And They're Off! The Democratic Candidates for 2020

[drogulus]

Pointing out that Sanders's agenda  consists of imposing national bureaucratic control over major areas of life and taking away decision making from the average person is not fear mongering.

     Government does that. It's what it's for, even if it can be pejoratively described as such. What is hard to understand apparently is that the size of a government has no fixed meaning in a constantly evolving and expanding economy. You can't run a 2016 system from a 1916 set of parts and the role of ideology is blown way out of proportion, describing more than deciding.

     If "big government" was a thing it's purported to be, we'd find another way of building the system components we want. Conservatives will fantasize about another way with their alternative plans, rightly ridiculed by almost everyone. When a branch of the conservative intelligentsia came up with an alternative that turned out to be a practical possibility, Repub politicians recoiled in horror. ObomneyCare unmasked them brutally. Especially irksome was that it lacked a public option that would characterize it as communistic.

     If the state is big when it does something big, and bigness itself is to be avoided, why it is only the now or the near past to which this understanding is applied? Why are there no serious efforts to repeal everything government has done since the Louisiana Purchase? The real answer is that government and total system function are not separate but intertwined. They evolve together guided by a rule set that is itself undergoing transformation. I judge that the systems of self-government with a democratic predisposition are the best at doing this.

The GOP is not anti-government. The GOP is government that benefits them and no one else.
Right now, there's almost no one in the corridors of power in DC who takes the classic position: there's not really much that government needs to do, and most of what government does now is something government doesn't need to do.

     As far as I'm concerned, there isn't much difference. Of course undermining government function relatively benefits those who need it least. I understand this through the lens of behavioral economics. The rich are aware that they will get money richer in a more equal society where people can afford the products produced by companies the rich own. Income flows up. It takes an army of poor to middle income people to support a billionaire.

     So why impoverish most people, the customers? The answer is that it's the power and prestige money confers that matter most, not the purchasing power of it. The growing inequality in income and wealth is not an unfortunate byproduct. The rich want as much power and prestige as their wealth can give them, even if it means getting richer more slowly.

     As for what government needs to do, it doesn't have to be re-litigated for ideological purposes. Once you figure out that it's necessary for everyone to have health insurance for the benefit of the whole and all the parts (IOW where are are now), plans with various roles for the government (all plans, that is) will be compared for their consequences.

By being other than Hillary.

    That doesn't say why Sanders, with all his obvious negatives according to conventional wisdom, was so good at climbing such a greasy pole as the Hillary alternative. Why him?

    If you don't accept my answer about how economic decline manifests itself by partially erasing old categories of radical/mainstream, what explains Trump and Sanders? History suggests strong parallels with similar disruptions.

[Karl Henning]

Much to my surprise as an outsider this is getting more and more interesting. The main problem is keeping up with the turnover of this thread! Don't you guys sleep!

I do rather worry for Poju that he may stay up until the California polls close, though.

[André]

     Government does that. It's what it's for, even if it can be pejoratively described as such. What is hard to understand apparently is that the size of a government has no fixed meaning in a constantly evolving and expanding economy. You can't run a 2016 system from a 1916 set of parts and the role of ideology is blown way out of proportion, describing more than deciding.

     If "big government" was a thing it's purported to be, we'd find another way of building the system components we want. Conservatives will fantasize about another way with their alternative plans, rightly ridiculed by almost everyone. When a branch of the conservative intelligentsia came up with an alternative that turned out to be a practical possibility, Repub politicians recoiled in horror. ObomneyCare unmasked them brutally. Especially irksome was that it lacked a public option that would characterize it as communistic.

     If the state is big when it does something big, and bigness itself is to be avoided, why it is only the now or the near past to which this understanding is applied? Why are there no serious efforts to repeal everything government has done since the Louisiana Purchase? The real answer is that government and total system function are not separate but intertwined. They evolve together guided by a rule set that is itself undergoing transformation. I judge that the systems of self-government with a democratic predisposition are the best at doing this.

     As far as I'm concerned, there isn't much difference. Of course undermining government function relatively benefits those who need it least. I understand this through the lens of behavioral economics. The rich are aware that they will get money richer in a more equal society where people can afford the products produced by companies the rich own. Income flows up. It takes an army of poor to middle income people to support a billionaire.

     So why impoverish most people, the customers? The answer is that it's the power and prestige money confers that matter most, not the purchasing power of it. The growing inequality in income and wealth is not an unfortunate byproduct. The rich want as much power and prestige as their wealth can give them, even if it means getting richer more slowly.

