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Israel Hamas War, West Bank, Etc. | Hostilities resume

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
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RaiGuy said:
While Trump is a million times worse, I wouldn’t say that Biden did much in the best interest of Palestinians. In his last interview, he basically stated that Netanyahu was telling him they were basically planning to commit a genocide (comparing it to what the US did with the nuclear bombs) and Biden was fine with it. Again, I voted for Harris and know that Trump is basically Satan, but that doesn’t mean that Biden was good for Palestinians in this situation. He was just not as bad as Trump.
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He did put sanctions on the settlers. If Kamala had won that might have been expanded. Trump removed them and Israel is running wild.

Biden's problem was politics of Iraq War redux. The Republicans just lied that Saddam = Al Q, and the Dems who told the truth were ousted as unpatriotic, including the truly pathetic Saxby Chambliss campaign. And Hamas really were terrorists. The politics were impossible, because too many Americans just hate Islam and Arabs. Period.

I don't know exactly what Biden thought or what he would have done if unconstrained by politics. But he did burn his relationship with Bibi over this, and pressed hard to get the slaughter to be at least contained. The American contribution was overstated anyway. To my knowledge, the bombs were just bombs. Israel could have and would have gotten them elsewhere.
 
Any chance that Trump’s comment will detail the peace plan?

Why would Palestine continue releasing POWs and hostages if there is a credible threat that they will be wiped out after the prisoner/hostage exchanges are completed?
 
Paine said:
The left isn’t often given a real chance in American politics but not because of any kind of conspiracy against the left. I’ve never claimed that there is a conspiracy against the left, though other leftists certainly have claimed that. Again, please just engage with what I’m saying rather than what you think I’m saying or what other leftists have said.

My thoughts about why the left doesn’t gain traction in America are much more structural than that. Besides, there have been times in American history when the left has gained traction. It’s no coincidence that the left was it its strongest in this country when labor was at its strongest.

Leftist ideas heavily influenced the New Deal. Last time I checked, the programs that are still around from that era are pretty damn popular with the American public.

It’s just not as simple as the left making claims and then the public rejecting them. That’s not how politics in this country works. That’s not really how politics works anywhere.

Look at opinion polls of issues that would be considered “left” issues. A ton of them garner a majority of public support. It’s not a conspiracy to say that operating within the current political and economic structure of the United States puts the left at a disadvantage. I’m sure you would acknowledge that it puts the Democratic Party at a disadvantage. That is magnified x100 for people left of the Democratic mainstream.

To simplify politics to the point of accepting or rejecting an entire program or worldview based on individual election results (especially in an electoral system as skewed as ours) is asinine. Is the entire platform of the Democratic Party now rejected by the American public since Harris lost?

The wider point, going back to the origin of this discussion, is that the left-wing in the United States is utterly broken and disorganized. Not as much as it was in its nadir, but it is not anywhere close to an effective political force. Bernie was the closest thing to hammering out some kind of consistent left program, but we all know of his failures. If there was a real left force in this country, we wouldn’t be talking about college protestors as representative of the left.
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I would say that American voters have rejected the ideals and goals of the Democratic Party. If the party can lose 2 of 3 elections against someone as terrible as Trump, then it’s clear that the voters don’t want what Dems are offering. I’m not sure where the party goes from here and I’m not sure how the party even figures it out.

As to the failures of the left to coalesce as a real group/movement, why do you think that is? And what do you think would change that failure?
 
SnoopRob said:
I would say that American voters have rejected the ideals and goals of the Democratic Party. If the party can lose 2 of 3 elections against someone as terrible as Trump, then it’s clear that the voters don’t want what Dems are offering. I’m not sure where the party goes from here and I’m not sure how the party even figures it out.
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Trump will make the Democrats win again. He's been president a week and he's thrown everything into chaos. In two months, his approval rating is going to be in the toilet, far deeper than anyone's ever been. Republicans are going to have to distance themselves from him. The pardons will blow up in his face. The trade wars are going to be extremely unpopular. We're going to slide into a fairly deep recession, I think, once the fallout from the retaliatory sanctions take hold.

This is looking a lot like 2004. Bush came in again, badly overreached, created chaos and the Dems cleaned up in 2006 and then swept through in 2008. It just so happens we have a rising star who even talks like Barack.
 
SnoopRob said:
I would say that American voters have rejected the ideals and goals of the Democratic Party. If the party can lose 2 of 3 elections against someone as terrible as Trump, then it’s clear that the voters don’t want what Dems are offering. I’m not sure where the party goes from here and I’m not sure how the party even figures it out.

As to the failures of the left to coalesce as a real group/movement, why do you think that is? And what do you think would change that failure?
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There is a massive blank space in the history of the American left due to the Cold War. We are only just beginning to recover from that. Socialism has to get out from under the shadow of the USSR and other totalitarian regimes. It has to reconnect to its radical democratic origins, something I think liberalism also needs to do in order for it to advance.

For socialists and leftists generally, I think the path forward runs through a long development of communal institutions in order to rebuild some semblance of solidarity in this country. This how we can start to build a counter hegemony capable of challenging capitalism run amok. Conservatism and reactionary politics thrive in a political environment devoid of solidarity and collective understanding.

Analysis of the failures of the Democratic Party, as the party of the American left, is a crucial part of this process and why it’s something that I talk about and think about a lot. I also think a lot about the failures of the American left (and the international left) outside the Democratic Party umbrella but tend towards discussions about the Democrats since that’s what most posters here are familiar with.

The strategy of Morena in Mexico is something that I think the Democrats should examine. This idea of deconstructing neoliberal capitalism through a campaign of anticorruption. AMLO was able to win power through this campaign and then implemented social programs (including direct payments to certain populations) in order to cement his party as the champion of poor and working people.

Obviously this can’t be applied 1:1 in the United States, but it’s a useful framework IMO.
 
superrific said:
Trump will make the Democrats win again. He's been president a week and he's thrown everything into chaos. In two months, his approval rating is going to be in the toilet, far deeper than anyone's ever been. Republicans are going to have to distance themselves from him. The pardons will blow up in his face. The trade wars are going to be extremely unpopular. We're going to slide into a fairly deep recession, I think, once the fallout from the retaliatory sanctions take hold.

This is looking a lot like 2004. Bush came in again, badly overreached, created chaos and the Dems cleaned up in 2006 and then swept through in 2008. It just so happens we have a rising star who even talks like Barack.
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To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dems will never win another election, the electorate is far too fickle for either party to dominate national elections like that.

But it's clear to me that even slightly left-of-center politics isn't enough to motivate folks to go to the polls for Dems in numbers sufficient to win. It seems to me we're in an age where Pubs are leading the national discussion and Dems essentially get voted into office occasionally to clean up the messes Pubs make so that voters can then put Pubs back into office to fuck everything up again.

At some point, the government can't continue in a "barely keep functioning" manner and needs to address the major issues we're facing. Unless the Dems can do something significant to gain control of the government again, it looks like those solutions will be largely Republican determined.
 
SnoopRob said:
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dems will never win another election, the electorate is far too fickle for either party to dominate national elections like that.

But it's clear to me that even slightly left-of-center politics isn't enough to motivate folks to go to the polls for Dems in numbers sufficient to win. It seems to me we're in an age where Pubs are leading the national discussion and Dems essentially get voted into office occasionally to clean up the messes Pubs make so that voters can then put Pubs back into office to fuck everything up again.

At some point, the government can't continue in a "barely keep functioning" manner and needs to address the major issues we're facing. Unless the Dems can do something significant to gain control of the government again, it looks like those solutions will be largely Republican determined.
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How do you figure?

Since 92 we have:
Dem
Dem
Rep
Rep
Dem
Dem
Rep
Dem
Rep

That looks like a country that is divided 45/45/10 and just rotates on a very regular basis. Doesn’t look like either party has any better grasp on the electorate than the other.
 
SnoopRob said:
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dems will never win another election, the electorate is far too fickle for either party to dominate national elections like that.

But it's clear to me that even slightly left-of-center politics isn't enough to motivate folks to go to the polls for Dems in numbers sufficient to win. It seems to me we're in an age where Pubs are leading the national discussion and Dems essentially get voted into office occasionally to clean up the messes Pubs make so that voters can then put Pubs back into office to fuck everything up again.

At some point, the government can't continue in a "barely keep functioning" manner and needs to address the major issues we're facing. Unless the Dems can do something significant to gain control of the government again, it looks like those solutions will be largely Republican determined.
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This is very much where I am at as well. The current system isn’t sustainable.
 
SnoopRob said:
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Dems will never win another election, the electorate is far too fickle for either party to dominate national elections like that.

But it's clear to me that even slightly left-of-center politics isn't enough to motivate folks to go to the polls for Dems in numbers sufficient to win. It seems to me we're in an age where Pubs are leading the national discussion and Dems essentially get voted into office occasionally to clean up the messes Pubs make so that voters can then put Pubs back into office to fuck everything up again.

At some point, the government can't continue in a "barely keep functioning" manner and needs to address the major issues we're facing. Unless the Dems can do something significant to gain control of the government again, it looks like those solutions will be largely Republican determined.
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The dynamic right now seems to be system vs anti-system, so long as the system doesn’t seem to be working correctly to most people.

If Republicans continue to be able to position themselves as anti-system while Democrats position themselves as defenders of a system that most Americans dislike, then Republicans will continue to win.
 
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