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The smug style in American liberalism

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Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#151

Post by bambax »

Wow. This article was published on April 21st, before the end of the primaries.

> Trump capturing the nomination will not dispel the smug style; if anything, it will redouble it. Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the fuck happened?

But the § just before that one is the meat of the article:

But even as many have come around to the notion that Trump is the prohibitive favorite for his party's nomination, the smug interpretation has been predictable: We only underestimated how hateful, how stupid, the Republican base can be.

Krugman today:

> We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law. It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elect...

Some people never learn, but they're not the ones we think don't.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#152

Post by pessimizer »

privong wrote: post #118
triplesec wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I think it's not that he didn't, but he couldn't, with the most obstructive Congress in modern history Ironically, some of that might have been his own doing, though. The healthcare reform was passed essentially without republican support; I think that's a very rare example of major [healthcare] legislation that was not passed with bi-partisan support. Not doing more to bring R's on board likely burned lots of poli…

And to not just push single-payer when they were never going to get Republican support burned a lot of his support on the left. He spent an enormous amount of effort whipping the Democrats to the right in order to pass ACA as the great compromise that he conceived (it was a Heritage Foundation policy after all); and the most controversial part of it (the universal cash penalty for being uninsured) was a Clinton policy that he campaigned against in the primary and won.

He didn't have to bring any Republicans on board. What he had to have was the integrity to push for what he had the mandate to deliver, instead of all of this pre-compromising, losing anyway, then eventually quarter-assing something through presidential fiat or lack of enforcement. If President Obama had chosen to pursue the policies that Candidate Obama had been elected on, the voters would have punished congressmen who got in his way. Instead he had one of the least transparent administrations imaginable, passed a bunch of complex garbage with a million special interest carveouts, and tried to create social change through undemocratic executive action.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#153

Post by verbify »

rorykoehler wrote: post #54
scarmig wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full disclosure: I'm a Hillary voter, after much internal fretting about voting third party or writing in Obama. Looking at the reactions on my Facebook feed, the large majority of people seem to be taking from this experience the learning that Trump voters are all disgusting misogynistic racist pigs, and America deserves to be damned for its sins against the pro-Clinton media orthodoxy. It's tiring, because in terms…

Obama is a huge part of why this happened. He promised change and delivered empire.

Which is why he has an approval rating of 55%?

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#154

Post by jacobolus »

arethuza wrote: post #147
jacobolus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested to read http://www.salon.com/2015/12/28/behind_the_ronald_reagan_myt...

Somewhat surprisingly for a leftish Scot I am a fan of Reagan - for one very important reason. He understood that the standard US view of the Soviets was actually wrong and it was the Soviet leadership who were utterly afraid of the US (perhaps for good reasons) and he changed his approach .

It wasn’t widely realized at the time even at high levels of the US government, but the USSR collapsed under its own economic weight, and was in demographic free-fall before Reagan ever took office. It’s unlikely that any action the Reagan administration took had a significant effect on the end result, though arguably US policies might have accelerated or retarded the decline by a couple years.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#155

Post by esja »

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…

Agreed. And compounding the problem: she also put Trump in that basket.

"Well, she said I was deplorable, but couldn't be more wrong, because I'm a good person... she must be wrong about him too"

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#156

Post by crispyambulance »

rorykoehler wrote: post #123
mrow84 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert on US politics, but wasn't he hidebound by a Republican house and senate?

Promises were made. Why they weren't kept is irrelevant. Edit: to clarify this is not my personal position but more a reflection on how I see the electorate behaving.

... yes, "promises" are how people defend their vote, and now we're going to get a front-row seat to see what happens to "promises" when the bullshit artist, Trump, is in charge.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#157

Post by jessaustin »

CalChris wrote: post #112
wojcech wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I pointed out above, the status quo is actually pretty good. For you. And me. But we are not the majority. The majority does not benefit from automation, globalisation etc. as much as you and me. And it doesn't matter if in absolute terms we are all better of(for which citation would be needed, specifically for the lowest income bracket), it matters that the benefits of this new age are not spread around to thos…

"I love the poorly educated." This wasn't about the economy at all which is pretty good. This was a demagogue preying on gullibility. Y'all just elected him, citation unnecessary.

What's the alternative? Hating them? Pretending they don't exist?

How did that work out for you?

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#158

Post by arethuza »

jacobolus wrote: post #154
arethuza wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat surprisingly for a leftish Scot I am a fan of Reagan - for one very important reason. He understood that the standard US view of the Soviets was actually wrong and it was the Soviet leadership who were utterly afraid of the US (perhaps for good reasons) and he changed his approach .

It wasn’t widely realized at the time even at high levels of the US government, but the USSR collapsed under its own economic weight, and was in demographic free-fall before Reagan ever took office. It’s unlikely that any action the Reagan administration took had a significant effect on the end result, though arguably US policies might have accelerated or retarded the decline by a couple years.

The Soviet's might have been broke in the 1980s but they were armed to the teeth and I do think that the change from "evil empire" rhetoric to actually engaging with their new leadership probably reduced the risks of an all-out war which few of us would have survived - certainly not here in the UK.

Re: The smug style in American liberalism

#159

Post by gaius »

CalChris wrote: post #110
majewsky wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

It's a lagging indicator.
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