Let's pretend for one moment that he does die before the election, just for the funsies. What happens then? Will the nomination revert to option number 2, aka Bernie Sanders? Or will his running mate automatically replace him just the way Vice-President is supposted to step in after the Big Man in the White House chokes on a piece of matzo? Does he even have a running mate yet?
US Joe Biden News Megathread - The Other Biden Derangement Syndrome Thread (with a side order of Fauci Derangement Syndrome)
- Thread starter Borscht
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2020
Imagine being the guy that had to copy/paste the same still frames so the next Biden responses syncs with Jimmy's questions and the audience laugh/applause.
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2021
What no twitter does to a MFHe is getting in better shape. Rumor is he cut out the hamburgers and such in favor of steaks.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
They probably just had jimmy rehearse against the recording over and over again to make sure everything lined up and that he repeated the questions they gave him correctly.
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2020
Yeah, your plans for the country to "come together in unity" ain't going so well, huh Brandon?
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2020
Yes Biden there is a" lack of civility in politics" but the thing you failed to mention is that your the one encouraging un civility. By telling people to out those who aren't vaccinated and ignoring Americans concerns on the economy. Also you are very hostile towards the part of the country who didn't vote for you. Want civility don't be a fucking asshat.
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2018
I'll give you one guess as to the religion of Corey Robin, the author of this schlock. What a cohenincidence!
tldr: blame Republicans
tldr: blame Republicans
Why the Biden Presidency Feels Like Such a Disappointment
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/opinion/joe-biden-political-time.html (https://archive.ph/nzylk)No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden. With a razor-thin congressional majority — far smaller than that of Barack Obama — President Biden has delivered two enormous spending bills, with another, the Build Back Better act, likely on its way. Elements of these bills will have a lasting effect on the economy into the next decade; they also push the country to the left.
Every president since Reagan has tacked to the rightward winds set in motion by the conservative movement. Even Mr. Obama’s stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act owed as much to conservative nostrums about the market and runaway spending as they did to liberal notions of fairness and equality. Mr. Biden has had to accommodate the demands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but their intransigence has not had nearly the constraining effect that the voices of austerity and market fetishism had on Bill Clinton or Mr. Obama.
Yet over the past several months, Mr. Biden’s presidency has been dogged by a sense of failure. Critics, friendly and not so friendly, point to what he has not delivered — voting rights, immigration reform, a $15 federal minimum wage, labor law reform and a path to freedom from personal debt and fossil fuels. Democrats fear that Mr. Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the party’s losses in the November elections indicate that the Republicans will take back Congress in the midterms.
No president, however, achieves his entire agenda. And presidents have suffered first-term losses greater than those currently anticipated for 2022.
The real cause of the unease about Mr. Biden lies elsewhere. There is a sense that however large his spending bills may be, they come nowhere near to solving the problems they are meant to address. There is also a sense that however much in control of the federal government progressives may be, the right is still calling the shots.
The first point is inarguable, especially when it comes to climate change and inequality. The second point is questionable, but it can find confirmation in everything from a conservative Supreme Court supermajority to the right’s ability to unleash one debilitating culture war after another — and in the growing fear that Republicans will ride back into the halls of power and slam the doors of democracy behind them, maybe forever.
There’s a sense of stuckness, in other words, that no amount of social spending or policy innovation can seem to dislodge. The question is: Why?
American politics is punctuated by the rise and fall of political orders or regimes. In each regime, one party, whether in power or not, dominates the field. Its ideas and interests define the landscape, forcing the opposition to accept its terms. Dwight Eisenhower may have been a Republican, but he often spoke in the cadences of the New Deal. Mr. Clinton voiced Reaganite hosannas to the market.
Regimes persist across decades. The Jeffersonian regime lasted from 1800 to 1828; the Jacksonian regime, from 1828 to 1860; the Republican regime, from 1860 to 1932; the New Deal order, from 1932 to 1980.
