Good read on the dismantling of Bidens agenda

kingstonlake wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
Nonsense.  Things like 12 weeks of paid family leave are straight out of Bernie’s playbook.  Hopefully Congress learned their lesson with this failure.  

I find it odd your obsession with Bernie. We’re talking about things a large percentage of the population is on board with. But for some reason you turn your angst to one person. Really weird.

PennSpartan wrote:

kingstonlake wrote:

I find it odd your obsession with Bernie. We’re talking about things a large percentage of the population is on board with. But for some reason you turn your angst to one person. Really weird.

I use him as an example.  He invented much of the Progressive agenda.  Insert AOC or Warren or Omar if you like.  I choose Bernie because I find it odd that he wants to be the voice of Democrats while refusing to join the Party.  And as I have said to TrapperGus, I don’t believe Progressives make up a majority of Americans.  I would put the percentage at 33% at best.  Prove me wrong.  

Trapper Gus wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
I use him as an example.  He invented much of the Progressive agenda.  Insert AOC or Warren or Omar if you like.  I choose Bernie because I find it odd that he wants to be the voice of Democrats while refusing to join the Party.  And as I have said to TrapperGus, I don’t believe Progressives make up a majority of Americans.  I would put the percentage at 33% at best.  Prove me wrong.  

Or FDR, Truman & LBJ ...

Heck, even Eisenhower & Nixon were Progressives compared to what came after Reagan.

PennSpartan wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

Or FDR, Truman & LBJ ...

Heck, even Eisenhower & Nixon were Progressives compared to what came after Reagan.

It’s a little early to be drinking, Gus. Take it slow.

Trapper Gus wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
It’s a little early to be drinking, Gus. Take it slow.

Stop believing what the MSM is pouring into that space between your ears.

Here is a review of a book that lays out the hard right turn the Democratic Party took with Carter and beyond.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/free-markets-besieged-citizens-gerstle-kuttner/

PennSpartan wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

Stop believing what the MSM is pouring into that space between your ears.

Here is a review of a book that lays out the hard right turn the Democratic Party took with Carter and beyond.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/free-markets-besieged-citizens-gerstle-kuttner/

How many Progressives have been elected President since Carter?  Zero.  That tells me all I need to know about what the country wants.  

Trapper Gus wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
How many Progressives have been elected President since Carter? Zero. That tells me all I need to know about what the country wants.

No Dude. One. Biden.

Beginning with the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a succession of Democratic presidents joined Republicans in turning away from the New Deal model of regulated capitalism toward what has come to be known as neoliberalism. The neoliberal credo claims that markets work efficiently and that government attempts to constrain them via regulation and public spending invariably fail, backfire, or are corrupted by politics. As public policy, neoliberalism has relied on deregulation, privatization, weakened trade unions, less progressive taxation, and new trade rules to reduce the capacity of national governments to manage capitalism. These shifts have resulted in widening inequality, diminished economic security, and reduced confidence in the ability of government to aid its citizens.

The Republican embrace of this doctrine is hardly surprising. Given the lessons learned about the necessity of government interventions following the 1929 stock market collapse and the success of the Roosevelt administration as a model for the Democratic Party, the allure of neoliberalism to many Democrats is a puzzle worth exploring.

The term “neoliberalism” itself is confusing, because for at least a century “liberalism” in the United States has meant moderate left, not free-market right. Neoliberalism in its current economic sense draws on the older meaning of liberalism, which is still common in Europe and which holds that free markets are the counterpart of a free and democratic society. That was the claim of classical liberals like Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson.

Only in the twentieth century, after the excesses of robber-baron capitalism, did modern liberals begin supporting extensive government intervention—the use of “Hamiltonian means” to carry out “Jeffersonian ends,” in the 1909 formulation of Herbert Croly, one of the founders of The New Republic. This view defined the ideology of both presidents Roosevelt and was reinforced by the economics of John Maynard Keynes. In Britain, the counterpart in the same era was the “radical liberalism” of social reform put forth by the Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George.

The term neoliberalism also gets muddled because some on the left use it as an all-purpose put-down of conservatism—to the point where one might wonder whether it is just an annoying buzzword. But neoliberalism does have a precise and useful meaning, as a reversion to the verities of classical economics, with government as guardian of unregulated markets.

