Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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> from the left's perspective all the agreed upon societal ills--e.g. loss of blue collar jobs to free trade, lack of income growth combined with increasing income disparity, corporate oligopolies, etc--are a consequence of conservative, Republican, policies

But even if this is accepted for the sake of argument (I'm not sure it's entirely true, but let's assume it is), the left has not done what a sane political party should do when these things happen: penalize their own party leaders who let it happen. If Clinton allowed NAFTA to pass despite his own party's fierce opposition, why didn't the party fire him? Why didn't some other candidate beat him in the 1996 primaries? Why did the Democrats continue to protect him despite the fact that he's a womanizer and a liar? And why does the party machine of which he and his wife are poster child beneficiaries continue to run the party despite the fact that it obviously doesn't represent the will of the people? If it did, Bernie Sanders would have been the Democratic candidate for President in 2016, and again in 2020 (and he might have won in 2016).

In other words, I think Gurri is correct that the left talks a lot about reforms it says it wants, but doesn't back up its talk with action.

Once the New Deal coalition fell apart after the Civil Rights Act passed and the GOP implemented the Southern Strategy and right-to-work laws destroyed unions, the Democrats lost unions as their base of financial support. They still held on in Congress for a while, but couldn't win the Presidency until the Third Way/neoliberal Democrats and groups like the Blue Dogs took charge of the party. At that point, the Democrats became captured (at least financially) by Wall Street and rich urban professionals who were socially liberal but fiscally conservative. There's no "firing" Clinton at that point. The party has been captured. The Democrats are also a much more diverse party since they are as much "not-GOP" as anything else. Why should a conservative Black voter vote Democratic? Of course they shouldn't, but the GOP was pretty explicitly home to racists for decades.

Both parties continue to self-sort in unhealthy ways. The GOP needs more diversity (but of course, is doubling-down on gerrymandering) and the Democrats, frankly, need less. I'd love to trade off some fiscally conservative Democrats for some working-collar populist Republicans. Bernie's support came from appealing to what used to be the base of the Democratic party: the working-class. But it's not enough voters in the raucous big-tent Democratic party to win a primary, and likely not the general election.

We also can't even have a serious conversation about policy since the GOP attacks everything the Democrats do as socialism.

Anyway, to your last point: the left is part of the Democratic party, but it doesn't have a strong-enough hand to play.

Also, look, voters are weird. I volunteered as a Democratic poll greeter here in NC with two women, both professionals, a white woman originally from Cincinnati and a Black woman originally from New Jersey. They'd both voted for Biden in the primary. I was like, what, why? Why didn't you pick someone more progressive? They both said: "because Biden is who we thought would make the strongest general election candidate." So they're not even voting on who they think is best, but who they think the rest of America will accept.

p.s. don't be so hard on Hillary. Let's not forget that she expended a lot of political capital trying to pass universal healthcare. She got killed on that, by Democrats and Republicans alike. I think that really changed her idea of what was possible in politics in the US. She is not the devil she's been made out to be.

Really glad to see your comment and others pointing out what’s really happened and happening. I typically can’t get out a fifth of this in conversation before being told I’m wrong. Of course sources are dismissed outright.

The one thing Democrats can do is dictate what republicans won’t back by taking it on themselves. There’s got to be a way to snap back go normalcy that way

I'm not sure that would work. The Republican party, at least the powerful do seem to believe that government can do no right. Even Donald Trump could not turn them toward fiscal stimulus nor infrastructure. Whereas democrats seem willing to take just about anything (though this has stemmed a bit under Trump).

In this case there is no middle as there is no place to compromise between "any" and "none".

Republicans have been getting death threats towards themselves and their families for even looking likely to disagree with the president for years now. They also had no problem passing huge tax cuts without funding and thus exploding the deficit. I think it’s imperative that the next president start by trying to stem the online propaganda and anything else contributing to those death threats. The US simply cannot tolerate death threats against its elected officials. They’ve affected our politics for years and progress may be impossible until the propaganda is halted.

Edit-On the original topic of getting the two sides to agree on things, I think the fundamental problem is the us/them dynamic between urban and rural communities. I further posit that a large government program to employ these two communities together would go a long way toward building a communal bridge between them. If people in rural America saw the rest of the country building things like high speed rail to make them less isolated they would see promise for better days in the future. Ie make it so that people can live in rural areas and take a train into work in a city in minutes. Property valuations will increase. Crime will decrease through frankly there being better options all around. (Though I still think a revamped drug scheduling system needs to address the source of crime.)

Except rural people aren't going to agree to that because it would mean an increase in taxes as well as massive amounts of state and federal intervention into their communities.

