This is a really good article that covers a lot of the things we've talked about here, namely what Bernie Sanders should do to make sure his "revolution" continues and what his supporters should do to support more progressive candidates. Definitely worth checking out:
"All the enthusiasm is there; it just needs to be cultivated and channeled into something durable. But that requires a sacrifice, of sorts. For as much as Sanders and his most vocal supporters identify themselves as outside the party system, the only way a real Sanders movement can make change is to take an active role within that system. Voting is too imprecise to send a message or make a statement, and withholding a vote does nothing to persuade or build influence. (Who in the Democratic Party solicits Ralph Nader for advice and aid?) Sanders supporters who want to move the Democratic Party to the ideological left need to become Sanders Democrats, political actors who participate in the system as it exists. To win a lasting victory—to define the ideological terms of Democratic Party politics—the people inspired by Sanders need to do more than beat the establishment; they need to become it."
Yea the only issue is a large % of Bernie Suppoters are Green's, Libertarians and Republicans who don't really want to get in a particular party per say and will generally just go back to their court to play ball after he is gone. So the movement will blow up because in generally they don't want to be a part of a party or do anything beyond show up at a rally or post a few memes :-p
This is a really good article that covers a lot of the things we've talked about here, namely what Bernie Sanders should do to make sure his "revolution" continues and what his supporters should do to support more progressive candidates. Definitely worth checking out:
"All the enthusiasm is there; it just needs to be cultivated and channeled into something durable. But that requires a sacrifice, of sorts. For as much as Sanders and his most vocal supporters identify themselves as outside the party system, the only way a real Sanders movement can make change is to take an active role within that system. Voting is too imprecise to send a message or make a statement, and withholding a vote does nothing to persuade or build influence. (Who in the Democratic Party solicits Ralph Nader for advice and aid?) Sanders supporters who want to move the Democratic Party to the ideological left need to become Sanders Democrats, political actors who participate in the system as it exists. To win a lasting victory—to define the ideological terms of Democratic Party politics—the people inspired by Sanders need to do more than beat the establishment; they need to become it."
Yea the only issue is a large % of Bernie Suppoters are Green's, Libertarians and Republicans who don't really want to get in a particular party per say and will generally just go back to their court to play ball after he is gone. So the movement will blow up because in generally they don't want to be a part of a party or do anything beyond show up at a rally or post a few memes :-p
It's kind of funny that Sanders supporters seem to mirror him so closely. He's spent his entire political career as an Independent, criticizing the political process and the "establishment," rather than trying to change it. Sanders supporters are really just emulating their preferred candidate in that way.
The real, core problem is that aside from directly spending money, the only way to influence politics is to be actively involved and informed. The personal cost of doing so, however, is enormous. Only the most extremely motivated people have any say (again, except for the rich). There is a high cost to being politically active.
Even if one is extremely informed, watching CSPAN every time something actually goes down and reading multiple news sources from home and abroad, and spends a bunch of time, and really pays that personal cost. What can they do?
Outside of getting a job on a representative's staff I don't see what being informed does, outside of allowing you to vote in your own best interest.
I'm in this because being informed (to whatever degree I actually am) makes me feel smart and like I know what's going on in my country, even if I'm powerless to change it. I have vague hopes that by being informed and informing others I can do my part to affect the Zeitgeist and nudge it in the right direction. But that's not affecting real change, that's just a vague notion.
The cost isn't just being informed, it's using that information and your idle hours to work in the machine. You have to volunteer in the orgs, join the party, rise through the ranks, feed the bureaucracy.
"Attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that her husband signed when she was First Lady is intellectually dishonest. This is so on several grounds. First, his attacks omit that he himself voted for that bill; Clinton supporters have had to bring that up. Second, Sanders keeps demanding that Hillary apologize for having used the term “superpredator” on one occasion, when she has already apologized for it, said she would not use it today, and has put it in context (which I think makes clear it was not intended as code for race or to apply broadly), and yet he never admits that he used the term “sociopath” in the same way when supporting that same bill, nor has he ever apologized for doing so. Instead, he rips out all context and background for that bill, pins the entirety of its consequences on Hillary (who did not vote for it), and omits his own role in voting for it and the reasons why so many people supported it at the time, including him and the Congressional Black Caucus, despite its warts. So he blames Hillary for the draconian sentencing rules that the GOP insisted on in order to pass the bill, contributing to a false narrative he has constructed that Hillary is not actually a liberal."
I was really really bugged by the discussion on the 1994 crime bill that happened.
