Funny how Texas, with a few exceptions, always votes reactionary. Your last dancing governor was a cosmic joke. How many times did Texas reelect him?
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Teixeira must be the most optimistic guy on the planet. Heâs been talking about Dems surging and taking backing the government for years even in the face of our party losing. Now Iâm beginning to think heâs delusional. OTOH Ed Kilgore, Democratic strategist for many years make the case for the House flipping including the reasoning that mid-terms go against the sitting prez.
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Thereâs so much left out here. It seems to be assumed that industrial-system economics is the determining factor. But the age of an industrial system is being replaced rapidly by something else - probably a lot faster than it replaced an agricultural system. Given robotics, automation, etc., âlaborâ is quickly becoming obsolete. An analysis of future economics and politics has to be based on that inevitability. By default, the future belongs to those who own or control the means of production of goods and services. And, by default, that is the wealthiest few percent of society. âLaborâ in the traditional sense is rapidly losing most of its economic value.
One might think that once the âaverageâ citizen/voter catches on to whatâs actually happening, that the traditional political system will make it possible to adapt in a way that benefits the vast majority of the population. But the very high concentration of wealth in a few percent has the means and the power to effectively combat that - through things like propaganda, lobbying, regulatory capture, surveillance, etc. (The â1984â scenario.)
And one of the most powerful tools of the few percent is entrenched conservative social/religious/racist/sexist ideology that can be employed - through lies and propaganda spread through public and private media controlled by the few percent - to confuse the great majority from acting and voting in their own economic best interest. Oligarchies have thousands of years of successful experience doing exactly that. If all else fails, they can just arrange a few convenient wars here and there. The rational self-interest of the majority always goes up in smoke during war times.
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The Congress is controlled by gerrymandering that occurred after 2010 and Trump was a one-off thing. And Kevin Drum wrote what I find is a very convincing argument in his article 2016 was not a Tight Race that the Comey letter right before the election together with the strange turn out elected Trump over Hillary. Without Comeyâs letter, Hillary would be President today.
As for Democratic organization, I agree with Tiexiera. The womanâs march on January 20th and the special election to replace Price in Congress suggest that the Democratic Organization is being formed right now.
We are also getting a LOT of help from Trump and his utter incompetence and his insanity. I donât want to see it, but he is going to get Americans killed sooner rather than later, and the GOP is to blame for that level of idiocy. But the GOP is controlled by the very wealthy and they donât give a damn how many people die as long as they get their tax cuts and they can gut the PPACA (in order to steal the funds.)
Even if he doesnât go soon, Trump is paralyzing the GOP. They have done essentially nothing since he became President, and they will not do anything as long as he remains outside of a strait jacket inside a rubber room somewhere. The Democrats have become aware of how to use the Vetocracy built into the Constitutionâs system of checks-and-balances to demonstrate they have a lot of power, even when not IN power.
In the meantime, Democrats are beginning to be aware where the lack of an overarching organization has failed to get them and are beginning to work together and to communicate with each other, locally, state and nationally.
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Any discussion that doesnât lay part of the blame for this election squarely at the feet of the political press is a failed discussion in my view and I donât share Teixeiraâs optimism either because of the political press. For decades Democrats have been saying and trying to do the right things for the middle-class but for decades, the press reflexively promotes right-wing talking points. Until that is changed, nothing will change.
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Weâre always going to be up against the Electoral College.
For all her failings, Clinton received 3 million more votes than Trump and lost the Electoral College by the mere 77,744 votes that cost her the previously blue states of Michigan (which she lost by .2 of a percentage point), Wisconsin (.8 point), and Pennsylvania (.7 point). Of the 208 counties in America that voted for Obama twice and tipped to Trump in 2016, more than three-quarters were in states Clinton won anyway (some by a landslide, like New York) or states that have long been solidly red.
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The Lady ran the 2016 race with both legs encased in concrete and her opponent 1 mile ahead of the start line. She still beat him by 3,000,000 plus votes.
If you wish to crystalize EXACTLY WHY HRC lost you must go back over 50 years ago to a quote attributed to President Lyndon Johnson as relayed by his Press Secretary Bill Moyers:
Fleecing the Poor
We were in Tennessee. During a motorcade, the President spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs by a few plain, he called them homely, white women on the edge of the crowd. Late that night in the hotel, long past midnight, he was still going on about how poor whites and poor blacks had been kept apart so that they could separately be fleeced-. ''Iâll tell you whatâs at the bottom of it," he said. âIf you can convince the lowest white man that heâs better than the best colored man, he wonât notice youâre picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and heâll even empty his pockets for you.â
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Unicorns, shiny unicorns all the way down.
The fact that Judis believes that Obama won in 2008 because of the financial crisis is why I canât take him seriously as a political analyst.
This seems, to me, a key issue that has never been addressed. âAutomationâ and âlabor saving devicesâ never lead to the actually logical question of what do people do with the free time? Workers do not receive ANY benefit from being automated out of a job, and the .001% that are making money off the deal are not inclined to share that nor to care for the workers displaced.