In his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gary Gerstle, an American historian who has taught at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, since 2014, argues that neoliberalism needs to be understood as a “political order,” which he defines as an era in which a certain set of ideas and policies have become politically hegemonic. “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will,” he writes. “Thus, the Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower acquiesced to the core principles of the New Deal order,” just as “the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton accepted the central principles of the neoliberal order in the 1990s.” Gerstle’s lens helps us appreciate the self-reinforcing power of neoliberalism. As government became a less dependable source of economic security, people were made to feel that they were on their own, thus internalizing an individualist rather than collectivist view of citizen and society.

What differentiates neoliberalism from the older ideal of laissez-faire is the recognition that a free market will not reemerge if the government simply gets out of the way. The neoliberal perspective, as first articulated in the 1930s by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and by Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, holds that if we want entrepreneurs, financiers, and ordinary citizens to be liberated from state regulation, strong government rules must protect the market from the state. Milton Friedman, in a 1951 essay titled “Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects,” agreed that this project went well beyond laissez-faire. Gerstle writes, “This strategy was built on a paradox: namely, that government intervention was necessary to free individuals from the encroachments of government.” The historian Quinn Slobodian, in his authoritative intellectual history of neoliberalism, Globalists (2018), goes further: “The neoliberal project was focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy.”

Leftist theorists had long appreciated the role of the state in defining the market. As Karl Polanyi famously wrote, relishing the paradox, “laissez-faire was planned.” And indeed it was. To function at all, even “free” markets require extensive rules defining property itself, the terms of credit and debt, contracts, corporations, bankruptcy, rights and obligations of labor, and so on. The difference between the New Deal or social-democratic view of markets and the neoliberal ideal is that progressives want the government’s rules to act as democratic counterweights to the abuses of capitalism, while neoliberals want them to protect market freedoms. But both accept that capitalism requires rules.

...

PennSpartan wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

No Dude.  One.  Biden.

LOL.  And yet Joe and me have been attacked repeatedly on this board for being too moderate.  I love it!

PennSpartan wrote:

kingstonlake wrote:

I find it odd your obsession with Bernie. We’re talking about things a large percentage of the population is on board with. But for some reason you turn your angst to one person. Really weird.

I use him as an example. He invented much of the Progressive agenda. Insert AOC or Warren or Omar if you like. I choose Bernie because I find it odd that he wants to be the voice of Democrats while refusing to join the Party. And as I have said to TrapperGus, I don’t believe Progressives make up a majority of Americans. I would put the percentage at 33% at best. Prove me wrong.

kingstonlake wrote:You’re paranoid Penn. that’s fine. You’ve got old boomer brain rot that fears anything resembling change. You’ve benefited from a system set up perfectly for you. You reject anything that threatens that. Anything that levels that playing field. Your line of thinking is what has the pay gap astoundingly disproportionate between the wealthy and middle America. You reject an open competition for further education. You want it for only those that are willing to pay into it. Government holds 92% of student loans. You don’t want universal healthcare. You only want those who can afford it to have it. You prefer the rigged system that is bought and paid for by lobbyist.

PennSpartan wrote:

kingstonlake wrote:You’re paranoid Penn. that’s fine. You’ve got old boomer brain rot that fears anything resembling change. You’ve benefited from a system set up perfectly for you. You reject anything that threatens that. Anything that levels that playing field. Your line of thinking is what has the pay gap astoundingly disproportionate between the wealthy and middle America. You reject an open competition for further education. You want it for only those that are willing to pay into it. Government holds 92% of student loans. You don’t want universal healthcare. You only want those who can afford it to have it. You prefer the rigged system that is bought and paid for by lobbyist.

trust me,  

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
trust me,  

PennSpartan wrote:

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

I’m not religious, but I will pray AOC gets the nomination in 2024. It’s time for Progressives to shit or get off the pot.

Trapper Gus wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
I’m not religious, but I will pray AOC gets the nomination in 2024.  It’s time for Progressives to shit or get off the pot.  

Biden is a fine Progressive, he just needs more Senators and for the Democratic Party to hold the House.

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:You’re literally the only one talking about that so if you’re tired of hearing about it then you could just stop talking about it and you would no longer have to hear about it.

PennSpartan wrote:

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:You’re literally the only one talking about that so if you’re tired of hearing about it then you could just stop talking about it and you would no longer have to hear about it.

What I’ve read here repeatedly is how boomers and moderates like me destroyed the country.

PennSpartan wrote:I saw what happened in 2016 when Progressives ruined the Democrats’ chance of beating Trump. And trust me, Hillary would have won.

Cameron wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:I saw what happened in 2016 when Progressives ruined the Democrats’ chance of beating Trump. And trust me, Hillary would have won.  

Hillary ran, got the nomination, and lost to the worst candidate the GOP has ever nominated. None of that is the fault of progressives. You might be the dumbest man alive.

Cameron wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:I saw what happened in 2016 when Progressives ruined the Democrats’ chance of beating Trump. And trust me, Hillary would have won.

Hillary ran, got the nomination, and lost to the worst candidate the GOP has ever nominated. None of that is the fault of progressives. You might be the dumbest man alive.

Cameron wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:I saw what happened in 2016 when Progressives ruined the Democrats’ chance of beating Trump. And trust me, Hillary would have won.  

Hillary ran, got the nomination, and lost to the worst candidate the GOP has ever nominated. None of that is the fault of progressives. You might be the dumbest man alive.

kingstonlake wrote:

Cameron wrote:

Hillary ran, got the nomination, and lost to the worst candidate the GOP has ever nominated. None of that is the fault of progressives. You might be the dumbest man alive.

Wise up buddy. The public at large has no right to form their own opinion on whomever is “next in line”. How dare voters question whomever is the bought and paid for chosen one by big money politics.

PennSpartan wrote:Just in time. This should help the situation a lot:

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/sanders-manchin-intentionally-sabotaging-presidents-132625928.html

Trapper Gus wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:Just in time. This should help the situation a lot:

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/sanders-manchin-intentionally-sabotaging-presidents-132625928.html

So, you think Machin will walk away from lowering drug costs & making health care affordable because Sanders took him behind the woodshed?

PennSpartan wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

So, you think Machin will walk away from lowering drug costs & making health care affordable because Sanders took him behind the woodshed?

No. I think Sanders is hot air, as usual.

Trapper Gus wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
No. I think Sanders is hot air, as usual.

Sanders is riling up his voters to get them out for the mid-terms to keep the Democratic Party in power, nothing else.

PennSpartan wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

Sanders is riling up his voters to get them out for the mid-terms to keep the Democratic Party in power, nothing else.

We’ll see.

PennSpartan wrote:

kingstonlake wrote:

Wise up buddy. The public at large has no right to form their own opinion on whomever is “next in line”. How dare voters question whomever is the bought and paid for chosen one by big money politics.

I for one can’t wait until Progressives announce their little money no name candidates to compete against the Republicans.  Should be a fair fight.

kingstonlake wrote:

PennSpartan wrote:
I for one can’t wait until Progressives announce their little money no name candidates to compete against the Republicans.  Should be a fair fight.

That’s a weird response to someone having an issue with there being to much corporate money in the political process. Honestly I don’t know why I keep bringing it up. You prove every day it’s not an issue for you.

kingstonlake wrote:Status quo boomer…..

kingstonlake wrote:

AvgMSUJoe wrote:
And the death of the labor union.

I don’t think they’re dead. It’s just that a lot of them fell victim to the culture war BS. Many of them vote R now because of it. Again, voting against your interest…

AvgMSUJoe wrote:

kingstonlake wrote:

I don’t think they’re dead. It’s just that a lot of them fell victim to the culture war BS. Many of them vote R now because of it. Again, voting against your interest…

Not dead per se, but the rank in file don't feel the need to protect their jobs like they did back in the day. Growing up I knew a ton of GM guys who were avid outdoorsmen and racists who were Ds cause they knew they needed their jobs to be able to afford to go hunting.

AvgMSUJoe wrote:

kingstonlake wrote:

I don’t think they’re dead. It’s just that a lot of them fell victim to the culture war BS. Many of them vote R now because of it. Again, voting against your interest…

Not dead per se, but the rank in file don't feel the need to protect their jobs like they did back in the day. Growing up I knew a ton of GM guys who were avid outdoorsmen and racists who were Ds cause they knew they needed their jobs to be able to afford to go hunting.

Trapper Gus wrote:

AvgMSUJoe wrote:
Not dead per se, but the rank in file don't feel the need to protect their jobs like they did back in the day. Growing up I knew a ton of GM guys who were avid outdoorsmen and racists who were Ds cause they knew they needed their jobs to be able to afford to go hunting.

They don't see the union doing much for them now.

PennSpartan wrote:

Trapper Gus wrote:

They don't see the union doing much for them now.

They are hurting as much as helping now. For every benefit they secure, another job goes to Mexico or overseas.