MelancholicMechanicus
Thought Criminal
Something of a text wall ahead. TL;DR at the bottom.
Bernie Sander, a longtime politician and currently Senator to the state of Vermont in the USA is a "Democratic Socialist" (by his own words) and a progressive political candidate. He is running for president, looking to win the Democratic nomination this year and to beat Trump whom he has called "one of the most dangerous presidents of all time" (again, his words). He fought for civil rights, he lived in a commune, he visited the USSR. He is a advocate for high taxation, universal healthcare, gun control, student debt forgiveness, open borders, the "Green new deal" and other hallmark progressive ideas of the aptly named progressive wing of the Democrats that he has been a part of for decades now since the late 60's.
Bernie Sanders is about to crash the Democratic Party with no survivors. And it's not his fault at all.
Let's wind back the clock a bit to 2012. You will forgive me if I do not want to or have the resources to fully create a timeline of events but all of you who are politically minded will remember how during Obama's 2nd term a sort of shift happened within the american left. From 2012 to 2016 the Democrats slid very far to the left in a really short amount of time. People who were against gay marriage suddenly became staunch allies all along, immigration control suddenly became a taboo and downright evil thing, gun control talks skyrocketed and so on. Meanwhile the Republicans who mostly remained true to their old Neo-con, paleo-conservative and such ways found themselves being painted as "far-right" and "neo-nazis" for holding opinions that 10 years before were almost the same throughout the entire center spectrum of american politics. Going into 2016 the Democrats assumed a hard line "progress, diversity, social justice" banner that would prove their downfall with american voters. Especially given who they chose to lead this charge and whom their enemy in that election would be.
The first snag in this road was Bernie Sanders. If they wanted to take this sort of progressive position, logic dictated that naturally you would want someone with progressive credentials right? Who better than the man who has been consistently progressive and left leaning like that for over 30 years? Who already has a established base, a nice record, a good PR arm in the form that best suit politicians: honest support from voter who like him? But they could not and indeed would not pick Bernie, because all of these progressive positions were not actually meant to be.
See, picking Bernie would not only see the Democrats putting a self appointed socialist (who once visited and praised the soviet union!) which would kill any boomer support he might have with centrists, it would imply they would actually have to honour these things he was promised. And that would just not fly with the donors.
Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg LLC, Saban Capital Group, Soros Fund Management, and these are just the big enterprises. None of these people wants someone who would actually threaten their bottom lines at the end of the financial quarters. So they needed someone who would spout whatever political slogans and messages was needed to secure the win but whom they could also trust not to enforce things that would threaten them too much. So in the end, the DNC conspired among themselves and threw Bernie under the bus for Hillary (See: Donna Brazille's Hack and the DNC E-Mail leaks).
In other for Hillary to secure her win, she and her allies then decided to get their friends in the media to help (As one does in politics, nothing really extraordinary about that in Hillary's 2016 campaign except for the sheer scale of her network) and she decided that to better secure her chances the perfect opponent would be the buffoon, not-a-politician, joke candidate Donald Trump.
I don't need to say what happened afterward do I?
Fast forward to today, January 2020. The Democratic party has spent 4 years desperately trying to undo the massive loss of 2016 and throwing tantrum after tantrum after conspiracy after scandal after disaster at Trump but the truth is the man just cannot be stopped. Both him and his core supporters are confident, and most of the public not firmly and religiously against Trump is just jaded after these almost 5 years of "This will be the end of Donald Trump" coming from the media and political pundits. The economy is good, the jobs are here, troops came back from Syria. As far as they care it doesn't matter.
Which brings us to the point of this wall of text and the apocalyptic prediction of mine.
As one does, the DNC is gearing up to run a candidate against Trump. The favorite so far is Joe Biden. A somewhat senile old man, Biden is a reminder of the nice times of the Obama era when you could actually be OK with the existence of borders and immigration control and call yourself Democrat. He is popular with centrist voters who dislike radicals, but does not really stand up to Trump in popularity terms and is expected to lose when he runs. Biden has the confidence of those donors behind him who also like his "I don't think we need to seize the means of production" tax and economy plans. The second place however is contested by both Bernie and Warren.
