What will the Democratic Party learn from their loss?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Bowser, Nov 12, 2016.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    But you followed it up with a reference to people fearing they will have to work for what they want, instead of (as now?) obtaining it by putting others down.

    Clearly the average Trump voter obtains very little in their lives without working for it, and almost nothing by putting others down.

    The term's meaning cannot be restricted to some pre-selected sense, in real life usage. It should not be used to address the public by those who only mean it in some narrow sense unfamiliar to the readers and hearers of it. In this case, the usage does serious political harm.
     
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  3. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    I would contend that a majority of straight white American's don't have to "work for" their safety - they don't have to do much of anything aside from being white (well, and perhaps take basic measures such as not walking into a crackhouse alone at night, you know, common sense stuff)

    By compare, LGBTQ and non-white folks in many places are harassed, assaulted, and even brutally beaten simply for existing... so they now have to take excessive measures to try and protect themselves.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That is not at all the same as "working for what they want" , and it cannot be included in this:
    .

    White people really really really enjoy their safety, and don't want to suffer others being as safe as them because then they'd have to work for their safety instead of putting others down for it? Seriously?

    I don't think it's a good idea to describe ordinary civil rights as a privilege, any kind of privilege. It's a threat.
     
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  7. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Aye, it is a threat. And that's the threat millions of Americans are currently facing thanks to Trump's rhetoric and the bigotry he condoned as part of his election bid.

    If you don't want to call it "privilege", then what should we call it? Bigotry apparently doesn't work as a label anymore (in part because these assholes have openly embraced it it seems)
     
  8. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    You need to look at the crime statistics. Most of the crime, assaults, and murder against blacks, come at the hands of other blacks. The majority of assaults is not due to white on blacks, even though there white crime against blacks.

    This statistic is also true for nearly all the ethnic diversity groups; bad people in the ethnic group, tend to prey on their own kind. In my town, there is are different Asian communities. This is great for food. The asian gangs target mostly asian people, with the victims often not willing to go outside the community for help. The gangs prey only within the clan, thereby not bringing outside attention to themselves, beyond the group.

    Liberals do a disservice to the innocent, via diversity groups, since they scare the innocent with the prospect of white privilege, so the innocent are afraid to ask the whites for help. They become willing to accept the lessor of evil .However, the crime statistics,tells us what they assume is the lessor of two evils, is far worse. The Democrat party was the original party of slavery and segregation. Diversity segregates. If you combine this with privilege mantra, you get segregated slavery to white Democrats, using a white bogey man.

    A better approach is to set the dividing line between good and evil, or character and lack of character. This dividing line applies to all demographic groups. There are good whites, blacks, women, gays, old, young, Democrats and Republicans, etc,. There are also evil versions in each group and those who lack character. If we divide each group based on character, the good whites, good blacks, good women and good gays are on the same team; character. They both will drive out evil, side-by-side, so evil separates out of each group, to form its own team; team evil.

    Trump is going to purge the immigrants of the evil; 2.5 million known immigrant criminals will be deported first. Once the lack of character element is gone, the rest of the immigrants, will look much better, based on any crime data average. This will create a change of heart. If this purge is done to all demographics, the good can unite in peace.

    Now, when evil blacks, prey on the good blacks, the black crime statistics makes people, outside the group, average the good with the bad. This is how prejudice begins. It is based on applying group data averages, to individuals, which may not apply. The average can also justifies defending evil since it averages better, than it really is. The looters who are known criminals are treated like victims, while victims are pulled over like criminals. If we divide good and evil, this become just.
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2016
  9. Watcher Just another old creaker Registered Senior Member

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    Not sure about the Democratic party per se. If you mean the voting bloc that voted against Donald Trump, which is not the same thing, the primary lesson learned is to never underestimate the power of misinformation, populist propaganda, and appeals to hate and bigotry, particularly when the electorate has been groomed for decades to be manipulated by these methods. Not only did Donald Trump rise to power using these methods, we see them working effectively in Europe as well, especially in Germany and France. The lesson learned is that democracy is far more fragile than we dreamed; particularly in the post-truth Information Age where the lines between facts and opinion/speculation are not only blurry, in many cases they are totally erased.
     
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  10. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    That does nothing to explain why, since Trump became President Elect, the number of White on X crimes (ones being officially designated by police as Racially or Religiously Motivated) have risen sharply...
     