There are only so many jobs in the left and retraining/reeducation programs for displaced workers will not increase the number of jobs that are available.
A strong government with high tax rates COULD provide all basic services of food and shelter and healthcare, but the few that have the money (and, at present, the power) are not going to go along with that easily, if ever.
So, how do we provide for the human population that have no means of supporting themselves???
I donât have any answers, but the question has to be asked and answered at some point.
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FWIW, I used to play poker with Ruy in the early 1980s in Madison, Wisconsin. My recollection is that he wasnât bad, but that could be wrongâŚ
Iâm an optimist, so his position appeals to me, I agree with one of the main points in his book, which is that the shrinkage of the middle class is largely people moving up to the upper middle class. Those on the left shouldnât buy into the Trump narrative (stolen from the opening song on âAll in the Familyâ) that things were better in the 1950s. They absolutely were not, even for whites. Those houses you could buy on the income from a factory job, were tiny and cramped and lacking in amenities. We are better off today and will be better off in 50 years unless we make really horrible choices (which is not impossible). Trump will be seen as a historical anomaly, a temporary insanity.
You could add to the list of damaging information thatâs now being used in the post mortems this book. Itâs called Shattered by two talking heads. Why didnât these all wise heads come out earlier and impart their wisdom to the campaign team? Then theyâd have nothing to write about.
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Had the outcome of the election been different, the book would have been called Superb and hailed the Clinton campaign as the best-run campaign in history.
Whatever you think about the analysis, the economic model needs to work for most people people, if not all. Markets help with financial efficiency, but they need to consider the quality of investment, technological innovation, environment and protection of natural legacies, health, education, quality of life, etc. Politicians, in contrast, see the economy by a single metric, growth, which usually means GDP growth. If Democrats could at least reposition the discussion to something like in Denmark, you could at least turn the discussion to growing the quality of life. If you do that at least you might begin to restore larger and happier middle class, not just a wealthier one that faces many externalized costs.
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How many more decades are we going to be subjected to this useless kind of âinevitabilityâ and demographic determinism stuff. Please. Stop.
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They are getting this wrong. The Right comes to power out of either fear or complacency. The Left comes to power to clean up The Rightâs mess. It has been that way for the entire history of our country. The progressive gains at the turn of the 20th century gave rise to complacency of Coolidge and Hover for which FDR came in to âclean up the messâ. GW Bush was elected out of complacency of the Clinton era for which Obama was elected to âclean up the messâ. We have Trump because of fear, and the fact that Obama was less than totally successful in his cleaning of the mess which allowed the Trump âfearâ. The premise that the left doesnt do as well in bad times is crazy. They MAKE the good times out of bad.
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Just not buying it. The discernible course of recent US history is that when the Republicans have power they loot until they collapse the economy. Pinched into real pain, the people vote in the opposition party. The Democrats fix things up and things get back on track. Voters, now complacent because things are going well, completely forget the damage Republicans did and put them back in office. Where upon, the cycle repeats itself.
I see nothing whatsoever to break this cycle. Dems have proven themselves unable to build upon their success or communicate effectively, while Republicans easily mislead voters about GOP failures and make absurdist promises voters eat up.
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Not a well-schooled economist, LBJ still puts his finger on something that has only grown since then. The political trickery he points to has been much further advanced by, first, segmented marketing. This is pretty much analog and based mostly on both applied Freudian and Jungian psychology.
Now, second, we have pervasive and comprehensive price discrimination. This is digital. It steals what used to be âconsumer surplusâ and through government concessions created, nurtured, and protected by deregulation.
Deregulation is not the opposite of regulation. It is government regulation in the form of protecting and apportioning monopoly rent-shares among the immediately regulated parties to magisterial proceedings but ultimately to their lenders and, on the margin, to political contributors.
This is something that both parties make sure their voters know nothing about and can do nothing about. But, given the betrayal of loyalty involved and the lack of voice it entails, this leads to massive exit from both parties, hence, very volatile and hard to explain elections.
Sorry, but Teixeiraâs proven acuity for predicting events is not better, and is probably worse, than Bill Kristolâs, George Willâs. Leon Trotskyâs and Karl Marxâs. If this guy told me the sun would rise tomorrow I would go out and buy floodlights.
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I think the word âtriumphâ must be defined. It surely doesnât mean a permanent ruling Party and shouldnât. Ideally, weâd have two real Parties in our two Party system that no matter their ideals and agendas, always put America first.
I donât ever see the right getting back to this and in fact, their survival techniques are being rewarded, not penalized, so why should they. Being sort of liberalish is a loser for them.
I donât believe that a candidate Trump without Russian backing and meddling wouldâve won. And I donât think that there is another Trump around the corner, unless the family dives in, in which case, we are in for a long cold Siberian styles winter.
America leans left in its heart of hearts but political wins obviously arenât necessarily guaranteed by that.
The other side just cheats because they have to and thatâs that.
Conclusion; all assumptions are based on fairness and righteousness and that is just a mental block of a way of looking at things. Reality says otherwise.