shame on anybody for trusting a politician.

Maybe try watching the news?

In not just the election in Austria, there is the referndum in Italy.

Referendum in Italy, and the five star party with there **** you slogan, as well as the Austrian vote which the Greens have won and are the main representation of the left.

Also if you had watched the news the first time the Greens won that vote there were a lot of faqs given all round Europe as it showed their was some public resistance to swings to the far right.

Sure there is some immigration led swings to the right, but that is only one part of the story and you are the one denying the reality of the other. Brexit is not really explained by that, as there is a strong correlation between having lower immigration and voting leave.

Same with your ad hoc rationalisations of the Trump victory, which desperately reach to normalise an outlier event. If it was all due to the predictable normal knowable predictable circumstances you outline I hope you made a fortune betting on Trump........you didnt though did you, because the ontological basis of the rationalisations you use gave him no chance.

In the UK and USA the left is showing strong forces pushing away from the centrist positions they have held for years personalised by Bernie and Corbyn.

Also you cant just handwave a few southern countries, when its basically all of them.


This article does a good break down country by country.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...is-on-the-rise

austria rejects the centre by electing a boring liberal pro-eu economist.

Whose party had never polled higher than 12.4% before.

Also Italy.

both of these are fine examples of why youre wrong.

continental green parties are definitely part of the centre-left. they're not radical anything. merkel might be in government with one next year.

renzi couldnt win a referendum basically on his own but the social democrats are still polling at a little above 30% which is what they always get. 5 star are weird but they're not further out than the old italian left. in many ways they're a broader party than the old leftwingers.

what is also happening in both countries is that the anti-immigration populist (far-) right is doing really well. fpö and lega nord are reaching new highs. that's the main development. there's nothing like it happening on the left.

Uh Polosi that's the barest of silver linings

http://nypost.com/2016/12/04/nancy-p...new-direction/

Those two ideas aren't my ideas. I do think Trump is uniquely bad but I mentioned a few times that Democrats misfired by assuming it was enough to say only that, or to focus their communication on that, and not to provide an affirmative, positive reason to vote for their candidates. I understand voters who stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate; I don't agree with their choice but I think it's on the Democratic Party to rectify that, not a moral imperative that people simply fall into line.

The second idea is also a strawman. In fact I even acknowledged that if the Democrats want to put identity politics on the back-burner, that's a valid strategy so long as they don't literally genuflect to white supremacy feel-good measures in governance. See my continued reference back to the Clinton Era about how politicians can either cynically or 'accidentally' fall prey to winning on the backs of the white working class and then trying to mollify them through policy: see the 1994 crime bill.

Phone Booth wasn't even demanding I dump that stuff either; he just thought that should all move out of the Democrats superficial messaging and that it move to back-office, smoke-filled room maneuvering. I just voiced the note of caution that the strategy has been tried before and resulted in policies that actually actively uniquely harmed black people and other racial minorities and was borne out of the Triangulating Strategist's Playbook to satisfy angry whites.

Also "sacrifice none of the core principles" is some glib retelling of the story since it's not at all clear the election was some grand rejection or affirmation of any principle at all, not was like a litany or full-breadth of Democratic core principles laid out and my opinion gauged. We were, I think, only talking about 'identity politics' branding and messaging that we're assuming Trump won on but which I dunno seems inconclusive at best.

So in sum, your whole post here is basically a strawman. It pretends I insisted everyone who might sympathize with Clinton vote for her because Trump is bad (I didn't and I acknowledge that's actually a big political mistake) and that I am willing to give up nothing at all, when I merely said that appealing to whites on identity has historically lead to crafting policies that are supposed to appeal to whites on identity and that it's not as simple as a sleight-of-hand messaging trick.

The problem with the identity politics stuff is that it really isn't the Democratic party doing it. Sure, they talk about it a lot, but the jimmies are rustled as much by college kids shouting down their professor as anything officially done by the party. Liberalish media focus on how various issues affect different races differently is maybe part of it as well and also totally out of the hands of the Democratic Party.

