2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumThe Clintons and their triangulation should not represent the Democratic Party
Everything that has made the Democratic Party great started with the old Democrats of the mid 20th century (FDR to LBJ.) The Clintons' triangulation added some of the worst things to the party, including selling out to Wall Street and other big corporations, attacking the poor (welfare reform), passing tough on crime laws that hurt black communities, and embracing free trade (that decimated the working class and the livelihoods of Mexican farmers, leading to increased immigration.) They should not be allowed to represent the Democratic Party.
procon
(15,805 posts)They hobnobbed with the elitists, royalty, the bankers and financiers, and the great barons of industry, and they took lots of money from them all to get elected. They were proud to call themselves Democrats while striving to uplift the working class. She has worked for Democratic causes most of her life and all this caterwauling and criticising aimed at Hillary for doing the same thing as all her predecessors sets a double standard.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)They are nothing compared to the progressive FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ.
procon
(15,805 posts)Sanders votes for some pro gun bills. That's not usually considered a Democratic position, but it hardly makes him a conservative. LBJ was deeply involved with perpetuating the Vietnam war, but no one would brand him as rightwinger. Truman dropped the A-bomb over the city of Hiroshima; not exactly a Democratic ideal, yeah? Kennedy was hours away from attacking Cuba and escalating the Cold War with the USSR into what could have been WWIII, hows that for "progressive"?
You didn't think any of this through, did you?
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)Bernie Sanders supporters have legitimate concerns and all you Hillary supporters do is accuse us of "demanding purity" and scaring us about the Republican candidate potentially winning. This is clearly an abusive relationship, with the DLC / Third Way and professional left being abusive to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and playing "good cop, bad cop" on us for decades.
Chan790
(20,176 posts)AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)procon
(15,805 posts)If you are so fragile that it scares you to have your political stance challenged, maybe your convictions are no longer as solid as they once were.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)If you can cry foul, I can as well. Anyway, what I'm saying is legitimate. The phony Democrats are being abusive to the progressives and other true Democrats and use them to win elections and, like what Obama did, cast them aside after the election.
procon
(15,805 posts)Now you even have a litmus test, unless everyone meets your perceptions of whatever "progressives and other true Democrats" are, then you brand them as "phony Democrats". You want to claim "legitimacy", but look at the stuff you've written in this thread. You haven't been right once, so you'll understand why I'll remain skeptical of your views.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)How the Clinton wing is so similar to the Republican Party.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)of being ideological purists, and since last year has shut down Bernie supporters in on air debates by accusing them of "demanding purity." This talking point is not new. BTW, Norman Goldman is a former lawyer who has claimed to spend $1.5 million of his own savings on his radio show. I find it hard to believe that someone that has $1.5 million of free savings can empathize with struggling Americans.
procon
(15,805 posts)We've seen how Republicans have used similar tactics to rip apart their own party, dividing into warring factions fighting over who qualifies as a "real" Republican, and here you are doing the same thing, imposing your unyielding purity tests on everyone.
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)NorthCarolina
(11,197 posts)he had a level of morality and compassion for the average working stiffs that no longer exists in the Democratic Party (with the exception of a few members).
procon
(15,805 posts)That's the "morality" of which you speak.
Peacetrain
(22,877 posts)There are no saints in politics..
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)The whole America is guilty, more than 100 years of imperialism around the world plus the genocide of the native americans and the whole slave industry that made America wealthy, not to mention America being the inspiration for Hitler's holocaust / final solution.
The human race should be improving, not making excuses to remain corrupt and savage. The old Democrats were making progress, only for the Clintons to come and reverse things.
Response to procon (Reply #1)
silvershadow This message was self-deleted by its author.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Consider Chile, CIA and Social Security:
The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the privatization scam for Pinochet, ITT and the globalist crowd. President Clinton liked the privatization and austerity before it was cool.
President Clinton and the Chilean Model.
By José Piñera
Midnight at the House of Good and Evil
"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?' recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.
I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.
That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the worlds superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.
Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:
[font color="green"]Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.[/font color]
Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).
I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clintons attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chiles Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clintons campaign.
The mother of all reforms
While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with Americas unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.
So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.
But while de Tocquevilles 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] an Entitlement State,[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.
[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm
Democratic solutions -- like New Deal and Great Society -- work because they are Democratic, not capitalist.
Agony
(2,605 posts)We need our Party to stop pretending to represent ordinary citizens.
Dem2
(8,168 posts)All or nothing.