Okay, it's just the Wikipedia mentioned Keynes.

What I seem to get is that, economies can be locked into a cycle where there's not enough demand to maintain growth.

Though the Wikipedia mentions a couple potential causes. Which do you find particularly convincing?

It could also just be that people's moral standards have changed?

I'll grant that many people are unfair with regards to Obama and Clinton, but if Obama were running in 2016 for the first time, I feel he would have been raked over the coals for these sorts of things. Sentiments about gay marriage have changed drastically from eight years ago.

One of the really impressive things about Bernie is that he's had the same beliefs on social and economic issues for decades. He was really ahead of the curve. In the 2000s, and especially in the early 2000s, nobody of stature was talking about marriage equality -- except maybe Dennis Kucinich, who, on the whole, was taken about as seriously as Ralph Nader was...


But the Democratic party has now moved further to the left, and, in doing so, it's basically caught up with Bernie's progressiveness -- at least as far as social issues go. Social liberals these days are incredibly intolerant of any views on social issues that aren't as "progressive" as their own, and they've quickly naturalized/normalized their beliefs (that is, they've succeeded in marking views that disagree with their own as "offensive"). Since Bernie was so far ahead of the curve, when social liberals look at Bernie's past, they see someone whose views are basically the same as their own. But when they look at almost any other politician, they'll see "regressive" or "backwards" beliefs, just because those were the views democrats ran on before 2012 and 2016.


If I could magically decide who was and who wasn't allowed to run for the Democratic nomination in 2020, I wouldn't let anyone run if they ran for national office/governor before 2012. They -- like Hillary -- would have too many skeletons in their closet, too much fodder for YouTube videos, just because they will have expressed views that were normative in the 2000s, before polarization intensified.

The only reason Obama didn't run against a leftist in 2012 is because he was incumbent, and his opponent came across like even worse of a pro-corporate *******, with that infamous line about half of Americans being lazy. I'm pretty sure the anger people felt in 2016 is exactly what they felt in 2012, it's just the space for criticism was more open in 2016. The feelings from OWS are still very widely felt by all.

I think economic anxiety on the left in 2012 and 2016 were different in many ways, especially in how it colored partisan politics. One big difference is that in 2012 we were so much closer to the financial crisis and the recession, and the recovery still felt very vulnerable to relapse. Much of Obama's economic policy could still be seen as a response to an economic catastrophe created during the Bush administration/Republicans, rather than as the establishment of a new status quo for an economy that was more unequal and had fewer opportunities for upward mobility than the one that preceded, which is how many see it now. In other words, most still saw Democrats as the solution to a Republican problem.

The anti-establishment view that Democrats and Republicans were equally as culpable for a rigged system -- which is the leftist interpretation, but not the liberal one -- was not nearly as pervasive as it was in 2016. In 2012, the Democrats did a good job pinning it on the Republicans. And after 2008, Republicans did a good job providing Democrats with new fodder to prove to Democratic supporters that the Dems were right.

Yup.

As I wrote a few posts ago:

If AHCA passes today, all Americans are granted the moral authority to lynch every single one of the people who vote yes.

b-bu... muh 3% investment tax cut for when I strike it big

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/699bbk/house_passes_health_care_bill_bye_bye_obamacare/dh4ridx/

Current top comment on their thread, asking "wait isn't this the ****ty bill still?"

Even Trump supporters can't deny how ****ty AHCA is.

It is a tad sad because, now that Blizzard is part of Wall Street, they're never going to be in a position to release this sort of thing, no legal team would ever allow it. It would be nice, though, if that sort of stuff became public domain, because the current status of intellectual property is no good.

Source code disappearing into the bowels of an ever growing corporate entity. Reminds me of another company....

Carmack spoiled all of you! The proper way to keep games alive is to reverse engineer bugs in the engine that game scripts depend on for proper behavior.

Hail Stallman. Death to the corporate infidels!

I will die for my country on the front lines of untreated diabetes before I submit to Obamunism.

Our forefathers fought for these freedoms, and from time to time, the tree of liberty must be replenished with the blood of its own citizens.

Ugh, ****ing Alex Jones. When did Moloch become an owl? I'm pretty sure every historical reference is to a deity in the form of a bull. But history is no obstacle for the gayfrogman