Bernie and Warren are both similar, with the main difference being that Bernie has been on the game longer and is better at speeches and grassroots crowds and Warren is a bit more dry but a more technocratic "I have a scientific model for that" type of candidate. Both of them are a threat to Biden as they would likely not play nice with those corporate donors but Bernie is the absolute threat here. He has the "people" behind him, the ones who will preach his gospel and try and convince people to vote for him. That is a danger, and already he is being targeted.
A few days ago the (honestly pathetic) rumor that Bernie said to Warren "A woman will never be president of this country" to her face came out. A completely out of context comment that was then used in a maneuver one could mistake as a Onion satire of political debate setups during the DNC debate where Bernie was asked to clarify himself, only for the CNN debater to turn around and ask Warren how she felt when Sanders said the line to her. Completely ignoring the answer he gave and proceeding as if he had either not spoken or admitted. See the high octane cringe for yourself.
It is obvious the DNC is worried about Bernie winning the nomination, and they are hard at work to stop that and why not kill two birds with one stone by setting the two primary progressive candidates on each other so they can eat themselves? The story was so over the top Trump came out during a rally and defended Bernie, using this as proof of his claims that CNN is fake news and such. A pretty decent move to further provoke and strain the democratic base.
But this is not the only problem Sander has. The other comes from much closer to home: his own supporters.
As I am sure the more politically minded of you have noticed I mentioned a name in the title. McGovern. To those that do not know he was the democratic nominee for the 1972 election. He didn't win, obviously, as the existence of Richard Nixon's 2nd term proves. But the thing is how he lost: hard. Very hard. As in a whole 17 electoral votes to Nixon's 520. How did Nixon manage that? How did McGovern manage that? He got less electoral votes than the guy who ran on a "Segregation forever" platform 3 years before! To make a long story short, McGovern's platform was alright in principle but went too far to the left in a lot of things.
McGovern was in favour of complete withdrawal and an end to the Vietnam war along with negotiating to bring all POWs home. A good platform for starters, likely to win voters who want to see sons and father come back from a unpopular war. But then he also wanted to issue amnesty to draft dodgers, a controversial move as while the war was unpopular draft dodging was still seen as a dick move socially. He supported a reduction of around 37% of the defense budget, again highly controversial thing among the people who were ok with leaving Vietnam but not with that. A sort of proto-UBI plan (dropped in august 1972) was also part of his campaign, Not surprisingly, this led to a booming support among college aged people and liberal university students. This would end up killing his campaign, as he became known as the candidate for "Amnesty, abortion and acid" as that was what his most vocal support group was focused on. It's important to not McGovern himself did not talk much at all about the other two, but his association with these die-hard college leftists who constantly brought up the other two points doomed it to somewhat unofficially become the part of his campaign image. (Fun fact: During Watergate it came out that Nixon that crafty crafty fella helped McGovern get the nomination, using his squad of agents and propaganda people to sabotage other candidates and help him along as he saw McGovern as the easy candidate to defeat. A maneuver Clinton would try in 2016 but fail as she instead created her own defeat)Does that sound familiar?
This brings me to the point that made me want to write this. Recently the media watchdog organization Project Veritas released a new series of videos part of their 2020 election coverage. Veritas is a right wing organization, but their coverage speaks for itself. Constantly attacked for being "fake" and "maliciously edited" I am still waiting to see anyone actually disprove what they say. The closest they ever came to being "exposed" as frauds was over a Planned Parenthood series of videos and even then they managed to sand their ground.
Bernie Sander is in many way way more radical than McGovern but to make up for that he also has to deal with much, more hardcore supporters. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Bernie Sanders supports high taxes. Bernie Sander is for free college. Bernie Sanders is for the ban of "assault weapons" and "high capacity magazines" and such other gun control classics. Bernie Sanders is a supporter of massive minimum wage hikes and union powers. But you know what?
