Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
A brief word on the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden.
That’s OK, though. We can still be friends. Carry on with your day.
Rife with disorganization and insecurity, the Democratic Party wants you to vote blue no matter who. I guess. I mean, they do sell the phrase on a t-shirt.
And it loves its metaphors. When you criticize fellow liberals, so they say, you’re just engaged in a circular firing squad. They really love that metaphor. You know, circular firing squad. They write about it over and over and over and over.
Not that they started recently. They were writing about it in 2016. Hell, even in 2006.
Probably in 1896, for all I know.
But there are real distinctions and divisions among liberals and leftists. And between liberals and leftists, as I wrote about previously in a quiz. The call to line up behind a candidate and a message is always louder when it comes from those who dominate the debate and the issues. That’s, of course, the fly in the ointment. Among others, which I’ll say more about below the flow chart.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernie_Sanders_2015_(1).jpg)
Let’s suppose it’s April 2020, and the New York Times reports that Bernie Sanders has just won enough delegates to clinch the Democratic Party nomination for President. Bernie will face Trump in November for the presidency.
How did he get there? What does a Bernie Sanders victory look like? And who’s a part of a winning Bernie Sanders coalition?
Each presidential candidate is traveling to Iowa, and each presidential candidate has a problem or two. Today I’ll be their consultant.
I’ve got a few quibbles with 538’s taxonomy, but it’s a good starting point. Arguably there are five corners to the Democratic primary electorate. 538 draws a distinction between ‘party loyalists’ and ‘the left,’ whereas the better distinction is probably between ‘moderate’ Democrats and ‘progressive’ Democrats, but whatever. It’s a start.
I’ll lay out one key thing each candidate needs to do to get in a position to win the nomination.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:What_Happened_audiobook_1.png
Let’s start here: It’s hard to write a book about your own failure. And that was Hillary Clinton’s task in What Happened. Silicon Valley and the business press are full of schlock extolling the virtues of failure, but that’s shit people write after they’ve succeeded. They look back at how they learned from failure. Lessons from the road, and other nonsense.
That’s not the kind of failure Hillary Clinton is writing about in What Happened. What Happened is like writing a book about that time you hit a home run in Game 7 of the World Series, but you got thrown out because you inexplicably forgot to touch first base on the way in. Then your team lost. And then you retired.
Al Gore made a movie after he lost the presidency, and he forged ahead with a new career in stopping climate change. I don’t see a tomorrow for Hillary Clinton’s political career, even on the scale of Al Gore. It’s all the day after November 8. The presidency was supposed to be it for her: the defining moment of the career of the first woman president.
So that’s the kind of failure she’s writing about in her book. I’m not a fan of Hillary Clinton’s politics. I didn’t caucus for her in the primaries or vote for her in the general election. And I’m not interested in revisiting that debate. I’ve said what I have to say on those issues.
But I do think it took some chutzpah for her to write about the election, especially so soon after it. What Happened is supposed to be the story of how that event…well, happened.
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