George Washington lost his first campaign to the Virginia House of Burgess in 1755, 271-40.
When he ran again 3 years later he gave away 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and two gallons of cider royal — "nearly enough for a half-gallon per voter." And guess what, he won.
Considering we wouldn't even declare independence until 18 years later, it's safe to say that buying influence in an election has been American since the beginning, and even before.
On the other hand, the Rockefeller family had a very long record of spending enormous sums on elections, whether by running themselves, or through an own candidate, and loosing every single time.
It will be a good read for everybody deifying "a realpolitik grandmaster" Henry Kissinger how badly he failed in the role of Rockefeller's political adviser. His ineptitude in politics was borderline tragicomedic. This the best proof to me that a "professional politician" is really an oxymoron.
The rich are bad at politics more often than not, and their money can compensate for that only partially.
Georgie Washington was however a spectacular politician on his own, without a doubt.
To me, Yang seemed like an advertising platform to raise awareness on a few of his clearly defined issues such as reasons for war, freedom dividends, and support for mothers raising children. These are a small number of ideas any candidate or senator can adopt and as president, you don’t just write 3 bills go home, and call it a term. Sanders and Buttigieg seemed more capable and well equipped (to me at least) to be able to tackle the wider range of B.S. presidents have to deal with.
I'm confused by this comment because he had more issues on his page than anyone else and was constantly adding more and updating them as he was talking to average day Americans and trying to better understand their day to day problems.
This comment carries the implication that because this practice is American, it's OK if we continue doing it. I heartily disagree and thinks it's abominable to consider something as consequential as this election in such stark, cynical terms.
For some reason, say the words Founding Fathers and too many Americans' brains seize up, even though they were a motley assembly of, among other things, tax cheats, drunks, and racists. Nor were they particularly great political scientists: all of their main goals (no political parties! Congress acting on a check on the President!) fell by the wayside, and the rickety mess that is the Constitution has only survived because of a lack of threatening national competitors within a couple thousand miles of our borders.
And yet it is the oldest existing nation with a constitutional government in which the people elect their own government and representatives. It's always been a work in progress and always will be.
Is it? Really? Hasn't the U.K. been a constitutional monarchy since 1688 or so?
I totally accept it if we're only counting from the start of true universal adult suffrage, including women and taking no account of melanin content of skin - whoever is first on that deserves it be known widely for their national pride. Was that the USA?
The US can't realistically be considered an elected government until, optimistically, the 1960s. If you want to grant the US a couple centuries worth of mulligans, you can do the same with, at the very least, the UK, and arguably some other countries like Switzerland.
And you ignore the other key point, which is that the US had no real national competitors near its borders, while other countries whose stability you discount did. That's the key point to American stability, not any world historical genius in drafting the Constitution.
See: impeachment proceedings. Concretely, the Trump administration ignored Congressional subpoenas, among other things, in clear acts of obstruction of justice in a way that undermined Congressional authority. Also see, for instance, his treatment of tax returns. Partisan polarization has made the idea of interbranch checks and balances defunct.
The courts never made a ruling on whether those Congressional subpoenas were legally binding—in fact, when one of the people subpoenaed tried to take that question to federal court, the House instead chose to withdraw the subpoena. I’m also not sure what Trump’s tax returns have to do with checks and balances between the Congress and the President.
Setting those things aside, claiming that Congress doesn’t act as a check on the President simply does not square up with such things as the government shutdowns of 2013, 2018, and 2018/19, the Senate’s refusal to confirm Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, and it only goes on from there. Partisan polarization has made the checks and balances between the two elected branches more, not less relevant.
No; you're attempting to evade the central point by changing the argument to a typical Republican/Democratic slugfest.
I don't care about the merits of Congressional prerogatives here, which is an entirely secondary point. The point is that the Founding Fathers believed that Congress would defend its own prerogatives against the executive. This has been proven false: a model where government is dominated by partisan prerogatives is far more descriptive of reality than one where branches-of-governments pursue their own prerogatives.
Your latter point--that a Republican Congress investigated and obstructed a Democratic President--is true, but it is, again, an indication that Congress is driven by the needs of the political parties who happen to be running it at the time, not as an institution in itself.
This is entirely contrary to what the vaunted Founding Fathers intended or expected. Not least because the main thinkers among them thought the system would prevent the development of political parties. The Constitution was theorized to deal with abstractions that don't correspond to reality, and it doesn't even consider the most important driver of politics and governance not only in the contemporary world but in the world that existed a year after it was ratified.
In a world where political parties are accepted as a given and inevitable, no one would write anything like the Constitution and expect it to be effective. And no one has: even after WW2, when the US was drafting constitutions for its defeated opponents, it went with documents entirely unlike our own.
> you're attempting to evade the central point by changing the argument to a typical Republican/Democratic slugfest.
I wasn't intending to.
> I don't care about the merits of Congressional prerogatives here, which is an entirely secondary point. The point is that the Founding Fathers believed that Congress would defend its own prerogatives against the executive. This has been proven false.... Congress is driven by the needs of the political parties who happen to be running it at the time, not as an institution in itself.
Got it, this is a better explanation and I think I agree with it.
If those subpoenas aren't valid, then congress cannot possible act as a check on the president.
> Senate’s refusal to confirm Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Not a check so much as a complete refusal to perform constitutional duty. What McConnell did was subvert the process of checks and balances to remove the presidents ability to make appointments.
> If those subpoenas aren't valid, then congress cannot possible act as a check on the president
Sure they can. They can refuse to confirm his appointments, they can pass laws with a large enough supermajority to override his veto, and they can even remove him from office with a Senate supermajority.
> What McConnell did was subvert the process of checks and balances to remove the presidents ability to make appointments.
Thus disproving this notion that Congress is powerless against the President. The President has the constitutional power to make appointments with the advice and consent of the Senate. There's nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate has to have a good reason to withhold that consent.
> There's nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate has to have a good reason to withhold that consent.
The constitution is a deeply flawed document that relies on the acceptance of norms and generally good actors. Absent that you end up with a wannabe dictator like Trump acting basically unchallenged.
> and they can even remove him from office with a Senate supermajority.
an act made much harder when the executive flouts subpoenas.
What is healthy, is that an American spent his money how he liked, the American media is free enough to have reported on it, American citizens are now well-informed enough to know that some of the folks they talk to online are paid, and the American election will be based on the interactions of a free people.
He's not purchasing anything - as long as Americans care enough to be informed, he's blowing hot air that no one will believe.
> is that an American spent his money how he liked
Caps on campaign spending are there for reasons. A campaign
should contribute to meaningful public discourse. Nothing more.
> the American media is free enough to have reported on it
Private media can be biased. Either explicitly (lying to peoples faces), or implicitly (self-censorship on stuff related to the owner). Surprisingly, in several countries - such as Britain or Czech Republic - state-owned media are the one sticking to higher values.
> American citizens are now well-informed enough to know that some of the folks they talk to online are paid, and the American election will be based on the interactions of a free people
> Private media can be biased. Either explicitly (lying to peoples faces), or implicitly (self-censorship on stuff related to the owner). Surprisingly, in several countries - such as Britain or Czech Republic - state-owned media are the one sticking to higher values.
If you can show evidence of this, I’d be interested. I’m pretty sure that /all/ media can be biased, and is. The BBC is no different or better than Fox News. They both share the news from their perspective.
> American citizens are now well-informed enough to know that some of the folks they talk to online are paid
I'm curious: How do you think that Americans can be well informed in a system that actively attempts to feed them disinformation by a series of interested parties that have down to a science how to switch public opinion and humungous budgets?
I'm not claiming that it's impossible for a single person to be well informed, mind you; I'm simply saying that it's pretty clear that the efforts to keep people misinformed are giant, becoming stronger by the day as technology advances and with no significant opposing force. I can't see how anyone can see that trend and think it's not going to have a harmful effect on society.
I agree with you, but I think it's a very debatable problem as to whether addressing the result (money buying influence in politics) or the source (voter education) is a better plan of action.
Unintended consequences abound, should Citizens United be fully overturned and financing be more tightly policed. Maybe those are good, maybe they're bad.
Personally, a 50% tax on any political speech spending, dedicated to funding voter media literacy and education, seems like a better approach.
Give everyone the freedom to speak, but teach everyone to listen critically.
Many voters don't have the time to spend on political education, nor the interest - I actually think the lack of free time is an issue in a democracy, and it's why elderly people are such an active demographic during elections
And the elephant in the room is that propaganda works even on informed people. Just making a name familiar to you is money well spent for marketers, even if you don't buy the claims of the ad it's still an advantage.
Media is designed to be addictive in our days. We should start treating it for what it is - if something disguising as news is actively attempting to evoke an emotional response for the reader/listener to get them hooked, that thing is harmful and not a public service (state funded or not). I don't have a solution, but I do think that at some point in the future we'll look at clickbait and disguised ads the same way we look at tobacco or asbestos now.
Right the media is 'free' enough to report on it... Krystal Ball, Cenk, TYT, sure they HAVE talked about it, but the major netwroks like CNN and MSNBC? Not really, if they did he might not get so far, and then would stop literally throwing cash at them by buying ads. Public funding of elections needs to end, and Bloomberg is literally showing what's possible.
Cause after the oligarch looses then Zuckerberg, Kushner and other sundry mindlessly ambitious people might rethink their future plans to run. At least for a few years.
in fairness, there are two billionaires running on one side and a near billionaire (trump) on the other side. at least one (Ross Perot) has run in the past.
having a lot of money makes it easier to run, but there's no guarantee of success
People are still voting to choose him. He is making his case for why he should be president, people are deciding they like his more than others, so they vote for him.
That individuals can shake up the system, but only if they can convince voters to vote for them, is a sign of health in a democracy. The alternative is deeper two-party stagnation.
You mean with tax-payer dollars? Through a federal government which is currently $21+ Trillion in debt running deficits of around a trillion dollars annually? Would this funding involve new taxes or borrowing since it is new spending, requiring either current or future taxpayers to finance the program?
Meanwhile, small donor fundraising has become much easier and much more successful than in the past, and imho, the entire problem revolves completely around the amount of power that has been centralized and expanded to the Federal Government. Part of the whole idea behind, you know, the principle of limited government... is to limit the amount of power that could be bought in the first place and therefore limit the incentive to corrupt the process, but obviously that ship has sailed a long time ago...
I would think that in a free society, people are not forced to give their money to support political activity they would otherwise not support. For me, it’s that simple. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”
Not really. So far the biggest fundraiser in the Democratic primary has been Bernie Sanders and he has raised most of his money from small money donors.
So it's absolutely possible to raise money without using one's own money or taking bribes.
And even if a candidate raises money from a 100 billionaires, that's better than one billionaire. The more people you raise money from the more likely it is that those people have conflicts with one another that can then balance one another out.
A single billionaire financing their own campaign is just too much centralized power for my tastes, even if I trust that billionaire and generally like his policies.
Exactly. The only thing preventing Trump from being more successful in implementing his ideas is that he's so brash and offensive to people's tastes in character. If Bloomberg can put on a nice mask, he can (and if the past is anything to go by, will) enact much worse than Trump did, and I wouldn't be surprised if mainstream media outlets announce his policies with fanfare.
This is the allure of libertarianism - since a free democracy can't predict the quality of its leaders, representatives, and lobbyists, the government should be given as short a leash as possible to prevent things like a "truly scary authoritarian police state".
Comparable to a library of unix programs - would you rather have small tools (/ organiziations) that are limited to a single job - which they are often optimized for - or a single behemoth which tries to do everything, and may not do it very well?
The federal government is far more comparable to the first situation than the second. And most of the departments are extremely effective when they have leadership that believes in the mission of the agency.
Michael Lewis' the Fifth Risk highlights this pretty well.
Anarcho-Capitalist libertarianism maybe. They're the ones who want a smaller government at all costs, even if that means creating a power vaccuum for some other (potentially bad) actors to fill.
Maximizing-liberty libertarianism would say that an impartial government is necessary to enforce rights for all citizens, even if that's the right to information to vote efficiently.
I was referring to his current party. He was in Republican party when he was a mayor and only changed his party affiliation in 2018 (most likely after noticing 2018 election results)
In what way, other than both being old, white, rich and from New York.
Trump wanted to tack hard away from the center and to tear down the Republican establishment and rebuild it with a more populist vision. Bloomberg is running to stop the Democrats from tacking away from the center and to 'protect' the party from those threatening to tear it down and rebuild it with a more populist image.
Trump ran as an outsider populist, Bloomberg as an insider technocrat.
Different flavors of dictator. Confederate Fascism where the leader rules based on tribal loyalty vs. an Octavian-style emperor who rules by controlling everyone who matters behind the scenes.
Neither candidate believes in compromise or their own fallibility. In either case, we would be choosing to forfeit the ability to decide for ourselves going forward.