Reagan’s market regime of deference to the white and the wealthy has outlasted two Democratic presidencies and may survive a third. We see its presence in high returns to the rich and low wages for work, continents of the economy cordoned off from democratic control and resegregated neighborhoods and schools. Corporations are viewed, by liberals, as more advanced reformers of structural racism than parties and laws, and tech billionaires are seen as saviors of the planet.
Eventually, however, regimes grow brittle. Their ideology no longer speaks to the questions of the day; important interests lose pride of place; the opposition refuses to accept the leading party and its values.
Every president presides over a regime that is either resilient or vulnerable. That is his situation. When Eisenhower was elected, the New Deal was strong; when Jimmy Carter was elected, it was weak. Every president is affiliated or opposed to the regime. That is his story. James Knox Polk sought to extend the slavocracy, Abraham Lincoln to end it. The situation and the story are the keys to the president’s power — or powerlessness.
When the president is aligned with a strong regime, he has considerable authority, as Lyndon Johnson realized when he expanded the New Deal with the Great Society. When the president is opposed to a strong regime, he has less authority, as Mr. Obama recognized when he tried to get a public option in the Affordable Care Act. When the president is aligned with a weak regime, he has the least authority, as everyone from John Adams to Mr. Carter was forced to confront. When the president is opposed to a weak regime, he has the greatest authority, as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan discovered. These presidents, whom Mr. Skowronek calls reconstructive, can reorder the political universe.
All presidents are transformative actors. With each speech and every action, they make or unmake the regime. Sometimes, they do both at the same time: Johnson reportedly declared that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democrats had lost the South for a generation, thereby setting the stage for the unraveling of the New Deal.
What distinguishes reconstructive presidents from other presidents, even the most transformative like Johnson, is that their words and deeds have a binding effect on their successors from both parties. They create the language that all serious contestants for power must speak. They construct political institutions and social realities that cannot be easily dismantled. They build coalitions that provide lasting support to the regime. Alexander Hamilton thought every president would “reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor.” Reconstructive presidents do that — in fact, they reverse and undo the work of many predecessors — but they also ensure that their heirs cannot.
Politics is not physics. A president opposed to the established order may seek to topple it, only to discover that it is too resilient or that his troops are too feeble and lacking in fight. Where we are in political time — whether we are in a reconstructive moment, ripe for reordering, or not — cannot be known in advance. The weakness or strength of a regime, and of the opposition to the regime, is revealed in the contest against it.
What is certain is that the president is both creature and creator of the political world around him. Therein lies Mr. Biden’s predicament.
There also were signs that the Reagan regime was vulnerable. Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 suggested that conservative orthodoxies of slashing Social Security and Medicare and waging imperial warfare no longer compelled voters. Mr. Trump’s presidency revealed a congressional G.O.P. that could not unite around a program beyond tax cuts and right-wing judges.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden rejected the transformation Mr. Sanders promised and assured wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” on his watch. Yet there were signs, after he won the nomination and into the early months of his administration, of a new, “transformational” Mr. Biden who wanted to be the next F.D.R. The combination of the Covid economy, with its shocking inequalities and market failures, and a summer of fire and flood seemed to authorize a left-leaning politics of permanent cash supports to workers and families, increased taxes on the rich to fund radical expansions of health care, elder care and child care, and comprehensive investments in green energy and infrastructure, with high-paying union jobs.
Most important, the package cohered. Instead of a laundry list of gripes and grievances, it featured the consistent items of an alternative ideology and ascendant set of social interests. It promised to replace a sclerotic order that threatens to bury us all with a new order of common life. This was that rare moment when the most partisan of claims can sound like a reasonable defense of the whole.
Yet while Mr. Biden has delivered nearly $3 trillion in spending, with another $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion likely to pass, he has not created a new order. In addition to a transformation of the economy, such an order would require a spate of democracy reforms — the elimination of the filibuster and curbing of partisan gerrymandering, the addition of new states to the union, and national protection of voting rights and electoral procedures — as well as labor law reforms, enabling workers to form unions.