The real, core problem is that aside from directly spending money, the only way to influence politics is to be actively involved and informed. The personal cost of doing so, however, is enormous. Only the most extremely motivated people have any say (again, except for the rich). There is a high cost to being politically active.
The real, core problem is that aside from directly spending money, the only way to influence politics is to be actively involved and informed. The personal cost of doing so, however, is enormous. Only the most extremely motivated people have any say (again, except for the rich). There is a high cost to being politically active.
This is especially stark when you look at just how under-represented the poorest people are in politics.
As a group, they stand to gain more than anyone else from greater political power, but individually they simply don't have the time or money to actually obtain it.
Three weeks ago, I learned a few things about the two Democratic candidates that changed how I voted in the NYS primary today. This underscores Rym's point above.
My recommended, long term remedy: EVERY school should have a class devoted to news and politics. Just like reading, we need to hook kids on regularly consuming, scrutinizing, analyzing, critiquing, debating, and reassessing current affairs and politics (including their sources for same). Civics, logic, and critical thinking matters, and they feed into every subject. We MUST make these subjects educational priorities or just give up and welcome our fate as serfs to major conglomerates, which is the inevitable outcome of our current oligarchical state.
At my high school we were taught how to form an idea, find evidence, and prove it in STEM classes where there is (at the level we were taught) an objectively right answer, while English and history classes were taught as straight narratives. If we just take the teaching methods we've already developed in STEM classes and apply them to humanities (and give up on this notion that non fiction isn't literature), I think we would see a huge increase in critical thinking ability in political discourse.
But then that would encourage young people to develop their own ideas and opinions and no one wants that.
In my undergrad curriculum, there was a series of Critical Thinking classes where we had to research an issue all semester, and the professors literally questioned EVERY SOURCE we brought up. It was incredibly irritating, but it also forced us to seriously consider what we brought in to support our arguments.
This probably deserves a new thread, but if you could design your perfect school from scratch, what would you include? From teacher/student ratio, class length, curriculum, etc, I'm curious what people think the "ideal" school should be.
There's a lawsuit underway in NY at the moment regarding voters who have had their party affiliation wrongfully changed without their consent, which is a good thing. A lot of people were effected by that - primarily minorities - and they seem to be trying to fix it.
On the downside, I've seen a lot of people openly encouraging people who wern't part of that issue to take advantage, lie on an affidavit, and try to get a vote in when they were not taken off the roll or had their affiliation changed without their consent, but instead just didn't change their party affiliation from "Independent" to "Democrat" in time. No prizes for guessing which supporters seem to be biggest on that idea.
My recommended, long term remedy: EVERY school should have a class devoted to news and politics.
When I was in high school in my junior year, I had to take a class on politics as part of the required curriculum in order to graduate. The first and second halves of the school year were split between politics and economics (also a requirement).
Did anyone here not have to take any courses on politics in high school?
There's a lawsuit underway in NY at the moment regarding voters who have had their party affiliation wrongfully changed without their consent, which is a good thing. A lot of people were effected by that - primarily minorities - and they seem to be trying to fix it.
On the downside, I've seen a lot of people openly encouraging people who wern't part of that issue to take advantage, lie on an affidavit, and try to get a vote in when they were not taken off the roll or had their affiliation changed without their consent, but instead just didn't change their party affiliation from "Independent" to "Democrat" in time. No prizes for guessing which supporters seem to be biggest on that idea.
Is it just not possible for supporters to not go off the deep end with this stuff. The New York Primary has been a Cluster for a really long time. Everyone already knows this :-p
Australia is now (quite likely to be) headed for a full Senate/House election around July 2, 74 days or so from now. By Australian standards, that's a really long election season - roughly double the usual length; the news is referring to it as a "marathon".
Yea the only issue is a large % of Bernie Suppoters are Green's, Libertarians and Republicans who don't really want to get in a particular party per say and will generally just go back to their court to play ball after he is gone. So the movement will blow up because in generally they don't want to be a part of a party or do anything beyond show up at a rally or post a few memes :-p
In countries other than the US with non-shitty electoral systems, failing to support one of the two major parties doesn't automatically make you "not serious".
There is something to be said for the presence of "outsider" candidates, and the outcry against the methods that the GOP and the Democrats use to select their nominees. In Sanders' case this is mostly fake outrage as he ultimately still trails Clinton in the national polls, but if Trump loses the nomination his supporters will be pretty pissed off, and not without good reason.
If that outrage can be maintained, perhaps it could be channeled into supporting candidates who would support campaign finance reform and electoral reform?
Is it just not possible for supporters to not go off the deep end with this stuff. The New York Primary has been a Cluster for a really long time. Everyone already knows this :-p
I'm not sure it's even really a "cluster," though it's not intuitive for first-time voters (which I suspect is the source of much consternation for many Sanders supporters). New York has been a closed primary forever, and doing a trivial amount of research tells you that. The system is very much set up to prevent non-partisans from participating in partisan selection procedures. It's deliberate, and it's been deliberate for a long time. You want a say in the candidate a party puts forth, you register for that party.
The poll opening time sucks for sure. I can go either way on the open primary idea - in principle, I understand that parties are private entities who can set whatever selection rules they want, but in practice there are really only two parties that produce viable candidates. Seems subversive to force an identification on people who don't want it, but it also seems like a stabilizing force for a state that would be very volatile otherwise.
The delegate selection thing was definitely not intuitive, though. It barely mattered, but it was a source of confusion for many people. It's the first time I've seen it on a ballot, and I'm not sure if it ever comes up that often. We very rarely have actual decisions to make in national-level elections up here in NY, so it's not something with which people are generally familiar.
I don't have a huge problem with Closed Primaries, but New York's cut off for changing parties is over 8 months from when voting happens which is crazy long compared to most states. You are almost better getting delisted as a voter and reregistering! On top of that they generally are slow at getting results back... (I mean Westchester county still has 150 precincts that haven't reported at 10 am the next day!!!). That's South Carolina slow :-p
The Berners may be irritating about the NY primary results, but consider how much worse things would be if the results came in on a day other than 4/20.
I literally can't even with the Clinton hate anymore. People are foaming at the mouth. I've heard Democrat voters complain about her email scandal and "getting people killed", that she's the " same as Trump ", that she's a politician and an insider, that she has either done nothing as a senator for NY or was destructive, that she stole the NY senatorial election by literally getting there first and strong assuming other candidates, and that she is the worst candidate.
I've never seen the left eat it's own so quickly before. I understand the Bernie butthurt, but these people need to get a grip.
Case in point:
In that article they talk about how Al Franken contributed in a large way to the obamacare bill but his name isn't on it. Name something Hillary contributed to but wasn't able to get her name on. Just do anything other than paste a link or quote wrong numbers please.
Soooo.... don't post evidence? This is in response to a link I put up from Politifact.
The poll opening time sucks for sure. I can go either way on the open primary idea - in principle, I understand that parties are private entities who can set whatever selection rules they want, but in practice there are really only two parties that produce viable candidates. Seems subversive to force an identification on people who don't want it, but it also seems like a stabilizing force for a state that would be very volatile otherwise.
Ultimately, electoral reform to stop the system from being a de facto two-party system would be a better solution. However, it is quite understandable that in a system that is deficient in inter-party democracy people would want to see it compensated by intra-party democracy.
I wouldn't mind seeing an outcome where Bernie loses the nomination while leading in the polls, while Trump is straight-up denied the nomination—it seems to me that if that kind of thing happens in both parties at the same time this could help to shift public opinion. If it only happened in one party the other party would just say "just shows how much [Dems/GOP] suck" and dissolve it into the usual polarized party politics, but if it happens in *both* parties you might get some interesting results.
I think NY has two issues that are intermingled in people's minds: closed primaries and cut off times to change parties/register to vote. These are two different things and shouldn't be discussed as if they were the same.
I think that the cut off dates that NY has, to change parties and/or to register to vote, are ridiculous and need to change. This is just a personal anecdote, so take it however much you want, but I have a friend who used to work for the NY Board of Elections. He's told me on numerous occasions that the BOE is incredibly underfunded and understaffed and the reason why the cut off times are so long is because that's the only way the BOE can deal with the sheer amount of paperwork and requests it gets. That doesn't make it right, it just means that NY has to fix the BOE. Unlike what others may think, it's not a conspiracy to suppress the vote, it's just general bureaucratic incompetence in an underfunded government agency.
The issue of open vs closed primaries is a different one. I actually keep going back and forth on it. The Democratic Party has every right to limit who can vote for their own nominee. People seem to forget that the Democratic and Republican Parties are private organizations. They aren't part of the government. There is nothing stopping someone from forming their own party (even if I personally think that's mostly futile). I think regardless of whether NY has an open or closed primary, if the cut off dates were more reasonable, this issue would mostly go away.
Yea it's a hard line and interesting topic on the closed vs open primary. In some ways our primary system has never been more open but it still lacks some of the "ideals" people have in modern times. It's funny to think that before the modern primary system the person nominated to run for President was pretty much just picked by party bosses.
