Wow Jon, I didn't know you hated innovation.

It's hard to get people to accept they had cancer all along when they've been going to a quack doctor for longer than they can remember.

How about a free iPad instead?

You can say Apple is using the money to innovate as soon as they spend it.

Why don't they?

Actually, isn't Apple an example of a company that one can understand being tight with their cash? I mean, they've gone through terrible times in the past.

Speaking of Apple.

Wookie, you're anthropomorphizing a corporation a bit there. Why should we empathize with a corporate entity to the point that we worry about its potential demise? Is Apple providing such a valuable product to the world at this point? Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?

Also, isn't capital much more of a valuable thing to hoard than cash?

I'm not saying we should. I'm just saying that from their perspective it's probably an understandable course of action.

Anyway, can't wait for the campaign.

Because capitalism doesn't work.

There are a pile of macroeconomic details I could shovel onto this discussion, but much like the Civil War boiled down slavery, this boils down to capitalism not answering the basic economic questions.

No. Companies are generally supposed to return profits to their shareholders, and generally supposed to raise significant new funding through dilution.

It's also extremely problematic to validate the idea that structural social issues can or should be evaluated through lens of personal experience. People will use confirmation bias to justify and reinforce any preconceived notions about another group of people.

There's this idea that you don't even have a right to speak about issues unless you've personally experienced them, as if subjective experience is the only valid way of understanding society. At that point you are just picking which group's narrative to believe a priori.

Definitely. It also encourages people to interpret their personal relationships and tensions with others through their identities. If someone has an issue with another person, the problem is not understood merely as a personal disagreement or conflict, but as a manifestation of structural inequalities.

Yeah, it's a useful framework but absolutely should not be the only framework used to analyze politics. Though I partly think it gets overemphasized not due to fault of the people but because it's all our political system allows. You can't call your boss a capitalist pig but you can call out racism from white guys.

Or as is the case with many disadvantaged people, you can't even find a person to exploit your excess labor.

Why do you guys think Hillary did better with minority races than Bernie?

Well, this chart was a surprise to me. It suggests that, for younger Democratic voters, age was a stronger predictor of how one voted in the primaries than race:



https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/black-millennials-arent-united-behind-clinton-like-their-elders/

That makes sense. Older people don't seek education so it seems logical they wouldn't support free education as much. Same with minimum wages.

I did some quick research and I may have a hint. From what I can tell, African Americans have double the unemployment, and both attend and graduate college at lower rates than white people. Two of Sanders' main sells were increasing minimum wage and cheaper/free education. If your concern is that you can't get into schools or even find a job, then these promises might be less appealing. Just a guess though.

IIRC Bernie recently advocated 15$ federal minimum which is probably a mistake. I don't think all parts of the country are ready for that.

Yeah, it makes sense that younger people with poorer economic prospects than older generations would seek a candidate whose policies would better insulate them from the tumult of the economy.

Another thing to keep in mind: very few people actually knew who Bernie Sanders was at the beginning of the primaries. But everyone knew who Hillary Clinton was. And Bill Clinton was very popular with African-Americans when he was president.

Many African-Americans likely went into the Democratic primaries eager about Hillary Clinton's candidacy in part because of who her husband was. It could be that Bernie Sanders struggled to convince African-American voters who remembered Bill Clinton to switch into his camp. But it was perhaps easier to convince younger voters who were too young to remember him, and to whom his message had greater appeal. That might partially explain the discrepancy above (along with the point you just made, that some of the core elements of Bernie's message were especially relevant to younger voters in a way that they weren't for older ones.)

Also: Bernie had some difficulties with black voters very early on in his campaign. Remember when a rally of his was interrupted by BLM activists in Seattle in August 2015? It established the basis for a narrative very early on that Bernie's supporters were almost exclusively white, and therefore that Bernie and his supporters were deaf to the concerns of minorities (especially African-Americans).

Another thing: African-Americans supported Obama in overwhelmingly high numbers during his presidency (high 80s, 90s). So perhaps Hillary's popularity amongst African-Americans can be attributed to the fact that she was essentially Obama's self-chosen successor.

Bernie didn't do well because his brand self-righteousness pandered almost exclusively to the perspective of young white people. He didn't have any real polices, his message was basically telling young white people that everyone else was immoral for not fixing their problems. He didn't spend much time at all directly speaking to minority perspectives, and for a guy running on anti-establishment sentiment, it looks too much like more of the same.

No.

There's something about accusing someone of self-righteousness that sounds incredibly self-righteous to me. But ignoring the negative connotations of the words you used I agree with your criticisms.