What makes such reforms reconstructive rather than a wish list of good works is that they shift the relations of power and interest, making other regime-building projects possible. Today’s progressive agenda is hobbled less by a lack of popular support than by the outsize leverage conservatives possess — in the Senate, which privileges white voters in sparsely populated, often rural states; in the federal structure of our government, which enables states to make it difficult for Black Americans to vote; and in the courts, whose right-wing composition has been shaped by two Republican presidents elected by a minority of the voters. No progressive agenda can be enacted and maintained unless these deformations are addressed.
The only way to overcome anti-democratic forces is by seeding democracy throughout society, empowering workers to take collective action in the workplace and the polity, and by securing democracy at the level of the state. That is what the great emblems of a reconstructive presidency — the 14th Amendment, which granted Black Americans citizenship, or the Wagner Act, which liberated workers from the tyranny of employers — are meant to do. They give popular energy institutional form, turning temporary measures of an insurgent majority into long-term transformations of policy and practice.
It’s not clear that Mr. Biden wants such a reconstruction. And even if he did, it’s not clear that he could deliver it.
The first is the Republican Party. Here the party has benefited less from the “authoritarian” turn of Mr. Trump than from the fact that the Trump presidency was so constrained. As Mr. Skowronek argues, “Nothing exposes a hollow consensus faster than the exercise of presidential power.” At critical moments, exercising power was precisely what Mr. Trump was not able to do.
Confronting the free fall of the New Deal, Mr. Carter unleashed a stunning strike of neoliberal and neoconservative measures: deregulation of entire industries; appointment of the anti-labor Paul Volcker to the Fed; a military buildup; and renewed confrontation with the Soviet Union. These defied his party’s orthodoxies and unraveled its coalition. Reagan ended the New Deal regime, but Mr. Carter prepared the way.
For all his talk of opposition to the Republican pooh-bahs, Mr. Trump delivered what they wanted most — tax cuts, deregulation and judges — and suffered defeat when he tried to break out of their vise. Republicans repeatedly denied him funds to support his immigration plans. They overrode his veto of their military spending bill, something Congress had not been able to do in the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Trump’s own administration defied his Russia policy. This combination of weakness and deference to the G.O.P. helped keep the Republicans — and the Reagan regime — together.
The second obstacle is the Democratic Party. There’s a reason party elites, led by Mr. Obama, swiftly closed ranks, when the time came, behind Mr. Biden and against Mr. Sanders. They wanted continuity, not rupture.
Likewise a portion of the base. Many Democrats are older, with long memories and strong fears of what happens when liberals turn left (they lose). Newer recruits, who gave Mr. Biden the edge in some key districts, usually in the suburbs, are what the Princeton historian Matt Karp calls “Halliburton Democrats,” wealthy defectors from the Republican Party.
“A regime is only as vulnerable as the political forces challenging it are robust,” writes Mr. Skowronek. That robustness is yet to be demonstrated. Despite the clarity of the path the Democrats must take if they hope to topple the Reagan order, it’s not clear the party wants to take it.
The third obstacle to a Biden reconstruction is what Mr. Skowronek calls the “institutional thickening” of American politics. Since the founding era, the American political system has acquired a global economy, with the dollar as the world’s currency; a government bureaucracy and imperial military; a dense ecology of media technologies; and armies of party activists. While these forces offer the modern president resources that Jefferson never had, they also empower the modern-day equivalents of Jefferson’s opponents to resist a reconstruction. Should Mr. Biden attempt one, could he master the masters of social media? Mr. Trump tried and was banned from Twitter.
The real institutions that get in the way of Mr. Biden and the Democrats, however, are not these latter-day additions of modernity but the most ancient features of the American state.
The power of Senators Manchin and Sinema is an artifact of the constitutional design of the Senate and the narrowness of the Democratic majority, which itself reflects the fact that the institution was created to defend slave states rather than popular majorities. Their power is augmented by the centuries-old filibuster, which has forced Mr. Biden to jam many programs into one vaguely named reconciliation bill. That prevents him from picking off individual Republicans for pieces of legislation they might support (as he did with the infrastructure bill).
