2020 US Election (Part One)

[Berzerker]

foreigners have helped Presidents lie us into wars

 

[WackenOpenAir]

I think is clear that things are changing. Both on the left and the right, both in europe and america, people are sick of the status quo. This can have a multitude of reasons: Being spoiled by half a century of ever growing wealth and safety. The end of that growth. (public spending power hasn't really grown in the last 20 years). And probably most importantly, the internet. Before the internet, people watched their news channel and believed what they heard. Or maybe they didn't really, but there was little else.
A growing amount of people are (rightfully) distrusting the mainstream media and getting their sources elsewhere. (not necessarily much more objective and truthful sources indeed)
On the right people blame immigrants and other countries, on the left people blame politicians and rich people. Either way, they want change.

Trump fits in that picture, Bernie fits in that picture.
The status quo however obviously doesn't like this. But the more they resist it, the bigger the group not trusting them grows. (and that is i think where the internet is the most important, in the past they could resist such people and they wouldn't have any podium, now they can get enough attention without main stream media that they cannot be ignored anymore)

The republican party didn't like Trump at first, but they weren't as stupid as the democrat party. The democrat party is committing suicide by trying to oppose this force. They proved this in 2016. If the most important thing for Nancy Pelosi were to have a democrat beat Trump, she would write a nice speech about what the people want, taking responsibility, passing the stick to a new generation etc and resign. She is a very very disliked person and i think her continued presence hurts the party. This is what political leaders do in my country when their party suffers a significant loss. They can no longer just put the blame on the candidate that lost. (and putting the blame on Russia was the most ******** thing they ever did, their "blame Russia for everything" strategy was already becoming rather obvious and gaining distrust)

I don't think they ever had the notion that Biden is going to be president. Indeed he can't speak, he lacks the x-factor, he is an insecure man who makes a fool of himself with things like that corn pop story. On top of that of course, he simply doesn't fit the time, he is an anti-progressive and doesn't even fake to be a little progressive or care about what they have to say. I just can't believe any political strategist ever thought "thats our guy, we're gonna make him our next president."

I do think it will be Elisabeth Warren, i think that is what the DNC want now as a sort of compromise. She sounds progressive, but she will work with the status quo and not do anything crazy. Maybe they intend to make her look like the progressive that beats Biden in the primaries. They probably know that Biden wouldn't beat Trump just like Hillary didn't.

The problem is that the hard-core progressives don't consider her a progressive as she clearly befriended the DNC / status quo. They will only accept the candidates that clearly speak against these powers. Many progressives might vote for whatever candidate the democrat party pits against Trump because anything is better than Trump. However, there is also a core that will only accept Bernie, Tulsi or Yang. And wont vote just like they didn't vote in 2016.
Noone knows how big this group really is, but seeing how close the outcomes of the presidential elections generally are (more like 52-48, not 60-40), you don't need an awful lot of people staying home in order to lose. 2016 showed this.

So in my view, the big question is, how many of the progressives will stay home when its Biden, how many will stay home when it's warren, and yes, how many of those that are democrats but fear the progressives will stay home when it's Bernie.

And don't look too much at the polls. Remember all the 2016 polls saying Hillary will win ?

As progressive, i must say i am especially happy to see the performance of Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang. Neither of them have a shred of chance of winning this, and i'm sure they never had any illusions about that. They are however so important in bringing the progressive agenda to the public. And their presence moves Bernie from looking like an extremist to looking much more acceptable to the moderate democrats. He is after all not advocating for a universal basic income (which sounds too much like communism to win an american election) or stopping to militarily dominate the world (which even peace loving democrats mostly understand, but don't want to understand, is what made america rich)

 

[El_Machinae]

This stinks of bothsides-ism. Details are pretty thin but just because Trump wants an investigation, that warrants one? Even putting aside the fact that he's asking this from a foreign power to go against his top election rival and also putting aside the massive quid-pro-quo implications, there's no reason why anyone should go along with what the corrupt buffoon wants just because he requests it.

