Democrats already retreating from public option before DNC even starts

[lil devils x]

Half of the US voted for him. Sad.

Not exactly though. We had low voter turn out and more people actually voted for his opponent. Since the popular vote doesn't actually determine the elections, it was the electoral college who elected him, not the people. I will agree it is sad though that even that many people voted for him. Even sadder though that with everything he has done wrong and so many dead and dying, while he calls it a hoax and promotes conspiracy theories and gets pandemic advice from the my pillow guy, we still have people saying crazy things like " I am a devout Christian and even if Jesus himself came to me and told me that trump was lying, I would tell Jesus to wait a second and go check with trump instead". THIS is seriously what is wrong with this country.

Just in case you think I am kidding...

MyPillow CEO Lindell Says White House Asked Him To Look For ‘Cures’ For Covid-19

Lindell has come under fire for promoting potentially-toxic extract Oleandrin to Trump despite serving on the board of a company that manufactures it.

www.forbes.com

Sadly these days the truth is worse than any exaggeration anyone could make here..

 

[Iron]

Not exactly though. We had low voter turn out and more people actually voted for his opponent. Since the popular vote doesn't actually determine the elections, it was the electoral college who elected him, not the people. I will agree it is sad though that even that many people voted for him. Even sadder though that with everything he has done wrong and so many dead and dying, while he calls it a hoax and promotes conspiracy theories and gets pandemic advice from the my pillow guy, we still have people saying crazy things like " I am a devout Christian and even if Jesus himself came to me and told me that trump was lying, I would tell Jesus to wait a second and go check with trump instead". THIS is seriously what is wrong with this country.

Just in case you think I am kidding...

MyPillow CEO Lindell Says White House Asked Him To Look For ‘Cures’ For Covid-19

Lindell has come under fire for promoting potentially-toxic extract Oleandrin to Trump despite serving on the board of a company that manufactures it.

www.forbes.com

Sadly these days the truth is worse than any exaggeration anyone could make here..

Pillow guy? I think it's one of the few friends Trump has left. Poor guy he used to be in the NYC swap, now everybody hates his guts. He's at a loss, really, and severely demoralized. Every rally he goes to with little turnout inches him closer to just giving up.
It was a joke, though. I think I tried to emulate Trump's style with tweets.

 

[Iron]

Me personally? Well, his economic policies actually reduced my take-home pay necessitating working longer hours in inhospitable conditions. His loosening of police oversight has made my encounters with the cops even more stressful and terrifying. I'm constantly in a state of anxiety that I'm going to lose my healthcare coverage if his cronies succeed in axing the ACA. Which, by the way, has had a knock-on effect for my mental health causing me to have regular panic attacks, sleepless nights and digestion problems. Thanks to his bungling of the coronavirus, I'm still out of work. The stimulus check was a pittance that covered my bills a couple months before it ran out. There are jackbooted thugs in my city right now arresting protestors without cause or charges so I risk that if I try to protest or attend any rallies. And that's me getting off comparatively easy.

And that's not even getting into all the other people he's fucked over. 170k+ dead form the pandemic, the economy cratering, the lack of oversight on the stimulus bill meaning that the lion's share was pocketed by the 1%, the evictions, the families separated at the border and tortured for the crime of legally seeking refugee status, the fucking up legal immigration, the tax scam that only further exacerbated our income inequality, the fact that he's actively destroying the USPS, politicized the justice department, all his cabinet appointment are corrupt AF, he's withheld federal aid from states that didn't go to him in the 2016 election and has explicitly said it's because he wants them to only say nice things about him, allowed the Saudi royal family to torture a journalist to death in the midst of an explicit assault on the free press...

So yeah. America is not a paradise. We're a failed state.

Ok dude I won't go on. I made a whole post for each of your points but don't want to fuck with you. Get better, try for some exercise and sunlight despite the whole situation.

 

[Buyetyen]

Get better, try for some exercise and sunlight despite the whole situation.

I already do, but it's not really enough to change the fact that my country is sliding from being just a regular corporate oligarchy to a full-blown a fascist autocracy in front of my eyes. The orange man really is bad. I hope that's starting to sink in.

 

[Iron]

I already do, but it's not really enough to change the fact that my country is sliding from being just a regular corporate oligarchy to a full-blown a fascist autocracy in front of my eyes.