  11. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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  12. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    You mean Russia?

    Yeah and all that left the republicans head spinning, to the point that John McCain had to defend Obama from his own racist electorate!


    There is a fundamental difference between blatant slanders that you cite, that will come off as racists and hateful to most, and political scandals backed by leaked documents that will come off as possible, even probable to most.

    and yet he won so gloriously, massive turnout, especially from the young who rarely ever turn out, almost like being black was an advantage, that millions saw in voting for him an opportunity to say "fuck you" to all the racists spout mindless hate.

    Once again lets take a moment to go over the difference here,

    Anti-Obama talk: "he is a Muslim plant here to enslave white people!" (you already got the idea above)

    Anti-Clinton talk: "How could she be so incompetent to transfer classified information on her own private email server? The head of the FBI said she demonstrated gross incompetence and negligence and her only saving grace was that they could not find malicious intent, than again what was she hidding in those 30,000 emails she deleted, yogga? seriously you think yogga?"

    The former is easily laughed off, and only a small minority would believe it. The latter on the other hand is not the product of blind hate, has a lot of data and half-truths and leads to a reasonably believable conspiracy to most people. That is why Clinton lost.

    And yet the turn out from every other demographic was heightened for Obama, giving him the win. Had he had decades of establishment political scandals behind him for the republican to parade around non-stop with glee, that turn out would have been suppressed as it was for Clinton.

    Yes some luck is involved, for example had Clinton been lucky and not had her email scandal blowing up right before the election, maybe things would be different, then again had Clinton simply not had a private server there would be none of that at all.

    Absolute fallacy on your part: LESS baggage is what is important.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    No, there isn't. There is a fundamental identity, in all of that stuff.
    You have grossly edited the Obama and Clinton talk. The Obama crap had plenty of "evidence" (his attendance at Wright's church, his Muslim name and parentage, his actual association with domestic terrorists, his melanistic complexion, etc), the Clinton crap featured plenty of bizarro-world (dead bodies by the dozens, a homicidal maniac with a nuclear war agenda, etc).

    And people believed the Obama crap, just as they believed the Clinton crap. You have forgotten how those campaigns went, is all - it was no "small minority" that thought Obama was possibly born in Kenya, or a secret Muslim, or a co-conspirator with terrorists, or an acolyte of the supposedly white-hating Reverend Wright, or an affirmative action benefitting incompetent, and so forth. It was 45% of the electorate at least - about the same percentage that believes the Clinton crap.
    Bullshit. All ridiculous crap like that has a lot of data and half-truths behind it - that's not what gives it legs.

    Clinton lost because the moribund economy afflicting the American white electorate had been continued on her watch, had not been recently - during the campaign - utterly and dramatically crashed by a Republican administration clearly to blame for the debacle; and because Trump - a much better campaigner than McCain - hammered on the bigotry button harder than McCain did; and because Clinton is a compromising politician as well as a miserable public speaker, the combination rendering her unable to make her agenda and its superiority to Trump's clear.
    Something we've seen plenty of in this campaign - more than in Obama's. The "discovery" by the Republican elite that their entire Party's voting base is a shitpile of bigotry and ignorance has been made every couple of years since the early '80s, more of a tradition than a shock.
     
  14. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    I don't see us making any progress on this issue, I oblige you with one more reply.

    His melanistic complexion is evidence of what? Maybe you are trying too hard to think from the perspective of a racist, but as I pointed out and by basic fact of Obama winning, twice: those people are in a tiny minority. Most people did not find that "evidence" valid or compelling, unlike the decades of Clinton scandals paraded by the right endlessly. The very idea you seem to think these things equivalent, that you can argue that somehow Obama had as much dirt on him as Clinton, makes your sanity questionable, the very basic fact that Clinton lost, twice, and Obama won, twice, disproves your statements.

    As someone that went door to door in rural america campaigning for local democrats and her, no you are wrong, well do a degree: Trump did not win on bigotry, swap that for Clinton scandals, trumps vague proclamations of making it all great again and "draining the swamp", and keep all the rest. I know you refuse to believe otherwise, but again how did Obama win, twice, if all these bigot voters were out here? Oh well keep demonizing the conservatives, we will lose again.
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    It's an example of the enormous baggage Obama brought to the campaign.

    You still haven't reviewed the actual circumstances of Obama's win, have you - I did point them out.

