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Notes -
I have 2 hypotheticals:
I ask because Sanders appealed very strongly to many Trump voters, doing great in e.g. West Virginia but lacking e.g. black support (which the democratic primaries overfocus on. Besides Wasserman-Schultz et al.'s machinations.) His approach was not based on identity politics etc. I'm curious how people think his "movement" or time in office would have turned out.
A) He would have lost terribly, because Bernie Sanders is a terrible campaigner and his target demographic was too far left of the American center. B) If he did, woke would have been more brazen, but with less institutional support, causing its collapse to happen earlier.
If you run as a Dem, you need black support, which is why Mayo Pete despite being the darling of the Clintonites is a dead man walking concerning his political prospects. Blacks will not vote for a gay man. It's such a foreseeable outcome that the outrage coming in about two years time will be a amusing bit of drama to spectate from the peanut gallery.
I really don’t think Pete would do much better with black Dems if he was straight. Black Dems tend to like (like most people) charming, handsome men and Pete is neither. Obama and Clinton had more in common than either does with Pete.
Generally I would disagree. Older black Democrats in the south (the demographic you really need in a primary) tend to prefer friendly, kind of goofy white candidates to slick sharky ones. I think Biden’s reputation as a gaffe machine was actually an asset to him there. It’s one of the reasons I think Gavin Newsome will never win a fair democratic primary. On Pete specifically though I do agree, his only major resume item before being whisked away to Washington was a badly handled municipal police shooting.
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Being gay also pushes him to the left, and black dems are the most moderate dems.
Fun fact- not particularly germane to the topic but still fun- Pete Buttigieg is E Michael Jones' nextdoor neighbour. I'm sure the national night out over there is fun.
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That may be true, but being gay is absolutely a dealbreaker for African Americans. If Pete was built like Arnold Swartznegger and had the charm of Casanova he still wouldn't fly.
This is fundamentally a flaw in the Democrat coalition that prevents them from presenting a gay candidate for the presidential office, because the black lobby is so strong. Even if you whipped the reps into grudgingly do so, their constituents wouldn't vote for him, so what's the point?
This presents a refutation of the intersectional logic that is impossible to ignore.
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Pete also has an unfortunate name. In the land of optics.
Yes and no. There's a lot to be said for a name that nobody will ever forget.
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I don't know why he didn't take the name of his spouse. Though maybe Glezman is not the best political name too.
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Eh, the Pete numbers grab headlines but that's in a polling format with a very specific list of options. In terms of general favorability? Don't have time to dig deeper, but one year ago among Black voters the numbers were 26% very favorable, 13% somewhat favorable, 10% somewhat unfavorable, 7% very unfavorable, 45% don't know. So it's not actually as bad as it appears. In other words, he's almost literally never Black voters' first pick... but that doesn't mean that if you become the nominee, that you won't get at least decent support. Personally I think he would do fine. The Black vote was only 11% of the actual turnout in 2024. I think his gains elsewhere would compensate decently well.
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I certainly think he could have beaten Trump for the standard reasons. Clinton almost beat him, and I think Sanders would've leached off more populist-type voters from Trump than he would've lost relative to Clinton. The type of Clinton voters who would've been upset enough at Sanders not to vote for him seems likely to be small, particularly Clinton partisans also tended to hate Trump even more, and Sanders's downsides to them were things he shared with Trump, i.e. old white guy. No way to know for sure.
I believe that at least some parts of woke would've carried on mostly the same way, which is everything to do with trans. The writing was on the wall beforehand with parallels being made between trans and gay in terms of being something innate to oneself that one discovers by being true to oneself, versus being something that can be influenced within people, especially impressionable young people in whom certain amounts of hormones are flowing for the first time, with the emotional influences thereof. The situation with Lia Thomas, the MTF college swimmer who's caused controversy for obvious reasons, probably would've happened regardless. I have to wonder, though, if we would have learned about WPATH suppressing research in order not to give political ammo to their critics.
Entertainment media is where I think there might have been a noticeable difference. Living in a blue area, I've yet to see it overstated how much President Donald Trump seemed to have broken an unfortunately significant number of people's brains, and this seemed to have been especially true in Hollywood, which I think probably led to more messaging being prioritized over quality, likely in subconscious ways. I can't remember any in particular now, but I'm pretty sure I've read a number of interview answers by directors, writers, and even video game devs who said their work was inspired by the idea of fighting against the rise of fascism in the USA in the form of Donald Trump. President Sanders probably wouldn't have inspired such works, and maybe execs might have had a slightly higher priority on profit over in-group approval among political peers such that some of, say, Disney/Marvel's downfall due to woke-ifying old franchises could've been slowed down.
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It depends on if capital would have rallied around Donald Trump if the alternative was Sanders. I just don't think sophisticated people were ready to do that in 2016. I think Bernie could have won. If you think our timeline sucks, there's an alternate one where the United States ends up like Germany or the UK.
I mean, the koch brothers switched to Hilary. Stranger things have happened.
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I think the first thing to note about Sanders is that while the establishment does not like Trump, they hate Sanders(and other actual socialists) a lot worse. Right-populism is bad for GDP maxxing but unpredictable left-populism is a lot worse.
So, that out of the way, we saw Hillary fail with full elite backing. Sanders with no elite backing? Hmm, that relies on a self-proclaimed socialist being popular enough to overcome that. I doubt that, especially in 2016.
I do think the coalitions would look different. The democrats are to a large extent reliant on upscale movement in their direction. What Sanders managed to win over from the bottom, he loses from the top.
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Had he won the primary or presidency, I think it would have turned out very similarly to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Bernie has been in politics on the fringes of his party for a long time, but has no friends in high places, would face a generally unfriendly media, and is extremely weak to idpol infighting. Do I think he could have beaten Trump? No, but Trump's victory would have looked very different. Bernie is not a strong character in direct interpersonal conflict, and he would face a great deal of that from within the party before even getting to Trump. Then you'd have relentless Trump bullying, probably in a manner closer to the primaries than to his contest with Hillary - say what you want about Hillary, she's no shrinking violet - playing up all the weirdnesses of Bernie's character and platform. Trump probably runs significantly closer to the center on policy (not that that's ever affected people's impressions of him), and the Republican Party donor class falls in line behind him far faster. The election is decided more conventionally, since the outcast white working class is more divided - that's one part of this scenario I'm not sure about, the extent to which "white working class rage" is sidelined as a media topic compared to our timeline, or if an anti-both-candidates media plays it up even further. The one wild card would be the extent to which the leftist organizers and agents (in the sense of media agents) behind the rise of the Squad, Mamdani, etc. step into the limelight earlier and pull something crazy off, though they would be younger, less organized, and in a less developed social media environment.
If Sanders won, there would be a crazy three-way power struggle in his administration between the Old Left (him), the New Left (woke), and the party establishment. I really find it hard to see anything other than the Old Left capitulating as far as possible to New Left demands. Sanders himself is not really woke, but the entire activist apparatus supporting him, and anybody under 70 he could get to staff his admin, would be New Left as much as they are Old. Sanders himself was very happy to drop policy planks, like immigration skepticism, where the Old conflicted with the New. But the end result is very different for "woke", in that it becomes the flagpole of an insurgent populist movement rather than an establishment ideology. Essentially, instead of a Trumpist right against a woke establishment, you have a much weaker but still fairly powerful populist right (this is not the critical defeat for populism that a Hillary victory would have been), a bipartisan establishment, and a SocDem/woke populist left. Bernie most likely ends up a pretty ineffective and chaotic one-term President (think Trump 1, but more internal shambles and economic problems than enemy action), which also harms wokeness by association. The private sector's wokeness is bigger in some ways but comparatively muted in others, at least among upper management, since the vibe is not "us the institutions resisting Trump", but more a fearful compliance with the Administration of the type you're seeing now. The civil war we saw in news media between cautious management and woke staff kicks off way earlier. Covid finishes the Sanders administration off, and the next admin probably inherits a significantly worse economic position, ratcheting up the three-way tensions between woke/Trumpist/establishment going into the incoming Republican (Cruz?) administration.
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Sanders is a populist grievance mongerer similar to Trump so it's not too surprising there is across appeal. I have a theory that's been kicking around in my head for a bit that the parties seem to be realigning as a low information populist Republican party and an establishment technocratic Democrat party. People willing to sling conspiracy theories about how the jews, elites, billionaires or whomever with very little actual support have long been able to garner some support but in the social media age now that the lowest common denominator is able to have their voices amplified it seems inevitable that this is catered to. I may be coping in my hope that only one party falls to this type of rhetoric.
There aren't enough intelligent, thoughtful people in the country for a viable party to get away with only making valid arguments and espousing only reasonable policy positions. If you don't make a serious play for the stupid vote you just get creamed, and that means both parties end up making stupid arguments for stupid positions.
Woman at a Rally: Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you.
Adlai Stevenson: Madam, that's not enough. I need a majority.
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I think the equilibrium would be found where the things being said by the populist side would be so obviously stupid and ruinous that even the median voting American would be like "uh, I dunno, all the state run raw milk distribution centers are losing money, do we really want to nationalize coffee shops?"
Do it. Throw more money at the raw milk centers. Have them start offering coffee, and sugar, and beef tallow.
Sure thing, by the way we taxed the billionaires which didn't turn out to be enough so we've been printing a lot of money, so your double espresso extra tallow shot is going to be $47
They're state-run, they can lose money.
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But if they're state-run, people won't notice if they're losing money! Medicare/medicaid are massive money pits, and yet Trump became dominant not despite but because of his comittment to not cutting them.
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To be fair, they weren't supposed to have the vote.
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