The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Electoral Politics Page 11 of 29

Brief Notes on the Democratic Primaries

Bernie Sanders

The polling is all over the place, but generally Biden is in first place, with Sanders or Warren in second. In early primary states, it’s generally Biden, but only slightly ahead of Sanders.

The clear truth about Biden is that he’s senile and gaffe-prone. Even if you like his politics (which, obviously, I don’t), this is the case. He’ll be a bad candidate in the general–I think Trump will eat him alive. Yes, Trump is senile also, but Trump is channeling some genuine anger and hatred, whereas Biden is channeling his elite entitlement, along with “Can’t we go back to Obama?” My suspicion is that the first wins.

As for Sanders and Warren, whichever one isn’t doing well in the early primary rounds had better drop out fast and endorse the other, otherwise it’ll be Biden.

All that said, who the hell knows? Things change and perhaps one of Biden’s senior moments will get through to people and they’ll realize that he’s no longer all there.

I prefer Sanders over Warren. Warren wants to save capitalism, she’s been very clear on that. Markets aren’t working well, and she wants to fix them. That’s her raison d’etre, that’s why she was a Republican most of her life, and why she switched her party to Democrat: Republicans were fucking up markets. She’s clearly said, for example, that she wouldn’t nationalize utilities, which is actually an extreme position among market disciples; many would say these are natural monopolies and should be owned by government.

This isn’t to say Sanders is anti-markets. He isn’t going to replace them or any such thing, he’s just a social democrat. He’ll modify them, make them more democratic, put more under public control, and so on.

He also seems the most credible on strongly tackling climate change. One might say that makes him a “must vote.”

As I’ve said before, I trust Sanders more. He’s been very consistent over the years, he’s not going to take oligarchs’ money even after the primary (Warren’s position), and he doesn’t think things were substantially “okay,” even in the 80s. (They weren’t, or we wouldn’t be here.) None of this is to say he’s perfect; he’s bad on some people’s key issues and not great on foreign affairs.

He’s still, in my opinion, better for ordinary people than anyone else, including Warren.


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A Rainbow Reading Out of Pete Buttigieg

Hi. I’m the blogger/artist formerly known as Pachacutec. If you are old enough to remember me as a lefty blogger, you’ve been on this internet thing too long. But I digress.

My friend Ian saw me tweet something, and he asked me if I wanted to do a piece about it. Sure, why not? But I’m going to adopt a prose style that is quick and to the point, with a bit of punch, as an homage to my longtime friend Ian.

I tweeted in response to Congressman Patrick Murphy as he endorsed Peter Buttigieg for Congress. I’m sorry did I say Congress? That’s what mayors usually do, but this guy is running for president. Alrighty then.

Let’s start with Patrick Murphy. My other longtime friend (and gay hero in his own right), Howie Klein, once described Murphy as:

“the perfect Chuck Schumer recruit– a slimy Schumercrat as corrupt as they come. Yesterday we looked at how he’s been selling his vote for campaign cash in regard to EB-5 visas, something I thought only real low-life Republicans did. Oh… that’s right; Murphy is a lifelong low-life Republican and just switched his party registration to get into Congress (where he votes with the GOP anyway).”

From that perspective, the endorsement of Mayor Pete makes perfect sense. But Mayor Pete is getting a fair amount of recognition for being a gay candidate. People who know me know me know that I’m a big old homo. And now with my tiara firmly in place, I’m here to call out Mayor Pete.

Okay, I don’t actually wear a tiara. I’m actually very much like Pete in my gay origins, in that I am a light-skinned person, presumed to be white (though I’m half Latino) with a good education, cis gendered, and a beneficiary of all the presumptions of competence and intelligence that accrue to light-skinned, well-educated men who are not effeminate in their conduct or manner.

Like Mayor Pete, I came out later in life, in my young 30s. That was a pretty traumatic time for me, actually. I made a fair mess of my life, and we won’t get into all that. But as Ian’s readers know, it’s what you do with your suffering that makes or breaks you. If you dive into it and learn from it, with the right support and process, you can turn it into your superpower.

Or you can become a preening, pompous, head-up-his-ass climber who cashes the cultural, social and political checks earned for work done by all the very homos, queers, transgender men and women, and people of color that you personally avoid engaging at all costs.

