[quote=“Wanderfound, post:97, topic:223”]
If it were a normal country, I’d be arguing for someone in their thirties. Given the USA’s archaic age restrictions, as young as is possible.
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I myself don’t want to see another person over the age of 60 in the WH, but there is something to be said for experience and emotional maturity. THAT’S the key. Someone who’s not been spoiled by ambition.
I see the valid of those points to a degree, but you fail to mention what they have to do with PF. Without resistance to corruption, it doesn’t matter how young, how anti-fascist, how ANYthing a candidate is. That is the main point to me.
And I must say, your points leave no room for hope. What do you see as potential solutions?
What exactly was the alternative you had in mind? Arguing with me that I don’t talk to my peers about these things, or that I’m misrepresenting the viewpoints I’m hearing?
And given what we know about the NRA, perhaps insurgent is a great way to describe their boy.
In all seriousness, though, a lot has changed since 2016. If you’re my age, you watched students evacuating Columbine from your 6th grade classroom, then couldn’t carry a backpack at school due to copycat shooter threats, and probably had your own school evacuated repeatedly due to bomb threats. If you’re younger than I am, you probably don’t even recall a time without a looming threat of school violence. And now your kids are learning lockdown songs in their Montessori.
The sustained push from the MSD kids and Moms Demand is changing the narrative. I live in a deep red area (+26 Trump) of a deep red state, and the nearby white-flight suburb hosted a March for Our Lives. Moms Demand scuttled a slate of pro-gun bills here. I don’t think state-level gun control (a position he takes because of his NRA money - but somehow taking money from an industry lobby to moderate your position isn’t “establishment” if you’re St. Bernard) is going to play as well this time around, and guns are higher on people’s lists. This dogwhistle, I think, will play especially poorly:
But the people of my state understand, I think, pretty clearly, that guns in Vermont are not the same thing as guns in Chicago or guns in Los Angeles. In our state, guns are used for hunting. In Chicago, they’re used for kids in gangs killing other kids or people shooting at police officers, shooting down innocent people.
Since there’s more consciousness that the NRA specifically chooses not to represent gun owners of color. It’s deeply frustrating, since it’s always been a matter of public record that Sanders takes NRA money. But I guess some people need high schoolers to do their homework for them.
Does that mean people wouldn’t vote for him, or that he couldn’t win? No. In “Twitter and Tear Gas”, Zeynep Tufecki draws a distinction between signalling power and electoral power. The gun issue clearly has electoral power if a group of pro-gun control folks is scuttling state-level bills across the country. Gun control is never going to unseat healthcare, economy, and defense as the Biggest Issue™. So what is the electoral effect of being a gun moderate? I think ultimately, if he’s the candidate, people will vote for him. But for a lot of my peers, a candidate without his personal negatives (elderly, white, male) and policy negatives, is going to be really attractive.
I find it amazing that, in the USA, people in their late 60’s and 70’s are routinely elected to what is effectively a new (and very high pressure) career. This hasn’t happened just once, but many times. This has to stop. Putting people into the White House who should be retiring is just nuts. The senior senator from my former home state is 85 years old, and is in my opinion, mostly senile, yet in recent memory she’s been proposed as a presidential candidate. And unless a miracle occurs, she’s going to be sent back to Congress this fall for another six years. In what world does this make sense? Age does not make one wiser or better at governing, it just makes you old.
Yeah, when I see truly old people, I don’t see any wiser/more intelligent than their 40 year-old selves. I just see someone who’s become more solidified in their thinking.
Reagan and Trump are both great examples of simple-minded fools who were/are ineffective Presidents except when it came/comes to doing harm. Is age not an issue at all?
On the one hand, ageism is an awful thing (and I’m dealing with it at work right now, so I’m extra-sensitive to it). On the other hand, I agree with you that if there’s a strong tendency for leaders to be old (or very young for that matter), something is wrong with how the electorate views its leaders.
Sure it’s an issue. I’m all for encouraging retirement of public officials at a reasonable age. I don’t think anyone’s at the top of their game in their 80s, and we need our presidents and justices and legislators to be at the top of their game.
I only spoke up because I think it’s unreasonable to say Warren is at the end of her career. Does she in any way exhibit the ravages of age the way second-term Reagan or first-term Trump did?
Joe Biden … seems better than average for a professional politician.
I could even relate to Clinton
if she’d been marketing herself as a Thoreavian mountaineer all this time instead of a warmongering neoliberal legacy candidate who already had eight years in the White House
Anyway, the PROBLEM is that when the Dems nominate people like this, they LOSE.
But here’s my thing. As a Canadian, I am not too fond of Hillary. She blamed us for 9/11 on so little proof at one point the Canadian ambassador to the US took her aside at an event and asked her if she had any information she wanted to share, because she seemed to know more about what had happened to the terrorists in their brief time in Canada than the Canadians did. (That shut her up a bit.)
And yeah, she tends to be hawkish on foreign policy. All else being equal, she was too right-wing for me, personally.
But all things were not equal.
In a choice between Clinton and Trump, Clinton was obviously the superior candidate. Despite all her faults. Trump so, so obviously had no idea how to run a successful government.
And he still doesn’t, and the reasons why are becoming more clear. But he won anyway.
It’s not time to exhort the voters to hold their noses and vote for a shitty candidate. There will be plenty of time for that in July, August, September, and October 2020. The next 23 months are for talking about what kind of nominee will defeat Trump. We know Clinton was not such a nominee, and nominating anybody like that again would essentially be partisan suicide.
I don’t find it surprising that when their platform is mostly “Hey, look at us! We can be almost as conservative as the Republicans! But we’re slightly less evil sometimes!” that’s neither very inspiring to Democrats and other non-republicans nor likely to win over many Republicans.
The link is that American politics have fundamentally changed, and are never going to return to how they were. Therefore, traditional political concerns based in the idea of a conventional Presidency have little relevance.
Yes, corruption etc will always be issues, but thinking in terms of “how will this candidate resist the corrupting influence of normal Congressional dealmaking?” is missing the bigger picture. Normal Congressional dealmaking is irretrievably dead as a means of achieving positive change.
Any candidate with a chance of success has to be going in with an understanding that the system is fundamentally broken. It needs to be scrapped before it can be rebuilt.
The fascists are heavily outnumbered, and they can be beaten. Just not by conventional means.
I’ve been arguing from the day of Trump’s election that (a) revolution is required, and (b) revolution does not have to be violent. That was Dr King’s whole point, really.
A general strike, targeted at the centers of industry and commerce, maintained until the government falls. It’s the traditional response to tyrannical government that has been used with success across the world.
Get in the streets, block traffic, make noise, and keep doing it for as long as necessary. It does not take as many people as you might think:
What The Rise Of Kamala Harris Tells ME About The Democratic Party is that the police state knows neither red nor blue.
She might not be a racist fuckwad intent on the extermination of human beings, but she is a cop. (Maybe not literally, but prosecutors are cops in my book.) Same for Eric Holder. And Clair McCaskill. Plus more I’ve forgotten. I wouldn’t be happy to vote for any of them, I just hope there are less fascist options.
