Democrat 2020

[Montmorency]

I edited this in after so you might not have seen my response why this is important:

Bernie took a shot an unnamed 'opponents,' literally none of whom believe what he's accusing them of.

It's important to push progressive policies. It's also important to have diverse viewpoints and have elected officials that reflect what America looks like. Other things can be important at once. Bernie is acting like it's one of the other.

He might not have intended it to be that way, but this comments like these which makes a lot of people skeptical he understands the issues that are outside his economic inequality shtick.

First of all, let us note that Sanders literally said "I think we’ve got to work in two ways".

Be careful with declarations like "literally none" believe something; many ideas exist. I have myself read several pieces arguing that doing both general economic reform and addressing particular group issues is actually racist and sexist, and can only come from a tonedeaf white man that does not understand the urgency of dismantling white supremacist patriarchy before all things.

Not to mention this recent comment about racism that just is very tone-deaf:
"There are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American."

And Hillary Clinton said only "half" of Trump supporters were "deplorables". It became a whole meme, despite her attempted grace and gentleness. Sanders is a politician, and he learned from the event. He understands you can't just condemn the white majority to their faces and expect to remain effective. So he couched it in a 'politically correct' way. Look at DeSantis and Gillum in Florida, in fact. The latter a black man and the former an open racist, but Gillum refused to call him that. In what became another meme, Gillum said in a debate, "Now, I'm not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist." Declaring DeSantis a racist outright would have made the ultimate defeat more convincing. TLDR: Politicians can't afford to talk like keyboard warriors, not even when they are keyboard warriors (like AOC).

Should they? It's arguable that it needs to happen. But the first ones that do openly pontificate on "white complicity" and the like to a mass audience are going to be taking one for the team, electorally speaking.

Side note: I recall seeing a study done where it showed something like half of the Bernie-Trump defectors were motivated in part by racial issues. Not saying it wasnt the same thing in 2008, but the political environment was different, and the impact of the internet wasnt nearly as large in 2008 as it was in 2016.

Many Sanders supporters were Republicans or Republican-leaning independents (arguably a factor in his favor against Trump, by the by...). Dovetails with majorities or pluralities of Republicans consistently polling in support of left-wing policies or ideas. For example, from the tweet you link:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

% of Sanders -> Trump voters who identify with ___ party...

Dem: 45%
IND: 26%
GOP: 29%

% of Sanders -> Clinton...

D: 94%
I: 5%
R: 1%

7 replies 46 retweets 136 likes

Sanders could never have convinced conservatives who voted him in open primaries to vote a Democrat woman they loathed over a Republican man many of them admired. 0 demerits for Sanders on that score.

Im not saying that Sanders is solely to blame at all, Im just saying that he is enough of a polarizing figure within the party that I think he would do more harm than good in 2020

Possibly, but I would suggest this conflict largely exists among Extremely Online people, and diehard party loyalists. "Regular" people don't know or care about it too much for it to distract them.


-------------------------------------------------

When I read this, I want to vote alt-right. Why is it important to have elected officials that reflect what America looks like? Should there be color-quotas in parliament?

Stop. Don't be a Dummkopf.

Of course it is preferable for a single group not to dominate a diverse society. Would it be a good sign if 40% of the members of the Bundestag were Koreans and Cameroonians in heritage, and another 40% French and Turkish? The point is that a healthy and relatively egalitarian society should naturally see a result where demography is roughly represented in positions of power and influence. If you're comfortable with white men running everything forever, you should ask yourself whether that's consistent with your other beliefs. A concrete example is, I recall reading in one article on German politics that there is a sarcastic saying about German women these days: [something like] German women can be anything they want, such as hairdresser, waiter, or Chancellor.

If you tell me that I can never understand you because of my skin color, then why should I give a **** about your issues in the first place?

Because they're people? That's really it.

With study and experience you can learn a lot about any person or group, but not everything. If a black person has an experience that a white person doesn't (and this can be correspondingly normalized across groups) - or vice versa - then logically a white person qua white cannot have that 'black experience'. That's far from saying that people or groups can never communicate or learn anything about each other, but there are qualitative gaps.