Everyone in the gay community knows these people. These are the white boys who stand and model, painfully preppy, in bars filled with other white boys, with a few token “ethnics” like black, Asian, or Latino men sprinkled in to provide a little variety, a little sexy “grit” and fetish fodder. Their Grindr profiles say things like “No offense, but I prefer white guys,” or “no fats or fems.”

These are cis gay white boys who might stay for the drag show and enjoy the bawdy jokes, but who feel painfully uncomfortable around effeminate men. As in my tweet, they don’t even see women, non-binary gender rebels, or black folk. Mayor Pete’s relationships with black folk in South Bend are a joke. Gay guys like Mayor Pete never go into a bar if the person of color ratio gets too high–say, higher than 15 percent, unless, for example, they really have a thing for Latin guys and it’s salsa night at the club. Some of these guys really fetishize some groups, be they Asians, black men, or Latinos. It gets very creepy.

I don’t want to belabor the point. This guy has no claim to stand for gay politics when he is precisely the kind of guy who wouldn’t have been caught dead anywhere near the Stonewall Inn, and lacks the self-awareness to know it or understand why. I personally know the type, because, in the beginning of my coming out journey, I had to overcome the legacy of cultural biases, blind spots, and presumptions of privilege (I know Ian hates that word, sorry) that would have made me into one of those guys.

For some people, the experience of coming out, and the experience of being marginalized or oppressed in some fashion, leads to expanded empathy and curiosity for others who are downtrodden or outcast. That’s clearly not Mayor Pete. Pete fundamentally believes in his inherent superiority, and subsequently wants to have it both ways: He wants people to overlook his gayness because he’s not that gay, and then he wants credit for being some kind of LGBTQ pioneer. But whether you look at his policies, his politics, or his presence in a room with real people, he is what he is: A conservative, wannabe frat boy who happens to be gay. No wonder Patrick Murphy loves this guy.

Hard pass. If you want more specifically on Pete from the great Howie Klein, I’ve got you covered.

Coda:

Scenarios for America’s Political Future

Big Brother Award

Let’s run through the most likely possible victories in the upcoming federal election and consider what they mean for the US’s future.

Put them in four baskets:

Trump wins. He does more bad stuff, the situation continues to get worse, American post-WWII-style multilateral hegemony and trade order takes huge hits.

Biden or Harris win. Harris will be a more effective President, but both will be neoliberals. More Obama/Clinton style politics. I very much doubt that Harris, who was a brutal prosecutor, will turn out to keep many progressive promises if elected. Both of these people perpetuate the conditions which created the possibility of a Trump worse.

Sanders wins. An actual left-wing President. He may have issues with Congress, but there is a lot that can be done by the aggressive use of executive power. Sanders is who says he is, he’s been that guy, with some updating for modern identity politics since the 60s and 70. He hasn’t changed, he can be trusted.

Warren wins. Don’t expect to get real universal healthcare, she’s talked out of both sides of her mouth on the issue too much. But she’ll be good on a lot of other issues.

Both Sanders and Warren will probably be good on the environment. None of the others who are likely win will be (and if you think they will…)

There are two important, longer-term issues at play here: (1) A real, right-wing totalitarian who seeks to end American democracy is the first (I maintain that Trump is not this man, largely because he is not organized enough), and;

(2) The environment. With permafrost melts happening 70 years ahead of schedule, we are out of time. Steps–aggressive steps–need to be taken now, and they aren’t being taken.

So let’s play this out a bit longer. Say Harris or Biden wins. The next chance to get a good President then becomes 2028 because there will be no primary challenge in 2024. So domestically, the situation will get worse (and better for a right-wing, totalitarian demagogue). Nothing of significance will be done about the environment.

Potentially catastrophic on both fronts.

What if Trump wins? Well, there’s another chance to have a decent president in 2024. That’s not good, and he’ll do damage in the meantime, but there is a schedule here with regards to climate change. As for a totalitarian demagogue (someone who sees what Trump did, combines it with Bannon’s politics, and is disciplined and charismatic), well, the risk is there, but odds are the next President will be a Democrat.

As for Sanders or Warren, well, they’ll be reelected if they deliver and won’t if they don’t. So it’ll be war, because Republicans will know that. But it’s always war with Republicans, so whatever.

I am not arguing, “Don’t vote for Harris or Biden.” I am pointing out the foreseeable consequences of certain electoral outcomes.