It's not both side ism. I don't know if Biden warrants an investigation. I do know it's the executives job to conduct when it is necessary. Problem is that the investigator is biased. That's my concern.

You also don't want a system where previous power-holders are presumed innocent by the public.

 

[Birdjaguar]

It's not both side ism. I don't know if Biden warrants an investigation. I do know it's the executives job to conduct when it is necessary. Problem is that the investigator is biased. That's my concern.

I think all investigations have elements of bias or they would not have selected person X to investigate. Evidence creates bias.

 

[Takhisis]

I really don't know how it's going to shape out. I think Trump totally changed the paradigm in this post-2007, post-Obama-(failure) world. I think, as Mark Blyth has correctly identified, populists on the both the left (AOC, Bernie, Corbyn, Obrador, Podemos, and the rise of Die Grünen) and on the right (Trump, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Boris, Baudet, AfD, etc.) are the new normal, and consequently and simultaneously the Center-Left Neoliberal parties (New Labour, New Democrats, SDP/CDU, etc.) are going and will continue to go the way of the Dodo going forward. As I said in the previous post, I'm supportive of Bernie, and I genuinely think he would win the General pretty convincingly for the reasons I staked out above. I'm very skeptical, however, about his chances in primaries, but I just don't know. Trump has changed the electoral equations totally. It could be the case that all of the polls are totally wrong à la 2016, but by the same measure, Bernie's numbers have been basically the same since he entered the race: 15-20%. I'm leaning towards Warren will eventually become the consensus "compromise candidate." So I suppose that's my ultimate prediction: Biden will fade as he has literally every of the other 2500 times he's run for president because of his bizarre propensity to constantly stick his foot in his mouth (Trump's apparently unique capacity for gaffes to flow over him like water on a duck has exactly nothing to do with something essential about his personality and everything to do with his position as a populist critic of Neoliberalism), the party will ultimately center on Warren as a bridge between the Bernie wing and the Biden wing, and Warren will ultimately fail in the general because a) she's a woman (sad, but there it is) and b) because she will essentially build the same coalition as Hillary (i.e. white, coastal elites). Biden could win the nomination, but then it would be the same outcome: he wins the coast, but minorities stay home (because of a déluge of racist gaffes that somehow exceed even Trump's) and the unionists stay home (because he's billing himself as Obama 2.0) and he loses with essentially the same electoral map as Hillary in 2016 (with the caveat that he possibly also loses Virginia and loses NC even harder than Hillary did).

Well, so far this does seem like a plausible conclusion. Whether it will actually become true or not I cannot say.

As often happens I think that Trump's paradigm changing was the result of his brazenness, i.e. he outraged half the (US) electorate by showing what happens when you do not heed Popper's paradox of intolerance, i.e. ‘can't we just get along?’ with people who shouldn't be just gotten along with and humoured and he also energised the other half of the electorate and empowered them to come out and stop being too subtle for the rest to ignore.
(notice that I'm not equating electorate to population, since it's the US we're talking about)

At least the old ‘everything's good and we need minor tweaks’ crowd is delegitimised yet, of course, whether their delegitimisation being achieved by shifting into outright fascism is a good thing is thankfully still debatable.

Speaking of ending a paradigm, it reminds me of the fall of the absolute or near-absolute ancient monarchies/oligarchies in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It led to various fascist regimes in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, etc. as well as the Soviet Union, and that world order ended only with a new cataclysmic World War and new totalitarianisms in the postwar era. Hopefully, in the face of a new impending -if not already ongoing- dual cataclysm (environmental as well as political) we can get our act together in time. The nuke of the day is big data and surveillance and it's currently in the wrong hands.

 

[innonimatu]

I really don't know how it's going to shape out. I think Trump totally changed the paradigm in this post-2007, post-Obama-(failure) world. I think, as Mark Blyth has correctly identified, populists on the both the left (AOC, Bernie, Corbyn, Obrador, Podemos, and the rise of Die Grünen) and on the right (Trump, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Boris, Baudet, AfD, etc.) are the new normal, and consequently and simultaneously the Center-Left Neoliberal parties (New Labour, New Democrats, SDP/CDU, etc.) are going and will continue to go the way of the Dodo going forward. As I said in the previous post, I'm supportive of Bernie, and I genuinely think he would win the General pretty convincingly for the reasons I staked out above. I'm very skeptical, however, about his chances in primaries, but I just don't know.

