With far fewer Sanders delegates, it has been rubber-stamping the corporate globalist elite agenda on one matter after another.
Although there had been widespread discontent among progressives that the Democrats have been turning into moderate Republicans, they had thought that the massive showing of a populist like Bernie Sanders during the primary would score them something this time around, even if it's a non-binding platform statement. Now that this minimal degree of compromise has been rejected by the Establishment, progressives are feeling betrayed rather than merely let down.
The talking head posers ("Hey fellow progressive kids") are trying to give the impression of building bridges to the "Bernie or bust" voters, but they're not having any of it. See the long list of dismissive replies to this tweet by Sally Kohn:
Wow, some great progressive things going on in #DemPlatform debate -- and drawing *very* powerful distinction w regressive Trump and GOP!!!— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) July 9, 2016
One of the party-wide changes this season has been the unmasking of supposed fellow travelers in the media, who now stand as bald-faced shills for the Establishment, against their populist-craving audience. For the Democrats, it began with Elizabeth Warren and then Rachel Maddow, right as Hillary clinched the nomination. Sally Kohn isn't as big of a figure as them (kind of a Jew dyke version of Laura Ingraham), but it's yet another example, and on yet another network.
Who knows if that trend will continue when Bernie inevitably endorses Crooked Hillary, but given the rest of the examples, it's not out of the question that his voters will shake their head and call him a sell-out.
If you search for Twitter responses to #DemPlatform that also mention Trump, their main gripe is that by being in favor of a job-off-shoring agreement like the TPP, the Establishment has handed the election to Trump, who will beat Crooked Hillary over the head with his populist stance. In fact, Trump has gone farther than Bernie by promising to pull us out of NAFTA, which we've already been in for nearly a quarter of a century, as well as slam 35% tariffs on off-shored manufactured goods.
As I discussed in this post, the downwardly mobile Sanders supporters will start to warm up to Trump, big-league. The progressives who have made it economically looked like they would eventually be brought back into the Democratic fold, but they seem pretty pissed by how little compromise there was on the platform. Whether they stay home, vote Green, or write in Bernie, it doesn't look like they'll be voting Democrat in the fall.
We'll have to wait until after their Convention to see which way they'll go. Right now they seem more demoralized and inclined to simply not vote at all. But if all hell breaks loose in Philadelphia, they just might be emboldened to launch a "Bernie write-in" campaign. If they had been gifted a candidate with more backbone, they could also draft him into campaigning himself as an Independent.
Major trainwreck ahead, either way, can't wait to tune in. We have a fractured party elite and a united electorate on our side -- they have a united Establishment and a fractured electorate!
I remain skeptical of any real split among the Dems but I will find it ironic if right as it looks like the Dems have national political power permanently in their grasp, they find themselves paralyzed.
ReplyDeleteThe national GOP is in a state of ill repair but in many states they have actual party establishments while Obama and the OFA crowd have gutted their's on a state by state level. Even states that haven't voted for a Republican candidate since at least 1988 have seen thousands of members defect from the Dems.
There's a far larger split in the Dem electorate. The Bernie voters were 45% of the primary electorate, and 30-40-50% of them won't be voting for Hillary (Trump, Bernie, Green, stay home).
ReplyDeleteThe NeverTrump voters are at best 5-10% of the primary electorate.
Worse, the split in the Dems is along very salient demographic faultlines -- primarily generation, but also race. Older voters and non-white voters reject progressivism. That makes it much harder to heal the rift, as such basic faultlines heighten the Us vs. Them mindset.
On the GOP side, the tension was along class lines and culture war lines -- that makes for a bumpy road toward unity (among voters), but doesn't seem as unbridgeable as White Dems vs. Black Dems.
"ironic if right as it looks like the Dems have national political power permanently in their grasp, they find themselves paralyzed."
ReplyDeleteRepublicans looked like they were a permanent party during the '92 election -- not since the New Deal had one party won three straight elections. Dems were demoralized by the Carter vs. Kennedy schism of '80, their utterly worthless challenger Mondale in '84, and their even goofier challenger Dukakis in '88.
They only benefited in '88 from the incipient culture wars, which peeled off several liberal deep-red states (like the Pac NW) despite Dukakis being a terrible candidate.
Any party holding the Presidency is not going to be permanent -- what trends in one direction for several decades is the overall zeitgeist that sets the boundaries for what kind of Dem or Repub will make it into office.
I don't know. I keep hearing about how Paul Ryan will simply let delegates "vote their conscience" during the convention and deny Trump the nomination so he can graciously accept it. The Republican leadership is as rotten and at war with its base as any political party has ever been.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile Hillary! is doubling down on Identity Politics specifically BLM. She told Whites they need to shut up and obey Black people or something in her latest Twitter feed. While Hillary! has a tin ear and is personally as grating as an aging Evita Peron on Meth, her team around her is good at crunching numbers and polling, and presumably they figure the equation:
98%(Black voters)*Massive_Turnout + 85% (Hispanic Voters)*Middling_Turnout + 35%(White Voters)*Midding_Turnout = victory. Particularly when you factor in Black voters voting twice, three times in many cases.
