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The smug style in American liberalism

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Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#101

Post by cafard »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #48
CalChris wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American Democrat, I'm not in the least bit embarrassed by our campaign. We ran on 8 years of growth, cutting the deficit, 5% unemployment, tripled stock market, etc. Justly proud of that. I'm embarrassed for the country by what Republicans ran on and who they elected.

No, "you" ran on "Trump is raaaciiist and if you support him you are too!" (I put "you" in quotes since I'm referring to Democrats in general, not you personally.) It's the same thing "you" ran against Bush and Romney on. It might even be true this time around, but you are the boy who cried wolf at this point.

"We" (an editorial we) ran on "Trump will do for the United States of America what he did for the United States Football League; and that he will be no better president than he was a businessman."

I don't remember anyone saying that Romney was racist. I remember many saying that he represented the very wealthy rather than the middle and poorer classes.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#102

Post by humanrebar »

cronjobber wrote: post #63
yummyfajitas wrote: post #35

This is definitely the preference falsification election. Those who know me on HN know that I'm an outspoken proponent of unorthodox ideas. I'm regularly shouted down, called racist/evil/etc, downmodded and flagged on HN. I also get a steady stream of private emails: "I wouldn't say this publicly cause of the bullies, but that .gov link with all the data does seem to support you. I think you might be right, I need to…

> This is definitely the preference falsification election. I agree. In fact, the point at which I started to think that Trump could win was Hillary's "Basket of Deplorables" blunder. It was a blunder because the way she phrased it, she put far too many in that basket. Paradoxically, because people believed what she said —that there are many Deplorables— she might have initiated the very preference cascade that cost…

Or, you know, she could have apologized for some of the things people were upset about with respect to the interminable lying and weasel wording.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#103

Post by triplesec »

rorykoehler wrote: post #65
scarmig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I do have plenty of foreign policy disagreements in particular with him. But he's the best we've had in living memory. Liberalism has had a smug aspect as long as I've been alive, but at this point that aspect has metastasized to something worse. The norms that have developed are toxic to progressive movements. They certainly alienate people, but beyond that they make it so you don't even have the institutional c…

I agree with everything you have said. Obama is a thoughtful type and a great orator. I'm sure he would have liked to enact some of the change he promised but he didn't. In many ways America regressed further under his watch and this is the outcome.

I think it's not that he didn't, but he couldn't, with the most obstructive Congress in modern history

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#104

Post by Nursie »

gadders wrote: post #89
yummyfajitas wrote: post #35

This is definitely the preference falsification election. Those who know me on HN know that I'm an outspoken proponent of unorthodox ideas. I'm regularly shouted down, called racist/evil/etc, downmodded and flagged on HN. I also get a steady stream of private emails: "I wouldn't say this publicly cause of the bullies, but that .gov link with all the data does seem to support you. I think you might be right, I need to…

A similar thing happened with Brexit, and the last UK General Election. Right-leaning voters just can't be bothered to identify themselves and get involved in debates about it. They just vote.

The thing about the UK situation that most worries me is the smug left trying to grasp at any way they can to overturn the referendum result or undermine subsequent action. There seems to be the idea that of we just keep ignoring and denigrating hard enough then the morons will be safely put back in their box and we can go on as before.

It never occurs to them that that would just make everything even worse in the long run, that now is the time to understand and compromise. They still seek absolute victory.

The article could just as well have been written about the UK.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#105

Post by yummyfajitas »

cafard wrote: post #101
yummyfajitas wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "you" ran on "Trump is raaaciiist and if you support him you are too!" (I put "you" in quotes since I'm referring to Democrats in general, not you personally.) It's the same thing "you" ran against Bush and Romney on. It might even be true this time around, but you are the boy who cried wolf at this point.

"We" (an editorial we) ran on "Trump will do for the United States of America what he did for the United States Football League; and that he will be no better president than he was a businessman." I don't remember anyone saying that Romney was racist. I remember many saying that he represented the very wealthy rather than the middle and poorer classes.

Here's people calling Romney racist:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/8/27/1124649/-Romney-Goes...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/07/romney-accused-...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-faces-challenge...

https://thinkprogress.org/romney-dog-whistle-obamas-philosop...

