> at the expense of talking about why she should be president.
Hillary couldn't make that argument because it would've drawn more attention to her most damning flaw: The fact that she's a textbook demagogue who was on the wrong side of every progressive issue until she found it politically expedient to "evolve".
That's why so many people were so passionate about Sanders. You could go back to C-SPAN videos from 1992 and hear him saying the exact same things he said throughout the whole primary season.
Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue.
In the (probably apocryphal) words of Keynes:
> When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?
It's not a sign of vice either; I'm sure he's been believing that the Earth is round for 24+ years, and that's fine. What matters is accuracy, and updating in the face of new evidence, not consistency. Consistency in the face of new evidence is called faith.
His opinions were sound and his predictions were prescient. He was right. That's it. He was right about Iraq, he was right about financial deregulation, he was right about civil liberties.
Having the same opinion in and of itself is not a virtue, but having wisdom and foresight and conviction and true ground level initiative all at once is far more than just virtuous.
That may be true, but he's also a terrible role model that says extremely racist/sexist things. I couldn't quote president Trump at work without being fired from my job because of his lewd language.
You're the only one repeatedly using the word "consistency" and then claiming that word is bad, which is kind of funny. That's because its a mistake you've made. That's OK. The correct word to use is "coherent". He's a believer in a complete and wide ranging logical philosophical system explaining the world resulting in a set of mutually compatible coherent opinions on all kinds of issues. That's why he's a statesman who's earned the respect of people even like me who disagree with him but can see a logical deeply reasoning fellow rational mind. And you try to compare that to someone who's idea of a philosophy, of the right systemic way to live a life, is to look at the polls, see X, Y, and Z are leading, well, guess I'm temporarily a supporter of X, Y, and Z. They're so dissimilar its almost impossible to compare the two.
You speak of faith and belief a lot. Bernie is like a wise theological scholar. Personally I think he's wrong about quite a few things, but I recognize the strong morals and ethics, the personal virtue, the deep rational thought, the coherent inter relatedness behind his system. He's a personification of sometimes wise people are wrong, but they still remain wise. He's not for me personally, I like other folks, but I'm proud he's an American and if he were the leader I could respect him despite disagreement. And his female opponent is like a televangelist seeking ratings and pledge drives, a faith healer, a fake messiah. And people somehow wonder how she lost. Doesn't her show have the highest ratings? Doesn't she make the best promises in her sermons? Don't our holiest people fall all over themselves to celebrate and show off their own holiness in supporting her? How could a charlatan like her not win, indeed?
>>Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue.
It is if they were good opinions the whole damn time. Being for marriage equality for 24 years is a virtue. Being for an improved social safety net for 24 years is a virtue. Being for universal healthcare for 24 years is a virtue.
Yep, the key about these is moral consistency. He was morally consistent the whole time, which shows integrity. Now, whether his positions were the right ones is another story...
Bernie's viewpoints were so far left that he had to hammer on them for 40+ years until the stars aligned and we all began to recognize the pearls of truth they held. Twenty years ago I could not have considered his viewpoint but now with more age and empathy driven into me I can get behind (most of) his viewpoint. Thank God for Bernie and hopefully we can rebirth a new democratic party that can integrate some of his views to help recapture a large part of the 59,000,000 people that felt compelled to vote for Trump.
As crazy as it might seem the USA has been right of center for a long (since WW2) and it is generally working well for us (we are so rich we don't even understand it). It is clearly not perfect (healthcare) but it does often work in unintuitive way (decade on decade carbon release decrease).
EDIT - Even though I think Trump is an existential threat to the USA, so have many of our leaders. Maybe 'us' wouldn't be the US if we weren't just a bit crazy. I must accept that I might be wrong about Trump be universally bad and see what happens.
> Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue.
You are deliberately misinterpreting the statement. Of course having the same opinion for 24 years by itself is not a virtue! The point is: he has had the same public stance on things that matter : gay marriage, healthcare, etc. In today's climate, when politicians change their views based on the most recent polling, this is indeed a virtue.
> Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue.
That was not what GP was saying at all. He was saying that Bernie has always stood for what he believes is the right thing to do, whereas Hillary would pick a stance based on its political value.
“But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room
Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position.”
I'm not commenting on the specifics of Berns and Hilary. I don't particularly like Hilary. I'm objecting to this type of argument in general.
Like, what if someone shows up and shows that Trump has had the same opinions all along? Is that a positive for him?
If the ideas are shitty, it doesn't matter how consistent or inconsistent they are. If they're good, I don't care if the person only adopted them 3 years ago, as long as they did for the right reasons, (e.g. not political expediency, I agree.)
I agree that the fact that he's held the same opinions for a long time is evidence that Berns doesn't act out of political expediency, but to me that point is far overshadowed by whether the ideas are any good.
If someone holds a private and public"shitty" opinion and another holds a public opinion as a demagogue and privately holds the same "shitty" opinions, who would you rather? The one open and honest with their opinions or the dishonest one who will lie and say anything to win the popular vote?
>but to me that point is far overshadowed by whether the ideas are any good
Mind telling me where his ideas are bad? Most of his beliefs are both long held, progressive, and in my opinion, largely agreeable.
> Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue.
But being right for 24 years is.
She adopted his ideas one by one and then tried to pretend they'd been hers all along. Unfortunately (for her), Democrats aren't that gullible. It was clear that she was only saying what voters wanted to hear, while Bernie truly believed everything he'd been saying for that past 25+ years.
Correct, but being right is orthogonal to consistency. If you are exposed to new evidence, and it points in a different direction than your prior belief, being right means changing your mind; if there is no new evidence, or the weight of new evidence points in the same direction, being right means keeping the same belief.
All I'm saying is, you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing, you have to look at the idea and history in detail, and show that it was a good idea all along.
(I'm not objecting to the object-level argument that Clinton does whatever is politically expedient, I'm objecting to the line of argument that it's good for a politician to hold an opinion for a long time, without also showing that the idea is good, and that it was good all along.)
> you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing
You're missing the point completely.
I'm not praising Sanders' stubbornness, I'm praising his foresight and vastly superior judgment. He knew what this country needed to do 20 years before Hillary, and he was willing to vehemently defend his opinions despite the overwhelming opposition. The fact that you're trying to turn this into some kind of debate about consistency vs. facts is frankly baffling. It's clear that he was right all along and she was late to the party on every issue that liberals and progressives care about.
And do you really believe she changed her opinion on those issues where she claimed to have "evolved"? I sure don't. We know she still wants TPP to pass, we know she still secretly supports DOMA, we know she had no interest in reigning in Wall Street, we know she (and Chelsea) were halfheartedly pretending to support medical marijuana, etc. etc.. The Hillary Clinton presented to the public was a fictional character designed for one purpose: To win the presidency.
> you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing
If that's the critique you hear when comparing Sanders to Clinton, you're not listening very well.
To restate, Sanders didn't just tout the same idea. He's fought for the same core principles throughout his whole career, even when in the clear minority. Overtime, the rest of our culture came around to those ideas (bringing Clinton with it).
His virtue isn't his tenacity. It's his progressive thinking.
I don't think the OP was criticizing her lack of consistency. (S)He was criticizing her lack of being on the right side of the issues the first time (in the way that Bernie has been on many issues). It's easy to switch sides when everyone does, and nobody should criticize someone for doing that. But to many people, greatness is being on the right side of the issue before everyone else, and convincing people of its rightness.
To boil this down farther, We are looking for a leader, not a follower. Hillary is a follower.
She has demonstrated over her career that she will vote for whatever is popular, lean on "think of the children" issues, and only vote progressively to catch up with the times. In a time where Congressional approval is so low, the American people couldn't stomach electing the epitome of a career politician who seems to have so many skeletons in her closet the door is about to burst (real or imaginary, the impression is there).
