USA Politics: Fate of the World

Skalpadda 2019-01-19 03:04:46 UTC #4306

I looked up the number (87%) from a Gallup poll from 3 days ago just to make sure (website is down now, annoyingly), but in any case the number has dropped a little over time, which is a good thing.

I want to be optimistic about that, but since over 40% of Americans don’t bother voting in the first place it’s always going to come down to turnout. My best case scenario is that Dems actually bring forward a positive policy agenda and let Trump self-implode in the background (which is sort of what they did with with some success in the midterms), but there’s still a lot of time for things to go even more insane and Republicans seem to have dug their heels in an made this an existential fight, so who knows what sort of fuckery we’ll see in the next year or two.

I was convinced the Trump 2016 campaign would sink catastrophically until maybe 2 weeks or so before election though, and then convinced he would lose a lot more support than he has since entering office, so my predictions are pretty much worthless.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2019-01-22 01:05:00 UTC #4307

You and large swathes of the American left leaning media who had pretty much called it for Hillary long before the initial results had surfaced.

Trump does not obey political rules. Remember this.

Wheelz 2019-01-23 10:24:47 UTC #4308

A large swathe of the political right didn’t think he would win either. Hence so many prominent politicians pulling support for him on the back of his “grab 'em by the pussy” remarks weeks before the election. In all honesty, nobody (who matters) genuinely thought he would win.

That he won regardless probably says more about the state of American education (or I guess to be fairer: the state of the average American’s understanding of politics) than it does American politics.

In any case, It seems Alexandria Cortez (?) has been doing a lot to generate good publicity, as her name seems to keep cropping up in various things; The only other vaguely interesting thing going on (other than the shutdown) is that Muller has made a statement regarding the Buzzfeed article about Manifort (?), simply saying that some of the facts in the article are incorrect.

I haven’t been following too closely, but it seems a curiosity that he felt the need to say anything at all.

Skalpadda 2019-01-23 15:09:09 UTC #4309

Yeah, it was around “Grab’embythepussy”-gate that I started thinking he might actually win. Not so much because of anything Trump did, but because I saw so many articles about Dems and various pundits overconfidently talking about (and devoting resources to) taking deep purple and red states, treating a few points’ lead in polls as if it made them invulnerable.

I like AOC a lot, but she really illustrates the ridiculous apotheosis culture in the US (as does Trump and Obama before him). Like, stop trying to treat people like they’re Jesus. It just makes the job impossible for good candidates. At best you’ll be really disappointed and at worst you get fucking Trump.

Nothing to do with Manafort. The Buzzfeed article was claiming that Trump directly instructed Michael Cohen to lie to congress and that the special counsel has evidence of that. The SC’s statement in response was a little vague, but I interpret it as saying they don’t have the evidence stated in the article, and they probably wanted to make it clear that the leak didn’t come from their office.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2019-01-24 22:31:43 UTC #4310

Those articles came about because nobody wanted to countenance the concept of a Trump Presidency, those same articles will come about again this time because nobody wants another four years of Trump, but unless someone genuinely outstanding walks up to bat, and no, Warren is not the hero the Dems need, Trump will be the President until 2024.

AOC may be ready for a shot when 2024 rolls around though.

LexW 2019-01-24 23:01:12 UTC #4311

You’re overestimating Trump and underestimating circumstances. Trump could potentially win against literally any candidate if in the months before the election, the economy surged, he did something populist and non-evil, and he actually had advisers smart enough to allow him to capitalize on it.

Unfortunately for him he’s fired or repulsed every adviser who wasn’t a kook, including pretty much everyone who got him elected, so that latter part may be an issue.

If he continues on his current course and at his current level of popularity, Warren would fucking steamroll him. 57% disapproval. He’s only got 81% approval among Republicans. It’s dropping steadily. Support for the wall peaked and then fell away, as people decided that it wasn’t important enough for a shutdown. Last I checked even most Republicans don’t see it as a particularly big issue.

