the inevitable fall of global capitalism

[melannen]

1. I had my election judge training! Hurrah. It was actually kind of hilarious because apparently the Board of Elections and the State Legislature are having a nonpartisan politicians-vs-bureaucrats feud and all of the BoE employees who were running the training were INCREDIBLY BITTER and NOT EVEN TRYING TO HIDE IT. Our main trainer was literally like "Let me show you the system we SHOULD be using this year and how great and smooth and foolproof and tamperproof it is, and by the way the legislature authorized us to spend millions of dollars on it before they decided they hated, look, isn't it great? So great. Now let me show you the horrible system we had to kludge together because the legislature SUDDENLY DECIDED they hated that one for NO GOOD REASON, can you think of any good reason? I can't. Back me up on this."

That's a minor paraphrase but basically accurate, including tone.

So that was entertaining.

2. All of the Republican candidates for President are unthinkably horrible and both of the Democratic ones are pretty OK rn so to be honest I really am mostly tuning out the election, but here are some links that have turned up on my reading list that are a pretty good summary of my feelings on Bernie vs. Hillary:

old post, you have probably seen: hth on what people mean when they say Bernie can't get things done
newer post, nicki on why people say Hillary is 'unlikable'

3. I have some RL friends who are very, very, very invested in Bernie winning. In that way where they have made themselves believe that if Bernie wins, all their problems will be solved and their lives will suddenly be good again. And I am watching them slowly fall into that pit of denial + despair where Bernie HAS to win okay because he's going to win because.

Anyway, I just want to say: Stop worrying. Bernie has already won.

Seriously. People have linked me several times in the last few days to several (clearly biased) Bernie vs. Hillary comparison charts, but what they all summarize to is:

Bernie is right about everything (except possibly gun control)
Hillary used to be wrong about everything, but now that she's running against Bernie, her positions are suddenly a lot like his, SUSPICIOUS.

Bernie got into the race not expecting to win: he got into the race hoping to push the Democratic center further to the left. And he has done that. He has done that in spades. Even if Hillary moves back toward the right in the general election, she'll still be taking much, much more lefty positions on a lot of things than she did a year ago, and than I imagined any Democratic establishment candidate would take this year. That was Bernie's entire goal. He has achieved it. Everything from here on in is just gravy.

Bernie already achieved his win condition, and I suspect he knows it.

4. RE: hth's post, what really matters more than the presidential primary at this point is who wins the downticket races: Congress and the local elections. If you're invested in the presidential stuff, please, please, look around you at your local races, find a candidate for Congress or County Council or Judge who is doing stuff you like, and throw some money and time their way instead. It really does make all the difference. In fact, given how much Congress has managed to lock up the national executive lately, it probably makes more difference.

...that said I haven't looked at any of my downticket races very closely because I'm not even sure what's going to be on the ballot because did I mention that the politicians are feuding with the Board of Elections? Seriously it's beautiful.

(Also I live in one of the skinny parts of the dead pterodactyl so my local votes on a lot of races are pretty pointless anyway. Another reason your state legislature vote matters! fucking gerrymandering.)

5. So I posted a thing on tumblr t'other day about Steve Rogers' personal political context, people seem to be liking it?

Comments

[ratcreature]

I don't think even if Trump were elected it would turn out catastrophically right then -- well, except maybe if he does something truly horrible with foreign policy (rather than "just" a worsening of war crimes or something like that) which is where he could do the easiest damage, I think, without running into your dysfunctional congress, that he is unlikely to get in a sweep with loyal allies, even if both chambers remained Republican majority, so he'd probably run into the same gridlock.

I think the even scarier part is that his electorate won't go away, but will get even more frustrated if they get disappointed by Trump as well, when he doesn't accomplish anything beyond angry posturing. And in the next iteration you may get the combination of all the implicit rules of civility boundaries being broken, people even more eager to dismantle the political system that failed them, and the formula is then used by someone who isn't a narcissist but a believer and is willing to cohere and build local movements and such.

I mean, from what I gather Cruz for example is all about some weird religious fundamentalist vision or something, but with the Trump example that some economic populism and protectionism talk combined with racism and xenophobia works better to attract people than being just all about the "war for Christian values" or whatever, but neoliberal Republican in economics, you get the next natural iteration of this, where the economic rhetoric switches.

[melannen]

Yeppp.

On the plus side I don't think his chances of winning are that great; he's consistently getting about 35% of the Republican primary vote, and that seems to be it, so if that really is his base, 15% of the general election vote does not win you the presidency even with total dysfunction everywhere else.

The scarier part is nobody really knows what happens next even if he doesn't win, because he's completely changed the landscape.

[ratcreature]

Well, the optimistic outcome scenario is that landscape change might somehow help with the dysfunction because the Republican party has to adapt.

[beatrice_otter]

I have been predicting the collapse/redefinition/reorganization of the Republican Party since the Tea Party started making waves. America has always had two major political parties, but what parties those are has changed over the years, and parties have had really dramatic sudden shifts of platform and key demographics. Such political realignments happen periodically, and we're due for another one. Sometimes a party just comes apart at the seams and is completely replaced; sometimes they keep the name but are almost unrecognizable. And it usually happens around a Presidential election. One election cycle, the system shows strain and stress; things get further stressed in the intervening four years; next Presidential election, the whole thing goes up in flames and everybody goes WTF? for a bit before adapting to the new normal. (The most interesting one, to me, was the formation of the Republican Party and Abe Lincoln's election.)

Now, whether any such realignment would be a net positive for the country ... I don't know. And, of course, using history as a guide for What's Happening Next is tricky in any case.

[ratcreature]

I have to admit that I find US parties really hard to grasp, probably because they are so very different in organization from what you understand as political party here.

[beatrice_otter]

Okay, here's a brief overview.

The structure of our elections and electtoral system is really hard on small parties--basically, for national politics, only the two biggest really have much of a chance at any one election. (This is why, historically, when one party died, another one quickly arose to take its place and the system carried on similarly to before.) And people tend to belong to the same party for both state and federal purposes, so it's only for strictly local politics that you start seeing political parties other than the two biggies, and even then only rarely. I mean, they exist, but rarely get elected.

The thing is, the range of mainstream American political beliefs isn't any narrower than any other country you can think of. But instead of having that range of politial beliefs split up into, say, five mainstream parties, each of which gets enough seats in the legislature that they sort of have to work together because none of them can get a majority on their own, we're divided into two political parties, each of which often can control a house of legislature by itself.

So a major American political party is actually the functional equivalent of two or three (or more) parties in a parliamentary system. Except that while those factions in a parliamentary system might only work together for an election or two before forming an alliance with a different party, here they are part of the same party with a really strong disincentive to go it alone. So major reorganizations only happen every forty or fifty years or so.

Does that help?

[ratcreature]

That wasn't what I meant. I know your system works differently from say a proportional legislature. What I meant is that what you call a party here is a organization with a program the members (who join and pay their party fees) vote on to determine the goals of the party and a leadership structure elected by the membership base (different from the voting base who are not all members obviously) to try to get elected to then implement their program. Due to that it is also much less person-centric than your system where you elect people for whom parties are a sort of election machine.

So when I hear "party" in my gut the association is with that kind of political organization. The disconnect is not just because of how you slice the political spectrum into fewer sections, but what and how a political party here does things is also different, not merely more defined ideologically.

[beatrice_otter]

Ah! Yes, that is different.