     As for what government needs to do, it doesn't have to be re-litigated for ideological purposes. Once you figure out that it's necessary for everyone to have health insurance for the benefit of the whole and all the parts (IOW where are are now), plans with various roles for the government (all plans, that is) will be compared for their consequences.

    That doesn't say why Sanders, with all his obvious negatives according to conventional wisdom, was so good at climbing such a greasy pole as the Hillary alternative. Why him?

    If you don't accept my answer about how economic decline manifests itself by partially erasing old categories of radical/mainstream, what explains Trump and Sanders? History suggests strong parallels with similar disruptions.

You mean Hitler and Stalin ?

[drogulus]

You mean Hitler and Stalin ?

     We don't know how far it will go this time, except by how far it has gone already. I don't assume a fixed end point.

[Karl Henning]

An opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg:

As Bernie Sanders has taken the lead in the Democratic primary, those of us with doubts that America would elect a Jewish democratic socialist president have been able to comfort ourselves with polls showing him beating Donald Trump, often by larger margins than his competitors.

New political science research by David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla of Yale erodes some of that comfort. Broockman and Kalla surveyed over 40,000 people — far more than a typical poll — about head-to-head presidential matchups. They found that when they weight their numbers to reflect the demographic makeup of the population rather than the likely electorate, as many polls do, Sanders beats Trump, often by more than other candidates.

But the demographics of people who actually vote are almost always different from the demographics of people who can vote. That's where their analysis raises concerns about Sanders's chances.

According to Broockman and Kalla's figures, Sanders loses a significant number of swing votes to Trump, but he makes up for them in support from young people who say they won't vote, or will vote third party, unless Sanders is the nominee. On the surface, these Bernie-or-bust voters might seem like an argument for Sanders. After all, Sanders partisans sometimes insist that Democrats have no choice but to nominate their candidate because they'll stay home otherwise, a sneering imitation of traditional centrist demands for progressive compromise.

But if Broockman and Kalla are right, by nominating Sanders, Democrats would be trading some of the electorate's most reliable voters for some of its least. To prevail, Democrats would need unheard-of rates of youth turnout. That doesn't necessarily mean Sanders would be a worse candidate than Joe Biden, given all of Biden's baggage. It does mean polls might be underestimating how hard it will be for Sanders to beat Trump.

"Given how many voters say they would switch to Trump in head-to-heads against Sanders compared to the more moderate candidates, the surge in youth turnout Sanders would require to gain back this ground is large: around 11 percentage points," Broockman and Kalla write in a new working paper.

About 37 percent of Democrats and independents under 35 voted in 2016. According to Broockman and Kalla's figures, Sanders would need to get that figure up to 48 percent. By comparison, Broockman told me, in 2008, Barack Obama raised black turnout by about five percentage points.

Disclosure: My husband is consulting for Elizabeth Warren. According to Broockman, she fares even worse than Sanders in their data, sharing his disadvantages among moderates without any sign of a compensatory surge among young people. Broockman said that if either Warren or Sanders is on the ballot, more Republicans will likely be motivated to go to the polls in response. "When parties nominate candidates further from the center, it actually inspires the other party to turn out," he told me.

In our age of extreme polarization, a widespread school of thought holds that swing voters are nearly extinct, and that turnout is everything. But that's an exaggeration. While there seem to be fewer swing voters than in the past, they can still be decisive.

As Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, pointed out in The Washington Post, the 2018 elections saw the highest midterm turnout in over a century, yet most of Democrats' improved performance "came not from fresh turnout of left-of-center voters, who typically skip midterms, but rather from people who cast votes" in the last two national elections and "switched from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2018."

The primaries have yet to demonstrate that Sanders can generate the hugely expanded turnout his campaign is promising, though that could change when the Super Tuesday results come in. In New Hampshire, turnout increased most in the places that voted for Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Dave Wasserman, an editor at The Cook Political Report, tweeted that most of the Democrats' turnout bump was attributable to moderate Republicans "crossing over from '16 G.O.P. primary — not heightened progressive/Sanders base enthusiasm." South Carolina saw record turnout, but it benefited Biden, not Sanders.

None of this means that Democrats would be justified in denying Sanders the nomination if he arrives at the convention with a strong plurality of delegates. Doing so would tear the party apart, probably leaving the eventual nominee even less electable than Sanders is. But it does mean that if Sanders wins the primary, his campaign has to learn to persuade people, not just mobilize them.

