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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Sanders, much like Trump's opponents, has been angling for a contested convention based on Clinton not getting enough committed delegates to reach a 50% majority and thus making the case to the superdelegates to support him on the basis of his greater electability. This was always a long-shot. Mathematically, it is far more certain that he will lose than that Trump will seal his side before the convention.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Fighteer: I wish I shared your confidence in the resilience of the American political system, but from a historical perspective, pretty much every other presidential democracy in history has ended up devolving into a dictatorship or an oligarchy eventually. It's just not a very stable system of government.
edited 19th Apr '16 8:27:07 PM by CaptainCapsase
Problem is we're at a historical low point for support of democracy in principle, which political theorists said couldn't happen (for some reason, too optimistic). That's why I'm worried, not the anti-establishment stuff.
Wage stagnation seems to be the reason for that from both directions (highest criticism of democracy from rich people, naturally). But I suppose since Hillary said she would sign any 15$ minimum wage bill in front of her and I imagine that'll help settle things down, so there's not much reason to worry as long as she gets elected. Maybe.
Really, the biggest thing democracy did was keep people fed, everything else flowed naturally from that. You lose the economic benefits each successive generation, that's a bad sign.
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It's hard to be anything but realistic in this situation. What would you imagine to be the conditions for escaping this trap? For most of history, most human civilizations lurch from crisis to crisis. What makes you imagine that we'd break out of that just because a popular dude from Vermont ran for President?
Our best bet is to nominate someone who represents Democrats' interests and also has the influence to push for the changes we need while keeping things from falling apart.
Agreed. The push for the $15 minimum wage may be the best thing to come out of this election cycle. Slow and steady wins the race. Above all else, we need to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of a Cruz or a Trump. Even Kasich would be a poor choice, as deluded as he is about so many things.
edited 19th Apr '16 8:27:08 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Maybe not (in fact yeah, probably not), but electing an anti-establishment candidate at this point would go a long way to defuse the current anti-establishment sentiments, and if those remain unchecked, eventually it's going to boil over, which could be extremely ugly.
edited 19th Apr '16 8:40:13 PM by CaptainCapsase
In which case, we'll get Sanders' revolution. We almost had one in the 1930s; it was prevented only because those in power saw the Torches and Pitchforks and got scared enough to enact change. Other nations weren't so lucky. But it was that same unrest that gave rise to fascist states in Europe. We should not encourage that kind of crisis just because we got lucky and elected Roosevelt instead of Hitler.
Edit: What people want is twofold: economic opportunity and representation. The latter is seen as a vehicle towards the former. If people have enough to eat, good jobs, homes over their head, safe streets, and well-funded schools, they don't care who's in power. So let's focus on those principles, not on sweeping generalizations.
edited 19th Apr '16 8:49:05 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
We're headed for that crisis no matter what, and honestly, I feel as if Clinton would do just as much to push us in that direction as Trump; for better or worse, she's a status quo candidate, and the current status quo is breeding significant resentment among the lower and middle classes of society.
I can't offer any reassurances there. It might happen. But Clinton is not the agent of destruction. If you focus on her, you're aiming at the wrong targets. And realistically, we're in a vastly different space than we were in the 30s or even the 60s. As bad as things may seem, our race relations are way better now than they've ever been, and the screaming and carrying on of the right is partly a scream of defiance against their dwindling demographics.
edited 19th Apr '16 8:57:15 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Considering that we managed to get through a civil war and resume regular elections fairly quickly (whatever else you can say about that war) and that we haven't had any military dictatorships in over two hundred years... I'm gonna say we have a pretty stable form of government and that we're unlikely to fall apart even if Trump wins. Frankly, saying that democracy is unstable is said so often and is actually a pretty shit commentary on democracy.You might as well say monarchies are an unstable form of government because the Romanovs were weak leaders and assassinated. Instability comes from a lot of factors, but the type of government doesn't actually seem to affect the survival of itself when people are at the pitchforks and torches stage.
And I'd like to point out that a lot of the middle and lower classes want a candidate who will continue with Obama's accomplishments and perceive Hillary as the candidate to do that. Which isn't status quo so much as a slower change for the better. It's not like her supporters come solely from the wealthy.
