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THE SANDERS/TRUMP LOVE CONNECTION
Jul. 22nd, 2015 12:28 pmOr, “Donald Trump is surging and I don’t feel too good myself”
[Casual political neepery from Team Frog Batshit Political Curator Lucky Bensonhurst]
There is much a-dithering over news that The Donald’s comments about Mexicans has shoved him to the top of a couple of polls, which is being interpreted by The Left™ as a clear indicator that the GOP has finally gone total batshit and OMG WHAT IF HE WINS?
My advice to the ditherers: relax.
First of all: he’s only getting so much attention because he knows how to troll the media, which basically encourages him to speak batshit because it’s good TV and effective clickbait.
And second: there's not just one poll. There are dozens. Trump leads a few of them, and his lead ranges from 14-24% of respondents out of a field of 15 candidates, and in most cases that’s only a handful of points above the Establishment Guy (a.k.a. Jeb Bush). That ain’t exactly a mandate. Also, remember in 2012 when Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich surged for about a week and everyone was saying the same thing they're saying about Trump now?
So yeah. Relax. Trump’s not going to be president. He’s not even going to be nominated.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is also surging, and one interesting result is that it reveals some weird parallels between him and Trump.
Both are surging in part because (1) they’re rallying their respective hardcore party bases with populist plain-spoken truthiness in ways the Establishment candidates aren’t, and (2) the media wants them to keep doing that – in Trump’s case because he’s a flamebait troll, and in Bernie’s case because Hillary needs some serious competition to keep the Demo primaries interesting.
Ana Marie Cox explores the first point in this piece here, and it’s guaranteed to piss off both sides, not least because she labels both Sanders and Trump “extremists”. I know plenty of Sanders fans who consider that a smear. That’s because they tend to use the word in association with blathering, foaming dingbats like Trump and Bachmann and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and the Tea Party in general – fringe-dwellers who want to pull the GOP as far to the right as it can go without violating Godwin’s Law.
Thing is, people who support Sanders (and also Elizabeth Warren, were she to decide to run) want to do the same thing with the Democrats – they want to pull it away from the center and waaaaaaaay over to the Hard Left where they think it belongs.
You might not call that extremism – at least not for yr own candidate. (Remember that the Hard Left and Hard Right think of themselves as fair and balanced centrists.) Whatever term you want to use, the point is that supporters of Sanders and Trump (or, if he’s too cartoonish, let’s say someone like Ted Cruz) basically want a candidate that’s ideologically pure and unwilling to compromise those ideals. I hear this a lot from on both sides. They’re tired of two-timing sell-outs and want a REAL conservative like Ted Cruz, or a REAL liberal like Sanders or Warren, representing them in the race.
Suppose both sides get their wish. Cox hopes that doesn’t happen, and not without good reason:
She has a point. My Facebook newsfeed provides anecdotal evidence of this every day. A lot of people want that cage match. And they want it in a way that shuts out the opposition party more or less permanently – not to the point of kicking them out of govt, maybe, but certainly to the point of making them so powerless they might as well not bother showing up for roll call. “Fuck compromise – the future of the country is at stake, man!”
What they haven’t thought about is this: let’s suppose both parties adopt pure ideologies, and suppose yr candidate wins. Do you really think he/she is going to be able to work with the losers and govern effectively? Would you want him/her to even bother trying? Or flip that around: if yr candidate loses and the ideological opposition candidate wins, where does that leave you? What are you prepared to do about that? And is that really the direction you want to take this?
This is why I personally don’t want a liberal or conservative ideologue in charge of the country. If you want yr party to govern by ideology with no compromise, the word yr looking for is “dictatorship”. Democracy is not supposed to be a winner-take-all game where we have free elections to vote for dictators every four years. It’s supposed to be government by compromise.
Not that it matters, since neither Sanders nor Trump (or Cruz or whoever) have a realistic hope of winning anyway. Not right now. Stranger things have happened, of course. But under current conditions, we’re not likely to have that ideological cage match in 2016.
One thing you can be sure of – when Sanders and/or Trump concede, their respective fans will blame it on unfair smear jobs from biased mainstream media (especially the Gawdamn New York Times).
– L. Bensonhurst
[Casual political neepery from Team Frog Batshit Political Curator Lucky Bensonhurst]
There is much a-dithering over news that The Donald’s comments about Mexicans has shoved him to the top of a couple of polls, which is being interpreted by The Left™ as a clear indicator that the GOP has finally gone total batshit and OMG WHAT IF HE WINS?