College-educated white women, for example, helped flip the House in 2018. They favor Biden over Trump by double digits, but Sanders by only two points. Sanders, however, seems to see little need to reach out to them. Speaking to The Los Angeles Times editorial board in December, Sanders said he didn't believe the way to win against Trump "is to just speak to Republican women in the suburbs."

Instead, he said, "The key to this election is, can we get millions of young people who have never voted before into the political process, many working people who understand that Trump is a fraud, can we get them voting?" Even if the answer is yes, it probably won't be enough. If he's going to be the nominee, the rest of us can only hope his campaign has a Plan B."


Emphases mine ~kh

[Florestan]

Yes, this insistence on "getting young people to vote massively" while ignoring or downplaying other categories might prove self-defeating, because "young people" are notoriously unreliable when it comes to voting. Broockman and Kalla are spot on.

[Florestan]

You mean Hitler and Stalin ?

Paralleling Hitler with Trump or Stalin with Sanders is sheer lunacy. Sorry, I can't put it milder.

[drogulus]

Paralleling Hitler with Trump or Stalin with Sanders is sheer lunacy. Sorry, I can't put it milder.

    The analysis from history doesn't have to be exact. TrumpPutin is not the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the odds are it never will be. On the other side, most people didn't think the "30s would produce what it did and it took many years for them to become convinced that Chuchill was right that an existential crisis was in the works.

    My goal is neither to over- or underplay the parallels, only to suggest that it explains better than any other framework the nature of the crisis. The democratic capitalist states have undermined themselves with disastrous economic policy that deliberately undermined the recovery/expansion of the present cycle. We got the populist/authoritarian response we had every reason to expect.

[71 dB]

Much to my surprise as an outsider this is getting more and more interesting. The main problem is keeping up with the turnover of this thread! Don't you guys sleep!

America, Australia/New Zealand, Europe... ...we are all over the time zones and someone can always be active here. 

[Florestan]

    The democratic capitalist states have undermined themselves with disastrous economic policy that deliberately undermined the recovery/expansion of the present cycle. We got the populist/authoritarian response we had every reason to expect.

While this might be true, it's no parallel to the situation of Germany in 1933, not even by a long stretch. But if you really find it to be the case, then you must also tell us who are the USA equivalents of Hindenburg and von Papen.

[Ratliff]

No Hitlers or Stalins on the ballot. Obama was our Gorbachev, Trump is our Berlusconi and Sanders could be our Hugo Chavez.

[Florestan]

No Hitlers or Stalins on the ballot. Obama was our Gorbachev, Trump is our Berlusconi and Sanders could be our Hugo Chavez.

[drogulus]

While this might be true, it's no parallel to the situation of Germany in 1933, not even by a long stretch. But if you really find it to be the case, then you must also tell us who are the USA equivalents of Hindenburg and von Papen.

     It's the pattern of economic crisis leading to an assault on democracy and the institutions of government that I'm observing. It doesn't go to the level of individual personalities. The fascist buffoonery and other elements, the lying and propagandizing with no discernible resemblance to anything true, the enhanced racism and scapegoating, the disestablishment of objective truth, they are all present. If there is an alternative framework to explain this, what is it?

     The institutional disruption will produce a set of personalities that don't correspond one for one with famous '30s individuals. Today's authoritarian/populist buffoons will bear a general resemblance to their predescessors, not a specific one.

     For instance the austerity mongers of today are none of them Heinrich Brüning, whose policy of austerity in 1930 did more to gift us with Mr. Hilter than anything else. The austerity of the last decade has many authors and assumed a privileged position in the economic zeitgeist with no major figure to blame for it. What was idiotically called "expansionary austerity" in Europe was herdthink of the worst kind. Funny, you don't hear much about that version of "shrink to grow" any more. The shrinksters are a little more cautious these days.

     We had our economic crisis, we had the response, and we have the pattern laid out for all to see. Do we need "this guy is just like that one", too? No, we don't.

     

     This is a system wide failure, not just an accident that puts a radically unsuitable person in the WH.

[greg]

Paralleling Hitler with Trump or Stalin with Sanders is sheer lunacy. Sorry, I can't put it milder.

For real. They're both in the same direction but each are like thousands of miles away. People would have to be extremely neurotic think either would come to that.

[drogulus]

For real. They're both in the same direction but each are like thousands of miles away. People would have to be extremely neurotic think either would come to that.