If you want to end discrimination based on skin color, stop dividing people into groups based on skin color.

Different groups exist. That's OK. It's possible that not all groups are treated fairly and that this needs to change. The problem doesn't go away if you ignore it.

The rest of what you say, well, it is indeed a form of privilege. Namely, that you de-emphasize certain accomplishments that did lead to improvements in the lives of millions. It's easier to do because you don't personally benefit (see: privilege). If "special subgroups" don't lobby for themselves, clearly you won't.

You're not speaking as though you really believe "I'm not saying the other issues are unimportant", see? Maybe it would help if all of the "special" movements were subsumed into the concept of 'achieving fairness'. Thereby moving economic power into more hands becomes part of the same battle as accepting more individual expression. Et al.

The point was that different viewpoints and backgrounds should not be a goal in themselves. Otherwise you will want someone who sees the world like Stalin as well or you end up with very biased viewpoints, defeating the purpose of different viewpoints.

That's a pretty weak argument, similar to right-wing people who say that even though Sanders-style policies were one mainstream/in practice in the United States, he should be vilified because it's only one step away from Stalin or Mao. Do you really need a case for why viewpoint diversity is desirable in itself? Hint: the lack of viewpoint diversity in economics over the past 2 generations across the Western world is part of how we got into this mess.

If the districts in your country are diverse, your representatives should be, too, without specifically making diversity a goal during an election.

Yes, as I say above. This is desirable. If it is desirable, and it isn't being achieved, then it's perfectly sensible to ask why this is so and what might be done about it (even if there are not many specific or direct, as opposed to overarching and indirect, policies that will achieve it).

I for one wouldn't vote for yellow Hitler just because I haven't voted for a yellow guy in a while and need my diversity fix. That's what dicversity as a goal often sounds like. If you have a diverse country, but representation is not, fix your voting system, then diversity should come by itself. Or in other words, don't call for a fix to the symptom, fix the problem.

What if the white people and their position and society are more the problem than the voting system?

So in other words, the school system should be fixed by those with the lowest IQ, because they're most affected by the "intelligence problem"? If the entire system is biased against African Americans, denying them education and money, then how can they have:
a) the money/power required to actually change it?
b) the insight necessary to make meaningful, lasting change to it?

Think about what you're saying here: If the system is biased against African Americans, then they're too poor and stupid to do anything about it and just have to wait for a solution to be delivered from white people.

In fact, there are plenty of intelligent and/or educated black people, and the left has always lacked for money, so the issue is more people, organization, and ideas. If black people participating = more people, ideas, and organization, then they measurably add to the movements to help themselves.

Civil rights weren't attained by the action of benevolent whites. It involved hundreds of thousands of black people in the streets, and thousands of black people, educated or otherwise, speaking out to the country and to other black people on their behalf.

This is why I said you have to grab the power first. The prison system is the way it is because other powers want it to be that way. As long as these other powers are in fact in power, you may narrowly get some change, but in the long term, it is unlikely to have lasting effects.

But this isn't really true. You're thinking like a Marxist, where all the bad effects and ideas are coming from a select group in power who run everything. That's not how the world works. Culture and institutions play a much bigger role than you acknowledge. So if both conservative and liberal white people believed that it's a good idea for many black people (or people in general) to be locked up, it's not because they rule the world and have some master plan and this is their plan - it's because they learned these ideas and values. So changes ideas and values is absolutely complementary to putting the right people in the right positions.

(If you're a radical leftist you may believe that the structure of law enforcement breeds the same styles of thinking and creates path-dependent results, so in fact the ideal for them is to abolish police and prisons, because there will never be good police or prisons in their theory.)

I'm not saying forget the other issues, I'm saying grab the power first, then use that power to fix all the dozens of problems you identified.

There may be independent problems, again, that don't simply stem from "power" or poverty. What if doctors are less skilled at treating black patients for various reasons, or black people have less geographical access to health care than white people even in the same class, or black people have unique health problems or even unique bad practices? Your view on how and where change comes from is too simplistic. We can agree perhaps that "seizing the power" is a good priority because it will put us in a better position to address the special problems than we are in presently, but the special problems do still exist as such.