My advice to the ditherers: relax.
First of all: he’s only getting so much attention because he knows how to troll the media, which basically encourages him to speak batshit because it’s good TV and effective clickbait.
And second: there's not just one poll. There are dozens. Trump leads a few of them, and his lead ranges from 14-24% of respondents out of a field of 15 candidates, and in most cases that’s only a handful of points above the Establishment Guy (a.k.a. Jeb Bush). That ain’t exactly a mandate. Also, remember in 2012 when Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich surged for about a week and everyone was saying the same thing they're saying about Trump now?
So yeah. Relax. Trump’s not going to be president. He’s not even going to be nominated.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is also surging, and one interesting result is that it reveals some weird parallels between him and Trump.
Both are surging in part because (1) they’re rallying their respective hardcore party bases with populist plain-spoken truthiness in ways the Establishment candidates aren’t, and (2) the media wants them to keep doing that – in Trump’s case because he’s a flamebait troll, and in Bernie’s case because Hillary needs some serious competition to keep the Demo primaries interesting.
Ana Marie Cox explores the first point in this piece here, and it’s guaranteed to piss off both sides, not least because she labels both Sanders and Trump “extremists”. I know plenty of Sanders fans who consider that a smear. That’s because they tend to use the word in association with blathering, foaming dingbats like Trump and Bachmann and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and the Tea Party in general – fringe-dwellers who want to pull the GOP as far to the right as it can go without violating Godwin’s Law.
Thing is, people who support Sanders (and also Elizabeth Warren, were she to decide to run) want to do the same thing with the Democrats – they want to pull it away from the center and waaaaaaaay over to the Hard Left where they think it belongs.
You might not call that extremism – at least not for yr own candidate. (Remember that the Hard Left and Hard Right think of themselves as fair and balanced centrists.) Whatever term you want to use, the point is that supporters of Sanders and Trump (or, if he’s too cartoonish, let’s say someone like Ted Cruz) basically want a candidate that’s ideologically pure and unwilling to compromise those ideals. I hear this a lot from on both sides. They’re tired of two-timing sell-outs and want a REAL conservative like Ted Cruz, or a REAL liberal like Sanders or Warren, representing them in the race.
Suppose both sides get their wish. Cox hopes that doesn’t happen, and not without good reason:
[A Trump-Sanders match-up] would, on some level, be a battle of caricatures — as defined by the opposing side. And what about the Democrats who would love to see Trump get the nomination? And Republicans who’d like to see Sanders? They envision that contest as referendum more than an election, a chance to finally and fatally eject the other side from the political spectrum.
[… Glenn] Beck and others frame the prospect of two extremists as a contest of “visions” but both sides are actually color blind: Everything is black and white. One side is totally wrong; one side is totally right. This zero-sum mentality and vengeful nihilism threaten to turn government into just another WWE show, a cage match of ideologies.
[… Glenn] Beck and others frame the prospect of two extremists as a contest of “visions” but both sides are actually color blind: Everything is black and white. One side is totally wrong; one side is totally right. This zero-sum mentality and vengeful nihilism threaten to turn government into just another WWE show, a cage match of ideologies.
She has a point. My Facebook newsfeed provides anecdotal evidence of this every day. A lot of people want that cage match. And they want it in a way that shuts out the opposition party more or less permanently – not to the point of kicking them out of govt, maybe, but certainly to the point of making them so powerless they might as well not bother showing up for roll call. “Fuck compromise – the future of the country is at stake, man!”
What they haven’t thought about is this: let’s suppose both parties adopt pure ideologies, and suppose yr candidate wins. Do you really think he/she is going to be able to work with the losers and govern effectively? Would you want him/her to even bother trying? Or flip that around: if yr candidate loses and the ideological opposition candidate wins, where does that leave you? What are you prepared to do about that? And is that really the direction you want to take this?
This is why I personally don’t want a liberal or conservative ideologue in charge of the country. If you want yr party to govern by ideology with no compromise, the word yr looking for is “dictatorship”. Democracy is not supposed to be a winner-take-all game where we have free elections to vote for dictators every four years. It’s supposed to be government by compromise.
Not that it matters, since neither Sanders nor Trump (or Cruz or whoever) have a realistic hope of winning anyway. Not right now. Stranger things have happened, of course. But under current conditions, we’re not likely to have that ideological cage match in 2016.
One thing you can be sure of – when Sanders and/or Trump concede, their respective fans will blame it on unfair smear jobs from biased mainstream media (especially the Gawdamn New York Times).
– L. Bensonhurst
