biden) having quite a different scenario to work with if say Cruz or Rubio won the 2016 nomination and general election.
Can't disagree. I have to imagine that a Rubio or Cruz presidency combined with full control of the House and Senate that Trump had would have made for a very different 2020. But my brain can't ignore the environment needed for that to have occurred. Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 due to a number of circumstances. Not least of which, mechanically, is that the Republican primary system is a winner-take-all system and he had a solid 30% support in almost every state. This resulted in his knocking off primary opponents much more quickly than Sanders could in the Democrat race where he had a similar if slightly lower base level of support and national name recognition, but every candidate could potential add to their total number of state delegates. So for Cruz or Rubio to have beat Trump in 2016, the Republicans would have needed to do what the Dems did in 2020 when the challengers to Sanders saw the only way to beat him was to consolidate the moderate vote behind one candidate and Biden was leading at that point after the surprise win in South Carolina. Only much earlier in the process since Cruz was a religious right darling but less attractive to less religious conservative voters while Rubio had the opposite problem. Or, alternatively, for either Rubio or Cruz to have won in 2016, the general sentiment would have needed to be different for Trump's glaringly obvious reasons for disqualification from office to have influenced people to not vote for him. Facts are, discontent is a strong motivator in the democratic process. Does income inequality issues, GOP cultural war twisting of that economic discontent into culture war clashing, Democrat third-way policies, or the ever intensifying Green/libertarian anti-globalist rhetoric from the late 80s onward have their impacts softened somehow in our imagined scenario to be able to make that feasible? I don't know.

One of my current beliefs is the Democrats have been nominating the person each election they should have nominated the election prior. Hillary was the better candidate to handle the economic crisis over Obama in '08, Kerry in '00 would have changed history, Biden in '16 would have beaten Trump and been four years younger at an age four years matters a lot.
The office only has so many tools in that tool box and what work can be done is further limited by how much clean-up is needed. Couple that with the ever growing partisan nature of the system, razor thin victory margins, and a system purposefully designed to resist big changes and I'm not sure it is fair to expect many miracles from elected officials. Is that good or right? Hard to say, but it is probably more rigid and inflexible than I'd like. But I also think that is exactly by design, rather than a bug in the system.
Completely agree. The legislative branch was seen as the seat of power by the founders, especially Madison, where the executive was seen as necessary given the experience of attempting to make the Articles of Confederation work. Our system of government is 2.0 version of an attempt at a nation, and one that came to realize institutions were required to be able to take the place of central power held by an individual or small cabal of individuals while a mob simply can't govern. The invention of our democratic institutions was truly an innovation that paved the way for leaps forward in progress in individual liberty, technology, the small "d" democratization of access to opportunities and quality of life measures previously held by the wealthy elite. I maintain the Federalist Paper #51 is one of the most important documents in our nation's history for the wisdom it represents. As Cultellus said elsewhere, revolutions are a dime a dozen, but ones that achieve longevity are rare. Ours succeeded because the institutions of democracy were seen to be essential to checking individual self-interest. A strong executive would be counter to this realization. It says something about people that we've worked hard for over 200 years now to empower the person in the chair of the President. We want strong men at our heads, we want leaders, but what we need are strong institutions and idealistic principles. We need to believe in something that doesn't exist, precisely because the best possible futures don't exist and probably never can. Where I agree the role of the President matters most is in helping people believe in that for as long as possible. It also means we can never see any one party hold the White House for very long, which history shows is indeed the case. The President is a symbol with a pen.

So in that case, it seems Sanders may have been more effective than Biden in his rhetorical abilities. But I also think the job of President requires two things. First, being an actual executive of an administration with the ability to lead a group that then enacts executive actions. I think Biden actually is doing pretty good on that front, which happens to be the actual job description, and I don't know what from Sander's history shows he'd do better. A White House of Bernie-Bros would seem very similar to a White House of Trump sycophants, in my opinion. Second, the president needs to lead their party and be the whip of last resort in the Senate and House. That's a terribly difficult job. Trump, oddly, succeeded at it by being the whipping boy of the Fox News crowd. When he strayed, Hannity and co., would turn on him, their viewers would rumble, and Trump would get back in line and bring the rest of the GOP with him. That's a terrifying dynamic but it was effective. How would a Sanders be doing better than Biden in that role? His record in the Senate suggests he would be failing at it miserably. I suspect purple state or red state democrats would get more traction with their constituencies by being opposed to a Sanders, being able to tell folks back home they were standing up against socialist overreach and spending.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful reply.
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by honorentheos »

To add to the above, Trump's victory and subsequent success in taking over the GOP changed the trajectory of our national politics in irreversible ways. During the primaries, far too many were engaged in realpolitik behaviors. Most on the left saw Trump as ineffectual and the best opponent for Clinton, those on the right saw Trump as an R who would be stage managed by McConnell and Paul Ryan who would be where the power of GOP control would reside. And ton of folks who were disgruntled with the two-party system saw him as no worse than Clinton and he gathered plenty of votes from the crowd of malcontents. The Jesse Ventura crowd isn't interested in healthy democratic institutions. They just want to be left alone to do whatever they feel like doing in the moment
To that crowd, freedom is indistinguishable from narcissism.

Trump destroyed any pretense the GOP had regarding decorum or the sanctity of democratic institutions. The pretense of belief in something greater than partisan victory was striped away and raw visceral disregard for a greater good became celebrated rather than given at least lip service. It made it possible for candidates to proclaim proudly their position as Christian Nationalists with not only zero shock but actual welcome embrace. Trump's election solidified that the political right in the US is anti-democratic. They wave a banner they claim represents individual rights but it's a banner at the head of a Crusade against what they believe immoral choices government should not enable rather than rights to be protected.