Well, that's good for these people and organizations, and I know they exist, they just don't seem to be getting anywhere near the traction they should get and should have gotten in 2016.

Again, please don't forget about the many people directly benefiting from this, such as services providing shelter for trans teenagers or the clinics that send volunteer physicians into poor rural areas. Most of these groups aren't aiming to dramatically resolve the issues on a national or global scale, but to provide relief to people who need help NOW. If you don't need help NOW, and so don't care - that's privilege.

It's like passing a homeless person on the street.
Homeless: Hey, could I have some change, maybe a job interview?
Husar: No way, I can't give you that. However, I will support a politician who promises to confiscate billionaires' wealth and use it to build whole neighborhoods of cheap housing in our city. Hopefully you can take advantage of that someday. Power to the people!
Homeless: Have a nice day.

The usual democrat approach of "we will change a percentage here and in two years a percentage there and in the meantime we focus on lots of feel-good-laws for smaller special interests" is not enough, especially not with climate change breathing down our collective necks.

I do agree. But why do you think this downgrades achievements like gay marriage, which btw were the result of years of public outreach and activism from the grassroots? Most mainstream Democrats steadfastly opposed it, until it was popular enough that they acquiesced? Until the anti-gay Democrats got voted out when enough people decided for themselves that they wouldn't accept it anymore? Hey, that almost sounds like the process that economic issues in the Democratic caucus could be undergoing right now...

Saying that Sanders is not focused enough of special interests doesn't help, he can get an entire cabinet and a huge staff of advisers for that, and I'm sure he will.

In fact, that's just what Sanders seems to have been spending the last 2 years doing, to build his portfolio on "special issues".

But prison reform won't save any black people from the next heat wave or the next flood caused by global warming. Prison reform will be a natural follow-up once the power of the oligarchs is broken, the same oligarchs who own your prisons and many of your politicians in both parties.

Climate reform will take a long time and is in fact liable to be a permanent feature of life from now on. Same for de-oligarching the economy. Prison reform is something that can help millions in a short time, and is something that we can start doing immediately. When in many places huge proportions, even majorities of the black population have been put through the system, do you really think they can afford you saying it's not a priority? Indeed, successful prison reform means many more votes, which in turn enables continuing reform on long-term projects related to climate or economy. For example, Florida in the midterms passed a referendum to restore voting rights to most felons. That means potentially 0.5 million more reliable Democratic votes (out of something like ~1.5 million felons eligible, ~1/5 of all potential black voters) - no wonder that the people in power, through their Republican lackeys who narrowly beat the Dems to retain the state government, tried to find a way out of implementing the referendum results despite its plain language. (I'm sure they'll still find a way to slowtrack applications in the bureaucracy.)

Speaking of which, how did Republicans keep the Senate and governor seats in Florida by less than 1% of votes in 2018? And the same with the governor seat in Georgia, where the Republican candidate was the officer overseeing the election? Oh yeah, by committing a whole lot of fraud and suppressing the votes of black and poor people, who mostly vote Democratic. Hmmm, maybe these special issues DO matter toward the big picture...

An example would be: A thunderstorm went through your backyard and cut down 30 trees, do you:
a) remove all thirty trees by yourself, very slowly, one after the other, fighting the force of gravity for weeks
b) fix your crane first and use its power to effortlessly remove the trees in a matter of hours?

In the time it takes for (b), the trees will be rotten and full of vermin and the crane will be all rusty. Better to get a whole bunch of people together who can tell you how best to move each tree, then have some teams moving some trees while the mechanics and engineers and various others take a look at the crane.

Husar, I'm not the best one to discuss this with you since I lean more overall in the direction you describe, but there are many important concepts you dismiss or aren't aware of (such as identity issues typically being ignored by Dem politicians until activists make their positions popular enough that the politicians are forced to support them - as opposed to Dem politicians stereotypically being obsessed with identity politics and "forcing" them on the public). I'll try to find some good articles that show you what you're lacking, or at least need more sophisticated arguments to contradict.