Should the Republicans take the House in 2022, it will probably not be because of Tucker Carlson but because of gerrymandering. Should the Republicans take back the White House in 2024, it will probably be because of some combination of the Electoral College and the control that our federalist system grants to states over their electoral procedures.
A polarized electorate divided into red and blue states is not novel; it was a hallmark of the last Gilded Age, which put the brakes on the possibility of a presidential reconstruction for decades. As the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider argued, the division of the country into the Republican North and Democratic South made the entire polity “extremely conservative because one-party politics tends strongly to vest political power in the hands of people who already have economic power.”
What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside F.D.R. stood the unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions. Each of them was disruptive, upending the leadership and orthodoxies of the existing parties. Each of them was prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did.
Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs. More important, they take political arguments out of legislative halls and press them in private spaces of power. They suspend our delicate treaties of social peace, creating turbulence in hierarchical institutions like the workplace and the family. Institutions like these need the submission of subordinate to superior. By withholding their cooperation, subordinates can stop the everyday work of society. They exercise a kind of power that presidents do not possess but that they can use. That is why, after Lincoln’s election, Frederick Douglass called the abolitionist masses “the power behind the throne.”
An independent social movement is what Mr. Biden does not have. Until he or a successor does, we may be waiting on a reconstruction that is ready to be made but insufficiently desired.
Corey Robin is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” and “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.”
Every president since Reagan has tacked to the rightward winds set in motion by the conservative movement. Even Mr. Obama’s stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act owed as much to conservative nostrums about the market and runaway spending as they did to liberal notions of fairness and equality. Mr. Biden has had to accommodate the demands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but their intransigence has not had nearly the constraining effect that the voices of austerity and market fetishism had on Bill Clinton or Mr. Obama.
Yet over the past several months, Mr. Biden’s presidency has been dogged by a sense of failure. Critics, friendly and not so friendly, point to what he has not delivered — voting rights, immigration reform, a $15 federal minimum wage, labor law reform and a path to freedom from personal debt and fossil fuels. Democrats fear that Mr. Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the party’s losses in the November elections indicate that the Republicans will take back Congress in the midterms.
No president, however, achieves his entire agenda. And presidents have suffered first-term losses greater than those currently anticipated for 2022.
The real cause of the unease about Mr. Biden lies elsewhere. There is a sense that however large his spending bills may be, they come nowhere near to solving the problems they are meant to address. There is also a sense that however much in control of the federal government progressives may be, the right is still calling the shots.
The first point is inarguable, especially when it comes to climate change and inequality. The second point is questionable, but it can find confirmation in everything from a conservative Supreme Court supermajority to the right’s ability to unleash one debilitating culture war after another — and in the growing fear that Republicans will ride back into the halls of power and slam the doors of democracy behind them, maybe forever.
There’s a sense of stuckness, in other words, that no amount of social spending or policy innovation can seem to dislodge. The question is: Why?
A prisoner of great expectations
Though it came out in 1993, Stephen Skowronek’s “The Politics Presidents Make” helps us understand how Mr. Biden has become a prisoner of great expectations.American politics is punctuated by the rise and fall of political orders or regimes. In each regime, one party, whether in power or not, dominates the field. Its ideas and interests define the landscape, forcing the opposition to accept its terms. Dwight Eisenhower may have been a Republican, but he often spoke in the cadences of the New Deal. Mr. Clinton voiced Reaganite hosannas to the market.
Regimes persist across decades. The Jeffersonian regime lasted from 1800 to 1828; the Jacksonian regime, from 1828 to 1860; the Republican regime, from 1860 to 1932; the New Deal order, from 1932 to 1980.
Reagan’s market regime of deference to the white and the wealthy has outlasted two Democratic presidencies and may survive a third. We see its presence in high returns to the rich and low wages for work, continents of the economy cordoned off from democratic control and resegregated neighborhoods and schools. Corporations are viewed, by liberals, as more advanced reformers of structural racism than parties and laws, and tech billionaires are seen as saviors of the planet.
Eventually, however, regimes grow brittle. Their ideology no longer speaks to the questions of the day; important interests lose pride of place; the opposition refuses to accept the leading party and its values.
