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There simply may not be enough of them yet, and Bernie may have missed his window in 16.
I don’t think it’s insignificant that he talks a lot about movement building and ‘not me, us’. Getting policies that benefit the working class in place takes organization, and generations of persistent pressure. It was 50 years between the forming of the AFL and the Nw Deal, 30 years between the first Labour government and the modern welfare state in the UK.
Point is, Bernie isn’t going to save us and never was. The great man theory of change is fascist bollocks. What we do need is organizations that can exert political and economic pressure on politicians on our behalf. With that, you don’t need good people in office, you just need for it to be in their self interest to do what we need.
Tldr; Bernie’s running to rebuild the labor movement at least as much as he is to win. It is way way way more important to our long term well being.
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Well, this is markedly different than the edit, in that I’d tentatively agree with this and strongly disagree with that.
Despite all my talk today about “they” and “them” pulling the strings, it still comes down to the voters. And it’s not their “fault” in that sense, it’s that they largely do know what they want. They’d stay home otherwise.
You probably thought it was a low blow when I said you’re making excuses for your family and colleagues, and it probably was in context, but I want to clarify it’s not just you. It’s almost literally everybody. I’m a bachelor whose almost entire family is dead and gone, but you have children whose grandparents et al who actively vote against their grandchildren’s. I literally can’t imagine trying to wrap my head around the personal horror of that.
Mainly this:
He had 4 years to get the truth out. Yeah, voters are stupid. They have always been. It is known. Anyone who blames them may as well blame their dog for hating the vet. Negligent. This shit is outrageously negligent.
The message has been out. It’s loud and clear. “Be kind and share” is not meant to be radical and esoteric.
I know this is wrong and against what I intended, but I gave up. No more $ and no more effort for Bernie. Also took leave from work until April and am going to use this month as a trial run for how my life looks if I only keep the tutoring job that’s half time but pays all of my bills (my other job is propping poker). I think I will be a lot happier but if I keep both jobs I can retire by 50.
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Not the whole story, obv, but:
https://www.google.com/search?q=voter+suppression+primary+2020
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Hopefully just less people will vote for Trump. I think a lot of disengaged people just thought what the hell, this might be fun,when Hillary wins and doesn’t do great I can say it wasn’t my fault etc. I think regardless of who wins for the dems out of Bernie/Biden there aren’t going to be a ton of people super pumped about voting blue. Winnable, but lose-able also.
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I kept donating to Bernie until April in 2016 but I’m on your side this time around. Bernie spent $1.7 million on ads in North Carolina, Biden spent $276k and ended up getting 150,000 more votes than Bernie. With the states voting the next few weeks I don’t think dropping Bloomberg levels of cash could change things for Bernie.
I used the new CA system when I voted. For the most part it was fine except for the More button to see more candidates - which wasn’t remotely clear.
There are so many easy ways they could have dealt with this - the #1 being don’t let the user progress to the next screen until they see all the candidates. Or at least make them click a box acknowledging they haven’t seen all the candidates yet and highlight the more button. Then once they click that they can skip future more buttons. I skipped a ton of the races because I had no clue who was running. But selecting someone in the top section w/o clicking more and trying to move on should force the user to at least look at the rest of the candidates - like a user agreement.
This is my biggest bugaboo about digital UX (user experience) - nobody takes it seriously and 99.9% of the population are woefully bad at it. In reality UI/UX should be as highly paid job as a programmer if not more. But because, unlike a bad programmer, the system doesn’t completely break if you hire a bad UX person - 99% of the UX out there is bad.
Yeah I have to agree. I cant wrap my head around Bernie not having better answers at the debates for how are you gonna pay for it.
Hes a great person but he is not a great politician.
That said he had still done a tremendous amount for this country pushing the Overton window to the left and inspiring lots of new progressives who will hopefully learn from his mistakes and get it done in 4 or 8 years. So I dont regret any donations or any time spent volunteering
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I’m not entirely comfortable voting for anyone. It’s a layered decision.
This is correct. People were fine voting for Hillary. Was there mass excitement? I wish but no. We were fine with her and just delighted to fade Trump. Until we didn’t.
If nothing else, Bernie has raised my standards. It’s no longer enough to be an acceptable candidate. The Dem nominee needs to energize people to vote for them the same way Trump energizes Dems to vote for anyone but him.
There is still some hope to Bern it all down. Imagine the momentum of Bern 2020 leading into AOC 2024. We’d all be fighting like dogs, but some of this atrocious theater would finally see a curtain call. These aren’t new fights. Go back and watch debates for the last twenty years and it’s the same arguments, the same rhetoric. They keep happening the same way Marvel makes the same movies or Disney is now doing line-by-line remakes and pretending they’re something new.
We’ve been starved for candidates that will energize voters because we’ve been fed this lie that what we really need is someone who can energize politicians. Nonsense. By the people, for the people.
Olds don’t even need to come around. They will die as surely as we will, too. The difference is in whether voters are energized and engaged with these issues. Nothing is ever going to change if people only get kind of excited every general for POTUS. We need people driving through these difficult conversations in their day to day lives. Where would we all be if more people spent twenty minutes a day researching and reflecting on policy and reform beyond inflamed articles and internet debates?
Where would a person be if they only went to the gym once or twice every four years? But is it really their fault if the only gym in the country is Planet Fitness? Now we’ve got two 80 year old white guys telling us they can make this work.
Well one of them is doing half reps on a Smith machine and the other is doing backflips between four plate ass to grass squats. He’s showing video of literally everyone else in the world doing the same thing thanks to getting rid of awful equipment and using something simpler but far more effective. He says listen, all we need is a collection of $5 from everyone here and we can have good equipment for life. But the manager is like hmmm, idk, that guy selling corn pops makes a good counter argument, and he gives me free pizza for $10/month.
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Yeah, the whole notion of a single guy changing everything is naive movie stuff. Just vote in every election and every primary for the policies you like. Make dems have to worry about the primaries in safe districts and don’t wait until you’re pissed off to vote in non presidential elections. Liberals have the raw numbers to win every midterm,they just have to stop being so much less likely to turn out than conservatives.
The party that just needs to energize younger and more liberal voters is about to nominate Joe Biden.
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Biden will get nominated BECAUSE nobody was able to energize young and more liberal voters. It was there for the taking but nobody could do it.
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Question for those that have followed politics longer than me, was Obama an obvious fraud in 2007-2008 to those in the know (I.e. his reliance on Chicago politics, most notably Rahm Emanuel, gave him away)?
That’s great, but young people are not voting for him any more this year than they did in 2016. Seems like a problem.
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This is a big part of it. They aren’t showing Bernie rallies, but they showed Trump rallies. They’ll show some Biden rallies, but not much of Bernie. He’s easy to bury. If he lobbed some grenades, he might get more coverage.