Bernie Sanders is not a Stalinist. Bernie Sanders does not want to create a dictatorship of the proletariat. Bernie Sanders does not wish to build gulags, nor imprison political rivals. Bernie Sanders does not want to "eat the rich" or think that "liberals get the bullet too". But a lot of his supporters do not seem to care.
"The only things fascists understand is violence." "Cities will burn." "Gulags were not that bad. That is CIA propaganda. They had conjugal visits and were paid a livable wage!"
There are not just random redditors or Facebook commentators being edgy. These are paid campaign staffers for the Bernie campaign. If anyone wants to claim this is somehow faked and that O'Keefe somehow hacked the DNC website to put these people on Bernie's pay roll, got them to read perfect scripts, has the world's best deep fake technology or something else please do because I just can't see how you would fake this.
This is what cost McGovern his election in 1972, times a hundred. These aren't just some hippies being contrarians to the good morals of christian white america by smoking pot and taking day-after pills so they can have "free love". These are people advocating for violent revolution, political re-education, mass imprisonment of double digits of the country's population that cause horror and honest shot to 80% of the political spectrum of the united states. This is what is gonna take Bernie down in the end, the fact that people just can't stand the zealots that follow him.
I want you to imagine what will happen when the DNC screws over Bernie again later this year. We already had a Bernie-Bro stage a political terror attack before in 2017, and Antifa has been ramping up their violent rhetoric since 2016. There is trouble brewing among the american left between the moderates and radicals, and this election cycle is showing just how hard the divide has become. These people are becoming high on their own propaganda, absolutely convinced that 50% of the USA is composed of Nazis and that Trump supporters want them dead. Propaganda started by the Democrat big wigs meant to convince centrist voters to cast their choice on them as the sensible candidates but that instead fueled a rabid left-wing response who now feels it's justified on using "any means necessary" to "combat Fascism and Nazism".
2020 will be one hell of a wild ride my guys.
This is now the 3rd forum I try and talk about this. My first attempt at AlternateHistory got me banned, my second at SpaceBattles led to me being sent here.
TL;DR Bernie's wild campaign ride and the DNC plays themselves again in 2020 Thread. Think of this as a general of the whole thing to discuss whatever happens during the year
Bernie Sander, a longtime politician and currently Senator to the state of Vermont in the USA is a "Democratic Socialist" (by his own words) and a progressive political candidate. He is running for president, looking to win the Democratic nomination this year and to beat Trump whom he has called "one of the most dangerous presidents of all time" (again, his words). He fought for civil rights, he lived in a commune, he visited the USSR. He is a advocate for high taxation, universal healthcare, gun control, student debt forgiveness, open borders, the "Green new deal" and other hallmark progressive ideas of the aptly named progressive wing of the Democrats that he has been a part of for decades now since the late 60's.
Bernie Sanders is about to crash the Democratic Party with no survivors. And it's not his fault at all.
Let's wind back the clock a bit to 2012. You will forgive me if I do not want to or have the resources to fully create a timeline of events but all of you who are politically minded will remember how during Obama's 2nd term a sort of shift happened within the american left. From 2012 to 2016 the Democrats slid very far to the left in a really short amount of time. People who were against gay marriage suddenly became staunch allies all along, immigration control suddenly became a taboo and downright evil thing, gun control talks skyrocketed and so on. Meanwhile the Republicans who mostly remained true to their old Neo-con, paleo-conservative and such ways found themselves being painted as "far-right" and "neo-nazis" for holding opinions that 10 years before were almost the same throughout the entire center spectrum of american politics. Going into 2016 the Democrats assumed a hard line "progress, diversity, social justice" banner that would prove their downfall with american voters. Especially given who they chose to lead this charge and whom their enemy in that election would be.
The first snag in this road was Bernie Sanders. If they wanted to take this sort of progressive position, logic dictated that naturally you would want someone with progressive credentials right? Who better than the man who has been consistently progressive and left leaning like that for over 30 years? Who already has a established base, a nice record, a good PR arm in the form that best suit politicians: honest support from voter who like him? But they could not and indeed would not pick Bernie, because all of these progressive positions were not actually meant to be.