Bloomberg is a Republican, a lot of people have just forgotten what a more centrist Republican looks like. He's also like Trump in his racism, sexism, authoritarianism, etc. Ask New Yorkers about him.
Healthy? No. But its as American as apple pie. Everything these days,in America is based on money.
The entire political process is based on money (fundraising determines whether you're even on the ballot or a debate or able to be on a ticket) and controlled by money as there is a direct correlation between media spend and campaign success.
The worst part is that the "media" is the one sector in our country that has the most to gain from chaos and they're the ones who for the most part, control the dialog and the direction and worse, the cost.
Frankly, I am more shocked by the fact that people dont understand that its all about money.
That's why we need public funding of elections... Bloomberg can spend a billion, and who benefits the most? MSNBC, CNN, Facebook, so of course when he's not paying they STILL prop him up because the longer he stays in the race the more $$ they collectively make, who cares if it destroys America in the process as long as there's a paycheck.
When I look at politics and government in general, my immediate take away isn't "Boy, I'd sure like to pay even more for that".
That said, I agree that money in politics is an issue, but since getting money out of politics is impossible, perhaps we should just get politics out of money. A government which is not empowered/encouraged to waste the publics money would be a nice starting point.
In the Podesta emails john ivory laments the fact that the dnc thought the real treat was citizens untied, but turned out the free press from trumps celebrity dwarfed that. This time dnc is banking that Bloomberg billions can outspend even that...
It's not, but hasn't money always played a big role in politics? It's hard to define where a wealthy persons legitimate advantage lies and when it becomes purchasing the presidency. I'm all for a meritocracy, but getting money out of politics doesn't seem like anything easily solved.
The amount of money Bloomberg can/is using to buy this election is unprecedented in a Presidential candidate. The simple definition for attempting to buy the presidency is "any money you control", including your bank account, your business, dark money groups, etc. Elections should be funded entirely by donations from individuals.
Ok but I'm saying even with these rules wealthy people will have an advantage in many ways. Funding for a campaign is just one element of an elite wealthy candidates advantages, this guy has his own press and no one can do anything about that. But like I also said I agree that in an ideal system it's a pure mertirocracy for the jobs qualifications, that in practice is very hard to get though.
That doesn't mirror how primary voters actually rank candidates. Polling shows that many voter's first preference and second preference are often ideologically different -- you might have a primary voter who's 1st pick is a centrist democrat, and 2nd pick is socialist democrat, and vice versa.
> It's not, but hasn't money always played an important role in politics?
I guess it's a rhetorical question. In other words, let me rephrase: why money has always played an important role in politics?
In 2016 Lawrence Lessig tried to attack this problem, with little success. In this election there seemingly is another candidate, somewhat more practical than Lessig, with somewhat stronger systematic approach than others, so we can hope for some progress.
I'd respect the hell out of Bloomberg if he came out and said "damn right I'm buying this election...because the rules are that messed up" followed by a comprehensive plan to forever get money out of our elections.
Exactly. Bernie is the only candidate I know of who is a fan of getting the big money out of politics and has been fighting on that platform for years:
He's pointing to the impact his $400M political donations have made, like getting women elected, stopping homelessness, youth education, etc. whenever asked.
This $2,500/mo for influencers is a drop in the bucket.
I respect the guy that's said that very thing since he started running. Bernie is proving that we can win without corporate PAC money and he has a plan to get dark money out of politics.
I'm with you there, no doubt, but lately I've wondered how effectively Bernie could accomplish this.
Only Nixon could go to China, as the saying goes.
EDIT: I don't mean this in terms of electability -- I think Bernie can beat Trump hands down. What I mean is accomplishing what he sets out to do in terms of policy implementation -- which, as the Obama years have shown us, is not as easy as it sounds.
EDIT: Regarding policy, with so many Supreme Court Justices up in age, the next President will likely get the chance to set the tone. Citizens United is the ruling that enabled much of the financial influence in the government, and Bernie is committed to dismantling it.
> Regarding policy, with so many Supreme Court Justices up in age, the next President will likely get the chance to set the tone.
Terrible strategy. Bernie replacing Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer isn't going to advance the agenda. Clarence Thomas is only 71 and won't step down if a Democrat is president.
The only way Bernie passes his agenda is by getting significant portions of the country to strike until Congress complies.
With the support of so many unions[1] and willingness to use that support to push his agenda [unlike his predecessor 2], that might actually be a card in his pocket.
I suspect he'll continue to campaign and rally in various states where there is resistance to his goals (one could argue the people's goals), making it very costly to oppose him if you're not on solid footing.
Pretty much what Trump did to Republican resistance, but doubtfully as amazingly successful as it's been for Trump.
Something of note that Obama did is turn over an enormous movement to the DNC when he assumed office. Not sure anyone knows why except insiders, but it was definitely his biggest mistake, and neutered his clout. (https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-insi...). No chance Bernie will do that.
Bernie's answer to your question would probably be "I can't, but together we can." As cheesy as it sounds, it's true.
This is the game that is being played : https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-202... (The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President). The article is a little biased, but shows the sophistication required to play.
To bring a contrarian pt of view:
If you are a billionaire and you ask for donations, people might say, "Why are you asking us for money, why don't use your own?"
So he's hiring a bunch of barely-over minimum wage workers to spread his message... and? What do you think the other politicians are doing with the millions they raise? This isn't a story.
He'll be on the debate stage tonight as a legitimized candidate -- having not participated in the competitive process at all, and without a single donor (doesn't need 'em), and levering his billions to flood media.
You know, I strongly disagree with Bloomberg, having lived through his reign of terror in NYC personally. But I just don't see the point in focusing on this kind of attack.
The Democratic party is really not required to have any sort of fair process for deciding their candidate for president. It can be as transparently crooked and disgusting as this and really that's just how he chose to operate within the legal frameworks established by folks like him.
Sure, there's the huge personality flaws that Bloomberg displays by taking this strategy, but those don't seem to be of major concern to most American voters. Our current president is a daily salient reminder of this fact.
If we want to focus on Bloomberg's personality, why not start with all the horrific policies he enacted as mayor? There are far more visible character flaws in those decisions than this decision to buy his way towards the Democratic party.
If you supported his policies, after all, you'd have no problem with this strategy being undertaken - right?
"The Democratic party is really not required to have any sort of fair process for deciding their candidate for president. It can be as transparently crooked and disgusting as this and really that's just how he chose to operate within the legal frameworks established by folks like him."
So what though? What point is this rebutting? If a process is crooked and disgusting then damn straight you're gonna have people complaining about it and demanding they do better, as you see here.
My point is rebutting the point made by the poster before me, who said there was a real story here.
I disagree. This is somewhat par for the course. For many people, this could be the first time they experience the disappointment of how corrupt folks like Bloomberg operate within the political sphere. However, these people would be incorrect to chalk this up as historically or even politically noteworthy, for many of us this is rather unsurprising and the story has already been told many times. Why rehash these tired tropes when Bloomberg presents so many new, unique, and significant issues that we now must address?
That the process is crooked and disgusting is absolutely the realest story that there is here. Again, I don't understand your point. You're just being dismissive and accepting of a bad status quo for no reason other than that you (but not others!) are resigned to it.
In other words, just because you don't care doesn't mean that others don't. And the news isn't writing stories catering to solely your interests; there's millions of other readers to consider.
>> He'll be on the debate stage tonight as a legitimized candidate -- having not participated in the competitive process at all, and without a single donor (doesn't need 'em), and levering his billions to flood media.
> You know, I strongly disagree with Bloomberg, having lived through his reign of terror in NYC personally. But I just don't see the point in focusing on this kind of attack.
I think there are two issues here:
1) candidate Bloomberg himself, and
2) systemic flaws that are offensive to small-d democratic sensibilities, of which Bloomberg is a representative and symbol.
The point of that kind of attack is to bring focus on the systemic flaws. Also, at this point, many more people are probably attuned to those flaws than they are to the candidate himself (as only New Yorkers have really had to care about him, previously).
> The Democratic party is really not required to have any sort of fair process for deciding their candidate for president. It can be as transparently crooked and disgusting as this...
It can be, but not having a fair process turns off a lot of voters, and makes others angry. Doubly so if that lack of fair process means they'll be forced to choose between two bad options.
He didn't enact it, but it was a signature policy of his, and he pushed it hard. There were twice as many stops his final year in office as there were his first year. It is only a reduction if you compare it to his penultimate year, when there were 7x as many stops as his first year.
This claim he reduced it is a key talking point of his campaign, and an outright lie. He was defending it literally up until the moment he decided to run for president (defending it publicly for years until October 2019, then apologizing in November 2019 when he announced his campaign).
I wouldn't say its an attack on Bloomberg, it was the DNC who choose to changed their policy to allow him on their debate stage. They didn't have to do that.
I'm not convinced the typical process as far as there being two viable parties and running through the wringer of their processes, is something that is particularly great at producing good candidates, or that someone bypassing that legally is a bad thing.
The "right process" is whichever one ends up nominating Hillary Clinton.
... I'm only partly joking; I am not a fan of the idea that there are some special gatekeepers or One True Process™ for determining who's allowed to talk to voters.
The things Bloomberg has meaningfully "wrong" in terms of process look something like this:
- he is be a rich person (definitely not trendy in the party), and...
- his failure to solicit donations deprives people of one meaningful test of his political appeal, instead
- he spends his own money on politics instead: an uncool, Constitutionally protected exercise of the First Amendment, which has an unfortunate interaction with the political narrative that _Citizens United_ must be restored (though in fact it wouldn't stop him from doing this)
Needless to say, arguing about some of these "violations" is actually in practice just arguing about ideology and might be more effectively approached as such.
It is difficult to have these conversations and not think that people are just determining right and wrong by whatever they do or do not like based on what is immediately in front of them
The "competitive process" is getting people to say they'll vote for you in polls. So he has been participating in that process. Bloomberg -- rightly or wrongly -- has a broad appeal.
this is naive. The guy self funded. He's competing plenty, just not the classic way. No one is forcing anyone to support the guy. People are considering his points and saying "Ya, I support this guy". Best way to actually get that support down is to expose him to the public. You also risk him being a great debater, so it is what it is.
That seems to be the issue. People have largely forgotten how terrible we have been toward one another. Every generation needs the education or they will repeat the past.
True, but the 'story' is that he didn't 'raise' this money, it's his own. Meaning it has pretty big implications for campaign finance.
The precedent for having consecutive 'billionaires' as president is a little troubling. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with billionaires, but it sets the bar oddly high for a democratic republic.
> Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with billionaires
Debatable. Find me a billionaire who didn't get where they are through exploitive labour practices, monopolistic consolidation, political manipulation, massive environmental damage, or inheriting wealth earned in one or more of those ways. A world where billionaires can exists seems like a perversion of the ideals of "healthy" capitalism to me.
Wikipedia had her at £600 million in 2016, so probably not a billionaire, but that's quibbling. I honestly don't think she did anything wrong, but I also think she got that rich because she wrote her books in a world built on exploitive systems. How much less would she have if every book shop employee, amazon employee, or factory worker in china making harry potter ephemera was paid fairly for their labour?
More importantly, if she only had £60 million would she be any less happy?
I just don't get the socialist views people have here.
Where do you think the moral cash limit should be? 10 million or 100 million? When does your success turn you evil?
I don't see how you can say those things when you live in such a nice capitalistic economy when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil.
You're in the field that embraces capitalism the most, and it's beautiful. You can start a company in your garage and build an empire from nothing, and many of us have.
i think the moral limit should be set in a way that all citizens benefit from a growing economy equally. I view it as a moral failing of a society that the upper x percent are steadily increase their share of the output of the economy while a majority doesn’t benefit much from growth.
Capitalism exploits the greedy humans into generating wealth by rewarding them greatly, it also generates many jobs and assets for the economy. Yes that one person gets rewarded greatly, but many masses would not benefit if they never existed or were never motivated to do those things.
The lazy humans will fleece the system until there's nothing left. Some people need survival to motivate them to climb.
Socialism fails when you run out of other people's money. There's many examples of that.
Do you really believe that the billionaires are the virtuous ones and everybody else is lazy? My theory is that they have been able to focus the wealth the country generates on themselves instead of others. If all billionaires retired tomorrow I believe the country would keep working the same way and the economy would keep growing. Do you think e-commerce would be any smaller without Bezos? No way.
> Do you really believe that the billionaires are the virtuous ones and everybody else is lazy?
I literally called them greedy in my argument, not virtuous. I don't believe they are all virtuous, some might be. Some are seeking their passions. All are greedy in some capacity.
> If all billionaires retired tomorrow I believe the country would keep working the same way and the economy would keep growing.
I don't understand, we replace them with another person? Or would a government entity take over their assets they generated.
What I am saying is that billionaires get rewarded disproportionately more than their actual contribution. They also get listened to way more than they deserve.
There is absolutely nothing socialistic about any of the campaigns in the running. You're just creating a straw man.
Accruing capital almost never has anything to do with hard work or laziness. It's a lot of luck. What family you were born into, what area of the world, if you had parents growing up etc. You could be the laziest POS and have more money than you could spend in a lifetime.
Tax-funded education and healthcare is necessary to offset some of the insane luck a trust fund kid has vs kid with a single mother with debt and no inheritance in sight. So everyone can have a fair shot at participating in capitalism. Nothing remotely socialistic about it.
Maybe I can help. The view is that calling the accumulation of wealth "success" is a misnomer because there is hardly anything he as a person had to do compared to the collective effort of all of the people who labored to carry out the orders from above. The workers who made his "empire" what it is have been shafted, since the result of all of their work is that most of the profit goes to the few people at the top. It is wrong to say that Bloomberg did as much work. It is wrong to say that Bloomberg provided opportunity for those workers, because opportunity to be subjugated is not opportunity at all. Opportunity would be to earn 100% of the proceeds of your work so that you have the opportunity to achieve what you want. Employers unilaterally deciding how much money to pay their employees is fundamentally unfair by definition, courtesy of the word "unilaterally". Choice is a false concept in capitalism as you cannot choose from all possible options, just the ones that are graciously handed down from the plutocrats.
Also: the economy we live in is not "nice". It is if you have significant investments in the stock market, but relatively few people actually do. Of the total invested wealth, 90% of it belongs to the top 10% percent of the population. If you are not a part of this club, chances are you are hurting more than you were 15 years ago.
There are plenty of people making $100k/year exploiting labour and/or damaging the environment. But when you're one of the ~2000 billionaires in the world you are pretty much by definition responsible for such a massively larger amount of that harm than the guy making $100k.
> when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil
There are plenty of degrees of socialism that could be applied before you end up in stalinist russia. Canada is arguably more socialist than the US, is that in turmoil? Various scandinavian countries are more socialist than Canada, yet they seem to be doing alright.
I'm not saying let's become communist, I'm saying:
1. force capital to respect labour by compensating it fairly
2. force capital to pay for the social and environmental damage it does
3. stop capital from using globalization to avoid doing #1 and #2
4. keep capital out of politics, so that it can't roll back #1, #2 and #3
If we did those things, you'd likely have a lot fewer billionares. Maybe none. But if there were billionaires, they wouldn't be standing on a horde of blood money like a goddamn dragon from a fantasy novel.
I've literally described why I think generating billionaires is a symptom of a broken system. So the short answer is: because it's a broken system. A better question would be which country has the least inequality and the highest standard of living. That's the country I want to live in. Would be pretty nice if that was every country.
I hope you are not posting this from an Apple or Microsoft produced device because if you are you fall as a hypocrite to at least half the things you decry in this post.
Yes, my point is completely undermined because I own a piece of technology that was produced by labour exploitation and environmental damage. It was pretty bad of me to choose the unethically produced tech, when there are so many ethically produced options for me to choose from /s
Big difference between money sourced from individual donors and money sourced from an individual. In the former case, money represents the collective will of a group of supporters. In the latter, it represents the will of one rich guy. That's not democracy.
Unorthodox compared to what, the pre-internet age? I question the factual validity of that; I doubt there's a campaign in the last decade that hasn't paid people to support the campaign on social media.
Mostly other politicians are running ads and campaign offices as politicians have done for decades - maybe with a social media manager or two per major office.
Bloomberg is doing that, also at a level of intensity not really seen before, but then also managing a uniquely expensive social media campaign.
Clinton's total campaign was something like $600e6. Bloomberg has already spent half of that, within the span of three state primaries. I would not be surprised if he spends at least that on the primary, and if he somehow gets the nomination, a billion minimum for the entire campaign.
Bloomberg 2020 campaign is really weird, not only is he not pretending to have an grassroots campaign so far he haven't even been on the ballot at a primary.
It's only barely over minimum wage if it takes you a full-time job's worth of time to do it. This seems like the type of thing you could do in a little bit of spare time.
As for why it's a story: Well, there's was (and still is) a bit of controversy over the role that technology, specifically social media, played in the the 2016 election. What Bloomberg is doing fits right into that theme. It also raises questions about what is advertisement, and what is individual "speech", because the former generally has to be identified as such in the context of a political campaign. Posting a status update on Facebook isn't by definition an ad, posting such an update in support of a political candidate doesn't have to be either... but if you're making those posts and you also happen to be getting paid by the campaign? Does each update and DM need to say, "This tweet was paid for by 2020 Bloomberg for President"? Does it need to have a link to Bloomberg stating, "I'm Michael Bloomberg, and I approve of this ad."? Logistically how would he even do such a thing for each and every paid social media interaction?
In short, it's a story because it sits are the nexus of technology, politics, and general societal discourse.
I wonder if the entire race could be won by offering an incentive of sorts. Say a $50 Amazon gift card for every (new) voter who sends a pic of their vote receipt or something... Granted its a lot of money, but so is gifting billions to the media conglomerates for more (useless) ads...
I am not even thinking it should be clandestine. You could literally set up kiosks outside of voting areas and as people come out, and they show you their ballet stub, you give them a gift card.
The volume of young people,minorities and poor who would vote for a little cash is enough to push the ballot towards the Democrat. Its not prejudice, just a fact that there are more people who lean left than right, but most of them do not vote.If they did, the entire landscape of Washington would change and in states like Kentucky it would shift the entire balance of power.
Who cares? Just set up kiosks and give gift cards to anyone that votes. Pick the key districts (i.e. where people are likely to vote D but have low turnout) and you could easily push the electoral college over the tipping point for a few billion.
I saw someone recording a video of themselves selecting the choices on the voting kiosk. No one is going to stop you from doing that, nor would it be practical to try.
Make a publicly facing form on darknet to send in your vote receipt along with your full name, SSN, voter registration number, etc. (cross referenced against leaked databases) to prevent double dipping and spoofing. Send over $50 of Bitcoin (better yet Monero) on verification.
This is way more stringent than I realized (especially the buried in hashtags part) although the example at the end of doing #BrandNamePartner seems like it could be used disingenuously, like would #TeamMike satisfy the FTC requirements?
Whether or not you would, or believe people shouldn't have to do so, there are laws regarding ad identification and candidate approval of ads when the advertisement is political in this way.
Linking to an external image and then making a conclusion here isn't profitable to discussion here. It'd been better if the op had said, and here's Bloomberg with Trump and Clinton (I forget the 4th guys name: I'm oz)... all of them clearly golf buddies.
Trump - a former Democrat, now the Republican president
Bloomberg - a former Republican, turned Independent, now running as a Democrat
Parties used to have the power, but now it seems like popular politicians are picking the party they think provides them with the easiest path to power, realigning their policy views accordingly.
git merge first-party instead of git init or git merge 3rd-party
That's the strategy being used because 3rd parties have no chance in our system. The only thing you can do is merge into one of the 2, become the new repo owner and reshape it going forward.
Bernie's "independent" label means very little. Look at how he votes. He's a Democrat. It's a weird attempted knock against him considering how consistent he's always been.
At the very least I wish the parties would split themselves.
The Democrats seems to have both a socdem wing and a more neoliberal wing and the Republicans a growing right wing populist wing and the standard neocons. Maybe this is oversimplified, but I feel like these should be different parties
Yes. But they're kind of stuck to each other. Really I agree that we have 4 major constituencies stuck within 2 parties. First past the post and single member districts kind of force it to be that way.
This is the sad truth. Try being a person who leans conservative, having the absolute racists of society be on your team. I imagine it's not much different than a liberal leaning person getting all the crazies on their side. I wish there were distinct parties for reasonable people...
I was pointing out that it was not "supposed" at all. Trump is a former democrat in exactly the same way that Bloomberg is a former republican. There was no reason to weasel word it
Exactly, also Bloomberg only changed his party affiliation in 2018, when we had record number of voters during non presidential election, and Democrats winning large number of seats.
Given other information about him, and even last debate he is the absolute weakest candidate, almost feels like he is there to spoil the election to help the incumbent.
> a man who built his own personal tech/media empire.
Well, him and the three other people with the skills to actually built it.. he just provided the seed capital and then put his name on it. Secunda, MacMillan and Zegar are all billionaires.
They're building it, and seem to be recruiting heavily from Google/Facebook/Amazon etc.
From a political science and historical perspective it's absolutely astonishing. Mike has a lot of baggage but a lot of cash and talent behind him, including ~100 pretty excellent TV and online ads.
Emoluments case got thrown out the courts plus he donates 100% of his salary each year. His company’s net worth has dropped by at least 700 million when he became president. Meanwhile the previous president is now worth over 120 million and bought a $15 million mansion recently. Pelosi is worth $140 million while being a life time politician. Won’t comment further as I don’t want HN to turn into political flame war but I had to set the record straight because it sounds a lot like accuse opposition of what you are doing.
>Emoluments case got thrown out the courts plus he donates 100% of his salary each year.
This isn't correct. It was thrown out because the Democrats lacked standing. It wasn't ruled on the merits: a standing argument means you are not eligible to bring a case yourself.
It's not even a sensible argument: salary is a nominal sum the government pays the president. Emoluments are gifts from foreigners. There's no logical relationship between salary and gifts.
$450k per year is not a nominal sum by any means. He doesn't need to donate his salary but he does. No previous president has ever done this. If a democrat president had done this, they would be all over the news. But since it's Trump, most people don't even know about it. Also if he was really trying to rich himself, why have his company's net worth dropped by 700 million over 3 years? And how about the previous presidents and Pelosi who are worth hundreds of millions after serving while being life time politicians?
I think people are letting their disdain for him cloud their judgement. Also innocent until proven guilty.
Nominal relative to the sums alleged re: emoluments and other intakes of money such as secret service lodging snd not paying city security bills for police at his rallies. Those are in the millions.
You focussed on that and not the central point that your interpretation for dismissal of the court case was incorrect. It has nothing to do with his salary.
What exactly is secret service lodging? not paying city security bills for police? Are you being serious? A President and even ex presidents get secret service. How exactly is he lodging? These are absolutely absurd claims.
Have you looked into what the Bidens were up to? Where was everyone when Obama came out of office being worth over 120 million and Nancy Pelosi worth 140 million?
Like I said, I think your disdain for him is clouding your judgement.
Trump is highly unlikely to be a billionaire. The only source for this claim was Trump himself. He took on an alter ego and lied to Forbes to get on the Forbes list.
Other than Forbes, I know of no source that claimed Trump was a billionaire. I think it all goes back to the original lie.
Further, most of his charity scams have been strictly small time. Amounts ranging from $10,000 to a few hundred thousand. No billionaire needs to bother scamming figures so low. If you have, say, $5 billion in net worth and it grows at 5% per year, that’s $250 million per year.
$100,000 is strictly beneath the notice of someone with that much income. But it was not below Trump’s notice. Ergo, it seems unlikely he has the income. Again, the only source on his wealth was himself.
I should note, against my own argument, that Forbes presently thinks Trump is worth $4.4 billion. I could be wrong, but the charity behaviour seems so contrary to actually having wealth. We also know no banks other than Deutsche Bank would lend Trump money. If he truly has billions in assets not encumbered by debt....why? There seems little risk.
Actual net worth is very hard to estimate because he is hiding his financial status as much as possible. The fact that American banks don't do business with him anymore indicates that his financial situation is not good.
Paid shills tend to have a strange effect where they polarize people in the other direction than intended since their arguments are not always well founded and honest, and they will always suffer from some form of groupthink. It's a slingshot effect--at first people fall for the farce, but soon they realize they have been mislead. It could even spoil the election and get some to vote in the opposite direction.
I think it's also pretty easy to spot these days and we're armed much better to fight it at the platform-level.
I don't think this will end well for Bloomberg, he has a long way to climb, and his name is literally associated with big money. He may have already reached saturation, and this is a dying move.
> Paid shills tend to have a strange effect where they polarize people in the other direction than intended since their arguments are not always well founded and honest, and they will always suffer from some form of groupthink.
Another aspect of this is that when one encounters a positive comment about Bloomberg on the Internet, the default assumption for a lot of people is going to be that Bloomberg slipped them a twenty. Even honest supporters of Bloomberg are going to have their statements viewed with extreme skepticism.
> I think it's also pretty easy to spot these days...
Is that really true? Some forms of astroturf are transparently obvious, but just because some of it is easy to spot doesn't mean it all is.
> I don't think this will end well for Bloomberg...
Same here. I'll take him seriously as a candidate once he's defended his ideas and his record in an adversarial setting (such as tonight's debate) and has won some delegates.
There's a lot of engagement on some issue or other, such as this one of how easy it is to spot paid shills and then while making a pretty reasonable point about it stating something very contentious as fact. Just like we see from Bernie and his total commitment to call communism by another name.
And that last bit is 1% of the interest and is tangentially related so it doesn't totally jar. Look out for it. You get the same ones repeated again and again like that. It may be totally organic too because Assange is a narcisist rapist who is lying about being afraid of being extradited to the USA so lots of people have said so. Keep repeating and it becomes fact undermines anyone with a different point of view. Full disclosure I am not an Assange supporter nor a Bloomberg or Bernie supporter.
Paid shills are actually really hard to spot. I strongly suspect most of what jars as paid shills aren't paid.
Yeah I think you have to stem the tide to avoiding the "unpaid" shills. I've even seen people who shill in one direction just to be accepted by a community so they can troll them.
I hypothesize you could detect this type of stuff using semantic analysis of text if you check word order and frequency (or go ML with fastText or w/e) you could get maybe 90% accuracy at determining whether someone isn't a shill. There needs to be an investigative process which humans undergo after this. Then some form of identification would be required before any sort of ban (ideally you tell them, this only stops the false positives from rejoining) can be lifted, just incase any local laws are broken.
The shills all have some source material, so they should be closer to it language-wise than those that they teach/brainwash.
But hey, I wish I was paid to shill against other shills and detect them, it would be an interesting job.
Yes the executive powers in the Constitution are obviously not governed by Congress but Congress has indeed delegated some their responsibilities to the President. These, known as the emergency powers, are what I am referring to.
That's all well and good, but those are powers that have never been used since they've been granted, and that article is just a bunch of "Trump is so scary, look at all this stuff he could do!" tripe.
Hasn’t this been going on for years? People made the same complaints about spending on TV adverts. Is it substantively worse in this election, or just spending a bit more on a different type of media? I don’t know, genuine question from a Brit.
Part of the problem is that it's a self-funded campaign. It's one thing when a campaign raises a bunch of money from donors and does an ad blitz, because at least it in theory represents real people (with contribution caps) who donated. When it's a billionaire self-funding, that's not the case. (PACs are also problematic, because they side-step the contribution caps)
What's the alternative though? Even assuming it would be constitutional to cap Bloomberg's political spending, I don't see why Bloomberg's supporters should have to donate money to the campaign of the 9th richest person in the world.
I think that is a lot harder to know and an eternal debate I have.
Yeah lots of media is buying a lot of attention...in the end someone chooses to vote for that person, or not, or stay home.
I strongly worry about the influence / advantage of such money, but folks still pick them and provided they're not illegally ... imprisoning candidates (extreme example of course)... it's still an election.
I don't know how to tell how much these things really change people's minds or if they really do just get extra attention and folks pick the person they want.
It is super effective. I was in FL last weekend and the tv stations were flooded with ads; the positive tone seeps into your brain whether you like it or not.
The democratic party is not yet running anyone; the two major party members running are Biden and Klobuchar who are neither populist nor demagogues; it's unlikely Bloomberg is the preferred choice of anyone there; Bloomberg is not populist (and I would also argue against demagogue); and Sanders, who might reasonably be called populist (but also not a demagogue) is also far from the DNC's preferred choice, maybe even below Bloomberg.
Was Hillary Clinton "buying the election" when she outspent Donald Trump roughly 2:1?
Or is it only "buying the election" when it's a candidate you dislike?
My vote isn't for sale and I assume that's true for other Americans. If I thought otherwise, I'd have a hard time convincing myself that democracies can work.
A big difference is Bloomberg currently is 100% self funding his campaign while the '16 Hillary campaign had a lot of money yes but it came from donors supporting her. Bloomberg is self funding and is only where he is because of the massive amount of money he's throwing around from his own pocket.
Also it's not about explicitly buying votes but there's a lot of lower information voters out there who currently are principally hearing from Bloomberg because he's spending lots of money in later states where the more traditionally funded campaigns haven't because they're on lower cash reserves.
> A big difference is Bloomberg currently is 100% self funding his campaign while the '16 Hillary campaign had a lot of money yes but it came from donors supporting her. Bloomberg is self funding and is only where he is because of the massive amount of money he's throwing around from his own pocket.
It's not clear at all that Bloomberg would have failed had he run a traditional campaign.
I'm not bothered by self-funded campaigns because my vote isn't for sale (and I assume the same is true for others). Winning elections is about convincing people, not brainwashing them. Money increases visibility, but it didn't save Hillary Clinton.
> Also it's not about explicitly buying votes but there's a lot of lower information voters out there who currently are principally hearing from Bloomberg because he's spending lots of money in later states where the more traditionally funded campaigns haven't because they're on lower cash reserves.
"Lower information voters" is just code for "dumb people who disagree with me". Your perspective is that voters are dumb animals who flock to whoever spends the most on ads.
>Winning elections is about convincing people, not brainwashing them.
Are you suggesting that political advertisements don't use the same sorts of psychological manipulation as non-political advertisements? Or you do consider psychological manipulation to just be a form of "convincing"?
>Your perspective is that voters are dumb animals who flock to whoever spends the most on ads.
Voters are human beings, most of which are highly susceptible to being manipulated through an array of time-tested psychological tricks that advertisers have been using for over 100 years.
I'm not saying it's a 1 to 1 correlation between dollars spent and winning just that without being able to spend piles of money a lot of people who've gone from Biden to him wouldn't have heard much about him and that his large spending is artificially increasing his numbers in polls above where'd they be if he didn't have the funds to spam states later in the primary cycle.
No 'low information' is just that people who don't, either through apathy, time or lack of interest, seek out or read that much about the various campaigns. Tons of smart people are low information.
Also your vote might not literally be for sale but it's definitely influenced by the amount of media and information you see about campaigns which is correlated with money. Consider the degenerate case of a campaign with nearly zero money but a perfect fit with your politics. Can't vote for it if you haven't heard of it.
It doesn't work like that. The big spenders drown out any alternative and they offer only a different interface for pretty much the same back end.
Since the US green party had 200-300 views per youtube video for them out of a million voters about 1 or 2 are not fooled. With candidates further "down" the list we all are fooled. I read maybe half the program for 1% of the alt-candidates. Definitely fooled I was.
From your link you are presumably comparing $1,190.7M to $646.8M correct? Those values don't reflect the 66M of Trumps own money, don't reflect Russian interference (which has been going on since approximately the Magnitksy act), and don't reflect the in-kind gifts Trump gave by using his own private jet and numerous Trump properties for rallies. Maybe (and I truly mean maybe), the 100:1 remark was hyperbole on my part, but I personally don't doubt that the GRU spent billions.
I don’t think trump voters were “fooled”, they did in fact own the libs and will likely continue to try and own the libs. For many in america this culture war shit is the only substantive choice at the polls.
It’s true, the libs were owned. And owned hard. It’s all that matters to a lot of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if some are cheering on this Bloomberg phenomenon because of the potential damage it could do to the credibility of the Democratic Party, setting up the libs to get owned yet again in November.
That's a bleak and destructive ideology, if all they care about is hurting people they disagree with. What happened to political movements being for something, instead of just against everything?
That's not all they care about, it's just all they have left. Their values have been systematically eliminated from education, entertainment, and the courts. Their regions are socially and economically ruined. They have some representation in politics and the media but it's mostly just exploitive lip service. Their states are used as shorthand for incest and illiteracy in the punchlines of jokes.
I would guess that when there's a riot in an urban neighborhood you don't say they have an ideology which only cares about hurting people and destroying things. You should look at this in a similar way.
I think you nailed it. It is so easy to dismiss their complaints and then people are surprised when it turns out that people don't like being dismissed. Who knew?
Who exactly is being dismissed here? And who's doing the mismissing? Because we're talking about Trump voters only caring about "owning the libs". That is dismissing a massive chunk of the population. Yeah, of course liberals don't like that, but you don't see them going on a destructive rampage, they just want to elect better politicians who are going to fix the country. Their complaints are entirely legitimate.
Politics isn't a game, it's about running an actual country where people live.
Heh. Interesting. The meme of 'owning the libs' is clearly a strong one and happily repeated by left leaning talk show/radio hosts. Are you talking with 'representatives' of the population? I try. The sense I am getting is the frustration of not being heard, being ignored.. or having their voices simplified into a sound bite along the lines of 'owning the libs'. It can get annoying.
Trump is a symptom of that. A big giant scream that says simply 'can you hear me now?'.
I even disagree with you about it not being a game. It is. It has real life stakes and consequences, and scary ones at that, but it is a game.
As for liberals just trying to fix the country, while saying equivalent of 'we r gonna nix insurance companies, coal factories and big coke' may simply not be perceived as such. It needs to be addressed and not shoved down people's throats.
You have to be willingly blind to your own side propaganda to not see this big emergent picture.
I'm an outsider, but I talk to a lot of people online. The frustration I'm seeing is indeed one of not being heard and being ignored. Power is in the hands of a minority. The country is heading in a different direction than most people want it to go, because of the grip on power that the Republican Party has. And they're willing to bend and twist the Constitution to hold on to that power.
Seeing it as a game is a massive part of the problem. It's not a game. It's real. Trying to "win" at the cost of the country and the people in the country is doing very real damage.
The liberals are the ones who are trying to get everybody affordable health insurance. It's the Republicans who keep sabotaging that. The reason the solution is starting to look like one without private insurance companies, is because those companies deep desperately trying to be part of the problem: not paying people for the treatment they need, using any excuse to deny people coverage. All that is doing is proving to the people that this system is not going to work. Hence the increasing popularity of Medicare-for-all type systems.
The insurance companies are not the goal, good health insurance is. The Republicans and their supporters keep insisting insurance companies are more important than health coverage for Americans.
I see the picture. I'm not subject to your propaganda, as I'm seeing this from the outside, but I do see that your arguments try to paint black as white and white as black.
I apologize. It is possible I used too strong a characterization for the sake of effect. Still, with regards to propaganda, you are subject to it. Best you can do is be aware of it and act accordingly. Maybe it would a little less unnverving if I used term advertising since they are closely related and propaganda has more negative connotations?
But going back to the original thread. How are my arguments miscolored? I think your internal frame reference might be off. Could you elaborate? I do not want to assume and I find the conversation interesting.
I don't know if your arguments are miscolored, but they all seem to apply just as much the other way around. How exactly do Trump supporters get ignored or denied? Trump's primary policy seems to be that he wants to ignore and deny various minorities. It really appears to me that the primary reason Republican voters are angry at liberals, is that the liberals don't want them to discriminate foreigners, LGBT people, and women. Republicans claim they're being persecuted merely because other people are receiving the same rights they have. Many of Trump's policies are specifically about hurting people, denying them rights, and protecting people who hurt people.
Do you understand why I find it hard to have any sympathy for that?
I absolutely do. Being able to understand other individual's point of view is at the center of my argument. May I suggest that you conflate support for Trump and support for his policies? It is not a meaningless distinction. Without going too much into the weeds and reciting quotes from "Hillbilly Elegy", it helps to understand that Trump supporters, on average, were not in that great of a shape financially. They were literally abandoned by the elites, called various forms of deplorables, and then expected to vote for not-Trump, because... what exactly? They just had their livelihood decimated by trade deals that brought money to conglomerates, but left them in the dust. "Their" representatives in congress and senate pay lip service to what they think they want to hear, but nothing ( some cynically note by design ) gets done. Their farms are slowly being bought out by agrobusiness as they are effectively forced to compete with low wage immigrants. No politicians would dream of suggesting companies should stop hiring them, so fines don't follow, but a token level of enforcement makes it look like something is going on.
Along comes Trump and uses that pain to his advantage. We won't go after the companies, but we will sure deport them all. Kinda stupid idea given the sheer number of illegal aliens, but it is better than nothing. Some people nod. We will then build a wall. Kinda stupid, but it is a good visual. Some people nod. We will renegotiate NAFTA. People are listening. They know this is one of the reasons their little community fell apart. Nodding intensifies. And so it went on.. Trump was better than doing nothing.
It was a scream for help and it was ignored by everyone, but Trump, Bernie and Yang. Everyone else pays lip service, but do not seem to understand the underlying socio-political current in the US.
And more to your point, all the policies that you disagree with, the discrimination and all that jazz stems straight from that pain. Those people feel persecuted not because someone is getting equal rights, but because the country that they were born and raised in, sold them out in a truly American fashion. They felt betrayed. They would likely give zero to no shits about LGBTs, foreigners or women if their bellies were full and were left alone. But they are not and were not. Foreigners are a proxy for NAFTA issues. LGBT is a proxy for change. ( I think you may be onto something with women.)
And you have no sympathy for that? And you are surprised they are lashing out?
Then get ready for another 4 years of Trump. Unless you.. we somehow manage to go beyond our comfort zones and openly talk about what ails us, there is no hope for reconciliation, the polarization will increase with likely even worse results than what we have now; though I fear to speculate.
I have sympathy for their economic problems, absolutely. But they vote for the party that's primarily responsible for those economic problems. Over the past 40 years, the middle class has been hollowed out, and that's been done primarily thanks to Reagan. Before Reagan, the US had more left-wing economic policies and a stronger middle class. They'd be better off voting for Sanders than Trump. Trump hasn't realy done anything for them except some symbolic gestures, but he has made it harder for them to export their agricultural products.
