Surprise For NYT: BERNIE IS ELECTABLE!

[MFrohike]

141. Sigh

1. "I welcome their hatred." "I just told the truth and they thought it was hell." Those were the Roosevelt and Truman references I meant. As for the Southern Caucus, I imagine I can name more of them off the top of my head than you'd believe. They're not really relevant to this discussion, unless you'd like to discuss their policy preferences in full. They were a microcosm in many ways of the modern Democratic party, though minus the obvious obsession.

2. Your economic analysis is a cliche. Globalization, to use an overused term, really isn't the issue when it comes to underemployment and the underutilization of our productive capacity. The problem is boneheaded fiscal policy that pretends we're still on the gold standard. We pretend as though dollars are a limited resource when in fact they're just a unit of account that allows us to "value", through price, real resources. This confusion leads to the moronic conclusion that federal budget deficits are bad, when, in fact, they are what drives the economy. If you don't believe me, check out Keynes' aggregate demand equation. If you reduce government spending, the private sector, which can't create dollars at will, is forced to deficit spend. Private sector deficit spending, following Minsky, is the key indicator of financial crises.

The perjorative "protectionism" is so tired, it's not even a cliche anymore. After all, what's the opposite? Take the libertarian position of free flow of labor, capital, goods, and services? What about the fundamental issue of democratic governance? Is there no space between these ridiculous rhetorical extremes that recognizes that what is called globalization is simply a set of bad policy choices? Why continue to support a set of policy choices that simply benefit the large against the small? After all, we're supposed to be Democrats. Democrats are the traditional party of small business. Why not pursue trade and industrial policies that benefit them and work to trim down the size of larger organizations, so as to make them less dangerous to our democracy AND our economy?

3. The Team Blue group are boring. They only care about the party label and not the substance. Not only that, but their arguments are remarkably fact free. For example, I still periodically see pleas to support the Blue Dogs in red states. The Blue Dogs are nearly extinct. I don't get why anyone would support a group that has so catastrophically collapsed in such a short time. It seems like the political equivalent of throwing money down a well to me. If the right-wing Democrats can't win in those states, what's the harm of running people actually on the left? It's not like there's anything to lose in that situation.

I'm tired of the word corporatist. I'm not even sure what it means. It's a word like capitalism or socialism. Nobody bothers to define those words, they just impart feelings into it and throw it out there. It bores me. Warmonger is a bit hyperbolic, but it gets hard to fault people for it after the last 15 years. We've seen a lot of people die for no good reason and a lot of resources wasted. There's a debate to be had in this country about the imperial track we've been following for the last century or so. It's done most Americans very little good and provides a great mill for right-wing propaganda. I'm not one of those fools who thinks that empires don't pay because they clearly do, but I'm starting to see that the endless chase after empire combined with criminal neglect at home is a quick recipe to catastrophe.

The cheating bit wasn't well explained. Think of college sports fans who whine that "everybody's doing it" when their team is caught breaking the rules. Listen to them rationalize bad behavior because the team winning matters more than doing it within the rules. That's what I meant. Of course, I both love college sports and view it as a gigantic scam. The money sports are nothing but state-subsidized minor leagues for the pros. If the pros want minor leagues, let them pay for it.

4. The term "purity-troll" is really obnoxious. It's about as useless as corporatist. Additionally, with one or two exceptions, it's traditionally the right of the Democratic Party that splits during elections if anyone does. From the days of the Southern Caucus to the elections of Reagan and the Bushes, the issue was right wing defections not left wing purity. For all the hype of Henry Wallace or Ted Kennedy, they had nothing on Strom Thurmond and the Boll Weevils.

The primary problem of a Sanders presidency would probably be a lack of institutional support. The professional Democratic Party is really set up to support a soft libertarian agenda of economic conservatism and weak-kneed social liberalism. It's more or less neo-liberalism with a human face, if you get the reference. He'd need a lot of outside pressure in order to Congress and the bureaucracy in the right direction. I'm not terribly optimistic about the likelihood of that.

The opposite problem exists for Clinton. She would have all the institutional support. The problem is that she's very much a member of the Rubinite wing of the party. Their policies have failed utterly, but they stay in power because they can call on money. With her, the pressure would need to be brought directly on her to push her in the right direction. There would need to be pressure on the Congress and bureaucracy as well, but Hillary Clinton is far more formidable an opponent in a political street fight than just about anybody. If you get her to move, she can do a hell of a lot of the work on her own. I don't know if it shows, but I admire her tremendously. Unfortunately, I don't much like her.

As for people whining on DU, what else is new? The only thing that ever changes is the particular whine. I'm sure people did complain about Kucinich not winning. That's cool. I've seen a ton of people whine that liberals didn't show up in 2010, when the actual facts destroy that argument. DU is often an emotional, fact-free zone. It's quite American in that way. It's often just a bunch of bullshitting over platitudes, which is just moronic. Discussing issues in the abstract is for college students. In politics, it's just a smokescreen to avoid an actual discussion of policy.

So, there's some on point response for you and some rambling. Enjoy.