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Everyone seems terrified nowadays of having contested conventions which used to be the norm.
I'm reading Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 and it's an eye-opener.
After the first few primaries nowadays, everyone just drops out to make room for the Chosen One. And it's happening earlier and earlier.
That election is the reason both parties are so afraid of contested conventions. The Democrats came out of that with George McGovern, who got absolutely wiped out in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. After that, both parties quietly decided that candidate selection was too important to be left to the voters.
No, this is why The Democrats are so afraid of a contested convention. The would-be technocrats know that thier preferred policies (Socialism, Globalism, LGBTQism, Degrowth, Et Al) are deeply unpopular with the electorate which is why they have to rig thier primaries and are constantly appealing to emotion and identity politics in thier party messaging rather than expressing any sort of positive vision.
Meanwhile the GOP's willingness to let the voters choose the candidate is the only reason Trump was on the ballot in the first place.
Get real. Trump has just delivered the most anti-growth policy of the post-war era but Democrats still get this moniker because they, what, don't always acquiesce to tax and spending cuts?
As TequilaMockingbird pointed out, "degrowth" refers less to market statistics and more to the literal expansion of the "physical economy:" less power generation, less manufacturing, less consumption, etc., stemming from a belief popular among eco-minded progressives that syncretizes socialism and envrionmentalism into a desire to return to the state of nature where Man is theoretically more fulfilled and healthier, and in doing so, heal the Earth from the damage caused to it by civilization.
Now, of course, you can still be cheeky and say that Trump will accomplish the same things anyway, which I can't bring myself to dispute, but I would also like to register, per my recent posting history, that I truly do suspect that the setbacks to global capitalism will not spell the end of civilization.
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I'm not talking about FAANG's stock prices
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That may have been the beginning of it, but IIRC as late as 1988 the Democratic nomination was up in the air as late as June/July. (Anyone remember the "Seven Dwarfs"?)
Every election cycle since then, the front-runner has been locked in earlier and earlier, and the whole process rendered less and less interesting to watch.
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Also note the election of Jeremy Corbyn as head of the Labour Party in the UK. A very old, very socialist man who was thrown in as a sop to the far-leftists on the basis that he couldn't possibly win; the organisers had forgotten the reforms they'd made to try and grow grassroots support and boy, did Corbyn have grassroots support. Then he gets elected to the head of the Opposition party and he promptly starts talking about how he would never fire nuclear weapons to defend Britain, how he would prevent people taking their money abroad to prevent them avoiding the swingeing new taxes he was going to create, and videos started coming out where he referred to 'our friends from Hamas' etc. Not popular.
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