For Trump though, a small child, it’s everything. You say he doesn’t follow the normal laws of political physics. Maybe. But I think it’s more like the laws of physics changed, and he was the beneficiary of that change. But even under the new rules, this shutdown is fucking stupid. Like just plain dumb. It’s eroding his base, even. Probably the first thing that has, but unlikely to be the last. I think part of it is it looks like politics. Trump before could pretend to “not be a politician”, and “Just an ordinary guy* doing what is best…”. But this shit? It’s obviously politics. He can’t pretend. And that doesn’t play well for his whole vibe.

= Yes you would have to be profoundly stupid and blind to believe this but many Americans do.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2019-01-25 01:40:00 UTC #4312

Except he doesn’t need any of the above. He essentially won the last campaign by being Forrest Gump. He won the last campaign by handing out MAGA baseball caps. He won the last campaign by proving that you can drag your opponents down to your level and beating them with stupid.

People don’t grasp this because people are afraid to recognise that if they do they would have to reconcile the very real possibility that the American voter base is not so much ill-informed, but sick and tired of being told by chunks of the media what to do, what to think, they’re looking for easy answers to complex questions and they’re in effect looking for someone who is an answer to Russia’s Putin. He’s a terrible leader to be sure, but he’s what a lot of rural America asked for.

Except I don’t believe this and I don’t expect anyone who understands exactly what Trump did when he turned over Hillary the last election does either. Warren is another “DNC approved” choice that’ll almost certainly get coronated during the primaries with the superdelegates throwing their weight behind her to stave off any outsider runs that might appear, and if that includes anyone who gets popular support it’ll make the Dems once again look completely out of touch with their voter base.

Trump doesn’t have to win. All he has to count on is for the Dems to walk away from their candidate. That happened just enough with Hillary to net him the win last time and it only has to happen just enough again for the same to happen. He’s not a smart man, he’s not a good president, but he wins through being dumb, and dumb appeals to Joe Sixpack who finally sees someone who in Trump they can go “Fuck yeah!” which gets them out the door to vote.

Trump only needs the Dems to start eating themselves over the purity of their candidates and (something I think Trump is secretly praying for) for Hillary to throw her hat into the ring again and he gets four more years. You might not like it, you might disagree with it, but I can assure you, it’s what will happen.

Skalpadda 2019-01-25 13:16:04 UTC #4313

Well, there goes another one.

Trump is not that much of a magical mystery man. He played to the feelings of disenfranchisement of rural America, to racists, idiot machismo and to American exceptionalism well enough that he won, with some help from voter suppression campaigns, Russian interference and a last minute leg-up from James Comey. He lost the popular vote and only squeaked by in the electoral college by a couple of tens of thousands of votes. He hasn’t been getting any more popular since then, he’s delivered fuck all to swing voters, he lost the House in the midterms, he’s under several criminal investigations and there’s a decent chance he won’t even last until the next election.

You can see into the future now, can you? Hillary running again seems extraordinarily unlikely, and she wouldn’t make it through the primary even if she did. Turning your argument around, all the dems need is a more appealing candidate than Hillary (all the ones announced so far already fit that bill) and very slightly higher turnout than last time. It is of course possible that something will happen that drastically improves Trump’s position, but that’s pure speculation at this point and definitely not something you’re in a position to assure anyone of.

edit:
Missed this.

Dems changed the rules for superdelegates

alms 2019-01-25 13:43:20 UTC #4314

Lots are also sick of hearing that sacrifices should be made, things needed to be done a certain way, so everything will be better, except that has materialized into a rampant increase in income inequality, filthy rich getting even filthier richer, rights shrinking, standards of living stagnating or reducing, a job economy where people with 5 paid jobs, a consulting gig, and a newly released book, are publishing articles, saying it’s perfectly normal to switch jobs every 5 years or less, like that’s realistic for the majority of the population, automation that will, sure, destroy jobs, but also create new ones - no, we don’t know which ones yet, but stay assured everything will be alright! Because everything else has gone so well this far.

