The 2018 Midterms Game Day Thread of Angst, Worry, (and maybe some hope?)

I mean, there are folks on the far left who try to defend Communism today… It resulted in, literally, tens of millions of deaths.

Chavez and his goons didn’t set out to destroy Venezuela, i don’t think… But they did.

That’s all super extreme, and we aren’t there… But yeah, you can in fact go too far in that direction. You can fuck things up with good intentions.

It’s banning plastic straws and taxing soda. Yeah, worlds apart but still shitty.

It was the latter.

I don’t understand why you keep saying the Tea Party was unsuccessful. They were massively successful, even if that eventually led to Trump and perhaps (hopefully) the destruction of the GOP.

They got more than their fair share of Justices so far and tons of judges in the lower courts, no action on climate change, made big dents in the ACA by not expanding Medicare in many places and not fixing any of the easy problems with it, got rid of Net Neutrality and a bunch of other regulations, and generally shifted the conversation to preserve and deepen the insane tax cuts that should have come off the books long ago. Even if they are burning out, they achieved a massive change in the course of the country that will take a long time to claw back.

And they hopefully doomed the GOP to death.

For my part, I think If the Democrats had control of all three branches of government for an extended period of time, they might get out of control is what we normally call a high-class problem. I agree it’s possible, but let’s worry about that when (and if) the time comes.

I was curious - since the 1914 elections made voters voting for senators mandatory - when was there one party rule by either Democrats or Republicans. I hope I got it right:

1914-18 |D|
1920-30 |R|
1932-46 |D|
1948-52 |D|
1952-54 |R|
1960-68 |D|
1976-80 |D|
1992-94 |D|
2000-01 |R|
2002-06 |R|
2008-10 |D|
2016-18 |R|

I found it interesting that while the Democrats have had one party rule much more overall - since 2000 the Republicans have had one party rule more than the Democrats (though divided rule has been the case for the majority of the 21st century). Democrats have controlled all 3 branches of government only for 2 of the past 24 years - while Republicans have controlled all 3 branches for roughly 7 of the past 18 years.

No idea where to put this but Republicans simply don’t even want a democracy anymore.

It’s appalling. It’s gotten so bad that Republicans don’t even try to hide it. They just put their fuckery out in the open.

To be fair, Democrats are all Satanist pedophiles, so…

I’m not yet worried of an overreach by liberals because the liberal tradition in the US is so weak. Commerce wins 90% of the time in the USA, and the gains made by workers over the centuries have been extraordinarily hard fought for relatively minor gains.

Social security wasn’t established because of liberal agitation, for ex., but because of a paternalistic view from the coastal elites that as a response to urbanization the idea of the self sufficient American was completely outdated (there may have been some fear of curtailing the appeal of Communism).

That said the reason Capitalism is the superior system to Communism isn’t despite but because people are selfish. Innovation and work ethic are premised upon self determination - Socialism and Communism are premised on the idea of belonging to a group. In the US today we have especially strong subgroup identities and weak larger scale identities. It’s hard to push Socialist ideas if you don’t want anything to do with “them” (or vice versa).

Name a currently serving national politician who tries to defend communism. You are erecting houses of straw. The Democratic left is not the other end of the see-saw from the Tea Party. There is no equivalence. The Tea Party are raving lunatics who are fed a steady propaganda diet by Fox News. The Democratic Left have preferences for some policies that work in Europe but seem a little bit far-fetched given some fucked-up facets of America’s political system.

Also, there’s no evidence that the Tea Party destroyed Republicans. Besides the fact that the Tea Party was made up of Republicans, Republicans control the Senate, the House, and the Presidency. Their hold on the Senate is likely to be unbroken for a decade or more and the Supreme Court will be conservative for a generation. Democrats will be able to claim demographic victory: far more Americans will prefer Democratic policies and more Americans will vote Democratic than for the GOP, but the GOP will retain a majority of the political power in this country for most of the rest of my life. The Tea Party was the near-final thrust of a wildly successful decades-long political strategy.

You forgot “saved the global economy” too

Yet, interestingly*, Republicans have won the popular vote for President once since 1988.

I specifically said folks on the far left… I’m talking about the fringe element of the left, not folks who are actually holding elected office right now.

You know, I’m not going to bother arguing with you on this. You aren’t going to understand it. But for folks who were actually in the party and have now left, they know exactly what I mean.

But you do you dude. You should totally do what the GOP did, and embrace crazy zealots, and see where it gets you. That’s a top notch plan.

V8headslap Of course, how could I forget?!

Hold the line against these militant hard-left extremists, brothers! They’ve started electing transgendered commies now; the Republic is on the line!

Jenkins won about 73 percent of the vote in Minneapolis’s Eighth Ward, where she is known for addressing youth violence and improving the south-central ward’s neighborhoods. Jenkins helped redevelop the intersection of E. 38th Street and Chicago Avenue S. by working with small business investors, community advocates and artists. She said she hopes to further that sort of development across more Minneapolis neighborhoods once she takes her seat on the City Council in January.

What a monster. I only hope some True Moderates of Steady Character can save the Democratic Party from these intransigent insurgents.

But there are sitting members of Congress who are Tea Partiers. Not one GOP member of Congress or the Senate has put up anything more than a token resistance to Trumpism. Just 5 Senators could have blocked everything Trump wanted to do and rescued the GOP from Trumpism. Just a handful of House members could have. Hell, Ryan or McConnell alone could have done this. I’m not sure what you think the Tea Party was corrupting. The GOP is and has been, for most of my life, the party of jingoism, racism, homophobia, propaganda, ratfucking, and lies. The Tea Party is a feature, not a bug. The equivalent (whatever that might be) can’t happen on the left because our political incentives don’t permit it. The left might elect a few people who want radical ideas like universal healthcare or childcare subsidies or free post-secondary education or whatever, but we, lacking the propaganda machine and gullible masses of the right, actually have to make a case for our policies.

Yeah, I’m saying don’t let that happen to your party. Don’t vote for those people.

lol, you keep telling yourself that.

Timex, I do get your point and I would be very concerned about a leftist Tea Party that started nationalizing the economy and stuff like that. It’s just that it’s so far from being a current reality it’s just a little weird to keep harping on it. It’s like warning everyone they might die of bubonic plague. I mean, the possibility of a related outbreak isn’t out of the realm of reason and if there were signs of it I would take it seriously, but warning everyone of the dangers of the plague in 2018 would just come off as a little weird, y’know?

Maybe that’s a terrible analogy but I haven’t had my morning coffee yet, so hopefully my point at least comes across. :)

Can you cite one example of far left legislation in the Senate or the House sponsored by any elected Democrat? Point being, every single Democrat regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum is pro-capitalist, which by definition excludes them from the far left.

But here’s the challenge to you: Go ahead, what specific legislation has been proposed by a Democrat or even ideas from un-elected activists that are too far left for you? UBI? Banning fracking on public lands? Guaranteed job?

What does any of that have to do with my statement?

If you think that the Democrats don’t have gullible masses, then guess what? You’re part of those gullible masses.

Nothing anyone says has anything to do with any of your statements, apparently, since you keep uprooting the windmill you’re tilting at and carting it well past any goalposts that may have originally existed.

There is no hard left in US politics in the same sense that the Tea Party is hard right. Unless you think Bernie is equivalently hard left, in which case you’re far more deluded than you’ve generally seemed here.