this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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electoralism

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The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct. A lot of people are seriously worried about this, but I am not one of them. I have never been much of a Party Man myself. . . and the more I learn about the realities of national politics, the more I’m convinced that the Democratic Party is an atavistic endeavor – more an Obstacle than a Vehicle – and that there is really no hope of accomplishing anything genuinely new or different in American politics until the Democratic Party is done away with.

hst-pissed From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Libs will read this and assume Hunter wanted Nixon to win.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Known Russian disinformarionist Hunter "comrade Thompson

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Not much has been written about The Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the Presidential Campaign, but toward the end of the Wisconsin primary race - about a week before the vote - word leaked out that some of Muskie's top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with "some kind of strange drug" that no one in the press corps had ever heard of.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The lesson here is that we should never underestimate the resilience of the Democratic Party. It is one of the oldest political parties on the planet, clocking in at nearly 200 years old. It's survival strategy has been to stand for very little in terms of ideological consistency and absorb popular political movements that are gaining traction, and therefore has included in its big tent nearly every conceivable constituency under the sun at one point or another, including some that were diametrically opposed to the other.

It has always been a formidable ship of Theseus.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is fantastic, but never in my life would I have guessed that W.E.B. Du Bois voted for Warren G. Harding.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

sorry I had to edit the URL because I used Ep 8 initially but Harding begins Ep 9

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

The coolest part is this is still like a decade away from when triangulation kicked in.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

was this before or after the parties switched? probably still works

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would not characterize the parties as having "switched," despite it's prominence in popular discourse. I'd describe it more accurately as a process of ideological sorting that resulted in the creation of a liberal and a conservative party. The coalitions before that point both had liberal/progressive wings in urban areas amongst the middle class that came into prominence in the late 19th century, hence the bipartisan consensus of the Progressive Era. Both parties also had conservative wings to one extent or another. The process of ideological sorting that we have seen only really completed itself around 2010 with the defeat of the last Southern Democrats, the conservative so-called Blue Dogs. It started with Congressional opposition to the New Deal with the formation of the Conservative Coalition in the late 1930s. Conservative Southern Democratic strategy then evolved from breaking with the party in order to discipline the liberal wing, with examples such as Strom Thurmond's 1948 Presidential Bid in response to Truman's integration of the armed forces that year, to outright voting for Republicans at the Presidential level in 1964, with Barry Goldwater only winning the formerly "Solid South" outside his home state of Arizona, as a result of his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During this time from the 1960s to the 1994 Republican Revolution, you saw a proces of some white voters in the South switching to voting for all Republican candidates, abandoning a taboo they had held since the end of Reconstruction, while some continued to vote for conservative Democrats. This position of "Ticket Splitting" to elect a Republican President and a Democratic Congress saw some reprieve with the election of the Georgian Jimmy Carter in 1976 but, held as a trend until the next generation of white voters came of age and all voted solidly Republican in the states of the Deep South, where their superior numbers eventually overcame support for the local Democratic Parties that were being held up through the later part of the 20th century by the solid support of newly enfranchised African American voters. The landslide Republican victories in the Southern states in 1994 and 2010 completed this process in the Deep South, with many remaining Southern Democrats like Senator Richard Shelby becoming Republicans in response to these events.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

appreciate the really detailed answer, was mostly wondering if using this on blueanon would work without them countering with “but they were the bad party back then”

is this taught in schools over there or something that has to be learned outside the classroom?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The Blueanon people basically believe the Democratic Party started in 1964 and believe the first 150 years of the party's history didn't happen. They don't want to reckon with the legacies of Jackson, Bryan, Wilson, or even Roosevelt given how they're all diehard neoliberals. I'd say they're ideological descendants of the original Progressives but with less racism, with some even calling them "neoprogressives."

This amount of nuance is not typically taught in state-funded American public schools. I wanted to include some of it in the sort of units I wanted to teach for high schoolers but, my teaching career never materialized. Typically you most likely would learn this amount of nuance in the party's history in a upper level undergraduate course on the subject.

It's easier for me to see some ideological continuity in the Republican Party than the Democrats, given the original Democrats were a coalition of jingoistic yeoman settlers, slave-owning planter-aristocrats, and migrant- powered urban machines with a smattering of early conscious laborers. Nearly all those categories don't exist anymore. In contrast, I can at least see the theme of nativist middle class people in the Republican coalition going all the way back to when they absorbed the Know Nothing's in the 1850s. Though there were nativists in the Democrats at times pre 1964, especially in the Southern wing following the Civil War.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968 is probably still taught in schools, for classes that make it past WWII before the end of the year.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

if you mean when they switched being liberal/conservative, this was well after that

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

if it helps;

FDR began the process in the 1930s with his response to the Great Depression. Conservative funders fled to the Republicans, although they remained a relatively minor voice until they were able to capitalize on the racist backlash to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Just before the Wisconsin primary in 1972. McGovern had just beat expectations in New Hampshire. Next two paragraphs (page 125):

It is a bogus alternative to the politics of Nixon: A gang of senile leeches like George Meany, Hubert Humphrey, and Mayor Daley . . . Scoop Jackson, Ed Muskie, and Frank Rizzo, the super-cop Mayor of Philadelphia.

George McGovern is also a Democrat, and I suppose I have to sympathize in some guilt-stricken way with whatever demented obsession makes him think he can somehow cause this herd of venal pigs to see the light and make him their leader . . . but after watching McGovern perform in two primaries I think he should stay in the Senate, where his painfully earnest style is not only more appreciated but also far more effective than it is on the nationwide stump.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Man the fucking Daleys.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: