Senate Going Postal: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

I think you don't know what stupidpol means. It means stupid Identity politics, when you go full ****** on it.

 

I stand both corrected and by my statement

 

The issue is that right now all the big names for 2020 who are female are neoliberal. I'm sorry but Kamala Harris is not the progressive you think she is. And she won't be getting my vote, no matter how much the radlibs try to say not voting for her makes me a misogynistic or racist person.

 

I can't think of two leftists who have a chance in hell of making it on the ticket.

 

Vivec and Guy, out of all the current Governors/Senators/Representatives, who would you want?

 

Identity politics as inelegantly defined by Lord Vivec and finding qualified candidates as a process are not mutually exclusive - there are plenty of qualified women who could fill a democratic ticket. People are not stupid for wanting to promote qualified women into top positions out of a sense of a need to rebalance political power.

 

What if they say it makes you a Trump supporter?

 

Still no effect. It's pretty obciobv to anyone who knows me I'm a commie.

 

As long as we don't get a Hilary-like candidate I'll be fine with whoever the nominee is.

 

Elizabeth Warren will not be President.

 

Emotion and truth aren't mutually exclusive. If their leadership weren't irredeemably corrupt, the Democrats could run someone who speaks truth while coming across as an actual human being.

Bernie Sanders/Tulsi Gabbard 2020

 

Emotion and truth are very much mutually exclusive. When led by emotion, the human brain processes actually exclude the areas of the brain involved in rational thought.

 

LordBan: Tell that to the living supporters of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Both men managed to effortlessly touch the hearts, minds, and souls of every person of decency in the country.

 

I could tell that to anyone, but are people really ever going to accept en masse to lay down their prides and accept the reality such a harsh limitation of their intellectual capabilities exists? Better keep the illusion and the dream.

 

I have no qualms with dreams, so long as they're rooted in love and justice.

We don't need Vulcans to run for office; we need men and women who possess an actual conscience. Those who ask us, with equal parts emotion and reason, to confront climate change, poverty, racism and militarism.

 

I have no qualms with dreams either. I do with the knowledge many men and women have made a profession of exploiting them.

And you really don't want to apply logic to its fullest extent in politics either. We belong to a species which has eliminated 60% of its contemporary species in a span of four decades. Nobody in their right mind will want to follow that logic to its ultimate conclusion.

 

Hope she’s not the nominee. She’s too easily defineable by the GOP.

The messenger matters as much as the message. Often more so. Warren strikes me as one who would lose a messaging war with Trump.

 

I think something you aren't considering is how hard it is to bring socialism/genuine leftist ideas into the mainstream with all our history. Bernie Sanders had to work almost thirty years in congress to get traction and dispel myths and he still isn't entirely successful. He has been labeled as an extremist fringe along the way. He's a white man.

 

My answer is more complicated than you probably want. I don't think the President of the United States is a position that should even exist-- it concentrates too much power and authority into one person and almost as part of the job the president always tries to grab more power. But I also think the office tends to be overemphasized; the president is not a dictator or king, so he lacks the ability to institute lasting policy changes by himself (as we have seen with the Trump administration rapidly undoing much of what the Obama administration did).

I think Sanders has by far the best chance of being a president who correctly identifies as left-wing, albeit close to the center. I am skeptical of his ability to get any of his policies through a Congress full of hostile Republicans and Pragmatic Democrats. He is clearly aware of this hurdle which is why he's been trying to help social democrats and progressives make it into Congress. It hasn't been successful enough yet. For a Sanders presidency to yield real results people would have to constantly hold Congress' feet to the fire and not listen to their bull**** excuses for why single-payer is Too Expensive and a "living wage" is unworkable or why a "Green New Deal" shouldn't happen. It would take strikes and protests at least at the level we have seen in France that forced Macron to make concessions. I'm not convinced it would happen. I am concerned that too much of this current energy is focused on Trump himself and a big part of it will evaporate once he's gone. When I thought HRC would win I was similarly worried that people would stop paying attention to bad **** she did because at least she's Not Trump.

Er... TL; DR Sanders, reluctantly, pragmatically.

 

I certainly don't mean to ally myself with the "vote for Hillary or you're an Obama boy errr Bernie Bro errr whatever male candidate she's running against this time!" people. But I do think a ticket with two women is not only a good thing for the evolution of civil rights in our country and I think it would galvanize female voters... ESPECIALLY if it's a great female candidate not named Hillary Clinton! That said, this is more of a hope of mine for what comes out of the primary. If Elizabeth Warren doesn't run, I most likely will end up voting for Bernie Sanders. Even then, I only vote for Warren because I genuinely think she's a better choice.

I also agree with you about Kamala Harris... she is arguably one of the worst names being thrown around for the nomination, especially if you exclude the non-elected officials (Bloomberg, Cuban, etc). I assume you think similarly about Gillibrand and I agree. I think Warren is a cut above the rest but we'll see how she does in a debate when she lays out what exactly her vision of America's future is.

 

I want to see Tammy Duckworth go up against Trump. I can only imagine how small Trump's diehard support will get when he constantly harps on a woman who gave birth while in Congress and has no legs from seeing actual combat. Put somebody in the VP spot who will win some southern votes and I think that's a good ticket.

 

Duckworth may be a badass, but she opposes Medicare for All and other basic left-leaning causes, and says Ocasio-Cortez' politics "won't work" in the midwest.. which to me is just silly considering a) Tammy Baldwin does support MFA in Minnesota and crushed in her re-election, b) Bernie Sanders destroyed in the 2016 Michigan primary while advocating for MFA and c) few politicians are even making the argument there so how would we even know if it would work!

I guess I'd begrudgingly vote for her in the general vs. Trump, but I absolutely would never vote for her in a primary.

 

It wouldn't significantly affect Trump's base. They've stuck with Trump up to now, there's practically nothing that can cause them to stop supporting him. See: Trump's comments on McCain.

 

I totally missed this, but in my defense I've had over 30 notifications in the last 24 hours.

I'd have to go with Sanders, probably. It's not likely, as Even said, that he'll be able to get much done without more lefties in congress, but in terms of getting a start and putting lefter policies on the table and entering the national discussion, he's the best. The other important thing here, I believe, is that we need to get back to the point where the Democratic primary was an actual primary where we were able to support a leftist candidate without being called racist/sexist. I'll get to this in the next part.

No. No no.

This is the problem. Pushing female or minority candidates without doesn't help civil rights. It doesn't help progressivism. There's nothing progressive about Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Theresa May, Angela Merkel, or Hillary Clinton. You have to look at the policies. The problem is, a large subset of people who follow identity politics have been pushing candidates based on race and gender without concern for the policies, and that's been hijacked by corporate interests who want to push neoliberalism and who are against universal healthcare, living wages, etc. Now you find people like Neera Tanden, JK Rowling, etc who use feminism to push for Zionism, corporate interests, etc. These people are not progressives. But soon it's going to be progressive to take away workers rights by putting a female brown face on your corporation.