And claiming that any one president is the sole cause of disaster greatly downplays the role the rest of our government has to play in things. In fact, blaming the president seems to happen for a lot of this country's major happenings. We need to stop that and realize that Congress and the Supreme court play just as vital a part as the one person in the White House.
edited 19th Apr '16 8:57:49 PM by AceofSpades
The American system was emulated widely among Latin American nations after their independence from Spain. The vast majority of them ended up as dictatorships or oligarchies, and political science has demonstrated that's an inherent trait of a Presidential democracy. The United States has been extraordinarily fortunate throughout most of its existence, which is a big part of why its currently a geopolitical hegemon. When I talk about stability, I'm comparing it to parlimentary democracies, which are quite a bit more pluralistic than the American system, not to autocracies, which are even less stable.
edited 19th Apr '16 9:02:12 PM by CaptainCapsase
Oooor, they have a variety of problems specific to their situations (such as frequent destabilization by outside forces like the US wanting specific leaders) rather than anything inherent in any sort of political system. Considering that the US itself has a huge separation of the military from government, I doubt that's going to happen any time soon and you are basically fear mongering. Our military has long made a stance of being officially politically neutral. Militaries of South America probably haven't.
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Thats an extremely simplistic analysis of the situation. I don't doubt there is an argument to be made about the flaws in presidential democracy, but that wasn't it. The South American states had completely different pressures and circumstances to deal with that led to such dictatorships, including particularly the Cold War.
EDIT-
edited 19th Apr '16 9:02:37 PM by FFShinra
It would have helped if we hadn't deliberately destabilized them and tried to prevent them from becoming autonomous nations in our little imperial power games.
edited 19th Apr '16 9:02:51 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
That has nothing to do with the cold war; it started happening pretty much immediately after the United States won its independence, and there were several close calls early on in the country's history that very well could have been the end of the Republic. A century in and things were far more stable, as the system had acquired the legitimacy of the status quo,
Technically, they had dictators before their revolutions, and fell victim to situations similar to the Reign of Terror in France. In any event, most of them are peaceful now and working on said stability.
But again, the stability isn't really about the type of government, it's about the people in charge. And quite a few of them have very corrupt people in charge. Which again, isn't actually a useful condemnation against the US form of democracy. You're using examples without actually looking at the history and factors that made their situations what they are, and then using those poorly researched examples to declare that the US, which has a very different current situation, is headed for a military dictatorship. Your argument is nonsensical from top to bottom. And very, very far from being true.
Mathematically demonstrate that democracies turn into dictatorships? And this means that the US is absolutely, for sure, just suddenly turn into one? NOPE, that is not even the kind of proof you need to present in this thread for that dumbass argument.
edited 19th Apr '16 9:11:47 PM by AceofSpades
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It's a de facto oligarchy in the sense that congressional decisions have no correlation with popular opinion, but there's nothing preventing that state of affairs from changing; the United States still has free elections. My concern is that, going into the future, we'll see more laws enacted that disenfranchise portions of the population that tend to oppose the establishment, elections will become more opaque, and eventually we'll reach a point where votes by people who aren't members of the political clique running the place are tossed into the trash.
More prone to dictatorship doesn't necessarily mean dictatorship is inevitable, and compared to monarchies, a presidential democracy is quite a bit more stable, but there's a reason many early democracies failed; the systems had some very blatant flaws, several of which (ie first past the post voting) have been carried on into the modern political system of the United States.
edited 19th Apr '16 9:16:22 PM by CaptainCapsase
@Silasw: I actually was kind of fond of Bush, though I'm probably his only fan on the planet.
With Trump, I think he's in some ways too left-wing (he's the worst of both parties, essentially). Cruz'll bring in some policies I do like. I also don't think he's as extreme as some people make him out to be.
Hillary and Sanders-while we could do worse (thanks to Trump) they really have yet to propose anything I like. Their positives are mostly defined by bad policies they don't have.
edited 19th Apr '16 9:17:00 PM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34The US was fucking with South America and subverting their governments well before the Cold War, but yes the US system doesn't always work immediately, it's not a great system to go into strait away, but it's worked for the US and has built up enough momentum to now keep itself chugging along.
As for Sander's and the idea of a contested Dem convention, I'm still not convinced, we'll see what Sanders does when it becomes mathematically impossible for him to win the most pledged delegates.
Being a fan of Bush I can get on some level, but are you a fan of his foreign policy? Of the Iraq war? Because you're looking at that but so much worse with Cruz, the death toll of a Cruz presidency would be catastrophic, eclipsed only by the death toll of a Trump presidency, the world doesn't need that.
edited 19th Apr '16 9:18:05 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Sanders' campaign manager came right out and said that Sanders is in for the long haul on CNN, according to 538.
Incidentally, I'm so, so happy that my District (the Fightin' 24th!) was one of the two districts with enough sanity to vote for Kasich enough to grant him a delegate rather than let Trump get the clean sweep.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"