Also, very important. Stop consuming news and social media. I guarantee you it will make you much less anxious. There are enough people doing stuff that you like, they don't need you to get a heart attack. Take care of yourself man. If you die you won't be able to fight the good fight.

 

[Buyetyen]

If you die you won't be able to fight the good fight.

That's actually precisely why I fight. And I have relatives who stand to suffer way more in a second Trump term to the point where I don't know how many of them will live to see the end of it. Like I said, America is a failed state and has been for some time. It's just getting harder to ignore.

 

[Silvanus]

One in which you were not only factually (as it would have been Nixon in office, not Goldwater, in '64) and chronologically (Goldwater would have taken office in '65) incorrect, you brought up the wrong fucking bill (Goldwater might have impacted the Voting Rights Act, not the Civil Rights Act), [...]

Do you genuinely believe that once an bill is signed into law, that's the end of it? Even if a viscerally-hostile president is elected immediately afterwards?

In case it's passed you by, the current President of the US has rolled back a huge heap of measures brought in by his immediate predecessor.

[...] and proceeded to make this choice at the opportunity cost of examining actual elections and the impact they had on the state of civil rights in the US, when you knew damn well the 1964 election had an intervening variable in the form of a sitting Democratic president dying of a gunshot to the head.

Of course it had an "intervening variable". That doesn't negate its importance to the Civil Rights issue-- I'm not even sure how it would.

I didn't just pluck that election out of a hat. It was the election with the largest possibility of the Civil Rights provisions going either way. Had 1960 gone the other way, it's likely there would have been a bill proposed that was roughly analogous to the one we got; had 1968 gone either way, neither candidate would have repealed it. But in 1964-5, immediately after its passage and with a visceral opponent in office?

 

[Eacaraxe]

In case it's passed you by, the current President of the US has rolled back a huge heap of measures brought in by his immediate predecessor.

That's funny, I didn't realize bad orange man hopped in his time machine and created the war on drugs, mass incarceration, redlining, felon disenfranchisement, and the militarized police state. Because the problem is you seem to want this framed in terms of "would the CRA and VRA have been repealed, amended, or stricken down, or would subsequent legislation have failed to pass?". When, the actual historical record that exists demonstrates overwhelmingly that no, that would not have been the case, and that the oppression of poor and minority folk would find alternate pathways that didn't run afoul of civil rights legislation and for which consent could be manufactured with plausible deniability.

That doesn't negate its importance to the Civil Rights issue-- I'm not even sure how it would.

I didn't just pluck that election out of a hat.

No you didn't. You know damn well Goldwater never, ever would have won that election to begin with and any argumentation about it based upon civil rights is completely academic. Incumbency and the JFK assassination gave Johnson overwhelming advantages, but even then had that not been decisive his nuke-happiness and desire to dismantle SSA and privatize the alphabets did the trick. Shitting on the TVA is why he didn't even carry the solid South.

 

[lil devils x]

That's actually precisely why I fight. And I have relatives who stand to suffer way more in a second Trump term to the point where I don't know how many of them will live to see the end of it. Like I said, America is a failed state and has been for some time. It's just getting harder to ignore.

When we are surrounded by people who will actually die due to Trump's policies, we have a pretty good reason to fight.

 

[Buyetyen]

When we are surrounded by people who will actually die due to Trump's policies, we have a pretty good reason to fight.

It ain't easy, but it's a damn sight better than using cynicism as an excuse for inaction like so many other people.

 

[Silvanus]

That's funny, I didn't realize bad orange man hopped in his time machine [...]

The Executive had inflated power before Donald Trump. He isn't what that point was about; his office is.

Because the problem is you seem to want this framed in terms of "would the CRA and VRA have been repealed, amended, or stricken down, or would subsequent legislation have failed to pass?". When, the actual historical record that exists demonstrates overwhelmingly that no, that would not have been the case, and that the oppression of poor and minority folk would find alternate pathways that didn't run afoul of civil rights legislation and for which consent could be manufactured with plausible deniability.

Yes, the actual historical record shows it didn't happen that way. The actual historical record shows us bugger all about what a Goldwater presidency would have been like: we have to look to his actions beforehand (voting against the Civil Rights Act and being vocal & public about his opposition), his temperament, the demographics to which he chose to appeal (Southern segregationists by-and-large). But it's all hypothetical. If you don't want to engage with hypotheticals, that's fine, you don't have to.