We ended up with Trump, which I am absolutely not thrilled about, but at least this will send the Democrats back to the drawing board to come up with something better than "Less Evil." I just pray to the FSM that the Republican House, Senate, Cabinet, and Supreme Court don't turn our great nation into a chop shop in the next 2 / 4 years. We are in for a bumpy ride.
I think you need both. You need the uncompromising Bernies, to act as visionaries and point out what the future should be. And, you also need the unprincipled politicians who can compromise, and adapt, and win elections. If Bernie had run in all previous elections, you would have probably gotten presidents Dole, McCain, and Romney. And, who knows, maybe Trump too.
I am not convinced those presidents would have been bad. Can we say that they were all acting in the same way as "unprincipled politicians who can compromise, and adapt, and win elections" or maybe did they believe something earnestly that is just different from what you believe?
Would you rather have an ethically malleable liberal than a principled conservative? In most cases I would rather have the principled politician because they will have some kind of goal to benefit some segment of Americans. Can we really say that any ethically malleable politician, of any flavor, will always help some segment of Americans?
Then as a counter to all this. Nixon did found the EPA.
I agree that maybe those presidents would not have been necessarily bad. Maybe, if Dole would have won, G.W. Bush would have never been elected, and the world would now be a very different (and better) place.
I think malleable politicians are malleable because they try to benefit the largest section of the population that they can. Conservatives, lately, have focused on benefiting a very small segment of the population directly, expecting the benefits to trickle down.
However, the trickle down has not worked. I know very little about economics, but, I remember, headlines in newspapers eight years ago were mainly about unemployment, and the growth of the National debt. The euro was $1.30 (now it buoys around $1.10).
I think the American economy is much better now than it was eight years ago, and a larger section of the population has benefited from that, than when principled conservatives were in the government. (And this is just from an economic point of view, which is a small part of the benefits).
Ya don't get me wrong. I wouldn't totally castigate her for that. I was just trying to explain the criticism. You definitely need both kinds of people for different things at different times.
But consistently having to change your position is not a good sign. It's good to be able to change your mind. But it's hard to trust someone who changes a lot of their positions.
This was actually what I thought was Clinton's best quality. I believe it's called "triangulation" and it means figuring out what compromise can be achieved in the current political circumstances and going with that rather that what you believe to be the one true right answer, if that would lead to less pragmatic progress.
Basically, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" applied to politics.
e.g. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a crappy policy compared with letting gay people serve openly, but it's an improvement on the status quo at that time which was setting up sting operations to catch out gay servicemen and throw them out of the army.
I guess I'm condoning her fighting for something she doesn't truly believe is right, as long as it's better than what's currently the case. Does that make me bad? Does it make her bad?
The Iran deal is huge. True it's early to tell how well it will work, but still it's there.
Then there's Cuba. Not a big deal in global terms, but a watershed in America's history. Although the payoffs for these mainly accrue to Kerry, it was Hilary who made them happen.
This Benghazi thing; it's a perfect example of the double standards as applied to Clinton. Prior to Benghazi, were there 13 attacks on embassies and 60 deaths under President George W. Bush. Where was the outrage then? Where were the hearings then?
It should have. And it would have if he belonged to the party that contains a majority portion of anti-war/pacifist types. Can't sell out the major beliefs of your base and expect them to show up at the polls.
Bush wasn't elected by progressives. Being pro-war isn't going to earn you progressive votes. The progressives sat out this election because Hillary wasn't progressive enough. There were 4M fewer votes cast this year than in 2008.
You don't have to qualify your statements anymore. The veil of illusion has come down and the sock puppet masters have ended their contracts, so you won't be attacked unfairly for pointing out the truth.
This was actually what I thought was Clinton's best quality. I believe it's called "triangulation" and it means figuring out what compromise can be achieved in the current political circumstances and going with that rather that what you believe to be the one true right answer, if that would lead to less pragmatic progress.
Basically, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" applied to politics.
A valid point, in spirit.