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Polling at this Time in 2015

Found this tweet, thought it was important enough to share:


Now I wouldn’t go as far as DeRosa: There probably were a few people who got it right, but the larger point is that polls have a good chance of changing a lot over time.

In the 2008 Democratic primary, things went back and forth a lot. Even once the field had been thinned, it wasn’t obviously Obama for a while.

None of this is to say that Biden doesn’t have the best odds, just that he’s by no means a sure thing.

Another Biden Problem

Matt Stoller, who was a Congressional aide, wrote an important article on Biden back in April.

… Biden is a bad candidate. Obama was exceptionally disciplined, and Biden is not…

Basically, Biden combined two traits that work against each other. He’s lazy. Staffers can deal with that, if the lazy person is willing to delegate. But Biden doesn’t delegate important decision-making authority. He won’t write a speech beforehand to clear it with political allies, and he also won’t just read the damn talking points.

This means important things don’t get done, because he won’t do them, and he won’t let others do them. It is a nightmare to work for someone like this, because the staff never knows if there’s going to be a scandal. They never know if the boss is going to straight out lie to their own staff about it and have them ruin their own reputations and connections with political allies. They will not be able to defend Biden because it’s impossible to defend someone who isn’t trustworthy, unless people go full Trump and deny reality openly.

Given that Biden has a decent shot at being the President of the United States, I’d suggest reading the whole article.


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The obvious similarity is, actually, Trump. The same type of mismanagement and laziness. Biden’s politics are different, and essentially the same as Obama’s, but a bit more retrograde: Biden is a neoliberal corporatist.

He’s less retrograde on social issues than many people think, mind you. Obama was against gay marriage until gay activists and donors took him out to the curb (something people forget). But Obama would bow to pressure on things that didn’t matter to him, like social issues.

He wouldn’t bow on key items, like making sure bankers were made whole, though, and Biden will be similar.

But Biden will also be, effectively, incompetent, even though Stoller notes he’s talented. All the talent in the world means little when he won’t do the work and won’t let anyone else do it.

So, not that anyone who reads me was likely to do so, I’d suggest not supporting Biden in the Democratic primaries.

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Bernie Sanders vs. Elizabeth Warren

Bernie Sanders

Many supporters of either Sanders or Warren have become rather vicious to each other. The claim from the Warren supporters is that their candidate is the candidate of ideas, having put out tons of policy proposals. (Sanders has 25 last time I looked, so he’s not shy on this.) She’s younger, and it’s important to some people that she’s a woman.

But the basic thing is that Warren feels like a technocrat, and people who want a competent technocrat as President are drawn to her.

Sanders has ideas as well, and plans, but he’s different from Warren. Warren has said that she’s “capitalist to the bones” and that the problem isn’t capitalism, it is that capitalism needs rules (enforced rules.)


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Sanders is a democratic socialist. He believes that capitalism has its place, but he believes it is fundamentally flawed. He has harked back to FDR’s second bill of rights, which include rights to health, education, a home, and a good income, among others.

Matt Taibbi’s interview with Sanders makes this clear:

He goes on to elucidate probably the biggest difference between himself and Warren.

“In the words of Roosevelt,” he says, “the Republic at the beginning was built around the guarantee of political rights. But he came to believe that true individual freedom can’t exist without economic security.

Elizabeth Warren

To Sanders, capitalism isn’t a good system that we’ve managed badly, it’s a flawed system which needs to be heavily controlled. Nor does he believe that the problem with the left is a lack of ideas. It is a lack of power. The left has ideas, the left has not been able to implement those ideas for decades because the left was out of power.

So, what is required is not to just get good rules back in place. It is to completely subordinate markets to democratic control, and when they are not the best way to do something, remove them.

Leaving these domestic issues aside, Sanders is clearly superior to Warren on foreign affairs, though certainly nowhere near ideal. (Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate who actually has good, clear, foreign policies, which oppose the US killing foreigners simply because it thinks it has the right to.)

I favor Sanders, overall. Warren or Gabbard would be fine. Foreign affairs do matter, because non-American lives matter. Even if you think they don’t, constant interference in other nations’ affairs costs the US far more than it’s worth, both politically and economically. A straight pragmatist would decide that the advantages of American hegemony, to Americans, are not worth the cost. (This is a longer article, and I’ll write it another day, as the end of hegemony does also have some costs.)