The notion has been dawning that a lot of measures that have been implemented had no other end than to screw over regular citizens for the benefit of those at the top.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2019-01-25 15:24:02 UTC #4315

In order - He played to stupid and got the highest recorded turnouts in primaries the GOP has seen in decades, including people who had long stopped being involved in the political system, voter suppression is nothing new and is a GOP favourite, so the level of effect is now mostly factored in, he lost the popular vote, this much is well known, but he won the electoral college system which is ultimately all that matters.

He did so by being stupid. He did so by handing the American electorate a way to say “fuck you” to the political class and he’ll do the exact same thing in 2020 because Trump will cast himself as the guy who offered Dreamers a path into America during this years shutdown in exchange for the wall but the Democrats didn’t bite. Every time that he does something that isn’t completely stupid and the Dems hold their noses up going “Never Trump” they’re simply making his platform stronger, because he feeds off of being the guy “on the outside”, that’s how he courts his voter base. He goes to them and says “Look, I made a really good offer, the bigliest offer, but these politicians, they wouldn’t take it!”

I get paid to figure out these types of things. I’m generally more right than wrong (like, significantly so, I don’t even need to be on the same continent to work out accurate results as long as I’m supplied with reasonable source information). I called Trump well before anyone else barring Michael Moore types who saw the writing on the wall, America still refuses to see that Trump is America’s Putin and still can’t bring itself to see that it still has major unresolved daddy issues.

Hillary is considering another swing because frankly she’s got little to lose, as does anyone who pitches up against Trump at 2020, the economy is on the rise, the Senate remains in GOP control so Trump is insulated from impeachment (and the more the Democrats go on about it in Congress, the more ammo they supply Trump for his campaign), if the Dems were in any way sensible they’d let Trump have his stupid wall and get the Dreamers sorted out so they had a positive message to sell the sensible side of America but their constant need to virtue signal gets in the way of good pragmatism. Ultimately that’s what is going to cost the Dems 2020, they’re still too busy playing to virtue to realise that politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the principle.

Automation is going to destroy the employment market as we know it in the West, in ways that should terrify people, it’s not here yet, but to give you an idea of the predictions, I’ve mooted that within 20 years, countries should prepare for 30% unemployment being the new “normal”.

Governments have to prepare for that kind of situation, and figure out a way to deal with 1 in 3 working-age people being out of work, and close to 1 in 2 people being economically inactive. The decades ahead are going to be unpleasant, and no, I don’t have the answers as to how we get out of the mess that’s going to be made as a result, that’s assuming climate change doesn’t become irreversible.

Skalpadda 2019-01-25 16:26:56 UTC #4316

On Trump’s voter base, what you’re completely ignoring is that he’s significantly less popular with almost every demographic but hardcore Republicans now than he was in 2016. He’ll either have to claw back independents somehow, or the Democrats will have to implode to get the playing field back to where it was in the last election where, again, he didn’t actually win by much. Either is of course possible, but I see no reason to make confident predictions about it.

When it comes to Hillary, what is the path you imagine that would bring her to becoming the 2020 nominee? Even if she runs and the Dem leadership decides to suicide they couldn’t just shove her through with superdelegates, so you’re assuming the entire Democratic party would just up and kill itself?

As for you getting paid to make predictions, well that’s just an appeal to authority fallacy rather than an actual argument, and one I have no way of checking against reality to boot.

TheDreamlord 2019-01-25 18:40:44 UTC #4317

I’m afraid that sounds terribly similar to Gove’s “the people are fed up with experts”.

Skalpadda 2019-01-25 19:06:07 UTC #4318

Yeah, no, that’s a very dumb thing to say.

An expert generally has more knowledge and access to facts on a subject and so can build a better argument for a case, but there still needs to be a line of reasoning there. In this specific case we’re on a gaming forum casually nattering about politics and I have no idea who Tiger is, so his claims of professional prowess in political prognosticating don’t actually mean anything to the topic at hand. He might be the foremost clairvoyant political analyst on the planet, but given his tendency to make grand claims based on little more than his self-proclaimed enlightenment through lack of any political convictions, and his historical use of some pretty dubous sources to back up his hypotheses, I doubt it.