Edit: I do not buy that death threats have anything to do with the present stalemate. We are nowhere near a historic high water mark for pokticial violence in this country. The 1850s, turn of the century and 1960s were all very violent periods and the US government did not find itself paralyzed then.

The biggest change is that one party has been over run by a philosophy that the government simply cannot do things well or make them better. You cannot launch a ship when half the crew denies that it will float.

Re high speed rail: The problem is, there aren't enough people in the rural area. You wouldn't have a high-speed rail stop in every other town in rural Kansas - if you did, it wouldn't be high speed rail. You're not going to connect all the farmer's kids to Kansas City that way, still less to Chicago.

I’m sure there’s a way around it. Got any ideas?

Of course there's a way around it. It's this great technology called "cars".

Sure, push to make cars more fuel efficient, push for ways to make fuel for cars that's more closed cycle (like biofuel), push to spread more infrastructure to make things like electric cars or plug-in hybrids feasible. But when you have a population that is very, very spread out, there is no such thing as "mass transit", and we just have to deal with that fact.

Bullet trains with a way to drive your car into them. Boom, individualized mass transit. Yes they’d have to stop every thirty minutes.

Another option is to actually have underground tunnels for vehicles to drive through in tightly controlled settings. That way you take the driver out of it - and maybe can install ways to power vehicles internally. You could take that system any time of day without regard for weather, it could be centrally ran and administered ie little room for accidents, and thus depend on it for quick access to daily duties like work.

> Even Donald Trump could not turn them toward fiscal stimulus nor infrastructure.

He can't pass an infrastructure plan because anything of that scope requires persuasion and compromise across many competing interests, things I believe he's constitutionally incapable of. It's the same reason he never had a healthcare bill. If he can't strong arm a deal, he can't get it done at all. I think he actually used the bully pulpit of the presidency to pretty poor effect as far as that goes.

Don’t forget the wide reports of death threats towards republicans and democrats - anyone remotely open to pushing back gets death threats. And they’re credible. That clearly has kept progress from being made.

To be effective, a US president needs to be a consensus-builder and compromise-broker.

I think Trump doesn't even know what those words mean.

I disagree. I think that Trump, freed of McConnell would have been for using a ton of debt to build things. Would he have insisted that a ton of that spending take place in states that votes for him? Absolutely. But he is not a deficit hawk.

Does this actually disagree with what he said? OP said Trump doesn't put in the effort to persuade (aka, get McConnell to focus on his agenda) and used his bully pulpit ineffectively (aka, putting enough pressure on McConnell to act). That seems to square with your thoughts.

No. This is heralding to a different era of Sorkinesque politics. There are just things the Republican caucus is not going to do because of their philosophical and public commitment to austerity.

My point is that Trump is almost the perfect president to get this done because he has purchase with the base even when he contradicts orthodoxy. A conservative nervous about being primaried for voting for a big government program like this has all the necessary cover to vote for it under Trump. That they could not get it done under Trump I see as incredible evidence of the party's commitment to austerity government.

Look at the fight over food stamps we have every time the farm bill comes around. SNAP costs about 1/3 of 1 percent of GDP. It helps ag and basically extends food security to the entire country. But Republicans fight over it like it's Medicare. I'm not condemning them for this. I happen to disagree but they fundamentally believe, no matter the cost benefit analysis that the government should not do these things and cannot conduct them effectively. It is hard for people to understand because we are so used to the post war order in which both sides believe in government up to a certain point at least.

> Bernie's support came from appealing to what used to be the base of the Democratic party: the working-class. But it's not enough voters in the raucous big-tent Democratic party to win a primary, and likely not the general election.

> Anyway, to your last point: the left is part of the Democratic party, but it doesn't have a strong-enough hand to play.

If those farther left types don't have enough support even to win the Democratic primary, how will they do in the actual race?

Interesting to see how Democratic party has been captured in order to win elections.

> Both parties continue to self-sort in unhealthy ways.

I agree.

> the left is part of the Democratic party, but it doesn't have a strong-enough hand to play

If by "the left" you mean people like Bernie Sanders, I agree. But his hand isn't strong enough not because he's a leftist, but because he's an outsider. The insider policies of the Democratic party are just as leftist; they're just a different flavor of leftist--roughly speaking, New Left vs. Sanders-style Old Left, hardball power politics vs. "softer" socialism. That's also why the Democrats now are just fine allying with Wall Street and big business: power politics needs financing, and that's where the money is.

> don't be so hard on Hillary

You're entitled to your opinion, but I'm also entitled to mine.

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