But the basic problem with the Clintonian philosophy (a term which was coined during Bill's tenure, actually) is that they both took "triangulation" to such an extreme (and made so many 180-degree flip-flops on basic issues, which really should have been principle gut calls -- Hillary's gay rights being a classic example) that the end, you could never get a fix on, let alone believe them what they stood for. It's like nailing jello to a wall, basically.
To be truly successful in politics -- the stance to take (which I hope this election proves) is not "triangulation at all costs" (a.k.a. Standard Clintonianism). Nor is it "perfection at all costs". But it does require a keen sense of judgement to know when, exactly, to make a proper gut call between the two -- and stand up for the right thing, and say the right thing. Even if it seems the majority is against you, or no one is listening to your speeches on C-PAN.
That, and a sense for not letting one's self be "played" (in the sense that Hillary appears to have genuinely believed both the Bush's administration line about the imminent threat of WMD in Iraq, and his private assurances -- albeit not encoded in the resolution that she tragically voted for -- that he wouldn't invade unless all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted; or in the sense that both of the Clintons allowed themselves to be played, for decades, by the Christian Right).
There's a dependency tree required to get to the point of "vote", and you have to pass thru "respect" first.
I disagree with, but respect, Sanders, Stein, Warren, Feingold (and some other lefties). Hillary equals revulsion, repulsion. I can't be talked from "respect" to "vote" with someone I can't even respect first.
The D party worked very hard on converting "respect" people to "vote" people. I think they achieved 100% success. The problem is most of the country can never respect her, and there was zero effort put into making her respectable (perhaps it was recognized as impossible?)
There's something fundamentally wrong internally with the D party when the ground seems to be crawling with respectable (possibly votable!) candidates but instead we get a movie caricature of Lex Luther combined with a slightly more chicken hawk bloodthirsty Joker from a sequel rejected in the 90s. There's something just horribly fundamentally wrong with how people gain political power inside the D party, resulting in the wrong leaders at the wrong times.
She'll be within one percentage point of Trump in the end in overall votes (and it looks like she'll beat him actually). All of these commentators seem to be making broad generalizations about the state of politics and how the strategy is obviously going to fail but the reality is that if the election was very slightly different in ways that neither campaign could really control it would've gone the other way. Maybe I'm wrong but all this just reminds me of all of the BS narratives that ESPN concocts to fill air time after football games.
But to not put a polarizing, inexperienced politician like Trump away easily is what makes the commentators (and me) think there are larger trends at work.
I agree that there are trends at work but many of the criticisms of her were only apparent in the last few months so saying that the DNC and democrats in general should've known somehow that she wasn't a good candidate and that their picking of leadership was fundamentally flawed seems odd to me.
Maybe if she had divorced and denounced Bill before the campaign run... They were not exactly free of scandal when Bill was in office. Her secretary of state term was... memorable. The situation was only unpredictable to maybe the youngest Millennials.
She was pretty unfazed by most of those scandals in the end, though. I think part of the reason they liked her is because she has been through so many scandals and was still the political force that she was. In the end they were wrong but a year ago it wasn't that unreasonable.
The popular vote is irrelevant for actually winning - what matters is how states at the margins vote. Look at Michigan. Look at Ohio. Look at Pennsylvania. For the Democrats, Hillary was an unmitigated disaster in all of those areas.
Also, keep in mind that most of the electorate votes against party lines, even if the party were to nominate Satan. She completely failed the margins.
I agree with you but a lot of the troubles that she had were difficult to see ahead of time, especially the email server and the leaks. It's easy to slap on a narrative after the fact but at the time Hillary really was the choice most likely to win the the election. I'm not saying that she didn't do an exceptionally poor job in certain areas but all she needed to do was one or two percent better and there would be the narrative of it being a landslide the other way.
That seems very "ends justify the means". Aren't you concerned that pragmatically the Democratic party is objectively unable to effectively govern itself? Given a choice of respectable statesmen something necrotic is instead selecting failure-prone sociopaths instead? Do you have a theoretical model where competent leadership somehow would result in worse end results? Wouldn't competent leadership, for a change, result in a permanent Democratic majority which theoretically would be a good "ends"?