Every president presides over a regime that is either resilient or vulnerable. That is his situation. When Eisenhower was elected, the New Deal was strong; when Jimmy Carter was elected, it was weak. Every president is affiliated or opposed to the regime. That is his story. James Knox Polk sought to extend the slavocracy, Abraham Lincoln to end it. The situation and the story are the keys to the president’s power — or powerlessness.
When the president is aligned with a strong regime, he has considerable authority, as Lyndon Johnson realized when he expanded the New Deal with the Great Society. When the president is opposed to a strong regime, he has less authority, as Mr. Obama recognized when he tried to get a public option in the Affordable Care Act. When the president is aligned with a weak regime, he has the least authority, as everyone from John Adams to Mr. Carter was forced to confront. When the president is opposed to a weak regime, he has the greatest authority, as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan discovered. These presidents, whom Mr. Skowronek calls reconstructive, can reorder the political universe.
All presidents are transformative actors. With each speech and every action, they make or unmake the regime. Sometimes, they do both at the same time: Johnson reportedly declared that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democrats had lost the South for a generation, thereby setting the stage for the unraveling of the New Deal.
What distinguishes reconstructive presidents from other presidents, even the most transformative like Johnson, is that their words and deeds have a binding effect on their successors from both parties. They create the language that all serious contestants for power must speak. They construct political institutions and social realities that cannot be easily dismantled. They build coalitions that provide lasting support to the regime. Alexander Hamilton thought every president would “reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor.” Reconstructive presidents do that — in fact, they reverse and undo the work of many predecessors — but they also ensure that their heirs cannot.
Politics is not physics. A president opposed to the established order may seek to topple it, only to discover that it is too resilient or that his troops are too feeble and lacking in fight. Where we are in political time — whether we are in a reconstructive moment, ripe for reordering, or not — cannot be known in advance. The weakness or strength of a regime, and of the opposition to the regime, is revealed in the contest against it.
What is certain is that the president is both creature and creator of the political world around him. Therein lies Mr. Biden’s predicament.
The language of reconstruction
Heading into the 2020 Democratic primaries, many people thought we might be in a reconstructive moment. I was one of them. There was a popular insurgency from the left, heralding the coming of a new New Deal. It culminated in the Nevada caucus, where people of color and young voters — an emergent multiracial working class — put Bernie Sanders over the top, ready to move the political order to the left.There also were signs that the Reagan regime was vulnerable. Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 suggested that conservative orthodoxies of slashing Social Security and Medicare and waging imperial warfare no longer compelled voters. Mr. Trump’s presidency revealed a congressional G.O.P. that could not unite around a program beyond tax cuts and right-wing judges.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden rejected the transformation Mr. Sanders promised and assured wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” on his watch. Yet there were signs, after he won the nomination and into the early months of his administration, of a new, “transformational” Mr. Biden who wanted to be the next F.D.R. The combination of the Covid economy, with its shocking inequalities and market failures, and a summer of fire and flood seemed to authorize a left-leaning politics of permanent cash supports to workers and families, increased taxes on the rich to fund radical expansions of health care, elder care and child care, and comprehensive investments in green energy and infrastructure, with high-paying union jobs.
Most important, the package cohered. Instead of a laundry list of gripes and grievances, it featured the consistent items of an alternative ideology and ascendant set of social interests. It promised to replace a sclerotic order that threatens to bury us all with a new order of common life. This was that rare moment when the most partisan of claims can sound like a reasonable defense of the whole.
Yet while Mr. Biden has delivered nearly $3 trillion in spending, with another $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion likely to pass, he has not created a new order. In addition to a transformation of the economy, such an order would require a spate of democracy reforms — the elimination of the filibuster and curbing of partisan gerrymandering, the addition of new states to the union, and national protection of voting rights and electoral procedures — as well as labor law reforms, enabling workers to form unions.