Hillary! is not even bothering to make an economic appeal to White voters. Where is the College Loan forgiveness? The Back-to-Work spending plans on defense and national infrastructure? There is nothing but identity politics which is what works for Dems.
Dems really are Goldman Sachs and Hollywood and Silicon Valley plus various wannabes in infotainment and female-dominated paper pushing and NAM babysitter/Nanny jobs. Hillary seems to figure its enough.
My guess is that turnout is key -- a Mitt Romney style turnout and Hillary! wins by a shrieking harridan landslide and orders immediate castration of every White male, Bill included. A massive Brexit style turnout of White middle and working class voters who have never voted or not voted in years means Donald Trump is President.
Turnout is gonna be yuge on the Trump side, about 72 million, which is 7 million more than Romney:
ReplyDeletehttps://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/05/09/attn-stuart-stevens-and-the-never-trump-coalition-the-monster-vote-is-very-real/
Ryan isn't going to unbind the delegates -- no rules allow it, and there aren't enough Cruz cucks on the rules committee to change the rules.
We can also dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton knows exactly what she's doing -- she has no idea what she's doing.
ReplyDeleteAny belief in her top-tier data metrics war room brain trust, is contradicted by every single thing she says and does. She's not only clueless and tone-deaf, but too arrogant to ask how she ought to do things properly.
It just goes to show how retarded the GOP Establishment has been, that they've been losing to the Obamas and the Clintons. They too have their high-payed consultants, databases, etc. But like the Dems', their stuff seems worthless.
Obama didn't employ some genius strategy -- just being marginally less retarded than McCain and Romney.
Now that they're facing genuine competition, they're toast -- first the GOPe during the primary, and now the Clintons in the general.
Hillary is stuck now appealing only to the Steve Sailer concept of the coalition of the fringes. Black Lives Matter, La Raza, etc. these organizations will throw a fit if Hillary throws one bone to white people. While young liberals and globalists don't mind that arrangement, conservative Democrats and Independents will definitely notice. The media and academia has done a fine job trying to convince white people to actively vote against their own interests but young liberals and globalists are just a small section of their base. They still have a lot of blue collar Democrats, conservative Democrats, left leaning independents who they are alienating with this approach. More and more of them will say, "I guess she isn't the candidate for me" and either stays home or votes for Donald Trump.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Soros will be sparing no expense in trying to make sure the RNC is as raucous as they can get it. The City of Cleveland was playing along, making sure that Trump supporters were forced into the same small area as BLM protesters but fortunately that got overturned. Nevertheless the left is going to try their hardest to make the RNC seem like a total disaster in hopes that they can pin all urban related violence on the Republicans. Republicans and Trump supporters are going to need to remain vigilant. San Jose actually backfired against the Democrats but their memories are short: if Soros misfires again and they have another San Jose on their hands, then Trump can start strong post-convention. This is where the race will really get interesting.
While some people seem to be itching for pitched battles between the factions, I think that Trump's steady rise is keeping his supporters well-behaved. Well, that and the fact that his crowd is older, whiter, and feels as though they have more to lose by starting crap. Meanwhile, the dark hordes (with a fair amount of doofus white Millennials) inherently have worse impulse control and are more impressionable. And a lot of them are in a nihilistic "fuck it" mode, which is far far removed from even modern kumbaya white liberal rhetoric, let alone the Boomer idealism of the 60's.
ReplyDeleteObama's pitifully trying to feign interest in the cop deaths. In reality, he's such a hard core cultural Marxist that he's really cheering on anything that hurts or destroys institutions started (but at present not necessarily comprised of) white Christian men. Obviously this doesn't include the Fed Gov. per se now that Obama himself is running the show. And actually starting federal inquisitions, or using threats of such things, to bully everyone around. As usual the liberal crowd is not forthcoming regarding the fact that the Obama era has brought unprecedented levels of non whiteness to the federal government, yet low class blacks are doing terribly and the government in general is rotten and hated by regular Americans.
"My guess is that turnout is key -- a Mitt Romney style turnout and Hillary! wins by a shrieking harridan landslide and orders immediate castration of every White male, Bill included. A massive Brexit style turnout of White middle and working class voters who have never voted or not voted in years means Donald Trump is President".
ReplyDeleteThe polls can't account for this. Since no poll can predict even how many people will show up, let alone predict their choice, we won't know 'til election day what the size of the sleeping dragon is. A poll asks a geographically/racially/economically diverse set of people what their intentions are. So by default, we're not getting in accurate idea of how many once demoralized/beleaguered/apathetic voters are going to get off their butt and vote.
Primary turn-out does hint that the GOP is getting a lot of enthusiasm. Meanwhile, how is the psychopath hag going to inspire the same turnout as "our" first black president?
Also, this is going to be the most lop-sided election ever, demographically speaking. Tons of white people have woken up to the fact that the Dem elites have betrayed regular white Americans.