They keep voting for the party that's hurting them, because that party keeps lying to them, and they keep buying those lies.
I will open by saying that the US party two party system is the root of a fair amount of issues in US. Normally, I would argue for some sort of rebalancing to ensure that the system works, but the power centers are too firmly entrenched and any real change would require major political capital. After all, levers are known. Who knows what kind of levers new system would introduce. In that sense, the party system is too far gone.
And it is a feature Trump successfully exploited. It is interesting to note that Sanders and Bloomberg are also exploiting that system; just in different fashions. And I am perfectly OK with both of their approaches though I favor Sander's as it seems more honest.
All that said, with your point about being better off under Democratic reign of terror versus Republican reign of terror, I just gave you an entire list of grievances of the forgotten class ( as the current president sometimes dubs them ). Those grievances did not get addressed by either party over the last 40 years. Worse, Clinton signature is on NAFTA papers.
I would agree with you on Trump vs Sanders as they, amusingly, shared a lot of the populist message. I have my pet theories, but they would just derail this thread altogether.
I would like to note that it is hard for me to argue that Trump policies ( with exception of Soybeans and the bailout there ) has not done anything for them. For better or for worse, Trump is very keen on listening to his core supporters. He seems to genuinely care about his ratings, which does lead to all sorts of theatrics ( as you note ).
That said, note that regardless of how it was achieved and how we are going to pay for it in the future, unemployment now is low and entry level wages are up. Just that fact alone should give you pause, because that likely means that some do feel relief under Trump.
You have to admit that from that perspective a voter may be inclined to vote for Trump again in 2020.
I certainly agree that the two party system, and correspondingly, the first-part-the-post district system, is crippling the US political system. Proportional representation in Congress and some sort of ranked or approval voting system for the president and similar offices, would do a lot of good.
I certainly think it'd be good if the Democratic and Republican parties both disappeared, but it's not true that both are equally corrupt or equally guilty to the problems facing the US. It really is since Reagan that economic inequality started to rise, middle class wages stagnated, and national debt started to spiral out of control. It's absolutely true that the Democratic party has been controlled by its conservative wing, with presidents Clinton and Obama not significantly changing the neoliberal direction set out by Reagan. Even so, the current economic recovery in the US was started by Obama, and that's what Trump is currently benefiting from.
But if voters want real change, the progressive wing of the Democratic party would be a better bet than voting for increasingly conservative Republicans.
The big obstacle is that everybody with power is afraid to lose it. A multi-party system would be much better at representing the will of the people, but to change that, the party in power will have to give up much of that power, and that's unlikely to happen. Especially in the current political climate.
This is my problem exactly. All this money, all these issues, and we're stuck with these clowns? Whatever happened to statesmen and women? Nope, we're stuck with politicians that act like pro wrestlers. We don't need to overthrow the government. We just need to overthrow the parties.
I had such high hopes for humanity with the emergence of the internet. With the all the world's knowledge at our fingertips, including detailed information about political fundraising, voting records, etc., it would be SO EASY to find and elect the "right" people.
I truly long for thoughtful discussions about real issues. I'm still holding out a little hope for the next great awakening.
With all the world's knowledge at our fingertips, including detailed information about political fundraising and voting records, people have increasingly realized that politics isn't the right place for thoughtful discussions about real issues. It's like going to Nike headquarters and asking why everyone's so focused on sportswear.
I strongly disagree with your Nike / sportswear comparison. Maybe I didn't communicate my point clearly here. I'm specifically talking about governance / political science vs. popcorn politics. There are plenty of real issues to be discussed in the world of political philosophy, public administration and government that don't involve stage shows and rabble rousing.
Starting with local politics first, then regional, THEN national - the question of who will govern us and set rules and make laws is of critical importance. What good does it do to solve the world's problems if our representatives are robbing the coffers and crashing the plane into the mountain?
Right, that’s the premise I don’t agree with. Politics is the art of stage shows and rabble rousing, and tackles larger issues only to the degree that they make a good show or easily rouse the rabble. Important questions usually aren’t and usually shouldn’t be solved through politics.
I have only ever voted third party. But they continue to not get any traction and I feel more and more that my time would be better spent almost literally anywhere besides trying to be involved in politics.
Bit of a chicken and egg issue. It's hard to convince people that this is a viable option until a third party receives a critical mass of votes at least once.
There were obvious and appreciable difference between the two candidates of those two teams, between their campaign promises and between their political and personal histories. Even if you didn't "like" either, you can still think about these differences and decide which one you think is more fit to serve as president.
Even if you're unwilling to do that, then practically speaking, there were more than 2 teams. If a party receives 5% of the popular vote, they qualify for federal funding in the next election. It might not necessarily get them on the debate stage, but we're talking about a lot of money to get their messages out there one way or another. Libertarians got 3.28% of the popular vote in 2016. It might be naive to think that they or the Green party could have reached 5%, but I'm not one to take the defeatist attitude that voting for a 3rd party is throwing your vote away.
You know a lot can be said about deficiencies in the democratic process in the U.S. but the crazy guy would just be removed. He'd need decisive support from the military to stay and ride out the fact that he lost all democratic legitimacy. I don't see a coup on the horizon. Do you?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Trump's actions that you imagine to be constitutional violations are probably actions that you personally disagree with, but are not actually constitutional violations.
Republicans as a group care deeply about the Constitution, and the Constitution is clear about when the term of the presidency ends. He would not have the support of the Republicans in the Senate if he chose to remain in office past the expiration of his term.
> Republicans as a group care deeply about the Constitution
Well, they say that a lot, I can't see any evidence that it's particularly true in general (it's definitely true that there are things that they care about that they cite their particular interpretation of the Constitution to support, though on issues like executive vs. legislative power their deeply held Constitutional beliefs seem to flip 180° when you flip which parties are in power in the respective branches; the Constitution seems to be more of an identity touchstone than a document whose actual content is of particular concern.)
I think the vast majority of folks who voted for Trump felt that they received what they were expecting to receive. I think most who voted that way the first go around will likely vote for him again should they return to the polls.
Most of my family was so nihilistic after the press called Romney a nazi for transporting their dogs on top of their vehicles that they were happy to do whatever made the press mad.
At first the press only talked about Trump to ignore real republican thought, then it became a reinforcing cycle as people bought into the despair.
Illinois counties downstate (I live in a bordering state) ran out of Republican primary ballots last election. These people come out in droves. They will continue to come out in full force, 150%. I believe we will see record turn out in the fall, and it will be mostly Trump supporters.
Edit: at least point out why you're downvoting me, this is a straightforward answer to the question.
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- The wall
- Fight against sanctuary cities, including now support for a bill that would allow relatives of murdered US citizens who were victims of aliens protected by Sanctuary laws, to sue those sanctuary cities.
- Travel ban, which for me is a litmus test as to whether you are a "crazy leftist" by whether or not you actually think it's a "muslim ban."
- Stronger economy through less regulation
- Bring back jobs to US
- Rational trade deals that prioritize US, not sacrifice it. (China, USMCA, etc.)
- A general aversion to taking other first-world countries' shit, who simultaneously exploit us for money and protection, and say how horrible we are.
- Reversal of Iran deal
- Efforts to remove US from middle east
- Prison reform
- Drug price transparency
- "Drain the swamp" / exposure of the "deep state" / revelation that this concept is real and simple: the natural bias that occurs within government when there is a 90%/10% political imbalance. (Currently 90% democrat/10% republican.) This manifests as things like the Mueller report: based on a lie, started by hostile government actors, causes a shit-ton of political casualties who would not even be considered if they were on the other side, wastes everybody's time and money. And it is only possible for it to happen one way: against Republicans. This is transparent and obvious.
- 5 year foreign lobbying ban
- Repeal and replace Obamacare. (As an anecdote, my mom said that out of the whole 8 years of Obama as president, the only thing that really changed for her is that she paid more for insurance while receiving less, a direct result of Obamacare.)
That's a bad faith response. He literally said if you believe it's a honest-to-god muslim ban he will categorize you as a 'crazy leftist', not if you disagree with him about whether or not it is good or bad. It is objectively not a muslim ban as anyone from those countries was barred, and the demographics of the countries don't automatically make it a muslim ban or imply any malfeasance by the president.
>- Travel ban, which for me is a litmus test as to whether you are a "crazy leftist" by whether or not you actually think it's a "muslim ban."
Can you elaborate on this? While it's not a literal ban on muslims, it does disporportionately affect muslims.
>- Bring back jobs to US
What Trump policies can be attributed to this? AFAIK there a bunch of reports that a bunch of companies that "brough back" jobs were planning on doing it anyways (eg. carrier/honeywell, couldn't remember which).
>- Efforts to remove US from middle east
Sure, he hastily pulled out of Syria, but earlier this year we were on the brink of war with Iran. What gives?
>- the natural bias that occurs within government when there is a 90%/10% political imbalance. [...] This manifests as things like the Mueller report: [...]
I will address one of the points as the other ones have been addressed by someone else already.
> But Mueller is a registered republican?
One thing you will notice is that a lot of Trump supporters hate both Democrats as well as many Republicans. Trump himself ran on attacking the Bush era. Remember his debate with Jeb Bush? Same with him hating on McCain (who gave the Steele Dossier to the FBI). That's why, Trump and a lot of his supporters dislike majority of dems but also many republicans.
I really dislike that you are asking me to do your homework for you. But,
> Can you elaborate on this?
The countries are predominantly muslim but how does that make it a "muslim ban"? Are muslims still allowed from other countries? Yes. Are Christians from those banned countries allowed either? No. Seems straightforward then that it is not a muslim ban. The list of countries was composed by the Obama administration, not Trump. Trump just made a rational application of it. If there were a European ban, would it be a Christian ban? It would "disproportionately affect" Christians. Seems outlandish to think so. This characterization is ridiculous.
> What Trump policies can be attributed to this?
China trade war tariffs, for example. The China trade deal more broadly. The USMCA. The effort to make the US energy independent and a net exporter. [1]
> earlier this year we were on the brink of war with Iran
This depends on your choice of media and its bias and characterizations. The choice to strategically eliminate a single terrorist general with a missile, rather than wait for the plans he was brewing to bubble, prevented things from escalating and did it with zero casualties. This is an example of, not a counterpoint to, efforts to remove.
> But Mueller is a registered republican?
This seems like a very hollow thing to say. Whether or not the specific investigator is of a certain party is generally meaningless when his appointment is the decision of someone else, and the work on his team was mostly not carried out by him, but his staff. This would be true anyway, but it was clear in his deposition that he was also a mostly ignorant figurehead, unaware of a lot of what was happening. More broadly, I used the mueller investigation as an example of a wide trend, and that Mueller is a republican has nothing to do with that trend, or the statistical makeup of DC.
> Prison reform
Please literally google "trump prison reform". The First Step Act on Wikipedia is the first result.
> Drug price transparency
Please literally google "trump drug price transparency". The whitehouse fact sheet is the first result. [2]
> Protection of religious expression in schools
Please literally google "trump protection of religious expression in schools". The whitehouse fact sheet is the first result. [3]
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If you are genuinely surprised you've never heard of these things before, you may consider what aspects of your information intake may be bubble-like and self-reinforcing. It would be healthy to question the media narratives that you tend to consume, and/or opening your stream to other news sources.
Announced intent + evident actual intent + major effect make it a reasonable description. Sure, it's not exact in a logically pure sense, but that's not how most descriptions of things in reality rather than analytical ideals are intended.
Your characterization is wrong. "Major effect" - to what end? Not the end of banning muslims. If that's the goal, it's doing a really, really bad job at it, since the majority of muslims in the world are unaffected. The most recent 6 counties added to the list are not even predominantly muslim.
If you have a child that claims he's going to dig a hole to china, but people tell him this is futile and he should consider digging a well instead, which is an action sort-of in the same direction but meaningfully different and actually practical, and then he agrees and digs a well, then you appreciate the well and call it a "well," you don't continue to call it a "hole to China," which it clearly is not. You could, but you'd be displaying your attachment to your original anger.
I don't think they honestly cared about tax cuts. It's all about "Owning the libs" and making America "great" which Fox news tells them is exactly what America is now thanks to Trump and no no other countries are laughing at us constantly that's "Fake news"
The far right is obviously very obsessed with "owning the libs".
There is a massive, silent, and barely political segment of the population between far left and far right. For that silent majority, the only real impact they will have noticed from the Trump presidency is that they paid slightly less in tax.
Most people genuinely don't care about politics. Everyone cares about their money. I think the tax cuts are more important than you let on.
If they honestly cared about the tax cuts then they would have noticed how transparent they were and how after a couple years they wouldn't benefit the average American at all.
It is nearly impossible to overestimate the stupidity of the average person.
They don't know or care about tax policy, what deductions apply when, how rates are calculated, none of it. They will only notice that they paid less this year than normal, and that will make them happy.