What makes such reforms reconstructive rather than a wish list of good works is that they shift the relations of power and interest, making other regime-building projects possible. Today’s progressive agenda is hobbled less by a lack of popular support than by the outsize leverage conservatives possess — in the Senate, which privileges white voters in sparsely populated, often rural states; in the federal structure of our government, which enables states to make it difficult for Black Americans to vote; and in the courts, whose right-wing composition has been shaped by two Republican presidents elected by a minority of the voters. No progressive agenda can be enacted and maintained unless these deformations are addressed.
The only way to overcome anti-democratic forces is by seeding democracy throughout society, empowering workers to take collective action in the workplace and the polity, and by securing democracy at the level of the state. That is what the great emblems of a reconstructive presidency — the 14th Amendment, which granted Black Americans citizenship, or the Wagner Act, which liberated workers from the tyranny of employers — are meant to do. They give popular energy institutional form, turning temporary measures of an insurgent majority into long-term transformations of policy and practice.
It’s not clear that Mr. Biden wants such a reconstruction. And even if he did, it’s not clear that he could deliver it.
What is stopping Biden?
The forces arrayed against a reconstruction are many.The first is the Republican Party. Here the party has benefited less from the “authoritarian” turn of Mr. Trump than from the fact that the Trump presidency was so constrained. As Mr. Skowronek argues, “Nothing exposes a hollow consensus faster than the exercise of presidential power.” At critical moments, exercising power was precisely what Mr. Trump was not able to do.
Confronting the free fall of the New Deal, Mr. Carter unleashed a stunning strike of neoliberal and neoconservative measures: deregulation of entire industries; appointment of the anti-labor Paul Volcker to the Fed; a military buildup; and renewed confrontation with the Soviet Union. These defied his party’s orthodoxies and unraveled its coalition. Reagan ended the New Deal regime, but Mr. Carter prepared the way.
For all his talk of opposition to the Republican pooh-bahs, Mr. Trump delivered what they wanted most — tax cuts, deregulation and judges — and suffered defeat when he tried to break out of their vise. Republicans repeatedly denied him funds to support his immigration plans. They overrode his veto of their military spending bill, something Congress had not been able to do in the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Trump’s own administration defied his Russia policy. This combination of weakness and deference to the G.O.P. helped keep the Republicans — and the Reagan regime — together.
The second obstacle is the Democratic Party. There’s a reason party elites, led by Mr. Obama, swiftly closed ranks, when the time came, behind Mr. Biden and against Mr. Sanders. They wanted continuity, not rupture.
Likewise a portion of the base. Many Democrats are older, with long memories and strong fears of what happens when liberals turn left (they lose). Newer recruits, who gave Mr. Biden the edge in some key districts, usually in the suburbs, are what the Princeton historian Matt Karp calls “Halliburton Democrats,” wealthy defectors from the Republican Party.
“A regime is only as vulnerable as the political forces challenging it are robust,” writes Mr. Skowronek. That robustness is yet to be demonstrated. Despite the clarity of the path the Democrats must take if they hope to topple the Reagan order, it’s not clear the party wants to take it.
The third obstacle to a Biden reconstruction is what Mr. Skowronek calls the “institutional thickening” of American politics. Since the founding era, the American political system has acquired a global economy, with the dollar as the world’s currency; a government bureaucracy and imperial military; a dense ecology of media technologies; and armies of party activists. While these forces offer the modern president resources that Jefferson never had, they also empower the modern-day equivalents of Jefferson’s opponents to resist a reconstruction. Should Mr. Biden attempt one, could he master the masters of social media? Mr. Trump tried and was banned from Twitter.
The real institutions that get in the way of Mr. Biden and the Democrats, however, are not these latter-day additions of modernity but the most ancient features of the American state.
The power of Senators Manchin and Sinema is an artifact of the constitutional design of the Senate and the narrowness of the Democratic majority, which itself reflects the fact that the institution was created to defend slave states rather than popular majorities. Their power is augmented by the centuries-old filibuster, which has forced Mr. Biden to jam many programs into one vaguely named reconciliation bill. That prevents him from picking off individual Republicans for pieces of legislation they might support (as he did with the infrastructure bill).