Sally Kohn always struck me as an idiot, a more masculine and middle-class American Laurie Penny, but every time I see one of her tweets I never cease to be astonished how she could top the stupid thing she tweeted before.
ReplyDeleteA CounterPunch writer suggests that progressives should not vote for either Hillary or Trump:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/08/dont-blame-me-if-trump-wins/
The best line is when he describes Hillary as "a warmongering enemy of workers and the environment, a friend of Wall Street and “free trade” (the corporate Clinton wing of the Democratic Party defeated efforts to insert opposition to the TPP into the party’s platform), and a genuine threat to launch World War III."
"We can also dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton knows exactly what she's doing -- she has no idea what she's doing."
ReplyDeleteSeriously. Anybody thinking that expensive brain trust consultants with fancy Powerpoint presentations are going to win this election for anybody hasn't been paying attention at all. If that was true Jeb would've been a shoe-in for the GOP, and he got BTFO'd so bad there will be epic poems of the Fall of the House of Bush. Taleb is right, "experts" can sometimes trick you into think they actually control things, but always end up badly embarrassing themselves in the attempt.
The experts can't even tell how badly they're being played by Trump about the VP "stakes" -- when it has been Jeff Sessions since last year.
ReplyDeleteTrump supporters themselves are allowing Trump to get them riled up with every "leak", but at least they're talking about Sessions as well.
For the talking heads and experts, they aren't even mentioning Sessions' name, if only to argue why it won't be him. They have the attention span of a flea, and whatever middling IQ they have is only used in service of ramping up the narrative du jour, not making sense of what's going on.
Ouch, Ag, but yeah, it's a little disconcerting to see them being played. I've even sometimes wondered if they aren't in on it themselves, going through the motions of acting out the drama, but I really don't think so.
DeleteMy husband is betting on Sessions on one of those sites, don't remember which. He got a little concerned over the Pence talk and asked me if I was sure*. I said 90%, I don't know Trump's mind that well and maybe he could change his mind, but you gotta go with the odds so stick with Sessions.
Trump gives the appearance of being erratic, but that's only with rhetoric, not actions.
*When Sessions price took a hit during the Newt bubble, my husband didn't hesitate to buy up more shares, but the Pence one rattled him.
"experts" don't necessarily have better information, but they sure as hell are great at rationalizing everything. Hell, I see that in the hospital all the time.
ReplyDelete"My husband is betting on Sessions on one of those sites, don't remember which."
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Trump is deliberately fucking with the BIG DATA hucksters (prediction markets, 538, etc.). They've proven that they don't know anything, and are merely expressing conventional wisdom, whether it's right or wrong.
The main reason he's floating all these names out there and sending them on the news channel rounds is to suck up the media oxygen from Hillary's VP choice. And to gradually build up excitement for the Convention.
But he could be floating all sorts of names -- by floating names who have zero chance of getting it, he's also testing who has any common sense among those reacting to it.
Pence gave him a back-handed quasi-endorsement before the Indiana primary, voters in his home state don't like him that much, he's a solid Establishment shill, heavy on culture war religious topics, and has no personal history / proven loyalty to Trump.
On top of kicking the BIG DATA geeks in their tiny nuts, it'll heighten the drama that all of the names being floated and micro-analyzed and endlessly debated were all wrong.
Turns out it was the affable, soft-spoken Southern gentleman who Trump had been promoting heavily during the primary season and just after -- but then quietly pulled him from public view during the VP "stakes" when all the decoys were sent out.
The audience will love seeing the shock and sense of being proved stupid before a national audience that the media figures will all be showing once Sessions is announced for certain.
It's been fun to see all of his media surrogates join in on the ruse, floating the no-chance names themselves or at least reacting sincerely to media questions about them as though they were serious contenders.
ReplyDeleteThose who are newer to national politics are witnessing first-hand what a bunch of naive babies the entire media sector is -- from NYT writers to talking heads on CNN to Twitter commentators.
They're just gossip addicts, and whatever IQ they may have is being wasted in pursuit of amping up the endorphin rush from all this pointless gossip. Being addicts with zero attention span makes them one of the easiest groups to manipulate and deceive -- just leave a trail of drug capsules toward the edge of a cliff, and there they all go.
"Just, like, a bunch, of babies"
I worried a little about the ruse being blown when they mentioned Sessions as playing an advisor role in almost throw-away lines in these articles: Dick Cheney was also a VP "advisor".
DeleteNewt's been so beautiful. I could be totally wrong, but I suspected that when he got angry several weeks back and lashed out at Trump in the media, that was when he learned that he wouldn't be VP. He got over it quickly and has been a good soldier ever since. A couple of the others quickly disappeared themselves after their names got floated, but mostly everybody has been phenomenal.
"...it's not out of the question that his voters will shake their head and call him a sell-out."
ReplyDeleteYou called this one so correctly! I more or less agreed with you, but was still taken back by how widespread and deep these feelings were.
Hillary twitter seemed caught off-guard and greatly disturbed by it all.