But whether you do or not, I'd appreciate a bit of de-escalation. The aggression is reaching a fever pitch.

 

[tstorm823]

his temperament (viscerally racist)

Find a single quote of Goldwater's expressing any "viscerally racist" sentiment, and I will never argue about the Southern Strategy on here ever again.

 

[Eacaraxe]

The Executive had inflated power before Donald Trump. He isn't what that point was about; his office is.

If this were a broad conversation about the unitary executive, then why invoke language such as "...the current President of the US has rolled back a huge heap of measures brought in by his immediate predecessor"? There is only one current President of the United states, Donald Trump, and he had but one immediate predecessor, Barack Obama. Neither of them held a candle to the expansion of the unitary executive under George W. Bush, and Bush himself was nowhere near to FDR in terms of executive power expansion.

Now, here's the broader problem with this assertion. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed on 2 July, 1964. Were this a conversation about executive power, not only would that and unitary executive theory have come up at any point before now, the bill signed 39 days after the Civil Right Act would also be of great relevance, and coincidentally enough, Goldwater's own thoughts on the subject would also be of great relevance. Not in the least because the two subjects were entirely interconnected and interdependent:

Yes, the actual historical record shows it didn't happen that way.

Then there's absolutely zero point bringing it up. There's real history to discuss with real implications for today's politics.

 

[Silvanus]

If this were a broad conversation about the unitary executive, then why invoke language such as "...the current President of the US has rolled back a huge heap of measures brought in by his immediate predecessor"? There is only one current President of the United states, Donald Trump, and he had but one immediate predecessor, Barack Obama. Neither of them held a candle to the expansion of the unitary executive under George W. Bush, and Bush himself was nowhere near to FDR in terms of executive power expansion.

It was an illustrative example of an incumbent rolling back a large number of the measures recently enacted by his predecessor. That's quite obvious. People use examples to make broader points that aren't unique or restricted to that one instance.

Now, here's the broader problem with this assertion. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed on 2 July, 1964. Were this a conversation about executive power, not only would that and unitary executive theory have come up at any point before now, the bill signed 39 days after the Civil Right Act would also be of great relevance, and coincidentally enough, Goldwater's own thoughts on the subject would also be of great relevance. Not in the least because the two subjects were entirely interconnected and interdependent

If you want to broaden the topic to include more examples of an election proving to have a great impact on an issue of high importance, be my guest!

If your only point is to say you think your example is better, nyah-nyah-nyah, then I don't give a toss, and find it surpassingly petulant.

Then there's absolutely zero point bringing it up. There's real history to discuss with real implications for today's politics.

Do... do you genuinely think that historical study is solely limited to the way things happened, without any consideration of other probabilities/ possibilities?

Hey, I guess the Cuban Missile Crisis was all fine and dandy after all! The world didn't end, and we just won't consider the risks, because they didn't pan out! Let's do it again!

 

[Silvanus]

Find a single quote of Goldwater's expressing any "viscerally racist" sentiment, and I will never argue about the Southern Strategy on here ever again.

I'm looking around to read more about it, but I think I may well have mischaracterised him with that description. I've edited that bit out for now.

 

[Silvanus]

SNIP

Yeah, after looking around, it does look like I probably mischaracterised him there.

I think this might be partly because I'm coming from a UK perspective. We don't have the "federal-vs-state" debate here, or really anything even like it. Rationales like that tend to strike me as a bit bogus, and a cover for something else-- particularly when voting on something as monumentally important as Civil Rights. Combined with the fact that he garnered endorsements from the KKK and Southern segregationists and re-segregationists, and hopefully you can see how I got the impression I did. But I jumped the gun and got a bit presumptuous.

I still think it's a fair argument to say there's a good chance he would have rolled back the Civil Rights protections brought in under his predecessor, and that the 1964 election stands as a strong example of the importance of participation in the electoral process alongside mass movements/protest to bring about legislative change.

 

[tstorm823]

Yeah, after looking around, it does look like I probably mischaracterised him there.

I think this might be partly because I'm coming from a UK perspective. We don't have the "federal-vs-state" debate here, or really anything even like it. Rationales like that tend to strike me as a bit bogus, and a cover for something else-- particularly when voting on something as monumentally important as Civil Rights. Combined with the fact that he garnered endorsements from the KKK and Southern segregationists and re-segregationists, and hopefully you can see how I got the impression I did. But I jumped the gun and got a bit presumptuous.