See, picking Bernie would not only see the Democrats putting a self appointed socialist (who once visited and praised the soviet union!) which would kill any boomer support he might have with centrists, it would imply they would actually have to honour these things he was promised. And that would just not fly with the donors.
Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg LLC, Saban Capital Group, Soros Fund Management, and these are just the big enterprises. None of these people wants someone who would actually threaten their bottom lines at the end of the financial quarters. So they needed someone who would spout whatever political slogans and messages was needed to secure the win but whom they could also trust not to enforce things that would threaten them too much. So in the end, the DNC conspired among themselves and threw Bernie under the bus for Hillary (See: Donna Brazille's Hack and the DNC E-Mail leaks).
In other for Hillary to secure her win, she and her allies then decided to get their friends in the media to help (As one does in politics, nothing really extraordinary about that in Hillary's 2016 campaign except for the sheer scale of her network) and she decided that to better secure her chances the perfect opponent would be the buffoon, not-a-politician, joke candidate Donald Trump.
I don't need to say what happened afterward do I?
Fast forward to today, January 2020. The Democratic party has spent 4 years desperately trying to undo the massive loss of 2016 and throwing tantrum after tantrum after conspiracy after scandal after disaster at Trump but the truth is the man just cannot be stopped. Both him and his core supporters are confident, and most of the public not firmly and religiously against Trump is just jaded after these almost 5 years of "This will be the end of Donald Trump" coming from the media and political pundits. The economy is good, the jobs are here, troops came back from Syria. As far as they care it doesn't matter.
Which brings us to the point of this wall of text and the apocalyptic prediction of mine.
As one does, the DNC is gearing up to run a candidate against Trump. The favorite so far is Joe Biden. A somewhat senile old man, Biden is a reminder of the nice times of the Obama era when you could actually be OK with the existence of borders and immigration control and call yourself Democrat. He is popular with centrist voters who dislike radicals, but does not really stand up to Trump in popularity terms and is expected to lose when he runs. Biden has the confidence of those donors behind him who also like his "I don't think we need to seize the means of production" tax and economy plans. The second place however is contested by both Bernie and Warren.
Bernie and Warren are both similar, with the main difference being that Bernie has been on the game longer and is better at speeches and grassroots crowds and Warren is a bit more dry but a more technocratic "I have a scientific model for that" type of candidate. Both of them are a threat to Biden as they would likely not play nice with those corporate donors but Bernie is the absolute threat here. He has the "people" behind him, the ones who will preach his gospel and try and convince people to vote for him. That is a danger, and already he is being targeted.
A few days ago the (honestly pathetic) rumor that Bernie said to Warren "A woman will never be president of this country" to her face came out. A completely out of context comment that was then used in a maneuver one could mistake as a Onion satire of political debate setups during the DNC debate where Bernie was asked to clarify himself, only for the CNN debater to turn around and ask Warren how she felt when Sanders said the line to her. Completely ignoring the answer he gave and proceeding as if he had either not spoken or admitted. See the high octane cringe for yourself.
It is obvious the DNC is worried about Bernie winning the nomination, and they are hard at work to stop that and why not kill two birds with one stone by setting the two primary progressive candidates on each other so they can eat themselves? The story was so over the top Trump came out during a rally and defended Bernie, using this as proof of his claims that CNN is fake news and such. A pretty decent move to further provoke and strain the democratic base.
But this is not the only problem Sander has. The other comes from much closer to home: his own supporters.
As I am sure the more politically minded of you have noticed I mentioned a name in the title. McGovern. To those that do not know he was the democratic nominee for the 1972 election. He didn't win, obviously, as the existence of Richard Nixon's 2nd term proves. But the thing is how he lost: hard. Very hard. As in a whole 17 electoral votes to Nixon's 520. How did Nixon manage that? How did McGovern manage that? He got less electoral votes than the guy who ran on a "Segregation forever" platform 3 years before! To make a long story short, McGovern's platform was alright in principle but went too far to the left in a lot of things.
