I hope we don't go this far left.

This may all be very reasonable in different times or in a Mitt Romney presidency or something but even granting that everyone is prone to cognitive bias (which is of course true), it is pretty much the case that a mainstream political party in America, the one that controls all the branches of government, is an extreme right-wing party by global standards.

Like, the fight this country should be having is between people like einbert on the left and people like me on the right, and in that situation your "both sides have a point, don't be so angry at each other" stuff would make sense but the Republicans are so far right at this point that your graph of political affiliation looks like this:

einbert->me--------------------------------------------------------------------->GOP

when drawn to scale so I think we need to deal with that problem first before we get back to civility.

This voter fraud bull**** is perhaps the most disturbing agenda that Trump has advanced, and that's saying something.

On the flipside, to bobman's point, patronage and dealing with rich elites have been part of the American political process forever. Abraham Lincoln was accused with some justification of being overly attentive to patronage which at that time came in the form of local jobs and offices to rich elites and donors in exchange for support. People said he took so many meetings with donors and favor-seekers in 1861 who supported him in the contentious 1860 Republican primaries that he was distracted from the war. In fact in many ways the quid pro quo was far more transparent and visible. People just assumed this was how politics worked.

I think the actual problem is the political classes spend a lot of time and rhetoric portending otherwise. It's perverse, and a trite extension of the idea that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. But Democrats may want to simply stop foisting any sort of personal virtues or morality onto elected officials and treat them like tools to extract **** from. Stop expecting them to be good people and instead simply pressure them to do things we want. I don't care about Chuck Schumer's character or what parties he goes to; right now the Democratic Party is at historically low levels of effectiveness and that's the galling thing. Now, if we collectively perceive their tight relationships with the mega wealthy pervert their ability to deliver stuff we want, primary them like good ideologues would. Lots of the elected GOP quake at getting primaried by mouthbreathing Tea Partiers back home, it just so happens that the Tea Party brigades don't care that much about sipping champagne with the Kochs so they don't self-monitor any of this.

To me, more than his social calendar, it's a ****ing travesty the GOP is this close to rolling back Obamacare and Gorsuch sailed through, etc. etc., and that's the stuff I want to hold Schumer accountable for. If we think that stuff is *due* to his gladhanding rich clowns then fine, whatever, I don't know that I care that much about the source of the ineffectiveness of elected Democratic leadership to deliver, only that they seem really bad at it right now and are partly responsible for the state we're in here.

Put differently: if Chuck Schumer fought Gorsuch tooth and nail or found some magic parlimentary tricks to thwart Obamacare repeal, or more correctly, if he forestalled the GOP gains in the Senate in 2014 and won more seats back in 2016, I'd gladly pay for the caviar and cocktails at their rich idiot shindigs.

"His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come."

-Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

No one said it was a new development.

I think it's too much and too complicated to expect people to not only know what they want, but to have a good idea of how to get it and then to tell their elected officials exactly how to go about getting it and then for politicians to mandar obedeciendo. (Well, actually I think that could work for local power.) People can be pretty good at spotting authenticity and if you don't find any good people, don't be surprised when they don't listen anyway; when they respond to different kinds of pre$$ure than you can apply.

You cannot meaningfully criticize people for wanting to kill the poor and being a pawn of Putin if you're also hanging out with them on the weekends.

It's that sort of **** that makes people think "ah **** it, they are all the same".

Which is, you know, true.

It ties in a little with the utterly insane way the media melted down over the wrestling .gif.

Advocating violence against protestors, against Muslims, against black people in general... that's all fine. That's Presidential.

But advocating violence against ME??!?!?!?! My God.

It's like, have some ****ing principles beyond pure shortsighted self-interest. I know that party was probably fun. It would've been cool to be invited. But you gotta say no. That's the ****ing test of whether your principles are sincere or whether they are just posturing.

I suppose what I would ask Democrats to do is go through this kind of mental calculation:

Do my elected representatives do everything they can to get what I want?