I still think it's a fair argument to say there's a good chance he would have rolled back the Civil Rights protections brought in under his predecessor, and that the 1964 election stands as a strong example of the importance of participation in the electoral process alongside mass movements/protest to bring about legislative change.

I mean, I know how you got the impression you did. It's sort of a long story. In the 1964 campaign, Goldwater went to Johnson and personally, privately requested they not make the election about race. Goldwater knew his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was political poison, and also knew Johnson had opposed civil rights at every opportunity as a senator. They could both be attacked on that issue. Johnson said sure. Then Goldwater, who could have spent the campaign putting a spotlight on Johnson's long-standing opposition to civil rights, kept the deal and didn't talk about it. Johnson, being one of the biggest douchebags in the history of politics, put ads on tv telling everyone that the KKK endorsed Goldwater (which I understand they did, but if Trump put out TV ads about Richard Spencer endorsing Joe Biden, you'd hardly call that sportsmanlike conduct). And then the American news media, effectively a wing of the Democratic Party without opposition in that period, published pieces claiming that Goldwater actually was talking about race, he was deliberately courting racists with coded language. And they'd go on to say the same thing about every Republican presidential candidate since. Thus, the myth of the Southern Strategy was born, built on the lie that the south voted for Goldwater because the Republican Party suddenly turned secret racist. Half a century of propaganda being treated as historical fact is how you got that impression, and obviously I can blame no individual for being lied to, but I hope you can see why the subject gets me riled up.

I don't think there's a good chance Johnson would have touched the protections. There's some possibility, sure, but his argument against is based on the proper role of government and separation of powers as dictated in the US Constitution. A strict constitutionalist would also say the president does not have the power to strike down unconstitutional legislation, the courts are tasked with that job. It's unclear if he'd want to roll back civil rights protections, since he's described as wanting the Civil Rights Act in practice aside from thinking it violated the constitution, but his principles would have stopped him from overruling them as president even if he wanted to.

 

[Silvanus]

I mean, I know how you got the impression you did. It's sort of a long story. In the 1964 campaign, Goldwater went to Johnson and personally, privately requested they not make the election about race. Goldwater knew his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was political poison, and also knew Johnson had opposed civil rights at every opportunity as a senator. They could both be attacked on that issue. Johnson said sure. Then Goldwater, who could have spent the campaign putting a spotlight on Johnson's long-standing opposition to civil rights, kept the deal and didn't talk about it. Johnson, being one of the biggest douchebags in the history of politics, put ads on tv telling everyone that the KKK endorsed Goldwater (which I understand they did, but if Trump put out TV ads about Richard Spencer endorsing Joe Biden, you'd hardly call that sportsmanlike conduct). And then the American news media, effectively a wing of the Democratic Party without opposition in that period, published pieces claiming that Goldwater actually was talking about race, he was deliberately courting racists with coded language. And they'd go on to say the same thing about every Republican presidential candidate since. Thus, the myth of the Southern Strategy was born, built on the lie that the south voted for Goldwater because the Republican Party suddenly turned secret racist. Half a century of propaganda being treated as historical fact is how you got that impression, and obviously I can blame no individual for being lied to, but I hope you can see why the subject gets me riled up.

I mischaracterised the man himself, partly because I find a vote against the Civil Rights Act to be pretty inexplicable unless there's something unpleasant under the surface.

But the realignment of the political map doesn't happen by accident, even if it's not entirely by design. It seems to be that a good chunk of Goldwater's supporters were aggrieved opponents of the Civil Rights Act (and for other reasons), or otherwise segregationists. His biographer described him as "accommodating the bigotry of others while personally distancing himself from it"; MLK described him as not personally racist, but "articulating a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists".

If people were getting the wrong end of the stick, it was primarily his own voters.

 

[tstorm823]

I mischaracterised the man himself, partly because I find a vote against the Civil Rights Act to be pretty inexplicable unless there's something unpleasant under the surface.

But the realignment of the political map doesn't happen by accident, even if it's not entirely by design. It seems to be that a good chunk of Goldwater's supporters were aggrieved opponents of the Civil Rights Act (and for other reasons), or otherwise segregationists. His biographer described him as "accommodating the bigotry of others while personally distancing himself from it"; MLK described him as not personally racist, but "articulating a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists".