Should the Republicans take the House in 2022, it will probably not be because of Tucker Carlson but because of gerrymandering. Should the Republicans take back the White House in 2024, it will probably be because of some combination of the Electoral College and the control that our federalist system grants to states over their electoral procedures.
A polarized electorate divided into red and blue states is not novel; it was a hallmark of the last Gilded Age, which put the brakes on the possibility of a presidential reconstruction for decades. As the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider argued, the division of the country into the Republican North and Democratic South made the entire polity “extremely conservative because one-party politics tends strongly to vest political power in the hands of people who already have economic power.”
How do we move past Reagan?
Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How?What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside F.D.R. stood the unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions. Each of them was disruptive, upending the leadership and orthodoxies of the existing parties. Each of them was prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did.
Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs. More important, they take political arguments out of legislative halls and press them in private spaces of power. They suspend our delicate treaties of social peace, creating turbulence in hierarchical institutions like the workplace and the family. Institutions like these need the submission of subordinate to superior. By withholding their cooperation, subordinates can stop the everyday work of society. They exercise a kind of power that presidents do not possess but that they can use. That is why, after Lincoln’s election, Frederick Douglass called the abolitionist masses “the power behind the throne.”
An independent social movement is what Mr. Biden does not have. Until he or a successor does, we may be waiting on a reconstruction that is ready to be made but insufficiently desired.
Corey Robin is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” and “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.”
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
A recurring theme in American politics since the nation's founding has been, "We have a commanding majority...that means we can do the dumbest shit imaginable and piss off anyone we want!"
Billy Beer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2021
Which group of the internal powerstruggle at the white house, has thrown CNN under the bus? Seems as they help Biden a lot, and run protection, somebody must be pissed off with them.
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2018
A deeper dive into the data behind the "media treating Biden worse than Trump" story, showing how broken or rigged this whole "sentiment analysis" bs is. The same articles are being rated differently, both positive and negative.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
This narrative only exists to assure the Vote Blue No Matter Who NPCs that they aren't just mindless followers of a team.
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2020
This happens just about any time there are two factions fighting where one gets the leg up for the current "run".
What comes to mind would be game consoles. Ps3 and Xbox 360. The 360 won handily, so the Xbox One was a shitshow of Microsoft overstepping with always online and spy cameras and thus allowed the PS4 to become the winner of that generation. The same thing has now happened with the current gen with Xbox wanting more ports to PC and crossplay, while Playstation has avoided both as much as possible in favor of whatever they've been doing.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
Yeah, no. She'll laugh and talk her way out of ANY confrontation.
I guess you can guess what I'm going to say next, am I?
Billy Beer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2021
Sorry, but my sperg alarm has just gone apeshit.
Sony ended up outselling the 360 and 'winning' the generation, even though Microsoft had it in the bag until they shit the bed in 2010. The current gen xboxes are a sales flop and neither have an exclusive game one fucking year in to the launch. Microsoft were the best the industry has even seen, from the launch of the OG xbox to ~2010. Since then, they've fucked it at every turn they've had. They haven't gone cross=play and PC ports for the good of the fans, they've done it to fudge numbers and to desperately claw back any money they've pissed away on their stupid, stupid, stupid decisions. Of the 4 generations that Sony have completed, they've won them 'all' (Wii outsold ps360 but arguably it isn't a console).
And I say this as a Microsoft fan, and someone who hasn't bought a Playstation console since PS1.
And I say this as a Microsoft fan, and someone who hasn't bought a Playstation console since PS1.
Better than farting and sharting her way THROUGH any confrontation.
Something something Hillary. I agree, she will be VP to Kamala and Clinton will get 10 years. If there's one thing I'll give Clinton, it's that she has never backed down or given up on a fight. She wants that presidency and she's coming back for it.