Trump did not buy the election like Bloomberg is trying to do. Sadly Bloomberg is pretty much evidence of that in three years the Democrats have not managed to formulate a message of other than "not Trump". Bloomberg is much more authoritarian bent than any current candidate or Trump. Trump might be an embarrassment but because he is under the Republican banner we know the press is more than willing to ride his ass no matter how long he remains in office. The real threat is if we get someone in who the press turns a blind eye to their actions.
Congress has abdicated responsibility for far too long to the Administrative branch. The greatest example is on immigration where they would rather act by decree, issued by court or their own guy as President. Unfortunately Congress answers to their party affiliation first and the people last. Used to be committees made Congress work but they have been slowly torn down since the Republican take over in 96 and Democrats have shown no desire to bring them back.
Congress works when both sides work it out and debate, this only happens with a strong committee structure and until it returns Congress will be controlled by their parties who have the power to punish members of the party.
Your assessment is pretty accurate based on some of his talks I listened to. Trump is scary to me partly, because he is not that competent and has low impulse control. Bloomberg is scary, because he is competent and seems to have very.. top-down view of things. His talk about regressive taxes in particular was illuminating.
It feels like a Simpsons episode. We are the democratic party. I don't know how we are going to blow it, but we will give it our best shot.
Disclaimer; I am in no way supportive of Trump or most of his policies.
However as an outsider (I'm not American), he actually seemed more on message and resonated more with his base than his opponent in 2016 so when Hillary became the nominee for the Democratic party I actually bet 100 NOK with my co-worker that Trump would win.
His message was definitely, in many ways, way more and more effectively populist than Hillary's. His wall's a great example: it's far-right from some perspectives, but from others it's what they've been speculating aloud (amongst themselves, with no public stage) as a "common-sense" solution for decades (source: been around plenty of that, for... decades). It's the definition of populism. Ditto trade issues. There's a lot of perception among voters that the average citizen got screwed by things like MFN (or whatever they renamed it to) status for China and a variety of other trade agreements and, go figure, a lot of that sentiment crosses party lines. His hard talk about those agreements and China was, again, blue-collar as hell and exactly what you could have heard anywhere in middle America (or just outside a big city) for many years before the election, but had practically no voice in either viable political party. His message was, to borrow one of his favorite words, kinda perfect.
Nb I'm not using populism as a negative term here, and do not consider something automatically bad because it's populist.
Now, to defend describing his supporters as having been "fooled", I'd say the strongest evidence for that would be that some of his major proposals weren't ever really proposals, and still haven't meaningful become proposals (his "most perfect" or whatever health care reform comes immediately to mind—what exactly was that supposed to be? Very good, the best, whatever it was.) and that his support many of these positions is very probably opportunistic and disingenuous.
To tack back the other way, I personally would accept someone I knew or suspected to be opportunistically, rather than genuinely, supporting my interests if I believed they were likely to meaningfully advance them regardless, so my support of such a person wouldn't necessarily be evidence that I'd been "fooled". Probably some were (I mean, there've been no shortage of interviews with Trump voters all over the media in the last 3 years, and clearly some were not, uh, going in with both eyes open) but who knows how many knew he was full of shit (I mean it's kinda his thing? What he was famous for everywhere, including right-wing radio, before he became a Republican politician?) but thought he'd effectively advance their interests anyway. Possibly a lot.
> His wall's a great example: it's far-right from some perspectives
I have no idea where people get this from. I am an Indian immigrant and India recently finished building their border fence/wall with Bangladesh. It works and helps reduce illegal crossing. Plus Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and other democrats are on video from back in 2000s and 2012 where they advocated for the exact same thing.
Simply labeling everything you disagree with as far-right is silly.
Living in the midwest, as soon as Hillary "won" the nomination, I knew Trump would win. People who don't like him genuinely underestimate the support his base provides.
There is a reason republicans are falling all over themselves to lick his boots. He controls the power now.
Entertainment is a key component in my theory as well. For me, I called the last election after seeing Trump's behavior in the first republican debate. After he won the election, I predicted him winning in 2020 and shooting for 2024.
The other major factor I see is how Trump handles scandal: brag about getting away with it, and accuse everybody else of doing the same thing. It's certainly dramatic -- I'm loath to call it entertaining... but it's hard to tear oneself away from this news cycle
> Living in the midwest, as soon as Hillary "won" the nomination, I knew Trump would win.
Exactly the same, for (probably—also Midwestern) similar reasons. As soon as he Wile-E-Coyote'd over the cliff of his first couple big scandals in the primary and made it clear that the secret to being scandal-impervious was simply never to look down, that plus his message meant I started telling people he'd probably win the nomination. He sounded like a mash-up of every Republican I'd ever talked to, and even kinda like a lot of older-school Union Strong sorts of Dems—not like a Republican politician or "intellectual" or media figure, mind you, but a voter, which is entirely different. Not even Palin had a message that close to what you might overhear at the local coffee, beer, & bait shop. It was uncanny.
Then Hillary became his opponent and while everyone else was laughing about the whole thing I was like, "Uh oh. Shit. Trump's probably gonna win. Doesn't matter if it's fair or not, fact is she's widely hated and, hate to break it to you, it's not just die-hard Republicans or irredeemable misogynists who feel that way. Should they hate her? Doesn't matter. They do."
It may be an unpopular opinion, but I am ok with Bloomberg spending some of his money. Granted, 300MM to him like approximately $20 to me, but still..
Do not misunderstand me. His attempt to simply buy an election is.. annoying, if not unseemly. That said, I am perfectly fine with him finally spending at least some of his vast fortune instead of hoarding it like a dragon.
Hell, he wants to pay me $2500? I will pocket that and then vote for hopefully less obnoxious candidate.
> Hell, he wants to pay me $2500? I will pocket that and then vote for hopefully less obnoxious candidate.
What about the votes of the people you influenced in his direction? If just 2 other people turn to him as a result, your vote against him has been effectively negated. Perhaps the $2500 means more to you than the vote against Bloomberg? If so, that's fair. A lot of people could use that kind of money, and I don't blame them for taking it. Ironically, that speaks directly to the imbalance of political power caused by the existence of massively wealthy individuals like him.
But assuming you are OK with promoting a candidate in exchange for $, why not take money from a candidate you believe in, rather than one you plan to vote against? Is it because (just guessing) he's paying more? In which case, it seems a lot like he's just buying the primary.
I believe people are not idiots and are capable of judging their own interest. I do not subscribe to the 'they are basically children, we have to protect them'.
To the candidate I believe in I give my donation. For someone I believe, I will spread their message for free. Him? He has to pay.
> I do not subscribe to the 'they are basically children, we have to protect them'.
He is paying you to leverage your reputation and trust networks, and you are extending your reputation and trust networks to him for a fee.
It doesn't matter that you think you don't subscribe to belief about people you posited above, because if you don't believe in Bloomberg's message, you are effectively deceiving those in your trust network.
Now, perhaps everyone in your trust network is in on your deception, but realistically the vast majority of humans, as social (vs. antisocial) beings rely on trust networks as a strong signal for forming opinions and taking actions.
I have no problem saying 'he paid me to do it you know'. Kinda undermines the message. Frankly, just the mere fact we are talking about it undermines that message. And it, oddly, seems to be mainstream consensus as well.
> I believe people are not idiots and are capable of judging their own interest...
I feel like this is often the crux of the argument against any kind of government regulation. "The people are smart enough to not be duped!" And in many cases it's easier to create chaos / scam people than it is to defend yourself against it. Just because some people seem capable of defending themselves / cutting through the fraud doesn't mean everyone who can't are idiots or children.
I'll give you an example. There used to be a ton of "Anti-Virus" apps on the iOS App Store. Due to how iOS is built, these apps literally weren't even able to do anything—they were all pure scams. But... people purchased them, not knowing about it. Many of us on HN would recognize immediately that these were scams, because technology like this is in our wheelhouse, so to speak. But it's likely someone in your family (a non-idiot) who's used antivirus software on computers before, and was comfortable with that arrangement, would easily be duped into buying one of these apps. Your analogy would have you advertise or endorse these products, then turn around and mock any "idiot" who purchased them. That's, to me, classic unethical behavior. I can't fathom how this is defensible to anyone with a modicum of empathy.
You do have a point, but I think your analogy does not hold.
US schools do have educational system focused on presenting how US election system is supposed to work under ideal circumstances. By default, citizen should know wtf they are voting for. It may be a system issue, but that is a separate conversation.
Apps, otoh, are relatively new. There is no class out there on avoiding scams ( though there probably should be ).
I also disagree with unethical part. He is spending his own money. How is that unethical?
> He is spending his own money. How is that unethical?
1. I was referring to your example scenario where you're taking his money and disingenuously working to support his campaign.
2. I'm not sure why you're suggesting "spending your own money" absolves you from unethical behavior. If I bought a bunch of worn-out tires and hired some kids around the neighborhood to start a tire fire in the nearest park, that'd be absolutely unethical (and probably illegal as well), despite the fact that I funded the operation myself.
1. My bad. I genuinely misunderstood your stance. Are you suggesting that by taking money from him in a manner that is not sincere is not ethical? Is it unethical, because I am taking money under false pretenses, sway opinion of a few, or some other reason?
2. I never claimed to be absolved. Then again I do not believe I committed a sin either. You may be pushing your analogies too far. Lets stick to the facts available to us.
> I believe people are not idiots and are capable of judging their own interest.
He's buying up media and politicians. People can't decide from themselves when he's spending a billion dollars to shape the narrative.
If Bloomberg gets elected the US is done. It's not longer anything resembling democracy and the only thing that will save us from the new order will be revolution.
In reality, compelling political science evidence suggests that people do not decide for themselves, and that in the absence of concentrated outside interests, elections are essentially random functions based on arbitrary group identity. We're now pretty close to sure that voters around the world don't generally individually map candidates to issue profiles (it's likely that the influence goes the other way), and that the electorate in the large doesn't aggregate preferences to a median acceptable policy. In that landscape, the one thing that does move outcomes is large amounts of political spending.
(This is the core argument of Democracy for Realists).
Companies spend billions of dollars on advertising _because it works_. Virtually everyone thinks they're too smart to be influenced by it. And they'd be wrong.
> If Bloomberg gets elected the US is done. It's not longer anything resembling democracy and the only thing that will save us from the new order will be revolution.
So being extremely wealthy and successful now disqualifies you from being a good President?
Unlike our current super wealthy President, Bloomberg has more experience in government (mayor of NYC) and has a more successful track record in business.
Money shouldn't disqualify you from being a good President, poor judgement, low moral character and lack of relevant experience should.
I certainly wouldn't mind if Bill Gates ran for President and if he did I doubt he'd accept donations.
> So being extremely wealthy and successful now disqualifies you from being a good President?
I don't believe anyone is saying this. Bloomberg, for example, is spending more on TV ads than every other candidate combined. It's not a level playing field at all. Bloomberg has a war chest nobody can compete with. His having it isn't the issue we're talking about here. The fact that he's able to use it in this manner should worry us all.
Nit: Trump being super wealthy is arguable on many grounds - definitionally ("super"), wealthy at all, debt superseding wealth, etc. Bloomberg is _actually_ super wealthy.
So where do you draw the line? At what net worth are you saying someone can't possibly help the country?
To say anyone with $X shouldn't be President sounds like profiling. Why not just disagree with his policies or actions?
As far as relevant experience, Bloomberg was the Mayor of NYC and has managed a large organization. That's a lot more government and leadership experience than Trump or Obama had.
Plenty of other things to not like about him but being Mayor of NYC or running a successful business shouldn't disqualify him by any means. So now no one who wants to be President should be a Mayor first or start a successful business? Maybe we should throw out senators while we're at it. Pretty soon we'll be left with armchair economists and self described philosophers who truly don't have any relevant experience.
If that's your justification for why you should be president, then you aren't actually qualified to be president. There is no business on earth that would adequately prepare someone to be president.
> Obama
Obama was a US senator for 4 years and a state senator 7 more.
> Trump
Is a disaster. Bloomberg would also be a disaster.
It is very easy to succumb to cynicism as it allows for an easy response to just about any issue in life.
For the record, I hear you. There are times I want to throw my hands in the air. But.. about 4 years I was driving through Ohio and I saw 'Save us Trump' sign on lawn of a delapidated house..Probably one of the saddest things I have seen in my short life.
I guess what I am saying is, it is really easy to dismiss. It is so much harder to try to understand others.
It's actually perfectly in line with our democratic process. It's not subverting it, it's working exactly as designed. Spending a personal fortune is well within the rules. We should be criticizing the design, not the people taking advantage of the design.
It is only subvertive if people let it be so. But if his spending is subvertive then ALL like spending is subvertive. He is just more upfront about it.
I do think you have a valid argument here assuming the process was not already subverted.