     We are in the midst of a crisis and will be for some years. Sanders isn't Huey Long and neither is Trump. The Great Recession wasn't the Great Depression.

     No sheer lunacy is involved. You can get sick from a disease that made you sicker in the past. The disease is the same, the outcome, though very bad, isn't the same as before, with the same symptoms of lesser severity, at least up to now.

     The cure for an economic crisis is to bring it to an end and put aside theistic objections to doing so. You earn the confidence of the populace by performing needed tasks. If the mainstream is no longer trusted, it has to earn trust back by doing the job it should have done when the economy fell apart. We have to build the new economy because that's what we are supposed to do, not think of clever ways to not do it.

[Florestan]

     Heinrich Brüning, whose policy of austerity in 1930 did more to gift us with Mr. Hilter than anything else.

This is wrong but I'm not going to pursue this off topic any further.

[Jo498]

Sanders and Trump are not in the same "direction" as Stalin or Hitler.
We have some examples of democratic states falling into fascism in the 1920s30s (but the conditions were quite different to 2020s US, so different that "fascism" is an almost useless label nowadays, despite being thrown around in a facile manner). I am not aware of any country that has ever devolved from social democracy (in the fashion of 1970s Scandinavia or Germany which is roughly where Sanders belongs) into Stalinist Gulags, despite Hayek and disciples claiming that a bit of welfare state gets you on the road to serfdom.
IMO throwing around fascist, communist etc. labels is bad in at least three ways:
It's a total misapprehension and belittling of the horrors of real fascism and Stalinism/Maoism etc.
It's lazy because it is a shortcut for damning instead of debating/critizing the real positions of today's politicians.
And it is foolish because by using obsolete labels that belong to movements of another century one will probably miss the totalitarian ways the present or the future will take that don't quite align with these old oppositions and are usually far more subtle and cut along different lines. Like the social control in China or the private company censorship on western social media and countless other ways, used both by the "corporatist right" as well as the "woke left".

[drogulus]

This is wrong but I'm not going to pursue this off topic any further.

     Wise choice, I'd say.

     To this day it's widely believed that hyperinflation was responsible for Hitler, and not the more proximate deflation/depression that created 7 million unemployed in Germany.

Before the crash, 1.25 million people were unemployed in Germany. By the end of 1930 the figure had reached nearly 4 million, 15.3 per cent of the population. Even those in work suffered as many were only working part-time. With the drop in demand for labour, wages also fell and those with full-time work had to survive on lower incomes. Hitler, who was considered a fool in 1928 when he predicted economic disaster, was now seen in a different light. People began to say that if he was clever enough to predict the depression maybe he also knew how to solve it.

By 1932 over 30 per cent of the German workforce was unemployed. In the 1933 Election campaign, Adolf Hitler promised that if he gained power he would abolish unemployment.

     As is the case today, it's not the crash that creates the political crisis, it's the response to it. Brüning didn't create the depression, he deepened it. It was deflation as policy that did Germany in.

[Florestan]

Sanders and Trump are not in the same "direction" as Stalin or Hitler.
We have some examples of democratic states falling into fascism in the 1920s30s (but the conditions were quite different to 2020s US, so different that "fascism" is an almost useless label nowadays, despite being thrown around in a facile manner). I am not aware of any country that has ever devolved from social democracy (in the fashion of 1970s Scandinavia or Germany which is roughly where Sanders belongs) into Stalinist Gulags, despite Hayek and disciples claiming that a bit of welfare state gets you on the road to serfdom.
IMO throwing around fascist, communist etc. labels is bad in at least three ways:
It's a total misapprehension and belittling of the horrors of real fascism and Stalinism/Maoism etc.
It's lazy because it is a shortcut for damning instead of debating/critizing the real positions of today's politicians.
And it is foolish because by using obsolete labels that belong to movements of another century one will probably miss the totalitarian ways the present or the future will take that don't quite align with these old oppositions and are usually far more subtle and cut along different lines. Like the social control in China or the private company censorship on western social media and countless other ways, used both by the "corporatist right" as well as the "woke left".

I agree with almost all the points you made except the one about Hayek. Please read this:

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/hayeks-tragic-capitalism/

[Ratliff]

My Super Tuesday ballot had 20 candidates for President. Some recent or not so recent drop-outs, others I have never heard of. Daffy Duck didn't get enough signatures to qualify, apparently. I decided to vote my real preference, rather than the stop Sanders (Biden) candidate. Elizabeth Warren.