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2020
It's less about pure numbers and more about the view of the customer. Anecdotal, surely, but the PS3 in terms of a game console with games to play was always seen as the lackluster and expensive choice. (Playstation has no games and all that)
It's not to say that Microsoft hasn't fucked their console related choices since, but it has forced them to do the things that are in the end good for the "fans". If they start adding something in an effort to make themselves look good, and that stays as a habit to avoid looking bad by taking it away, is it a wholly bad move? An example would be that I don't nor will not have a current gen console, or even previous gen console. Them porting games to PC in this case would only be a net positive in my book, and it's obviously being done to make themselves money. Sony being resistant to doing that until very recently seems to be only because they thought they could wait it out and hope people would cave and buy their shit. Which, due to chip shortages and such, isn't happening even if people felt like it.
I say this as someone who doesn't care about being a fan of either company because they sell products.
It's not to say that Microsoft hasn't fucked their console related choices since, but it has forced them to do the things that are in the end good for the "fans". If they start adding something in an effort to make themselves look good, and that stays as a habit to avoid looking bad by taking it away, is it a wholly bad move? An example would be that I don't nor will not have a current gen console, or even previous gen console. Them porting games to PC in this case would only be a net positive in my book, and it's obviously being done to make themselves money. Sony being resistant to doing that until very recently seems to be only because they thought they could wait it out and hope people would cave and buy their shit. Which, due to chip shortages and such, isn't happening even if people felt like it.
I say this as someone who doesn't care about being a fan of either company because they sell products.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
IN WHICH I SPERG HARDER;
Microsoft was a mix of smart and utter fuck-up from the launch of the original Xbox, and continues to be. They were better than Sony and miles better than Nintendo at maintaining developer relationships, since Microsoft's strength as a company hasn't really ever been technology so much as negotiating deals with suppliers, partners, and customers. Then they rather infamously bled money constantly with the 360s, since QA is hard, and mass-producing computers isn't as easy as bolting one together from parts you ordered on Newegg. But at least developers liked developing for 360 and Xbox Live was a great service.
Meanwhile, Sony lost every dollar it made on PS2 with PS3, thanks to breaking the bank on Cell R&D, which whoopsie wasn't IEEE compliant and therefore couldn't be sold to anyone, and managed to aggravate developers with its weird architecture and mediocre tools. They 'beat' 360, but pissed away so much cash that, well, they were really smart with PS4. And then dumb with PS5.
Meanwhile, Nintendo never really made developers happy, but somebody figured out how to make customers happy, so they sold the Wii like hotcakes. This success led to them handed the reins back to Miyamoto, who really had very little to do with designing the Wii and largely took credit for what junior engineers did, with Wii U and let him ruin everything.
Meanwhile, Sony lost every dollar it made on PS2 with PS3, thanks to breaking the bank on Cell R&D, which whoopsie wasn't IEEE compliant and therefore couldn't be sold to anyone, and managed to aggravate developers with its weird architecture and mediocre tools. They 'beat' 360, but pissed away so much cash that, well, they were really smart with PS4. And then dumb with PS5.
Meanwhile, Nintendo never really made developers happy, but somebody figured out how to make customers happy, so they sold the Wii like hotcakes. This success led to them handed the reins back to Miyamoto, who really had very little to do with designing the Wii and largely took credit for what junior engineers did, with Wii U and let him ruin everything.
Anyway Brandon is retarded and poops himself.
The Foldless Brain
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
Joe Biden is an ancient pedophile.
Oxous
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021
Even if the Democratic Civil War only kills CNN, and nothing else happens, it will still have been a net gain for society.
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2020
I'm curious what happens if Biden ends up being such a shitshow continuing on. Conservatism ends up being the truley Rebellion culture.
Oxous
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021
Biden just called Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear to "express his condolences" for last night's tornado outbreak. No word yet on what sort of relief the federal government is going to provide to Kentucky and other states, but they're going to need to provide a lot of it. Here's Dawson Springs, KY. Just one of many towns ravaged by the tornadoes.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Conservatism is over. There's nothing left to conserve, which is why Republicans really can't figure out what thing they're going to campaign on not changing. The political right in America is evolving into a mix of restorationism and pragmatic negotiation of constituent needs. The old guard may not like that the working class is joining the party, but they've been abandoned by the Democrats, and the GOP can't win without them.
- Status