If people were getting the wrong end of the stick, it was primarily his own voters.

But the realignment of the political map didn't actually happen for decades. The south voted for Goldwater as a protest against Johnson for stabbing them in the back. I agree with Johnson's change of course 100%, but he did factually stab southern Democrats in the back. Johnson's pick as VP to Kennedy happened to gain the support of traditional southern Democrats, and when he got into office, he did the opposite of what they wanted. That's the election of 1964. That's Johnson losing the south. But those Southern Democrats voted for the Dixiecrat party over Nixon. They supported Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The south wasn't solid red until the 2000s. Congressional representatives were still mostly Democrats in the south for all those decades as well. An average US citizen gets about 60 years of voting in their life. In 40 years, 2/3s of the voter base turns over. The south didn't align Republican because coded Republican language turned segregationist voters over to the red team, they realigned as the segregationist voters literally died off. The Civil Rights movement split the Democratic Party in two. The north won the fight for the party, and the modern Democratic party condemns the south to this day. But it wasn't the segregationists they got to switch parties, they remained loyal to their politicians in the South locally. It was the children of those voters who became Republican, and why wouldn't they when the other major party treats them like dirt?

That's not entirely by design, that's not by any Republican design at all. That's something the Democratic Party did.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Yeah, after looking around, it does look like I probably mischaracterised him there.

You didn't mischaracterize him. He was still a JBS lunatic, tstorm's trying to play the "dog whistles aren't real!" garbage everyone knows is Kentucky fried bullshit.

The problem's more complex than that, and it flies in the face of tstorm's arguments. It goes back to the Gilded Age and the first Red Scare, and the keystone of the landscape was the Pullman strike and Red Summer of 1919. This is the super-truncated, really long story short version.

Gilded Age capitol sought to drive a wedge in the labor movement, and hired black labor not out of diversity, equality, decency, or any other virtue one might attribute a reasonable human being, but rather as strikebreakers. That wasn't just black freedmen and their children, that was convict leasing and other venues of neoslavery as well. Blammo, instant, violent division between labor and civil rights that would last even until today. Worse, it proliferated Southern ideals of racial hierarchy to the North.

When the Rooskies went commie, you had a whole new layer of fuckery to the puzzle: unionists were *gasp* communist! Wouldn't want to be some foreign agitator, agitprop-spewing seditionist would you? Which is where we got bullshit like this:



So, we have two pieces of the puzzle: "labor unions are racist", and "labor unions are communist". And by extension, "democrats are commies": see, the second Red Scare and the John Birch Society with its lunatic conspiracy theories. So when the Democrats sided with civil rights, the party of labor became the party of civil rights, and all kinds of hell could be raised if labor and civil rights unified. It's not like we had any globally-famous civil rights leaders develop sudden cases of lead poisoning after and only after starting to talk about healing the labor/civil rights divide and unify them into a single human rights movement, whose legacies are extensively whitewashed to exclude their economic justice activism, right?

So, the third piece of the puzzle manifested: obviously if the "commie" party supports civil rights, clearly civil rights must be communism, but if labor is communist and racist, opposing civil rights is anti-racist and anti-communist, right? That's where Goldwater's dumb, nuke-happy, ass comes in. He brought us the marriage between Northern "totally not racist, we promise" JBS clowns and Southern racists.

...but he did factually stab southern Democrats in the back.

Fuck 'em.

But those Southern Democrats voted for the Dixiecrat party over Nixon.

It's good you at least admit dumbfuck, racist, southern Democrats continued existing after the 1948 election. Because this is important in a sec.

They supported Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Because in the South, Carter could lean on ol' boy networks to give the wink-and-nod that "things'll stay the way they are". Clinton in the meantime was blowing his "tough on crime" and "welfare reform" dog whistles right out in the open.

Congressional representatives were still mostly Democrats in the south for all those decades as well.

Yes, and why?

The south didn't align Republican because coded Republican language turned segregationist voters over to the red team, they realigned as the segregationist voters literally died off.

Yeah, because the dumbfuck racists were holding onto party affiliation down to their dying breath. Those Southern Democrats and their dumbfuck elected representatives were still dumbfuck racists. They just lacked the ethical fortitude, courage, wit, and political capitol to follow Thurmond in switching party affiliation.

And why they ended up on red team?