Probably an ideal ticket to me would be either Sanders/Warren, or Sanders/Gabbard. Sanders is old, and he needs a younger VP, not as a balance, but as someone who can be counted on to do much of what he would have done.

I hope, in particular, that neither Trump nor Biden becomes President.

As for the fights between Warren and Sanders followers: The differences are real, yes, but they are minor compared to the differences between either candidate and Biden. It would be good for people to remember that. It’s in the interest of no actual supporter of Sanders or Warren to make attacks on either candidate so damaging that it hurts them in the general.

I hope everyone will bear that in mind going forward.

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The Curse of Knowledge and Predicting Electoral Results

I’m good at predicting some thing. Economic events, longer term political and social trends, and so on.

When I was younger, I was also good at predicting elections.

Then I started getting election results wrong.

It took me a while to figure out why.

I knew too much.

When I was young, I didn’t follow politics much, I just read the newspaper and maybe saw the occasional newscast.

So I knew what ordinary voters knew.

Later I studied economics and politics and so on. I started knowing the actual consequences of elections, and I knew what governments had actually done, not just what was reported enough to sink into someone who wasn’t paying much attention, like most of the population.

In other words, I was no longer a proxy for the population.

Nor does analysis which tries to model “what does the ordinary person know” really help.


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The reason is simple enough: we don’t make most decisions, including voting decisions, rationally. We make them based on our feelings. The strongest feeling determines our vote.

Since my feelings, as someone who followed politics closely, were no longer in sync with those of the majority of the population, I could no longer use my feelings to judge. Even if I were to try and feel like someone different from me (not impossible) I still knew too much. My empathic sense of what they would want was based on more knowledge than they had.

And boom, lousy electoral predictions.

Talking with other close observers of politics and economics and so on I’ve noticed that this curse of knowledge is not mine alone. Most political experts predict elections badly.

So I’d keep thinking “wow, if you elect this dude it’ll be disastrous,” because I knew the consequences of what they were actually likely to do, and primary and general election voters would keep picking awful people.

The problem, of course, is that the consequences of actual government policies don’t go away. But the other problem is figuring out how to avoid the curse of knowledge: one needs it to make important predictions other than electorally, but if you don’t understand the electorate, that cripples any chance of good candidates being elected.

So far, I don’t know how to avoid this and if anybody else on the more left wing side does, I’m not seeing it.

A problem.

 

Biden Will Run on Fear, Trump Will Run on Hope

The reason one should run for office is to act on one’s beliefs about what a good society is.

When people, or a party (Democrats), run on whether they are electable, they aren’t actually running on anything but hatred for an incumbent.

That means that the incumbent controls, even more than normal, whether you win or lose. You can only back into power.

Right now we have the spectacle of Democrats running against their own base (as is very common, Clinton certainly did, so did Obama, but with more concealment). Obama won because Bush was really unpopular, and Clinton lost because Obama had fucked up the economy.

But if Clinton hadn’t run against her base, she probably would have won.

People are reluctant to vote for candidates with whom they disagree. Is this surprising? Is this new?

Is it, instead, crazy to think otherwise?


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Unless Biden’s support among likely Democratic voters crashes out, this is the de-facto Democratic plan. Biden voted for Iraq and is unapologetic about it, and Trump will kill him on it. He was for NAFTA and Trump will kill him on it. He was for a bunch of other policies that Trump can’t attack him on, but left-wingers won’t forget he’s been for basically ever regressive policy possible for his entire career.

Making bankruptcy impossible for students, by the way, is also one of those policies.

So Biden will probably win the nomination, thanks to The Onion making him into “Uncle Joe,” (an act for which they should be ashamed) and Democratic party members actually being centrists, but the left-wing voters needed to, like, actually win an election are likely to not come out. The only thing motivating them will be fear of Trump.

That means that Biden will run on fear, and Trump will (again) run on hope.

That’s not a good campaign to run, and it means that Trump determines Biden’s fate; Trump is in the driver’s seat. He has to fuck up for Biden to win.

He might, for sure. But perhaps hoping for our enemies to fuck up and having no positive plan beyond “I’m not my enemy” isn’t a good way to campaign, or govern.

(And Biden will be a disaster as President. Terrible economic policies and terrible foreign policy. A complete clusterfuck.)

Oh well.

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