Most of her troubles were difficult to predict ahead of time, especially the email server and the leaks. Besides those she's actually a pretty good candidate for the party. The DNC pushed against Bernie the same way that the RNC pushed against Trump (and in previous election people like Ron Paul) and the difference was at the end of the day Bernie just didn't have the support. I'm not the biggest fan of the DNC but I'm not seeing how the leadership did anything this election different than any other election.
The reason you don't respect her is not from her doing or the doing of the DNC. It is because there has been a plurality of the political community that has been working for literal decades to destroy her reputation. If you repeat a lie loud enough and long enough it becomes true. In reality she is in the normal range of candidate. I grant you she is closer to the bad side than the good (at least in most people's mind), but she is no more corrupt or politically calculating than your average member of Congress.
Hillary didn't need any help destroying her reputation.
As a matter of public record, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in her FBI interview that she could not recall briefings at the State department pertaining to handling classified information, nor could she give an example of how information might be classified.
Now this is either a lie, or a self-admission that disqualifies a person to hold the position of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, privy to the most sensitive information in the government.
How can you fault a voter who observes these facts and casts their vote for someone else?
Except that all is normal politician CYA type doublespeak. That isn't a good trait and it is something Clinton is certainly guilty of doing, but it is something almost all politicians are guilty of doing. Like I said, Clinton isn't a great candidate without faults. However a large group of this country has worked tirelessly to make these common politician flaws appear as if they are completely abnormal and disqualifying for the presidency.
But that's not what people believe! The Democratic party could have accepted that the right wing press had done a character assassination, and nominated somebody else, but they didn't see how they could lose.
I can't really disagree with you, but it is a sad state of affairs that we are asking one of this country's political parties to bow to the propaganda of the other.
To win a battle, you need to choose the right tactics for the battlefield you are actually fighting on, not the ideal battlefield you think you are entitled to fight on.
Or, to adapt from Donald Rumsfeld, you go into an election with the electorate you have, not the electorate you wish you had.
I know it's sad and upsetting. But propaganda these days is extremely powerful and I don't know how to counter it. If I oppose this kind of propaganda, do I try to counter it with my own propaganda? What are the other choices?
The problem with that conspiracy theory is it doesn't explain why her. Its clearly not gender or we've be getting the two minutes hate on Warren and Stein. Its clearly not simply being high profile because even pres Obama doesn't catch as much heat as Hillary. It's as if there's something about the Clintons. Sometimes a criminal is just a criminal, simple as that.
There could have been a vast conspiracy to frame the Unibomber or Al Capone or John Dillinger or Nixon. No one can explain why them. Therefore I think it infinitely more likely they were just crooks.
Because she has been in politics for for 30 something years, been on the national stage for 20 something years, and has been "the next president" for roughly 10 years. This wasn't one hit job, this was decades of concentrated work that eventually broke the camel's back.
That's because nobody gave a shit about Bernie until he tried to run for president. He was never a threat to anyone or a challenge to the status quo (like having a female president is).
"challenge to the status quo (like having a female president is)"
How is "I'll do exactly what the establishment tells me to do, just like the last couple figureheads, except in a $10K Chairman Mao pantsuit" a challenge to much of anyone?
The country has a not so comfy history with black folks, yet men and women have lived together for eternity, so why didn't Obama get it perhaps 100 or 10000 times worse? Surely you're not a racism denialist? Perhaps no one accused Obama of being a criminal because... he isn't? I mean I never voted for him but I can respect him, he's a wise constitutional scholar who probably deserves a supreme court appointment to an empty liberal seat when this is all over. I disagree with him on many issues but he's no crook and he's reasonably wise. He got teased, essentially, about a technicality of being born in a foreign country and being muslim which frankly don't matter and never turned out to be a problem and never went past offending people on twitter.