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#106

Post by triplesec »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #64
ant6n wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a fair bit of arguing with the folks here on HN, it's interesting because it doesn't match the echo chamber I have on twitter or facebook. There seem to be a lot of Trump supporter here, which I find very surprising. This idea keeps coming up again and again that using the word 'racist' in the context of the Trump campaign is essentially name-calling, an insult. The problem is, racism is a big, big, big iss…

Using 'racist' in the context of criticizing Republicans is just name-calling. Bush displayed no open racism, bullied no one, and was not xenophobic. Same for Romney. Yet the anti-Trump language is just a more hysterical version of the anti-Bush and anti-Romney language. At some point the term "racist" came to mean "insufficiently left wing". This happened because left wing types called every Republican "raaacciiiiis…

Bush was pretty inclusive racially. McCain too. IDK about Romney, but Mormons have written history and religion that makes him suspect on that, but he campaigned reasonably. Trump campaigned openly on a racist, xenophobic platform. They were key parts of his rhetoric and key to a good proportion of his winning. That is the difference here.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#107

Post by jessaustin »

cafard wrote: post #98
jessaustin wrote: post #94

On November 6, 2000, during his final pre-election stump speech, Bush explained his history of political triumph thusly: "They misunderesimated me." What an idiot. American liberals made fun of him for that one for years. It is worth considering that he didn't misspeak. He did, however, deliberately cultivate the confusion. He understood the smug style. W's was perhaps a more subtle dominating response to the Smug, b…

You aren't wrong, or not all wrong. However, you must consider a) that Nader made a very large difference in 2000, and b) that Trump got to run against Hillary Clinton. She is intelligent and able, but she has been a handy target for conservative media for twenty years now, and a good deal of that stuck with voters. "Both of them went to school with the Smug"; well, yes, and some would find it curious that our populi…

Johnson seems to have gotten more votes than Nader; Johnson and Stein together definitely did so. In many of the "battleground" states, Trump's margin is totally swamped by third-party numbers.

The observations you've made about Clinton aren't news to anyone. The fact she was nominated anyway, with her only primary opposition coming from outside the party, after the DNC had let it be known to all potential opponents that the fix was well and truly in, is symptomatic of the Smug. The insiders couldn't imagine the average voter rejecting the candidate chosen by the insiders. Maybe they still can't imagine it, only now it has happened. They're stuck in a loop, and for the next iteration the Republicans will know just what to do. Hint: it won't be another Romney.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#108

Post by majewsky »

CalChris wrote: post #60
jhoechtl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cutting the deficit? Which one? If you are referring to the National Debt you are grossly wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

Of course, if you look up in the dictionary you'll find that deficit and debt are distinct words: debit: something that is owed or that one is bound to pay to or perform for another deficit: the amount by which expenditures or liabilities exceed income or assets http://www.dictionary.com/browse/deficit http://www.dictionary.com/browse/debt The Federal deficit was about $1.4T when Obama started and its about $600B now…

Only tangentially related, but I'm amazed by the absolute value of the US deficit. The German federal deficit used to be around 10-20 billion € (now down to zero) and everyone was crying over how horribly high it is. (I know that Germany is smaller, but it has at least a fourth of the US population.)

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#109

Post by rbehrends »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #35

This is definitely the preference falsification election. Those who know me on HN know that I'm an outspoken proponent of unorthodox ideas. I'm regularly shouted down, called racist/evil/etc, downmodded and flagged on HN. I also get a steady stream of private emails: "I wouldn't say this publicly cause of the bullies, but that .gov link with all the data does seem to support you. I think you might be right, I need to…

> When pollsters call the preference falsification continues.

I don't buy this. Sam Wang had projected Clinton winning the popular vote by 4.0% (+/- .6%). She's currently projected to win the popular vote by about 1% (the Electoral College margin is an artifact of the electoral system and unrelated to voting preferences). That means that maybe 1 in 60 Americans voted differently from what the polls predicted. So, while the margin of error relative to the margin of victory [1] was pretty big, the margin of error relative to the electorate was fairly small. It doesn't seem that a whole lot of people were hiding their actual preferences prior to the election.

[1] "Victory" only in the narrow mathematical sense of winning the national popular vote, obviously.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#110

Post by CalChris »

majewsky wrote: post #108
CalChris wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, if you look up in the dictionary you'll find that deficit and debt are distinct words: debit: something that is owed or that one is bound to pay to or perform for another deficit: the amount by which expenditures or liabilities exceed income or assets http://www.dictionary.com/browse/deficit http://www.dictionary.com/browse/debt The Federal deficit was about $1.4T when Obama started and its about $600B now…

Only tangentially related, but I'm amazed by the absolute value of the US deficit. The German federal deficit used to be around 10-20 billion € (now down to zero) and everyone was crying over how horribly high it is. (I know that Germany is smaller, but it has at least a fourth of the US population.)

Post WWII, US deficits grow under Republicans and shrink under Democrats.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-EX454_wwii10_G_...

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