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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
People are confused because the economy began to recover in the last years under Obama, but it wasn't dramatic, and when the recovery began to be noticed under Trump, he successfully took credit for it. Also, the main reason why the economy did so well under Trump is that he lowered taxes, but kept government spending high, and borrowed heavily to make up the difference (just like Reagan did). The Democrats to this day have not developed a simple economic narrative that can dispel the impression that Republicans are just better at managing the economy.
Trump is a "Borrow and Spend" Republican. But Democrats don't talk like that.
Still, the underlying point is that Americans of Color, like other Americans, base their votes on what they perceive will benefit themselves personally in the quickest and most direct way possible. They prefer money over justice.
Edited by DeMarquis on Nov 22nd 2020 at 11:04:28 AM
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.![]()
These people should know about Trump's racism, and that it had existed ever since he became an adult: in the 70s, there was some lawsuits against Trump for discrimination against African-Americans with regards to renting apartments, and in the 90s, Trump both organized ads against several African-American men wrongly suspected of murder seeking to "punish them", and referred to Japanese-Americans as "Japs". The fact that they disregard this info could be interpreted as a Horrible Judge of Character or maybe that they Stopped Caring.
These people also pretend that the Party Switch never happened and that Trump is still carrying on Abraham Lincoln's platform. Yes, really. Just today I read that on Candace Owen's Twitter. The delusional nonsense this woman is spouting is absolutely batshit insane.
Reality doesn't apply to them.
Edited by Forenperser on Nov 22nd 2020 at 5:09:24 PM
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian"The Democrats to this day have not developed a simple economic narrative that can dispel the impression that Republicans are just better at managing the economy."
That's because voters keep electing Republicans right as Democratic labor bears fruit. Of course the GOP claims false laurels each and every time. The voters put them in a position to. Every economic crisis of the past forty years has taken place under Republican leadership. Every single one. Democrats are brought in to fix it, and Republicans are brought in to steal the credit. Our electorate is terminally stupid.
Until the Democrats are given four, five uninterrupted presidential terms, this cycle will continue.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."That's not necessarily so. Paul Krugman is of the opinion
that the economy will roar back to life once sane governance is in place and COVID-19 is (mostly) behind us because, unlike the 2008 crash, this situation is one in which consumers have built up a reserve of savings that they can spend in a rush when things open up again.
That's a NYT link and so paywalled, but I'm summarizing.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 22nd 2020 at 12:09:02 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I’m hoping against hope that the people who voted for Biden this time don’t forget that whoever the next republican candidate is will be just as destructive.
My musician pageI don't think some of the people who participate in our democracy understand that there is always another election around the corner.
One of the arguments that won Biden the primary was the logic that Biden may not be the best candidate for Presidency, but it doesn't matter; we need to beat Trump now and worry about having a progressive platform later, once the threat of Trump is gone.
Setting aside the conversation of how progressive Biden's platform is (more than a lot of people realize), this is a bad argument because it assumes that there won't be a Trump later. It assumes the existence of such a time when Biden can be replaced by a farther left Democrat without having to get that Democrat past an election against someone just as bad or worse as Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, or Trump.
It's kicking the can down the road into a pothole. It's claiming that we can push a farther left candidate just as soon as a Presidential Election pops up where the Democrats can run unopposed. And that's. Not. Really. A thing. Beating Republicans today =/= Beating Republicans forever.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 22nd 2020 at 9:17:52 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.My responses to that:
1. I voted for Warren in the primary. I believe primaries are the place for 'I really want this candidate!' and general elections are the place for 'This candidate is better than the other one on the ballot'.
2. If the candidate never gets elected, it doesn't matter how good their policies are. You can't enact policy if you're not in office in the first place.
3. Congress matters. You also can't get the policy you want implemented if it's obstructed in the legislative branch.
4. Moving the Overton Window.
What an idiot. People are destitute because they've lost all of their businesses and jobs.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
Electability has always been a silly argument. When Biden won, we asked that the Sanders and Warren voters come together to support him and push him to success in the general. If Warren had won, we would ask the same of Biden and Sanders voters. If Sanders won, it'd be Biden and Warren voters. Either way, the general election is the time to remove the party dividers and bring everyone together to ram our candidate into the Presidency.
When you take into account that party unity will be asked regardless of who gets the nomination, the electability argument basically becomes, "Whose voters do we think will throw the biggest ragequit tantrum if their candidate doesn't get the nomination?"