Palin was hated in the mainstream media, but it was just a generic Quayle style two minutes hate. How come no one provided any evidence of her crimes? Perhaps... there were none? Could there possibly be any hatred hotter than the DNC controlled MSM's hatred toward Palin, yet there's nothing but sophistry against her because she's clean? I wouldn't describe Palin as being a bright bulb or a beacon of wisdom yet I voted for her, she's not that bad.
Palin is the perfect comparison to Clinton because there was just as much smoke around her. For example Troopergate[1] is the exact kind of non-serious controversy that has hounded Clinton her entire career. Except no one really cares when Palin did this because she never was that close to actual power. Meanwhile if this happened to Clinton there would be endless discussion of it.
Warren has little power and Stein even less. No one bothers to villify women until they get real power. Everyone was cordial to Hillary until she started pushing for health care reform in Congress as a First Lady. It's about people stepping outside of their perceived place.
The Republicans dislike Obama just as much as Clinton, yet his presidency has been virtually scandal-free and he remains quite popular. Clinton's problem is that Democrats and Independents who aren't politically predisposed to dislike her have legitimate concerns about her trustworthyness.
I like your optimism, but do you remember what first brought our new president elect into the political sphere? It certainly wasn't to praise Obama for his clean and scandal free record.
People did not think she was genuine. They disliked her so much, that they picked a TV personality, said stupid stuff and off-color remarks. That says a lot about the level of disconnectedness between what she/her team/media thought of her and what a lot of people, even traditionally voting Democrats thought of her.
I guess nobody around her who had an inkling dared to raise their hand. Can't even imagine what they'd say "Ma'am, people don't believe what you are saying, can you be more genuine a bit?"...
>I guess nobody around her who had an inkling dared to raise their hand. Can't even imagine what they'd say "Ma'am, people don't believe what you are saying, can you be more genuine a bit?"...
Check out of some of the leaked emails. I'm not sure if they said it to her directly, but they regularly remarked on how insincere and artificial she came across as.
Ah, interesting. So people were warning her, she just didn't listen. It was probably like large ship at that point, it was full of steam (donations and promises), moving ahead and there was just no stopping or turning it around easily.
Actually, my impression is she tried to listen... she just didn't have it in her. There were many moments through the campaign where she tried to come across as organic and authentic, but even that seemed awkward and forced.
She just has almost no charisma or jovial presence, unlike Trump.
> That's why so many people were so passionate about Sanders. You could go back to CSPAN videos from 1992 and hear him saying the exact same things he said throughout the whole primary season.
This was this the exact same case with Ron Paul 4 years ago but it seemed to hardly matter
This! As an example, she had her staff draft a tweet, and it goes through a chain of 12 people to approve before it goes live, I am not sure she knew how to connect with real people.
She fought a near perfect 1970s campaign. She got every Columbia school of journalism grad eating out of her hand, total control and ally to the legacy main stream media. Newspapers. Radio. Every academic in the country shilling for her or they lose their position. She had nothing fundamentally new that a 60s radical wouldn't have recognized. There's simply no way she could have lost in 1976.
Of course its 2016 so Trump has approx 5 million NEETs on /POL/ shitposting insane memes about nazi frogs into every normies facebook feed on the planet while epic trolling social and legacy media and releasing all the proof of her corruption via email thru hacked servers on wikileaks. He was the only candidate talking about 2010s issues like the result of 1960s immigration reform or the marginalization and hatred of the white working class. He fought a pretty good 2016 campaign.
This being 2016 and not 1976 its no great surprise which strategy won.
The "R" side needs to take notes that the "D" are likely to make this mistake precisely once. The battles in 2020 and 2024 are not going to be baby boomers still stuck in the '70s losing to '10s millennials again.
Also she hates half the country and calls them deplorables. Somehow, oddly, her despising them didn't magically translate into votes. The sense of entitlement is strong with that one...
People remember! The 47% comment did not do well for Romney neither did the basket of deplorables comment from Hillary. Note to future candidates, don't make these comments. Please run for office only if you are genuinely passionate about serving people.