- Yes
- No

If no, there's no need to proceed. If 'Yes' then you might want to proceed onto some second and third level concerns about the moral character of the people we're electing. But only then. But Democrats really don't even need to proceed beyond 'No' so who gives a **** right now, honestly.

The Democrats obsession -- more than than GOP -- with finding morally righteous public servants strikes me as ultimately a form of ideological and practical confusion. Unclear or divided on what we want and how to accomplish it, we try to go to the lowest common denominator and assume if we simply find Smart and Good People then we can check out and a bit and things will resolve themselves.

Republicans OTOH, driven largely by a terrible ideology but in many ways a coherent and simple one, can do the opposite: they can elect ****ing ghouls and penny-ante fraudsters and rapists and all other sorts of sundry characters, and their voters know to hold the line on taxes and white culture tribalist symbology and that's it, and they get some stuff from it.* They don't have to give a **** who anyone eats dinner with or where they park their yachts.

Do I want to import precisely that? No. But the right-wing model is probably more in keeping with a far more effective form of politics.

------------

*At least until now. Trump is perhaps testing the boundaries of the terrible person/incompetent matrix and may have broken the dam there.

Or get the **** out of the way. If schumer wants to party with the kochs he should join the republican party and try to bring it to the centre. Thats not neccesarily an ignoble cause just a probably pointless one. Ditto for clinton. Take that sweet wall st cash, it's delicious, but dont tar the supposedly left wing party with it. Run your charity.

There is no way that you think Democrats and Republicans are "the same," and there is a huge difference between being at the same large party as someone, and being so close to them that you don't feel comfortable criticizing them.

I have been to plenty of social events where people I actively disliked were also in attendance. I doubt that I am unique in that respect.

What’s funny is I suspect many people think when politicians socialize with other politicians and billionaires that they talk about politics.

For the politicians it’s their day job and most of them are not talking about any of that stuff. Most of them don’t take any of it as seriously as the most serious 30% of us here. The billionaires can easily indulge and entertain to leverage work hours requests.

I suspect if you diagrammed the interests of older white male senators it would be a huge amount of overlap with only a few exceptions and political party would likely play little factor in it at all.

The reality is we have to leverage politicians with the threat of losing power to get things done. This is much easier for one billionaire then it is for 10000 middle class citizens. We can not get caught up thinking there are many idealists holding high federal elected offices. Congress is a tough row to hoe for an idealist so we do not see many at all.

I pretty much agree with DVaut. I can't count the number of people who cited HRC's supposed character flaws or lack of ideological purity as a reason to justify their lack of support for her. And as I told them repeatedly, even if I conceded that HRC was no better a person than Donald Trump (a point that I of course would never actually concede), the fact remained that HRC was sure to promote policies that were much more to my liking than Trump.

I think I've completely refrained from saying it (until now), but at least sometimes I think it would be better for everyone if the business wing of the Democrats just became Republicans. I assume they bring their anti-racism/sexism along with them. The working class Republicans get alienated and hopefully move back to the Democratic party. Racism/sexism diffuses and fades as common interests are clarified.

no

I'm not sure that we want wild-eyed idealists in Congress. Idealists in Congress mostly shake their fists at the clouds and accomplish little. They sleep well at night because they delude themselves into believing that they play a major role in setting the terms of the debate.

Very true and your point about Soros doing a lot of good as well. But, in the big picture the US has moved to the right for the last 40 years as much because the Dems have had the interests of Wall Street dictating left side of the Overton Window as because the Republicans have had Anarcho-Totalitarians dictating the right side of the window.

Were these people literal Neo-Nazis?

Hard to say. Let's try a thought exercise. Who was the more successful President?

- Lyndon Johnson, known very conspicuously for being tied to big Texas oil money and being deep into Texan graft and localized corruption schemes. In many ways, he was a total pariah on the political body. On the other hand, was seen as ruthless and cutthroat and quietly instrumental bullying Congress into passing monumental legislation like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, nominated the first black Supreme Court Justice, etc.