Comments
Well, I ... couldn't think of what I pictured a crowd of Bernie Sanders supporters doing until now..
Hits home on a lot of issues in the Dem Primary in my humble opinion.
Outside of getting a job on a representative's staff I don't see what being informed does, outside of allowing you to vote in your own best interest.
I'm in this because being informed (to whatever degree I actually am) makes me feel smart and like I know what's going on in my country, even if I'm powerless to change it. I have vague hopes that by being informed and informing others I can do my part to affect the Zeitgeist and nudge it in the right direction. But that's not affecting real change, that's just a vague notion.
I was really really bugged by the discussion on the 1994 crime bill that happened.
As a group, they stand to gain more than anyone else from greater political power, but individually they simply don't have the time or money to actually obtain it.
My recommended, long term remedy: EVERY school should have a class devoted to news and politics. Just like reading, we need to hook kids on regularly consuming, scrutinizing, analyzing, critiquing, debating, and reassessing current affairs and politics (including their sources for same). Civics, logic, and critical thinking matters, and they feed into every subject. We MUST make these subjects educational priorities or just give up and welcome our fate as serfs to major conglomerates, which is the inevitable outcome of our current oligarchical state.
But then that would encourage young people to develop their own ideas and opinions and no one wants that.
(also, a while back I made a thread for stuff like this.)
I think that should be part of K-12 education.
On the downside, I've seen a lot of people openly encouraging people who wern't part of that issue to take advantage, lie on an affidavit, and try to get a vote in when they were not taken off the roll or had their affiliation changed without their consent, but instead just didn't change their party affiliation from "Independent" to "Democrat" in time. No prizes for guessing which supporters seem to be biggest on that idea.
Did anyone here not have to take any courses on politics in high school?
Just a bit of perspective for y'all in the US
http://huffingtonpost.com.co/the-fix-is-in-sanders-supporters-in-new-york-see-votes-switched-to-hillary/
Like this is just terrible and going through the Bernie supporters
There is something to be said for the presence of "outsider" candidates, and the outcry against the methods that the GOP and the Democrats use to select their nominees. In Sanders' case this is mostly fake outrage as he ultimately still trails Clinton in the national polls, but if Trump loses the nomination his supporters will be pretty pissed off, and not without good reason.
If that outrage can be maintained, perhaps it could be channeled into supporting candidates who would support campaign finance reform and electoral reform?
The poll opening time sucks for sure. I can go either way on the open primary idea - in principle, I understand that parties are private entities who can set whatever selection rules they want, but in practice there are really only two parties that produce viable candidates. Seems subversive to force an identification on people who don't want it, but it also seems like a stabilizing force for a state that would be very volatile otherwise.
The delegate selection thing was definitely not intuitive, though. It barely mattered, but it was a source of confusion for many people. It's the first time I've seen it on a ballot, and I'm not sure if it ever comes up that often. We very rarely have actual decisions to make in national-level elections up here in NY, so it's not something with which people are generally familiar.
I've never seen the left eat it's own so quickly before. I understand the Bernie butthurt, but these people need to get a grip.
Case in point: Soooo.... don't post evidence? This is in response to a link I put up from Politifact.
I wouldn't mind seeing an outcome where Bernie loses the nomination while leading in the polls, while Trump is straight-up denied the nomination—it seems to me that if that kind of thing happens in both parties at the same time this could help to shift public opinion. If it only happened in one party the other party would just say "just shows how much [Dems/GOP] suck" and dissolve it into the usual polarized party politics, but if it happens in *both* parties you might get some interesting results.
I think that the cut off dates that NY has, to change parties and/or to register to vote, are ridiculous and need to change. This is just a personal anecdote, so take it however much you want, but I have a friend who used to work for the NY Board of Elections. He's told me on numerous occasions that the BOE is incredibly underfunded and understaffed and the reason why the cut off times are so long is because that's the only way the BOE can deal with the sheer amount of paperwork and requests it gets. That doesn't make it right, it just means that NY has to fix the BOE. Unlike what others may think, it's not a conspiracy to suppress the vote, it's just general bureaucratic incompetence in an underfunded government agency.
The issue of open vs closed primaries is a different one. I actually keep going back and forth on it. The Democratic Party has every right to limit who can vote for their own nominee. People seem to forget that the Democratic and Republican Parties are private organizations. They aren't part of the government. There is nothing stopping someone from forming their own party (even if I personally think that's mostly futile). I think regardless of whether NY has an open or closed primary, if the cut off dates were more reasonable, this issue would mostly go away.