McGovern was in favour of complete withdrawal and an end to the Vietnam war along with negotiating to bring all POWs home. A good platform for starters, likely to win voters who want to see sons and father come back from a unpopular war. But then he also wanted to issue amnesty to draft dodgers, a controversial move as while the war was unpopular draft dodging was still seen as a dick move socially. He supported a reduction of around 37% of the defense budget, again highly controversial thing among the people who were ok with leaving Vietnam but not with that. A sort of proto-UBI plan (dropped in august 1972) was also part of his campaign, Not surprisingly, this led to a booming support among college aged people and liberal university students. This would end up killing his campaign, as he became known as the candidate for "Amnesty, abortion and acid" as that was what his most vocal support group was focused on. It's important to not McGovern himself did not talk much at all about the other two, but his association with these die-hard college leftists who constantly brought up the other two points doomed it to somewhat unofficially become the part of his campaign image. (Fun fact: During Watergate it came out that Nixon that crafty crafty fella helped McGovern get the nomination, using his squad of agents and propaganda people to sabotage other candidates and help him along as he saw McGovern as the easy candidate to defeat. A maneuver Clinton would try in 2016 but fail as she instead created her own defeat)Does that sound familiar?
This brings me to the point that made me want to write this. Recently the media watchdog organization Project Veritas released a new series of videos part of their 2020 election coverage. Veritas is a right wing organization, but their coverage speaks for itself. Constantly attacked for being "fake" and "maliciously edited" I am still waiting to see anyone actually disprove what they say. The closest they ever came to being "exposed" as frauds was over a Planned Parenthood series of videos and even then they managed to sand their ground.
Bernie Sander is in many way way more radical than McGovern but to make up for that he also has to deal with much, more hardcore supporters. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Bernie Sanders supports high taxes. Bernie Sander is for free college. Bernie Sanders is for the ban of "assault weapons" and "high capacity magazines" and such other gun control classics. Bernie Sanders is a supporter of massive minimum wage hikes and union powers. But you know what?
Bernie Sanders is not a Stalinist. Bernie Sanders does not want to create a dictatorship of the proletariat. Bernie Sanders does not wish to build gulags, nor imprison political rivals. Bernie Sanders does not want to "eat the rich" or think that "liberals get the bullet too". But a lot of his supporters do not seem to care.
"The only things fascists understand is violence." "Cities will burn." "Gulags were not that bad. That is CIA propaganda. They had conjugal visits and were paid a livable wage!"
There are not just random redditors or Facebook commentators being edgy. These are paid campaign staffers for the Bernie campaign. If anyone wants to claim this is somehow faked and that O'Keefe somehow hacked the DNC website to put these people on Bernie's pay roll, got them to read perfect scripts, has the world's best deep fake technology or something else please do because I just can't see how you would fake this.
This is what cost McGovern his election in 1972, times a hundred. These aren't just some hippies being contrarians to the good morals of christian white america by smoking pot and taking day-after pills so they can have "free love". These are people advocating for violent revolution, political re-education, mass imprisonment of double digits of the country's population that cause horror and honest shot to 80% of the political spectrum of the united states. This is what is gonna take Bernie down in the end, the fact that people just can't stand the zealots that follow him.
I want you to imagine what will happen when the DNC screws over Bernie again later this year. We already had a Bernie-Bro stage a political terror attack before in 2017, and Antifa has been ramping up their violent rhetoric since 2016. There is trouble brewing among the american left between the moderates and radicals, and this election cycle is showing just how hard the divide has become. These people are becoming high on their own propaganda, absolutely convinced that 50% of the USA is composed of Nazis and that Trump supporters want them dead. Propaganda started by the Democrat big wigs meant to convince centrist voters to cast their choice on them as the sensible candidates but that instead fueled a rabid left-wing response who now feels it's justified on using "any means necessary" to "combat Fascism and Nazism".
2020 will be one hell of a wild ride my guys.
This is now the 3rd forum I try and talk about this. My first attempt at AlternateHistory got me banned, my second at SpaceBattles led to me being sent here.
TL;DR Bernie's wild campaign ride and the DNC plays themselves again in 2020 Thread. Think of this as a general of the whole thing to discuss whatever happens during the year