- Squeaky clean Barack Obama

It's probably Obama because Vietnam was a ****ing travesty for reasons partly due to Johnson's personal failings, but the Democrats could almost surely use a little more of Lyndon Johnson's spirit right now. And if that comes in the form of self-dealing power-hungry types who go into the arena and make unsavory friends and allies but come out with results like LBJ delivered, then so be it. I ain't gonna let estimations about personal virtues stand in the way of that. If that makes me the left equivalent of the Republican Trumpkin then so be it, but I'd note I'm not suggesting abandoning all lines and eroding all norms of Good Governance. But don't lose sight of the forest through the trees here. If somehow Chuck Schumer wind and dined with elites and accomplished something, we'd all be singing a different tune -- I'm quite confident of that. Democrats principle problem isn't that their corrupted or co-opted, it's that they're ****ing feckless. Chuck Schumer wines and dines and we don't get anything out of it. I am not but an amateur Lyndon Johnson biographer but he wouldn't let that happen.

Of course the tremendous difference between Chuck Schumer and Lyndon Johnson is that Lyndon Johnson achieved things he set out to do, and he wasn't really much of a modern liberal but believed deeply in the Social Gospel. He had a few guiding principles and that's it. As I said, the main problem I think we have is that our party doesn't even have those. If Chuck Schumer got into that room and (figuratively) cracked some skulls and got results, he can shotgun a beer with the Kochs, don't care. The problem is Chuck Schumer parties with all-stars and over his tenure we see a steady regression into a glorified Banana Republic.

The people in congress who shake their fists at clouds and accomplish little are the minority. It happens that way because they don't get enough votes.

I don't agree with this, but it is certainly true that much of the dysfunction in both parties is because the economic interests of the major coalitions in both the Democratic party (mostly disadvantaged minorities, limousine liberals) and the Republican party (plutocrats, poor whites with conservative social values) are not aligned.

I guess it depends on your definition. But I live in the real world. If my best friend's wife invites me to a 40th birthday party that she is organizing for my friend, I'm going to attend. I'm not going to tell her that my attendance is contingent on her ensuring that no Trump supporters are in attendance.

And if a work colleague asks me to attend some fundraising dinner or other for a worthy cause, I'm probably going to say yes out of politeness, without regard for whether there will be some Republicans in attendance. Again, that's because I live in the real world.

I really need to quit wasting time on the internet now, so I'm going to leave this as just a thought without a point, but Nixon participated in progressive politics at least for the environment and perhaps economically as well, because he knew which way the wind was blowing. Sure, being a good weather vane is good in a democracy, but maybe it's easy to give too much credit. (well, maybe that counts as a point)

A few things on this:

1. It's pretty clear that he is sincere if you read his posts.
2. If I recall correctly, his posting was a lot more reasonable pre-Trump, and a lot of what has made it ridiculous in my opinion is anger towards Trump and the direction the country is going. I think most here can understand and empathize with that even if we don't agree with the einbert doctrine.
3. A lot of people have said negative things about his posting and most of them have not been called concern trolls, racist, etc.
4. While einbert is radical, he is less radical than the current executive branch of the United States.

It's not the anger that I have a problem with, it's just that a lot of his posts don't make sense.

Well that's sort of the point. Let's be the wind. I remain ever confident in the actual, genuine numerical supremacy of our positions and the widespread popular support of what we want versus what the right-wing wants in many areas.

I take serious the notion that Chuck Schumer backslapping with the Kochs and Invaka may very well be an impediment to generating a popular movement to leverage our built-in advantages. If that's so then primary him.

I suppose my only point is that there exists an alternate, hypothetical universe with some slightly different players performing basically the same roles doing the exact same things -- Democrats socializing with the rich and the elites --- and we'd all be fine with it if our leaders actually delivered meaningful, durable political changes we seek. We get the worst of both worlds: Democratic leadership that seems far too cozy with the mega wealthy and precious little to show for whatever this networking is supposed to buy us. I'm far more upset by the 'precious little to show' part than the cozy relationships.

LBJ was in the majority, cutting deals to get **** done is entirely different than Schumer's role as figurehead of the #resistance.