I think this practice is a bit worse than other forms of electioneering since it is not clear if views being expressed come directly from the candidate or not (unlike a TV ad or a rally). When governments do something similar this, their methods are rightly criticized as being undemocratic [1,2]. I think a similar line of reasoning applies to US election politics.
Well, there’s a lot of regulation around campaign finance: spending limits, disclosure requirements, etc. As far as I know, Bloomberg doesn’t haven’t to adhere to any of that, because it’s not campaign finances, it’s his own personal (massive) wealth.
Except every other candidate accepts donations and has to be more transparent. Every other serious candidate is appearing on the debate stage and town halls.
Bloomberg is buying off people and hasn't been forced to defend his atrocious record, at all.
and plenty of people support aggressively campaign financing reform and public funding of elections.
Surprised to see such naive takes on HN. Wealthy people don’t “hoard wealth like a dragon”. It’s invested in companies that translate to products, services, and jobs.
I hate to tell you this, but all money that exists in the money supply is invested in products, services, and jobs - unless it's stuffed in a mattress somewhere.
Wealthy people do 'hoard wealth like a dragon', by definition - otherwise they would not be wealthy.
It really does not matter how much you have. You are hoarding wealth that you could be giving back to improve conditions for those that aren’t as fortune to be able to save. It doesn’t feel great to listen to people tell you what to do with your money, does it?
This is generally true. Most billionaires are there because of their stock ownership in large corporations. And if they were to cash out their stock they'd lose control of their enterprises.
Needlessly pedantic. If companies are profitable, they provide some sort of value even if you don't think so. Much more than people sucking up welfare benefits and not giving back, at least.
Even “cash” held by individual companies is not actually cash in a bank. It, too, is invested in marketable securities. Holding cash is an incredibly foolish move due to inflation.
Unseemly is not a strong enough word. An effort to knowingly pay off human shills to covertly interfere with an election outcome is shameful, completely unethical and arguably illegal.
Being passive about issues like this (let alone turning a blind eye and personally profiting from them...) gets into a scenario where there is no less obnoxious candidate to vote for.
I disagree on all counts. It may not be strong enough, but it is literally his money. He can burn it all in flames and you would have zero to say about it ( unless maybe ypu were his neigbor and smoke was too bad ).
And how is that covert? We are all talking about it. People seem to freak out, because it appears to be working, which is interesting.
Lastly, how am I passive? I said I would take his money if offerred. I placed myself right on the fence..
As for lack of candidates, I do not think we are at culling stage yet.
I'm surprised there are people not a little bit ashamed to sell their social trust. To me Bloomberg clearly is corrupting people with this. And somehow they seem to reason that they stand above it as they're shilling him (transparently, they imagine) to their friends. To me it seems that it's people who have been forced to take such a choice too many times to feel the disgrace anymore.
I find it morally acceptable to take his money if you need it. But let's not forget what that transaction means. It's the powerful forcing your outward attitude towards them. You're not a reputable citizen if your speech is controlled by your lord.
Believe it or not, I largely agree with the sentiment expressed. I suffer no illusions in that regards.
That said, riddle me this as it may yield some interesting answers. Do you believe there is such a thing as too much power in one set of hands? If so, is one Bloomberg too much?
It's not really a question one could answer no to in my view. The historical struggles against absolutism really don't allow any other answer but that power requires powerful checks. And that some forms of power are not legitimate at all.
With capitalism the solution was roughly that some things were taken out of money's reach. You can't buy them. Still I say that a guy like Bloomberg has too much power. It's not like the struggle is over.
At the very least, a billionaire is cashing out a decent chunk of his assets and the money is going to other people. I personally think he's wasting his money, but I guess it's helping the economy?
I don't think it's going to work. Money may be a guaranteed way to get yourself in "the top tier" in polling but when it comes to voting, I don't think that pans out. Money is a factor but it's not the only factor. Ross Perot spent I don't know how many millions and never got more than 10% of the vote. Clinton outspent Trump in 2016. If people don't get excited for a candidate and connect with them its just not going to translate to votes.
Do we have any any hard numbers how much was spend by various nation-states to benefit the Trump campaign?
To be fair, there are so many loopholes in campaign finance laws that it is hard to get accurate numbers of spending, beyond what is self-reported, for any candidate.
I agree. There is no way a guy like Trump could have won without being independently wealthy. Will Trump spend one moment reflecting on the moral way to spend his enormous reelection campaign budget?
You can't "earn" a billion dollars. You can acquire that much by winning big at the stock lottery or by appropriating the surplus value of others. All Bernie/Warren/Yang are promising is that they'll return some of that acquired wealth to the people who actually did the work.
I don't like this idea of buying elections. But at the very least, I'm happy to see the Democratic machine upside-down, with all of the designated incumbent royalty falling behind the outsiders.
I appreciate the sentiment, but for those of us who have been negatively impacted by the policies of the current administration, it is worrying that a candidate with broad appeal has failed to materialize at this point.
Based on approval polls, Bernie Sanders is one of the best-liked politicians in America. He has often literally been number 1 in these polls. So I think he does have broad appeal, just not to rich and influential people (who make up a small minority, despite their outsized ability to have their voices heard).
Broad appeal among democrats, but the candidate with the best chances in the national election is not the center Democrat, it's the center American, which if you imagine Democrats and Republicans being two ranges butted up against the center, is the rightmost Democrat!
I don't believe republicans or "independent" voters will ever actually cross the aisle anymore. Trump still has massive MASSIVE support from registered republicans.
And that third gives Trump something like a 90% approval rating. My base assumption is that in order to win them over, you'd have to significantly match up with their world view. A significant part of their world view seems to be that "Democrat = bad" so that's kind of a non-starter, and I'm not sure I'd want someone elected who has compromised their platform, morals, principles, etc enough to be liked by people who still support Trump.
Bernie Sanders is the most popular candidate among all Americans. Republicans are going to vote for Trump no matter what and a center-right Democrat will not change this. The only way to defeat Trump is to produce a record turnout among young people and people that have felt abandoned by the political establishment that would otherwise not vote. The only candidate that can possibly do this is Bernie Sanders.
That’s not what the head-to-head matchups against Trump say. Polls have shown over and over again that almost any democrat beats Trump in a head-to-head matchup, but that Bernie, Biden, and Bloomberg are all just about tied in beating Trump by the largest margins.
Most voters don’t have a coherent ideology. The ever-appealing “center” is not a real thing; it exists only wherever voters can be convinced it exists.
Shilling on social media appeared overnight. Literally a switch was turned on and suddenly hundreds of "totally organic" posts about Bloomberg are popping up everywhere mimicking local forum/board subcultures. Many of the people seem to be posting somewhat ironically, though it seems his campaign has attempted to embrace the same style of "no press is bad press" attention that undoubtedly contributed to Trump's election.
It's pretty gross to watch someone literally buy an election. I hope he fails. But there's a good chance he'll get far, because though he is running as a Democrat, many of his past statements regarding women, minorities, and stop and frisk appeal to the non-PC Republican sentiment that worked in the last election. And you can count on the fact that the average person won't understand that none of this buzz is organic.
The results are even clunkier than when Correct The Record began. Those were obvious and a little insulting. So far, Bloomberg's shills are staggering about like 1950s robots, emitting electoral noises on some kind of shrill, buzzing loop.
I see this also for Bernie, in odd locations. I've been playing Warcraft 3 reforged lately, and the general chat that shows up on the main menu in-game has been all kinds of people extolling the values of Bernie Sanders.
Of course, it could be grassroots. I just doubt it.
He's just protecting his fortune against Bernie. Spend a billion, keep the remaining 39. Good deal. He will lose even if he does get nominated, and he's OK with that. This is a page directly from Trump's playbook: Trump routinely puts himself into situations where there are several ways for him to win and no way to really lose.
It was a serious question where I don't know the answer... Shares are publicly traded at NASDAQ. The Murdoch family seems to hold 39% (of the shares with voting power?) according to Wikipedia... Not sure how feasible it would be to buy enough of the rest if money wasn't an issue?
That would require a hostile takeover, which is no simple thing. News Corp has a market cap of >$8.6 billion. It almost never happens that anyone can buy a controlling interest (of a sizeable corporation) on the open market without an explicit agreement from the board of directors.
Why is that a bad thing? It means the murdochs are now rich in cash from the acquisition, and free to concentrate on their news division, which was always his primary concern.
Murdochs did not want to sell. There was a semi-hostile takeover, involving a Saudi prince, that allowed investors to sell off the profitable franchises to Disney. It's a fairly interesting story if you find the time to read it.
If Bloomberg get elected and successfully purchases the presidency, I’m moving my family out of the US. I will no long contribute to our collective GDP or pay taxes. I’ll vote with my feet if I can’t vote with my rights as an American citizen.
Donald Trump spent on his campaign almost half the money of Clinton's campaign, and he won the presidency despite having raised less than any major party presidential nominee since 2008 [0]. So, if your concern is a candidate "buying" an election, Trump would be the worst recent example one could use.
Jeb Bush spent $130 million to lose the Republican primary. Hillary Clinton spent probably an order of magnitude more to lose the general election. Both outspent Donald Trump just to lose to him in their respective races. Money isn't everything and Bloomberg is risking alienating voters with his ham fisted advertising. His ads on YouTube are non-skippable. He paid extra for that yet it's more likely to anger viewers than to get their votes. If his social media army is just as obnoxious in their campaigning for him, well, a fool and their money are soon parted.
He would probably never do that, but I wouldn't begrudge Sanders if in case of a contested convention and having amassed the most delegates he would go 'Your call, but if you throw this to Bloomberg you should plan on a scenario of him running against Trump and myself as Independent' of course Bloomberg could do that too and in fact might be counting on it. And then it will be a game of chicken with a 2nd Trump presidency as the cliff, or maybe they'll just give it to Klobuchar
Interesting. Now that the cat is out of the bag any mention about him from any acquaintance is just going to make me think they got a check from Mike and make me dislike him more each time.
Does buying support like this work? "Hey family, Mike Bloomberg is awesome, we should all vote for him". That just feels so artificial and fake, but maybe if the phrase gets repeated enough people start believing it...
> Outvote also allows users to look up whether their friends have voted in past elections by matching their contact lists against public data.
That's a good way to lose family and friends. "I see you haven't voted, if you want to stay friends and be invited out, better vote or donate to Mike's campaign".
> it is important to be transparent about paid commercial promotions, but he views the ethics of political activism as less clear. ... “it took decades for TV and radio to figure out what disclosure for ads should be.”
So promoters don't have to put disclaimers in their messages. Does that open the door for his opponents to pretend to be Bloomberg's supporters but say ridiculous stuff to make people dislike him.
Definitely. When a voter is in the booth, and has to make their decision for once and for all, name recognition and the opinion of your community matters a ton. Further, the type of social media content that is being produced is painting him as sort of a benevolent, rich, goofy guy. It's intentionally anti-establishment, but not in the radical way or the thoughtful way... it's a safe type of rebellion and that is endearing to a massive amount of people.
> Does that open the door for his opponents to pretend to be Bloomberg's supporters but say ridiculous stuff to make people dislike him.
This has happened for a while and will continue to happen, although this kind of stuff is mainly isolated to niche Twitter... as we run up to election time, I think you will see more of this Clickhole/Onion type posting of anti-support-support.
Many here seem upset at the idea that Bloomberg is spending a lot of his own money to run for president.
Running for president is very expensive. All other candidates are also spending a lot of money -- but they're spending a lot of _other people's money_, to whom they are now beholden. What do those other people expect to get in return for their financial support? Surely they don't just give away millions of hard earned dollars to install someone in the most powerful office in the world out of faith in democracy. Donors and their groups -- especially the large and important ones -- are almost always aligned with explicit policy (and often persoanl) quid pro quo expectations, should the candidate win the election.
Bloomberg, by contrast, is spending his own money. He's not beholden to anyone's interests or greed or kickbacks or special interests. Whether you like or dislike his policy proposals, surely this point, at least, is better than a candidate with a wealthy donor network of obscure motives pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Many here seem upset at the idea that Bloomberg is spending a lot of his own money to run for president.
No - it's not that he's spending his own money. But rather, how he's spending it.
And they're not "upset". They're calmly pointing out the obvious: that this kind of attempted influence buying is profoundly dystopian and antidemocratic.
All of the other candidates are also doing that; there's nothing special about how Bloomberg is spending his money. The others are doing the same, but with other people's money -- people who will now expect to wield influence behind the scenes. Is that not worse?
Perhaps stating the obvious here, but if the money comes in small increments from millions of people who are broadly representative of the population (ahem, Bernie Sanders, ahem), then the politician will be beholden to the people they're actually supposed to be beholden to: the voters.
If we allow the extremely wealthy to have an extreme advantage in campaigns, we'll end up with a government that only serves their interests. Why would we expect anything else?
The solution to this is public funding of elections that puts all candidates on an equal playing field, or at least overturning Citizens United and only allowing direct donations under the maximum including from yourself.