I agree with most of this also. I am somewhat skeptical on some line AOC or Obrador, the centre still exerts a lot of pressure and many of the populists turn, to some degree. The center neoliberal parties are still far from extinct. Their problem is that the hegemony they had was made up of people capable of turning coat when power changes, but there are many "true believers" there also.

the party will ultimately center on Warren as a bridge between the Bernie wing and the Biden wing, and Warren will ultimately fail in the general because a) she's a woman (sad, but there it is) and b) because she will essentially build the same coalition as Hillary (i.e. white, coastal elites).

I wonder how it can go if Warren/Sanders run together. If that can even happen, one major issue would be who'd run for the top job.

 

[Berzerker]

Should possible corruption involving the Biden's be investigated? It sure looks to me like bribery, Hunter gets a bunch of money for his expertise and Father Joe threatens to with hold a billion in loan guarantees if they dont fire the prosecutor. Hey, if you want our help dont mess with me and my kid....and spread the word. Hell, Biden was bragging about it. If the VP cant make money on the side whats he's supposed to do, just attend funerals?

I think the Democrats screwed up again, the Biden family corruption is largely unknown but now people will find out. I dont know if Trump's looking that many moves ahead but this becoming a story hurts the Dems. Its Biden's kid who got the bribe, how does it hurt Trump to want that exposed? They didn't learn from RussiaGate. Trump is the whistle blower, by pressuring the Ukrainians to look into it he's bringing attention to Biden. Over here media...follow me and I'll lead you to the story.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hunter gets a bunch of money for his expertise

Morelike gatherer, amirite

 

[Truthy]

At this point, I really don't think it's clear there's a link between the US's desire to kick out Viktor Shokin (the Ukrainian General Prosector in question) and his investigation of the company Hunter Biden previously worked for (Burisma).

For one, he was disliked by many in the West and the US had plenty of reasons to want him ousted independent of Biden's son. It looks like the main reason Shokin had the job in the first place was to appease former supporters of Vicktor Yanukovych and, because of that, he was widely disliked by a lot of people in Ukraine and throughout the West. But more importantly, he quite or corrupt, as NYT and others have been reporting for years:

The United States and other Western nations had for months called for the ousting of Mr. Shokin, who was widely criticized for turning a blind eye to corrupt practices and for defending the interests of a venal and entrenched elite. He was one of several political figures in Kiev whom reformers and Western diplomats saw as a worrying indicator of a return to past corrupt practices, two years after a revolution that was supposed to put a stop to self-dealing by those in power.

As the problems festered, Kiev drew increasingly sharp criticism from Western diplomats and leaders. In a visit in December, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said corruption was eating Ukraine “like a cancer.” Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which props up Ukraine financially, said last month that progress was so slow in fighting corruption that “it’s hard to see how the I.M.F.-supported program can continue.”

This is from 2016, not a brand new NYT piece protecting Biden.

There were also a number of protests in Ukraine in 2016 advocating to have him fired. Hundreds were protesting outside the Ukrainian president's house the day the guy was fired.

Why were other Western leaders out to get him? Why was the IMF out to get him? Why were Ukrainians protesting him? I guess everyone was just really concerned about protecting Biden's son.

Also, Shokin's investigation of Burisma wasn't even ongoing in 2016; it had been dormant since 2015 and I'm not sure there's any evidence anyone in Ukraine was going after the company or planning on it at that point. The current Ukrainian prosecutor general has said he has no evidence of either Bidens doing anything corrupt or untoward.

So look, it seems plausible that Biden's son being on the board of a Ukrainian company was a conflict of interest. Maybe worth looking into. But there's not much reason to assume his getting the job was corruption (I'm sure his surname was the key resume item, but there's nothing inherently wrong about that). And Giuliani's claim that Shokin was fired for investigating Burisma looks like bogus.