My concern isn't one-sided. The left is abandoning principles in favor of positions at an alarming rate as well. Pluralism is being crowded out in favor of a very Robespierrian kind of egalitarianism.
Binger
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by Binger »

honorentheos wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 8:14 pm
To add to the above, Trump's victory and subsequent success in taking over the GOP changed the trajectory of our national politics in irreversible ways. During the primaries, far too many were engaged in realpolitik behaviors. Most on the left saw Trump as ineffectual and the best opponent for Clinton, those on the right saw Trump as an R who would be stage managed by McConnell and Paul Ryan who would be where the power of GOP control would reside. And ton of folks who were disgruntled with the two-party system saw him as no worse than Clinton and he gathered plenty of votes from the crowd of malcontents. The Jesse Ventura crowd isn't interested in healthy democratic institutions. They just want to be left alone to do whatever they feel like doing in the moment
To that crowd, freedom is indistinguishable from narcissism.

Trump destroyed any pretense the GOP had regarding decorum or the sanctity of democratic institutions. The pretense of belief in something greater than partisan victory was striped away and raw visceral disregard for a greater good became celebrated rather than given at least lip service. It made it possible for candidates to proclaim proudly their position as Christian Nationalists with not only zero shock but actual welcome embrace. Trump's election solidified that the political right in the US is anti-democratic. They wave a banner they claim represents individual rights but it's a banner at the head of a Crusade against what they believe immoral choices rather than rights government should not enable.

My concern isn't one-sided. The left is abandoning principles in favor of positions at an alarming rate as well. Pluralism is being crowded out in favor of a very Robespierrian kind of egalitarianism.
This does not accurately describe Trump, the conditions around 2016, the ambitions of voters who picked Trump on their ballots or the GOP. Most GOP voters despise McConnell. Your arguments here are not based on facts.
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by honorentheos »

Says the guy who doesn't know if he is wrong but asserts being right nonetheless. You know how evidence is supposed to work I assume. Feel free to set your narcissism aside and actually engage if you have a point to make.

The GOP hates McConnell says who in Kentucky? Is it that he isn't all in on the Trump train even if he singlehandedly gave the GOP the majority in the the Supreme Court?

Dude take the imagined majority that is the turd in your pocket that thinks just like you do (gasp!) and go back to talking to yourself.
Binger
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by Binger »

honorentheos wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:01 pm
Says the guy who doesn't know if he is wrong but asserts being right nonetheless. You know how evidence is supposed to work I assume. Feel free to set your narcissism aside and actually engage if you have a point to make.

The GOP hates McConnell says who in Kentucky? Is it that he isn't all in on the Trump train even if he singlehandedly gave the GOP the majority in the the Supreme Court?

Dude take the imagined majority that is the turd in your pocket that thinks just like you do (gasp!) and go back to talking to yourself.
I don't have the privilege of speaking to people like you and others speak to people. It must be nice.

The GOP is bigger than Kentucky. One person can't deliver the majority to the Supreme Court. That takes a majority of Senators combined with the opportunity of vacancies and probably some politics. Do not let facts get in the way of your opinions of reality or of me.
honorentheos
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by honorentheos »

Binger wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:11 pm
honorentheos wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:01 pm
Says the guy who doesn't know if he is wrong but asserts being right nonetheless. You know how evidence is supposed to work I assume. Feel free to set your narcissism aside and actually engage if you have a point to make.

The GOP hates McConnell says who in Kentucky? Is it that he isn't all in on the Trump train even if he singlehandedly gave the GOP the majority in the the Supreme Court?

Dude take the imagined majority that is the turd in your pocket that thinks just like you do (gasp!) and go back to talking to yourself.
I don't have the privilege of speaking to people like you and others speak to people. It must be nice.

The GOP is bigger than Kentucky. One person can't deliver the majority to the Supreme Court. That takes a majority of Senators combined with the opportunity of vacancies and probably some politics. Do not let facts get in the way of your opinions of reality or of me.
Oh? Feel free to put forward the evidence that non-Trumper members of the GOP hate McConnell beyond the infighting over Trump. I'm intrigued.
Binger
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by Binger »

honorentheos wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:17 pm
Binger wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:11 pm


I don't have the privilege of speaking to people like you and others speak to people. It must be nice.

The GOP is bigger than Kentucky. One person can't deliver the majority to the Supreme Court. That takes a majority of Senators combined with the opportunity of vacancies and probably some politics. Do not let facts get in the way of your opinions of reality or of me.
Oh? Feel free to put forward the evidence that non-Trumper members of the GOP hate McConnell beyond the infighting over Trump. I'm intrigued.
Jesus, honor. McConnell is a crap stain on society. But ya know. Maybe it was a bit of an exaggeration to make a point. You should ask the moderators to ban me or kill me since you are so smart.
honorentheos
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Re: What If? 2020

Post by honorentheos »

Binger wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:31 pm
honorentheos wrote:
Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:17 pm

Oh? Feel free to put forward the evidence that non-Trumper members of the GOP hate McConnell beyond the infighting over Trump. I'm intrigued.
Jesus, honor. McConnell is a crap stain on society. But ya know. Maybe it was a bit of an exaggeration to make a point. You should ask the moderators to ban me or kill me since you are so smart.
Or, alternatively, I can ask you to engage in good faith by supporting your assertions. You know. It's a discussion forum not a Cultellus blog.
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