I don't think it's antidemocratic. Bernie Sanders is doing just fine with a fraction of the ad spending. Ultimately, nobody is being forced to vote for him. Super Tuesday will be the first test, and it's very possible that Bernie will sweep all of the big states himself.
So instead of people buying politicians with large donations, he can buy people with large donations....like he's done with all those mayors.
It's worse because it's self-serving. It's unprecedented because he's outspent every candidate (I believe in the history of the US) and it's all his own money. He can buy anyone at this point...I'd rather have a politician pulled in several directions than one that just does whatever he pleases because he can buy influence and influencers
Bloomberg doesn't need money. He solicits donations because the act of donating money causes the donator to feel personally invested in the campaign. They will be more likely to take steps to influence their friends and family to vote for Bloomberg, and more likely to actually bother to vote themselves, than someone who hasn't.
This is the same reason governments sell war bonds -- they don't actually need the $100. It rather serves to make ordinary people feel they are contributing something to the cause.
The reason to sell war bonds in a fiat money world, at a base level, is that you want to devote some resources to the war effort, and therefore those resources are not available to produce consumer goods.
Now there are two options. Either the consumers have just as much money chasing a smaller amount of goods, leading to inflation, or you need to reduce the amount of money consumers have. Selling bonds is a mechanism for doing the latter. The end result is the same: the war effort means lower living standards, whether through inflation or through people voluntarily forgoing consumption by purchasing war bonds; the latter happens to make people less upset and likely has different distributional characteristics, so is probably a better idea.
Note that there are various details like whether your economy is at capacity (and if it's not, maybe you can do the war effort production _and_ still produce the goods consumers want by expanding overall production). And there can be various different mechanisms which lead to inflation in practice, ranging from "printing money" to pay for the cost of the war effort production, thus bidding up prices in general, to establishing rationing and a corresponding black market with high prices.
In a non-fiat-money world, there can be other reasons to do war bonds, of course, including "getting some of whatever counts as money", since the government does not control the supply of that.
Your idea makes sense. I guess there are always exceptions to any rule - I shared screenshot of that text and link to the amount of Bloomberg's wealth with my friends asking reasonable question - if he wants to help people, why he asking them to donate all the while sitting on $60B+ of own wealth.
I dispute this logic entirely. Yes, he is not beholden to external special interests. But he is worth some 60 billion dollars, owns his own media company, is the single largest donator to the democaratic party(he owns Pelosi's super pac), and is deeply enmeshed in wall street. The guy literally is a special interest himself. You should all be terrified of a potential Bloomberg presidency. Everything coming out about him recently paints a picture of somebody with a lot of the exact same negative personality traits as Trump, but who is deeply competent. This is horrifying.
> He's not beholden to anyone's interests or greed or kickbacks or special interests.
What a laughable statement. Of course he is, he's beholden to his own interests as a billionaire. Bloomberg is special interests personified. How is it possibly a good thing that any single person in our country can elect themselves via sheer wealth?
Also incredible that you phrase being beholden to many people's interests as a bad thing. Of course there is corruption by another name when candidates take money from Super PACs (Buttigieg/Biden), but isn't it a good thing that, for example, Sanders is now beholden to the interests of his over 2 million donors? Almost like he's beholden to the interest of his constituents, as an elected representative...
Yesterday it struck me that a quality i look for in a leader is integrity. E.g. their unwillingness to be bribed by wealth and luxury.
I think some Americans might be misinterpreting Trump's and Bloomberg's position. Their personal wealth made them jaded, not immune or uninterested in the idea.
If Bloomberg succeeds in buying the election, we will never have another president who isn’t a billionaire again. This is a far greater, long term threat to American democracy than anything posed by the Trump administration’s lawlessness.
Let's say he wins. Execution of spending billions to win an election is actually very hard. When you look at Bloomberg's tactics, he's been playing the game for a very, very long time. He is on another level from your other billionaires. Everyone is making it seem like you can just be rich and clone tactics or something and boom, election yours.
I think that this is true, though I have no numbers to back it up.
He appeared to run a cost effective campaign. The endless free coverage provided by pundits and commentators who continuously mocked was transformed (by him) into a strength. He also made full use of social media to reach as many people as he could. I'd be hard pressed to name another candidate who so effectively used twitter.
The slogan and the hats too. Make fun of him all you want - but it was an effective and cheap marketing campaign. More importantly - its a message that resonated with a lot of people.
"“OK. You want to talk about Trump? I voted for Trump!” I asked him if he was pulling my leg. He laughed. “No way. I may be a Muslim, but I am a businessman first and I am not stupid. Many Muslims here did. Under the table.” He added with a big smile: “We are Americans. We have diverse views also.”"
While it's not very substantive, this observation is correct so while it may be valid to downvote, it isn't valid to flag. The US is not a democracy. It's a constitutional republic with an electoral college. The checks afforded by this system make it much harder than just manipulating a mob (which is another way to describe a democracy).
It's both non-substantive and also incorrect. The United States is both a constitutional republic and a representative democracy. Ignoring the democracy part is a favorite trope of people who oppose it.
No one who supports the electoral college is opposed to the nature of democratic voting such as is used by the House of Representatives.
I believe it's a strength of the US that we have different voting methodologies for different roles. One for the House and a _different_ (yet also fair!) methodology for the President.
While these reasons were partially born as a result of compromise - the compromise is rooted in some good political theory.
We would be worse off if we only had one method and not the other. But we have both and we are stronger for it. I'd like to keep both. I think most ardent defenders of the electoral college would say the same.
> yet also fair! ... While these reasons were partially born as a result of compromise - the compromise is rooted in some good political theory.
You really want to celebrate a compromise that was made to enable to states to maintain chattel slavery? The electoral college is only fair in 2020 if your goal is to elect candidates who have fewer votes nationally. It no longer serves any philosophical or practical purpose.
It is popular to tar the electoral college with the slavery brush. But I think that's deeply unfair to the overall value that it offers.
Slavery is merely one kind of divisive issue that can be used by a candidate to leverage seeds of distrust, disdain and disagreement to gain leverage over the other side. Even without slavery, there were other issues that divided North and South. Anglophile vs. Francophile. Agrarian vs. Industrial. Federalist vs. "Jeffersonian Repulicans". Federal powers. vs State. Small states vs. Big States.
Something like an electoral college itself encourages compromise over divisive issues. You can't make just an appeal to populous coastal regions to win. You can't just make an appeal to moneyed northern industrial cities. You can't just make an appeal to agrarian southern interests. As we continue to change shape, candidates have to learn its shape and pull back to the middle if they want to win.
I like that modern candidates really have to get out there to so many different states and "press the flesh". They need to know a substantial portion of the country. A national vote would slowly put an end to this. And I think that's dangerous.
Consider today's angry issues - the debate over the 2nd amendment or Roe v Wade. A national vote would result in situations where a candidate can take a very strident position on topics like this and win - but it would ultimately lead to more division rather than trying to wrestle ourselves to some sort of compromise.
So I think it's really unfortunate to dismiss the EC as though its some sort of slavery preserving institution. It really promotes compromise and chills regional passions even if they are a large majority.
I don't think any of what you said supports keeping the EC. The slavery brush is just the most obvious reason to get rid of it. The electoral college has never increased unity in the country. Issues of federalism and culture are still unresolved, and the EC has only served to exacerbate those tensions by awarding the office to the popular loser multiple times in the last 20 years.
> Something like an electoral college itself encourages compromise over divisive issues.
I can name exactly one time this has happened and I don't think the Compromise of 1878 is something we should be holding up as good governance. Our current issues are a direct result of that compromise.
The EC only served to increase tensions at several points in our history - 1800, 1860, 1878,2000, 2016. I can't think of a single time it has served to increase unity or harmony. We have had a few individuals who were more-or-less consensus candidates (Monroe and Eisenhower), but that had nothing to do with the EC.
> You can't make just an appeal to populous coastal regions to win. You can't just make an appeal to moneyed northern industrial cities. You can't just make an appeal to agrarian southern interests. As we continue to change shape, candidates have to learn its shape and pull back to the middle if they want to win.
So instead the candidates spend their time raising money to run ads and pandering to about 6 swing states, which winds up leaving far more people out of the process than if every vote was worth, you know, one vote.
> I like that modern candidates really have to get out there to so many different states and "press the flesh". They need to know a substantial portion of the country. A national vote would slowly put an end to this. And I think that's dangerous.
See above. Trump literally knows New York City and nothing else. He lost by 3,000,000 votes. How is a national vote more dangerous than a system that happily elected an unpopular demagogue? Especially when the stated function of the EC is to prevent such an event.
> Consider today's angry issues - the debate over the 2nd amendment or Roe v Wade. A national vote would result in situations where a candidate can take a very strident position on topics like this and win - but it would ultimately lead to more division rather than trying to wrestle ourselves to some sort of compromise.
We've had the Electoral college for the entirety of the existence of those issues. They are more partisan than ever, with no compromise on the horizon (in large part thanks to the EC appointing 2 unpopular presidents in 16 years).
> So I think it's really unfortunate to dismiss the EC as though its some sort of slavery preserving institution. It really promotes compromise and chills regional passions even if they are a large majority.
You have demonstrated no proof of your claim. The fact that all of these issues are at historic highs really underscores the fact that what you are arguing simply isn't true.
> I can't think of a single time it has served to increase unity or harmony
There basically would be no country without it.
If we got rid of it today, every state that relies on equal representation would be in their right mind to secede rather than be legislatively bullied by the more populated coastal states.
Totally agree. The locking mechanism provided by having a bicameral house with different representation criteria and the electoral college are definitely features since they require a far higher level of consensus (and different forms of consensus, both in number of people and number of places) to make changes than a simple majority of people.
You can keep calling it manipulation all you want. But I truly believe both HRC's message reached the voters and that Trump's message also reached the voters and they chose accordingly. Are you suggesting that their respective messages weren't heard?
At no point did someone fail to deliver their message. HRC's message (to the extent that it could be parsed) just didn't click with a lot of people. Trump's did.
But by vote count, Clinton’s message clicked with more people than Trump’s did. That’s why he had to rely on the electoral college to “win” by negative-several-million votes.
Why dwell on an irrelevant number? It's not material to the presidential election. At all. There is no reason the mass media should even report it. It's not germane to the outcome. It only serves to confuse everyone.
The rules for winning a presidential election are well known and well established. You have to win a majority of the electors spread over many states. This means composing a message that broadly resonates with the country. Trump did that. HRC did not.
You said Clinton’s message “...just didn't click with a lot of people. Trump's did.” That’s a numerical comparison. Are you saying that X > X+3000000? It’s an incoherent claim, so find another argument.
It's only irrelevant for deciding who wins the office. You are making the argument that Trump won because his arguments were more popular among the electorate, which is provably false using the popular vote total.
Hillary Clinton's message resonated with over 3,000,000 more voters, however unfortunate their distribution was.
Insofar as the presidential election is concerned, the electorate is the 538 people in the electoral college. Trump was more popular among the electorate not HRC.
Democracy and Republic are orthogonal the same way you can be libertarian and right-wing, libertarian and left-wing or authoritarian of either economic policy.
The U.S. is a democratic republic, because the power stems from the people (demo-), not from a small group of people (oligo-) or a single person (auto-).
Clearly these tactics are despicable...and they work. Bloomberg is just demonstrating that he's the only one who really learned from Trump how to win in the modern era. Trump, of course, had Russian trolls posting rather than these folks...but potato/potaato.
And he's right - he went from nothing to third place (in national polls) solely through (mostly internet) ad spend.
What I don't understand is why every candidate isn't taking a similar approach. These guys are showing it's not about events, likeability, policies, history, etc. It's just about mass manipulation enabled by the internet.
I'm looking forward to the debate tonite, hopefully Bloomberg will get to show everyone what kind of candidate he really is.
I still think his entire campaign is just a twisted way to get around campaign contribution limits and possibly a bulwark to keep the wacko socialist candidates from winning the nomination.
Hopefully he proves me wrong and is a real candidate that will be able to stand toe to toe with President Trump and we will see a good old fashioned dust up between the two of them this summer!!
Love them or hate them, the one nice thing about Bloomberg and Trump is that, finally the billionaires are stepping out of the shadows. Instead of just bankrolling some frontman who looks good for the cameras, they are running as candidates themselves now.
Back in 2015 or 2016, The Atlantic had a great article that highlighted the billionaire donors behind each of the (traditional) Republican candidates in the presidential primary. It wasn't hard to see how the candidate's platform aligned with the donor's agenda in each case.
If some billionaire is going to be driving a political campaign, I'd much rather they were upfront about the whole thing and put their own name on it.
I don't think the OP meant it in the way you think. My guess is they're speaking of the riskiness of Bernie winning the nomination, where as someone more centrist seems like a safer bet.
But who knows, the experts said Hillary would win too.