 

[El_Machinae]

I think all investigations have elements of bias or they would not have selected person X to investigate. Evidence creates bias.

Well, unless the institution is corrupt. Trump wanting Biden investigated is horrifying. Now, the executive keeping an eye on past abuses is necessary. But Trump commanding the institution is horrifying.

I wish his supporters realized that his overwhelming lying and self-serving deception means that most of the country doesn't trust him to wield institutional power.

It degrades the ability to even skeptically trust.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@El_Machinae Exactly!

 

[Broken_Erika]

Will this be 2020

https://twitter.com/HarounRashid2/status/1128361444871933957

 

[Takhisis]

If we have an energised far-right wing versus a more-of-the-same centrist (add Justin Trudeau to Owen's list last page) then that can certainly be the case, Erika-san.

 

[Berzerker]

Well, unless the institution is corrupt. Trump wanting Biden investigated is horrifying. Now, the executive keeping an eye on past abuses is necessary. But Trump commanding the institution is horrifying.

I wish his supporters realized that his overwhelming lying and self-serving deception means that most of the country doesn't trust him to wield institutional power.

It degrades the ability to even skeptically trust.

Trump wanting Biden investigated is payback... and irrelevant to the pursuit of justice

 

[mitsho]

I'll add that all the intelligence services and governments from Warsaw and Berlin to Madrid would have had an opinion on Ukraine in 2016 as well. The US would not have acted in a vacuum. So yes, I don't see a basis for investigating Hunter Biden, much less his father.

Whereas with Trump, we have a phone call of asking for one thing in return of another. If that is not good enough to open impeachment procedures, what is?

 

[Truthy]

I also don’t think we should take Biden’s narrative that he played the decisive role in the firing at face value. It’s pretty clear Ukraine was under pressure from a lot of different parties, from the EU to the IMF to Ukrainian citizens. Meanwhile, Biden’s portrayal was an anecdote he was using to try to illustrate to an audience how he was a decisive leader who was tough on corruption. In fact, a lot of what he has said about his role in Obama’s foreign policy is hyperbole.

 

[Kyriakos]

I also don’t think we should take Biden’s narrative that he played the decisive role in the firing at face value. It’s pretty clear Ukraine was under pressure from a lot of different parties, from the EU to the IMF to Ukrainian citizens. Meanwhile, Biden’s portrayal was an anecdote he was using to try to illustrate to an audience how he was a decisive leader who was tough on corruption. In fact, a lot of what he has said about his role in Obama’s foreign policy is hyperbole.

It will be fun seeing Biden try to explain anything, given his dementia.
Other than that... you don't hit a person when he is down. Biden cannot become potus, and I doubt Trump would attack him in the interest of justice, so this is all more of a sideshow regardless of very possible corruption in Ukraine. Goes without saying, Biden wouldn't be the only beneficiary of what happened there.

 

[AmazonQueen]

It will be fun seeing Biden try to explain anything, given his dementia.
Other than that... you don't hit a person when he is down. Biden cannot become potus, and I doubt Trump would attack him in the interest of justice, so this is all more of a sideshow regardless of very possible corruption in Ukraine. Goes without saying, Biden wouldn't be the only beneficiary of what happened there.

Trumps a bully, ofc he'd hit Biden when hes down. He will also use any scandal, however minor and/or unproven, to try and smear any other Democratic candidate, even if like Sanders they aren't part of the Democratic establishment.

 

[Kyriakos]

Trumps a bully, ofc he'd hit Biden when hes down. He will also use any scandal, however minor and/or unproven, to try and smear any other Democratic candidate, even if like Sanders they aren't part of the Democratic establishment.

Sure, I just mean that it is also bad strategically to hit your adversary when he is down. Then again Trump is incapable of finesse, so there's that

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Whereas with Trump, we have a phone call of asking for one thing in return of another.

With a follow up of withholding much-needed military aid when Ukraine was at war with one of our key adversaries.

Clearly unrelated /s