    That tiny minority includes, at a bare minimum, everyone - every single person - who ever thought for three consecutive days that Obama might be a secret Muslim, or might have been born outside the US, or can't speak without a teleprompter, or went to University and Harvard Law School on affirmative action. It includes everyone who took the video footage of Jeremiah Wright or Shirley Sherrod or the Acorn office help seriously. Start there, and add up.

    The seriously racist white vote is at least 27% of the entire American electorate. Close to half the vote, in a normal election.
    And the correlation with all other measures of racial bigotry is a coincidence, then. Ok.

    That wasn't the issue - the issue was why these people you were talking to believed all that crap. Do they fall for such transparent bullshit in their personal lives? On their jobs? Because of what some professor in a distant college may or may not have said that was foolish?
     
  16. Goliathus Registered Member

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    44
    They will learn that majority of US are nutjobs that would vote for homophobe and racist just because he is very confident in what he says.
     
  17. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    27% where are you getting that numbers, second of all, how if there are so many racists DID OBAMA WIN, TWICE? You are denying basic reality here!

    They believe it because they are poor, uneducated, have massive debt, no savings, live in trailer parks, have shit jobs with no future for themselves or their children and they blame it on outsourcing, immigrants and a corrupt politico of rich people that rape them financially every day. In the words of Keith Ellison whom I got to meet last night when he guest spoke at our congressional district ceremony (but still deciding if I will vote for him) "this election was a table flip" paraphrasing now but he said what I and other liberals who are posed to take over the DNC have been saying, that the majority of trump supporters are not racists, some of them voted for obama, twice, but seeing no improvement in their lives, they voted to "flip the table" in rage, and voted for the candidate most likely to change things up, for good or bad.

    Now if you want to progress beyond endless internet arguing, I advice you suggest your candidate for DNC chair, who will double down on "they are all racist, misogynist, nazi, doodoo heads" and surely lead us to victory next time, surely.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    He beat the ones he couldn't persuade. Why is that a difficult concept?

    He beat them by taking advantage of a huge black turnout and the lameness of the Republican candidate. He persuaded them by carefully running a genius campaign in which every single thing he said and physical gesture he made and tone of voice he used was vetted in advance to reassure fearful white racists that he was no threat to them.

    Since they weren't panicked, they stayed home, or even (a small fraction) voted for Obama. They stayed home because the Republicans nominated an establishment guy who refused to pander below a certain level and failed to inspire, and his voters turned out because he was an inspiring campaigner and offered the possibility of serious change.

    You tell me who in hell voted for McCain/Palin. Seriously - subtract the bigot and fundie fraction of the white vote and he gets maybe 12% of the national vote. At most. Being very, very generous.

    The Republican Party had just then - that very summer, in the final weeks of the campaign - crashed the entire US economy, on top of horribly screwing up two wars it started itself, and botching disaster relief to the point that Cuba was offering to help New Orleans and being seriously considered. They had nothing.
    And so they think Obama is a secret Muslim really born in Kenya? Please.

    That was the natural constituency of the Democrats up until the Republicans opened the door to racial bigots and fundies, and launched their corporate funded media operations to pander to bigots and fundies in the wake of the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. As soon as the Republicans invited the white racial bigots and fundies to vote Republican, those people started voting Republican.
    And if you want to progress beyond the Fox and CNN and NBC wingnut fantasy world in which Lefty domination of the US political discourse is a massive force that has led US politics so far to the Left we are facing an abyss, and this Lefty discourse consists of endless attempts to impose gender neutral pronouns on everybody's conversation and make all the bathrooms unisex and call people Nazis, I suggest a little history.

    Here's a genuine liberal lefty, one of the people like me, one of the actual people you claim have been blithering on about Nazis and doo-doo heads, writing about the Democratic Party's problem as illustrated by Hillary Clinton, in 2006: http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/20/ivins.hillary/
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2016
  19. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    iceaura,

    So your answer is no you're going to stick with endless internet arguing. Fine.

    You seem to have forgotten 2012, you seem to have forgotten the more then 50% approval rating Obama now holds.

    Yeah no, simply no. Most republicans or at least more then 12% of the national vote, honestly do think that reducing all taxes, making government smaller, having a gigantic ass fucking military, will fix everything. It is easy to sit there and call them all bigots and fundamentalist (Christians?), it is harder to argue with them on tax policy and the role of government.