I think it's definitely true that Hillary had more branding coming in. And Obama did endorse her which I'm sure helped. I think everything you said is accurate. Nate Silver thinks Bernie is looking like the strongest democrat frontrunner for 2020. It's far out but do you think Bernie has a shot of changing that?

By agree, I should specify a bit. I agree that Bernie's policy positions are weak and are often not fleshed out, but I don't blame him fully for that. Typically the two parties have plenty of donors willing to fund thinktanks to do research on the policies they want. These donors are typically anti-populist so any populist position will likely have wonks ****ting on it because that's where the money is. And rarely will positive pieces be published for the same reason. I do think his policies are directed too much at younger white people, and should expand his views and possibly compromise a bit more where his policies won't work. I don't get your criticism about his relation to the establishment though.

According to the actuary tables, should Sanders win a second term of office in 2024, he will die half way through that second term at the age of 86.

For comparison, Ronald Reagan was just shy of turning 78 when he left office.

I really don't see why we should stop there. If we can get Ron Paul to run in 2020, he'd have to live to the age of 93 in order to survive his second term.

I was a Sanders supporter at the time, and remember that incident. I found the behavior of those two women, to put it bluntly, to be idiotic, rude, irrational, opportunistic, and at least a little bit hateful toward the white majority that made up the audience of the rally. And the things they mentioned in their tirade really had nothing to do with Bernie Sanders.

But I guess the media could have spun this kind of thing any way it wanted to.

Probably? In the end, it didn't matter very much in Hillary's case. Turnout among African-American (AA) voters in 2016 was lower than expected. Who knows if Bernie would've gotten appreciably fewer AA voters than Hillary did?

But whether the Dems win AA voters in 2020 doesn't matter that much. If the DNC admires Bernie right now, it's because the Democratic party leadership sees value in moving away from Clinton's strategy of a coalition composed primarily of minorities and women and towards competing directly with the Republicans over white working class voters. (In other words, important people seem to think that Bernie would have won, given the fault lines that emerged within the Democratic party during the 2016 primaries.)

The biggest strike against Bernie should be that he's way to freaking old to be president. Before Trump, Reagan was the oldest president ever elected. If Bernie wins in 2020, he'll about the same age Reagan was when he left office.

I just said that!

Oh whoops.

Ron Paul 2020.

Would you settle for Rand?

You have this exactly backwards.

Sanders's main problem is that he identifies wealth and income inequality as the root cause of most social problems. Under capitalism, the people who have the most are automatically able to achieve the most. That means (certain) white males have more potential for success than anybody else does. That means, for example, there are much fewer successful and influential black women than there should be, because they originally started with less. Socialists (some more than others) believe fixing the economic issues will eventually shake out the social ones; by offering equality of opportunity, people from disparate backgrounds will act upon those opportunities, gather wealth, influence, and respect, and eventually (if nothing else) make it extremely inconvenient to be racist or sexist.

This perspective is not popular among people who believe capitalism (read: extreme inequality) could work for them "if only". If only there weren't racism. Or if only there were better jobs. Or if only someone would give me a chance. They believe their success is being obstructed by specific people who are discriminating against them, rather than it being rooted in a structural economic flaw that gives them a much lower likelihood of success in the first place.

Social democrats like Sanders don't blame specific people for their problems, they blame a broken economic system that needs to be managed better, recognizing that poor behaviours are mostly rational and cannot be corrected without active intervention. It's the latter types who blame specific people - the bankers, the racists, the job creators - and expect them to magically "behave better" and fix their problems, while never giving them any incentive for doing so.

Well unless the man finds a way to become his own grandpa, we're not going to be breaking any records.

That, and I don't want one of his supporters to literally stomp on my head when I inevitably crash his rally to stage a counter protest.

That kind of doesn't bode well for movements like occupy wall St. and BLM, which inevitably seem to attract some of the most emotionally charged flash mobs with pitch forks. :-|

That said I believe most members of occupy should have supported Sanders.

*cough*astroturfing*cough*

That's fine as a statement of the aspirations of social democracy. But there was also a populist component to Bernie's candidacy that involved demonizing the financial industry. He definitely did "blame specific people." Bernie often said the system is rigged, and he undoubtedly attributed the rigging to the people who made it that way. "Greed" motivated the financial elites to rig the system to serve their own interests at the expense of the little guy.

There's a moralistic dimension to Bernie's message, for sure.

They didn't?

Haha. Different definition of the word 'should'. I meant that they probably did, but I can't prove it.