Trust me, I’m an expert on these things.

TheDreamlord 2019-01-25 19:15:24 UTC #4319

Heh, and some people wonder why intellectual discussion is dead in the forum!

LexW 2019-01-25 20:37:10 UTC #4320

Some of your points are arguable, but this is just lame ignorance on your part. Trump is offering nothing and threatening nothing.

Dude, you are demonstrably wrong. Trump’s actions over the shutdown have transformed him into a politician. His base even now regards him as politician.

58% of Americans disapprove of him. 34% approve. His base is eroding, and that’s a fact - his base previously was thought to be in the upper-30s. He got in on Independent votes, and the vast majority of them disapprove of him.

I get that you like repeating stuff about how he got in the first time but he’s not a virgin anymore, and the shutdown has hurt him, a lot. He hasn’t made a single “reasonable offer”. You point to the DACA thing, but as I’ve noted, that’s ignorance on your part (forgivable but ignorance nonetheless). He wasn’t offering anything, because even if the SC touches DACA, it won’t be until after the election.

Um. That’s worrying given you didn’t know this about DACA, and I did.

Whilst I agree re: automation and employment and so on, they don’t actually have to be. In terms of actual production of wealth, food, whatever, we will continue to increase and outpace population. The issue is that the actual monetary system simply funnels all that wealth into a smaller and smaller part of the population. If that wasn’t the case, if even say, the wealth of the 1% or the 0.1% or whatever was spread among the 10% or the 15%, we’d all be doing massively better. You don’t need “full Communism” or something (though you may well get it, particularly if climate change isn’t addressed), but you do need to actually reverse the wealth funnel.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2019-01-25 21:30:27 UTC #4321

Oh dear, here we go again…

Offering nothing? Odd kind of nothing. 3 years protection and opening up for talks to sort out the Dreamers as part of a wider immigration deal? You need to do your research.

-sings- Someone’s not paying a-teeeeen-tion

44% Approval, and that’s within margin of error for the last six months, not exactly big fish here.

But it is the case, and it’s going to accelerate over the next two decades, with more and more money being accumulated and stored in offshore hives, companies and wealthy individuals alike basically keeping it out to one side. What you’ll see eventually is closer to a 99/1 split. 99% of the world holding 1% of the wealth and vice versa. Yes, there will be a tipping point where this becomes unsustainable, but automation will render a lot of people very broke and very disposable before then.

Sarfrin 2019-01-25 23:56:11 UTC #4322

He didn’t play to it, he is it. Witness the shutdown, which he is still unconvincingly trying to blame on efveryone else.

Sarfrin 2019-01-26 00:06:13 UTC #4323

“If you give me what I want, I’ll stop trying to put children who were born in this country alone on a plane to somewhere they’ve never seen before. Until I get what I want, at least.” And that’s assuming the man who verifiably lies in public every single day of his life is telling the truth in this one isolated instance. Really?

ThatFuzzyTiger 2019-01-26 01:09:35 UTC #4324

Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day You have to remember, if he gets that wall, that’s one of his flagstone pledges nailed into the ground, he’s very willing to cede a lot to get that.

No, he did play to stupid, he is stupid as well, but he very much played to the people who look for easy answers to difficult questions, people who don’t want to think too hard about concepts like “nuance”, people who see CNN fuck up their stories and then believe Trump’s narrative about Fake News.

It’s possible to do both.

Skalpadda 2019-01-26 07:21:25 UTC #4325

Funny, because I actually took the time to make my case for why your remark was dumb (though you didn’t bother to quote or try to answer that bit of course). That’s an actual argument aimed at your intellect, whereas all you’ve done is try to snipe with a false equivalency and then threw your toys out of the pram when I pushed back.