    Some do, most don't, most just think he is bought out and that Washington does not care about them and trump will fuck Washington to death, you would know this if you spent time talking to them, in person, in their homes, in the middle of buttfuck nowhere minnesota... No no you're right they are all racist that why this time they did not vote for Hillary Clinton because Obama's blackness rubbed off on her or something... come on man be sensible!

    Wait... there were racist that voted democrat? Maybe 50 years ago. Do you know that Trump was not exactly the establishment republicans choice candidate, that he was a wave of destruction to them almost as bad as he is going to be to the whole nation? Do you understand that there is this tremendous anti-establishment hate on both the right and the left right now, do you? aah what ever I'm just wasting my time, Ok lets say your "they are all racist" theory is correct: how do you propose we win next time?

    yeah that not what I said or believe. Only that the left tended to end every argument about trump with "he racists, he sexists" and his supporters as being the same, did nothing to him, even help rally them against us. That we have pushed issues that get us no traction (transexual bathrooms and pronouns). Imagine for a moment we had not done that, that we attacked his policies head on (or lack there of) and put economic and political reform as our central policy, maybe had put Bernie as vice president to try to show she gave a fuck, maybe Clinton would have got just a few more hundred thousands votes in the right places and we would not have a trump presidency.

    Yeah and we choose wisely not to go for her and to go with Obama instead back then, let me guess was your argument "no he is black, they will never vote a black man in as president"?
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    No, I don't. Why would my posts seem like that to you?
    So why would you think they are not racist?

    And why would you claim that I and the people like me were not arguing with them on tax policy and the role of government? That's pretty much all we were arguing about, in real life.
    So you haven't actually been reading any of my posts, or links - not even the Molly Ivins link in that very post, which I explicitly endorsed as similar to my views;

    you haven't been paying the slightest attention to the actual arguments and proposals of the Left or me or anybody like me;

    and yet you blame "the Left" and "people like me" for Clinton getting beat - apparently because of some idiotic, shitheaded, wingnut memes you and the Trump voters of Minnesota got off the TV and the hate radio.

    I'm going to quote more of that Ivins column, just to point out that the Left and the Liberal factions, including me and the people like me, been talking about this stuff for decades now:
    Exactly. Why do you believe stupid shit like that? The actual Left did no such thing. Neither did I, or anybody like me. We were the folks trying to get the Dems to pay attention to the economics, to the problems, to the kinds of things that Sanders was bringing to the table.
    Clueless. Dozens of posts from me, and you still have no idea what I'm talking about.

    And this is not a simple thread discussion flap: this is the Democratic Party not figuring it out - the ridiculous blaming of "the Left", or the "Liberals", for the consequences of the rightwing and corporate influence on the media, the campaigns, and the Democratic Party, being an obvious symptom.
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2016
  21. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    I think that the corporate influence on the Democratic Party played a major role in this election with Democrats and their reluctance to vote. The politics of the Left probably had a major contribution on how others voted. Both played against the Democrats this election.
     
  22. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    How so?

    Democrats have traditionally been the party of the common man whereas Republicans have traditionally been the party of special corporate interests. It was a Republican Supreme Court which opened the flood gates sending untold millions of secret special interest dollars into our electoral process.
     
  23. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Because your only reference 2008.

    What does any of those ideologies have to do with race?

    Well here and now all I see you do is talk about how racist and or fascists they are.

    No, I'm blind, didn't you know?

    So you just evade answering my question, quote one person for 2006 and claim all the other talk of the regressive left does not exist?

    Oooh I get it, your doing a no true Scotsman, ok well what ever you want to call the democrats I worked with whom I have talked to, endless articles I could point to, videos of their rants, since they are not the "actual left" lets call them, ohh I don't know how about "Regressive left", or a maajid nawaz likes to call them the "control left" ("ctrl left" as I've seen it online) or simply "authoritarian left"?

    Ok well then you regressed now and spout on about racist and fascism being the problem.

    Yes pretend it is me.

    Do you understand the concept of non-mutually exclusive causes? Put it simply: blame can go around. Certainly had we run Bernie and he had won, the regressive left would just continue to be simply an annoyance, but now that we got President Trump ALL the diseased parts of the DNC and liberalism must be cut out in order to optimize our chances in the next elections.
     

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