We all know that Obama didn't create BLM by saying he was willing to investigate racial profiling, and that it's far more true that he was a follower rather than a leader, but that doesn't matter. The right/white demands that BLM et al are condemned and failure to do that lumps you in with what they see as dividing America.

Treating "identity politics" like it's a meaningful phrase and not reflexive right-wing derp is not what we should be doing.

Yeah.

Apart from you, every source I have read or heard has described the Austrian result as rejection of the centre left/right parties.

How you describe 5 star is just flat out nonsense. They are the quintessence of a populist anti establishment party, but no just make up some rando hand waves and reach for the stars.

5 Star has 91 in the chamber of deputies, Lega Nord has 14 despite being around since 91. 35 v 12 senators. 5 Star has over 3 times as many MEPs.

You are just pulling **** out of thin air.

Not even mentioning other Southern countries such as Spain. Podmos in Spain only formed in 2014, got 21% of the vote in 2015, but yea only far right.., no doubt there will be some ridiculous posturing hand waving over this.

I dont know why you have taken such a weird position on this, really really reaching to the point of abject absurdity to try and deny their has been some shift from the centre in both directions which is the consensus view amongst practically all observers and commentators, because it is an obvious reality.

So far its only a non mainstream left party that has actually formed a Government, in Greece, which wont count because hand wave hand wave.

The anti-establishment moment of this presidential election was in March when both government coalition SPÖ/ÖVP candidates failed to make it into the second round. That was due to a combination of refugee crisis peak and a very strong independent center/right candidate running (Griss), who drew her support mainly from ÖVP/SPÖ.

Van der Bellen is definitely centrist compared to the Greens, his positions are barely distinguishable from the social democratic SPÖ except for his stronger pro-EU stance. For the run-off VDB clearly positioned himself as the status-quo, pro-EU candidate.

Even though the terms themselves are right-wing creations and lack nuance, I feel like messaging on the left can either be "identity politics" or "class warfare". I think class warfare would have been better this election, but Clinton was precluded from using it because of her close ties to big corporations and Wall St. Instead of constantly pointing to Trump's racism, If the Dem candidate could have said "Trump is a billionaire fat-cat and him and his kind have spent the last 40 years systematically sucking up the wealth of regular middle-class Americans, depositing it in a collection of constant-growth offshore bank accounts and shell companies", Trump would have gotten trounced. But you needed a candidate that could say that with some credibility.

(I'm not necessarily saying Bernie would have won. He seems like he honestly believes in what he says, but he has a certain haplessness that seriously detracts from his credibility.)

The right's version of "identity politics" and "class warfare" are "not-a-real-American" and "trickle-down economics".

BIDEN 2020 LET'S ****ING GO

Love Joe, but this ship has probably sailed already. This would not energize young people or minorities, nor win back the Rust Belt states if Trump even does a remotely decent job of creating jobs there.

Trump's "policies" are only going to kill what jobs are left for many of these Midwestern backwaters were all so concerned about all of a sudden. Anyone who is capable of taking advantage of the coming oil and gas boom across the US might do well, tho.

I'd bet drump is a dog to run again. Impeachment or resignation.

I think there's a really good chance he's primaried in 2020, as well.

Pence is not exactly a desirable replacement IMO

Perhaps I'm just stirring the pot, but can we safely say that Hillary Clinton did not accept the election results, and Jill Stein essentially is Hillary Clinton's waterboy?

H2O!!!!

Disagree. The Clinton camp has no soul of its own and were perfectly fine accepting the results until they saw the cash and enthusiasm role in for Stein and then hopped on board after the fact.

That battle is already completely lost. Yesterday a guy I know who is a leftist political science professor in a European university referred to overreliance on "identity politics" as one of the problems of the Democratic party.

Interesting take on the supposed conflict between Identity Politics and Economic Populism.

There's no conflict here

Matt Bruenig had a pretty good take on the challenges facing intersectional theorists when dealing with class on his blog before it all got taken down earlier this year. I'll take a look later and see if I have it archived.

Fail by not quoting the first paragraph of that link:

if you find it I'd be interested. Thanks for the article.