She doesn't. Her mistake, and the mistake of everyone around her, including the media which defended and parroted everything she said was to believe they would fool people into thinking she is genuine.
A lot of people who voted for her are Democrats -- people she thought she had already in her pockets.
Trump wasn't a top candidate, he wasn't the popular one, has said stupid stuff, and yet people disliked Hillary so much, they still voted for him.
I looked through some emails, it was entertaining (even though CNN said it is illegal to look through them and only media was special and had to interpret them for us). There was very little in those emails of "Hey how does this help ordinary people, let's do something for them" or "You know, we should just tell the truth, let's not really spin this at all".
It is all about how do fool this block "Women, ok, she is a woman, that's easy". Black voters, those are easy... what should we do for them? Organized a rap concert, of course. Because that's not condescending... Let's call Jay-z so he can drop a few N-bombs at them, I hear they like that. She is like the awkward rich person trying to find common ground with peasant that she usually would never associates with and it just looks so fake and stupid... and now more people can see that.
Yes, and the same thing happened to Ron Paul. The RNC colluded to ensure he didn't get the nomination. They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen.
I'm sure if we had wikileaks of the RNC during that time, it would have revealed much of the same type of insider corruption.
> They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen.
Those knife fights over party rules (especially 40 (b)) made it possible for Trump to get into the running for the nomination, according to many GOP observers. See [1] for an explanation of how.
These election results are a political pressure relief valve: significant swathes of the electorate have been systematically excluded and ignored, then they tried to organize in different ways. First culminating in Ron Paul's bid, then a different wave in Bernie Sanders' bid, and enough formed coalitions behind Trump this time around to cost both parties' establishments their desired outcomes. Ignoring such large groups of the electorate for much longer would have cost us much more in the future. There are very big chunks of the population in a lot of pain for going on decades now, and effectively ignoring that is no longer much of an option going forward.
I see China possibly facing a similar issue with their rural population at some point in the far future.
They have the identification of a common problem in common, but their solutions are the complete opposites ends of the spectrum and mutually exclusive. I don't think a 3rd party could exist that met both their goals.
It would match up quite well with a party platform based on decentralization of power. Libertarian at the federal level, Republican for large states, Democrat for small states and big cities / metro areas, and liberal for small cities or towns.
This would allow for a lot of social services, but keep them more localized, so they can serve the population better and be held more accountable.
And it would avoid a lot of the problems with big government at the federal level.
They agree fully on criminal justice reform and the removal of money from politics, at the very least. If I recall correctly, their stances on government surveillance are similar as well.
It's interesting how my own political positions change over time and are completely unrecognizable compared to 20 years ago. I consider it a strength. Yet for a politician it's associated with hypocrisy or triangulation.
I'm a big fan of Bernie, but I'm not sure I want a politician with early 90s views of everything...
It's a matter of fundamental core values applied to situational matters. Opinions and preferences shift as time goes by. The populace sees this in the politicians of today. Bernie's actions are lauded not because they are the same, but because they represent an integrity to the core values of human life & equality. Politicians claim to value life & equality, but manifest their hypocrisy by going to war and endangering soldier's lives for profit. This is the disingenuity of the status-quo politicians.
If you can't open it, it's an exchange between Gimli and Legolas from the LoTR movie.
Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): I never thought I'd be fighting side by side with a trumpster.
Legolas (with MAGA hat): What about side by side with a deplorable?
Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): Aye.
Gimli (wearing Hillary for Prison 2016 hat): I could do that.
Ordinarily if the choice is bad I'd vote third party, but I really didn't want Hillary in and I was pretty sure this wouldn't be the election when the third party wins it.
Hillary couldn't make that argument because it would've drawn more attention to her most damning flaw: The fact that she's a textbook demagogue who was on the wrong side of every progressive issue until she found it politically expedient to "evolve".
That's why so many people were so passionate about Sanders. You could go back to C-SPAN videos from 1992 and hear him saying the exact same things he said throughout the whole primary season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vabeos-F8Kk