It's actually kind of amazing that the Unicorn Brigade gets shit on for being fickle voters when we keep tacitly declaring the moderates to be the ones most likely to take their ball and go home if their candidate isn't our guy.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 22nd 2020 at 9:46:54 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
You're framing the concept of electability in the general as a reason to back someone in the primaries as merely whoever is able to unite the different camps within those primaries, and not as whoever is able to unite the different camps within the general. I think that's a fundamentally flawed way of approaching why people voted for Biden in the primaries citing electability as the reason why.
Edited by GoldenKaos on Nov 22nd 2020 at 9:50:36 AM
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/527054-can-biden-vanquish-democrats-old-debilitating-ghosts
A good argument that the Democrats need to rethink their strategy with rural America and restore their once vast gains there. Some of this is naive and outright wrong but there is a core of truth to the idea that a big issue is the Democrats sacrificed their reputation as the party of the Working Class.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 22nd 2020 at 10:02:48 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
I dont think sacrifing their reputation is a good idea but is more that another aspect of polarization is in plan and that is the territorialization of conflict, what is seen as democrat and republican territories are suddenly see as ironclad thing that cant be move, more and more dems are less bother of what the rural voter think because they suspect they cant be move at all and vice versa.
Think one of the saddest things I've seen is a friend of mine who's a Trump voter (ironically due to the same stuff that was mentioned earlier Obama and Biden did with the Economy), but she also advocates wearing a mask, on account of being a pharmacy worker just down the block from a Hospital.
I've had to step in and defend her a few times from the serious Right-wing nutbars who think Trump was "prophesied to win" and think "masks are muzzles."
the EC Vote and January 20th can't come too soon.
Semper Fi. Semper Paratus. Vigilo Confido.Defeating Trump was a good step in destroying his cult of personality because the people here were rallied around his God-King pretensions and aura of invincibility (which is moronic and heretical but hey). His defeat is a big deal because it has, to quote Whiplash, made a god bleed.
They can't deal with that.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.![]()
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Agreed and I would point to the end of WWII, where Americans had a ton of savings from the forced recession while in the war to the point the economy didn't start feeling the hit until deregulation and effects of America's assholishness internationally started hitting the economy.
"Until the Democrats are given four, five uninterrupted presidential terms, this cycle will continue."
I'm sorry, but I think that this is stupid. To the extent that voters are predictable, it's the responsibility of the party and candidate that want their support to generate persuasive arguments which will have that result. No one owes the Democrats anything. If we can't come up with a narrative that helps us win, that's on us.
As for the economy, this is from the Krugman article Fighteer quote:
"OK, this is not the consensus view. Most economic forecasters appear to be quite pessimistic; they expect a long, sluggish recovery that will take years to bring us back to anything resembling full employment. They worry a lot about long-term “scarring” from unemployment and closed businesses. And they could be right."
So while Krugman might be wrong, he isn't being "silly", he knows he's proposing a counter-intuitive view and is prepared to argue for it. He cites evidence.
"What held recovery back after 2008? Most obviously, the bursting of the housing bubble left households with high levels of debt and greatly weakened balance sheets that took years to recover.
This time, however, households entered the pandemic slump with much lower debt. Net worth took a brief hit but quickly recovered. And there’s probably a lot of pent-up demand: Americans who remained employed did a huge amount of saving in quarantine, accumulating a lot of liquid assets."
There are links that quote which lead to his sources. Here they are:
- [[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=xIvv
" high levels of debt"
- "years to recover"
- "quickly recovered"
- "saving in quarentine
- "liquid assets"
"All of this suggests to me that spending will surge once the pandemic subsides and people feel safe to go out and about, just as spending surged in 1982 when the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates. And this in turn suggests that Joe Biden will eventually preside over a soaring, “morning in America”-type recovery."
I'm not enough of an economist to know if he's right, and maybe we should move this discussion to the economics thread, but it seems like a plausible argument to me. Most Americans didn't lose their jobs, most businesses haven't gone bankrupt. Trump didn't destroy the economy, in fact he was minimally competent at preserving it (at the cost of greater wealth disparity and a much larger federal deficit).
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.The million dollar question is what’s greater, the debt built up from people becoming unemployed and businesses going under, or the savings built up by people being able to work from home and stimulus money from the federal government?
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

It doesn't help that the Trump camp also hijacked the genuinely tragic cases of black businesses and even lives (like that of David Dorn) being caught in the crossfires of the more violent parts of the BLM protests to say: "See? They don't really care about black lives, WE do!"
Edited by Forenperser on Nov 22nd 2020 at 4:48:51 PM
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian