I actually think Bernie Sanders is great, and I hope he's changing the dialogue by running. He's an actual progressive, an actual liberal even, and it's impressive how much support he's getting. I think that's a good sign.
I just think that, as president with an uncooperative congress, Clinton will get more done with incremental change. Sander's ideas are perfectly reasonable, except congress won't pass them. Obama had good ideas too (mostly).
My response to this is that it's fallacious. We all know that as far as Dems go Obama is fairly moderate, not as much as Clinton but he's no radical in spite of the Hope and Change slogan. The Rs blocked him at every opportunity. I still remember the days not long after Obamacare passed and was implemented, it was hysteria and that passage was a major work of political wheeling. Bills were blocked on a literally Obamacare Delenda Est level of pettiness. D. Trump offered multi-million dollar bounties for proof that Obama was a lying Kenyan immigrant Muslim. Congress literally held the entire economy of the United States and by proxy the human race hostage as a political control tactic.
There is no game there to be played, other than the rejection of it. Diving to the frozen core of the status quo is not a solution to this issue, it will just re-frame from "no bills until Obamacare is appealed" to "no bills until prayer is back in schools". Might as well just appoint Cruz president now. Efficacy is in large part a game of the current window of what is considered reasonable politics, and the professional bonds between politicians.
In that light, Hillary is actually just about the worst possible choice because of how much she is interpersonally despised by those in and out of her party. She does not respect others and is not respected in turn. Conversely, there are even Trump and Cruz lovers who grudgingly admit the respectability of Sanders in spite of their near-total positional divide. Sanders maintains an anti-hostile rhetoric that holds everyone to an attitude of interaction regardless of agreement, while Clinton (admittedly not all her, but she participates gleefully) provokes with the worst of them. Getting people to come to the table is 90% of the issue.
I also would contest the idea that HRC is interested in gradual change. In spite of the radicalism that I'd love to see from a government spearheaded by Bernie Sanders, I am not against gradual change. The thing is, the line between gradual change in order to improve society without stressing it apart and masking our bland neoliberal corporate state stasis is a narrow one. I consider Clinton on the latter side of that line, a bought and paid for friendly face for business as usual, without any pesky objectors getting in the way.
Beyond that, there are places where radicalism is now necessary, such as the environment or the police state. We've already procrastinated away our luxury of measured gradualism on these things, and if the price is unrest it's one we've already agreed to pay, one way or another. The problem is that without someone willing to consider radicalism that price may just not end up being paid in the name of political amorphousness, thereby condemning us to the actual full impacts.
Though to be fair, just because I think Sanders is pretty cool, doesn't mean that other people should automatically hold Clinton in the same regard. I don't get why they treat her like the fucking antichrist, and act like the reasons are so obvious that they need not be shared, but they're welcome to their strong opinions.
Aside from her hostile and unnerving personality, Clinton is in the pockets of the usual suspects when it comes to SuperPACs. She has not demonstrated a shred of credibility, such as with her attacks on Bernie even when he refuses to retaliate, and in reports of her doing things like storming into Obama's office and yelling at him as StateSec. Or how she "doesn't want to see people in uniforms".
That's the personal stuff. Then there's how she changes her policy positions in regard to mass public opinion. She literally started supporting gay marriage days after Gallup released the first poll confirming it over 50% support, like holy shit. It's a sort of reverse demagogue tactic. Instead of riling the people's minds, she reshapes her own to fit theirs. God forbid there be any wave of large-scale hysteria in the US during her term, we'll be bombing foreign schools to make the people happy in no time. And we already bomb foreign schools sometimes.
She essentially totally ignores the solidification of the post-9/11 political order because it benefits her ability to act autonomously as President, and that's reason enough to reject her. This is most definitely not a person who would ever give up the ability to drone strike people, no matter what else. She will codify even further than it is now that she's above the law, that us peasants shouldn't tell the President what to do, and that the preservation of the neoliberal consensus that is killing our species body and soul is the right way to go.
And that is at least part of why I will never vote for Hillary Clinton.
Quick question about Sanders: Is what he (and his supporters) call 'socialism' actually supposed to mean 'social democracy'?
If yes, follow-up question: Why do they insist on calling it 'socialism'? Is it just to be edgy/to have a nice catchy word? Because it certainly isn't helping the discourse.
He's called it both socialism and social democracy before. So yes, essentially.
As for the follow up, because European polisci definitions aren't universal. Your socialist politicians aren't socialists either, in the orthodox Marxist definition of one who seeks to render the means of production into the collective dictatorship of the proletariat class. What's in a word, you know?
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1570828 times)