Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Do you think that the USA would have been in a better shape today if Hilary Clinton had won the Democratic primary in 2008? Whether she wins of loses the election itself is up to you.
I think that probably the social cohesion now would be higher and divisions somewhat lower.
Depends how specific you think a lot of things are to particular presidents and timing.
Does COVID still happen in 2020? Does Russia still invade Ukraine? What happens in Israel, we don't get the Abraham accords because we don't get Trump so we don't get desperate Hamas launching 10/7; but it's not like everyone would have just sat still in the meantime?
Does a more technically competent president ban or regulate Bitcoin in 2011? Does a bloodier minded president get more entangled with ISIS? What happens with Epstein?
Then you get into who follows Clinton. When does Mitt Romney run? When does Barack Obama come off the bench?
Yes
Very likely, maybe even sooner as Hilary feels pretty hawkish but I don't know enough White House-ology to know if that is true or if she'd accelerate Maidan type shit or make the CIA go even harder
Genuinely no idea what her Israel policy stance is but I bet a 10/7 still happens as the underlying trends still hold. The USA'S foreign interests are somewhat party agnostic and also driven a lot by the "deep state"
I think a super interesting question is what happens with China. I know Obama (?) actually started the "pivot east" but one of Trump's greatest accomplishments is single handedly shifting the Overton window of the west to make "Holy fuck China is getting swole and this is not good" acceptable and not "muh racism"
I think by now it's probably all the same, but China gets a few more years of runway
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It was almost certainly impossible to make a policy choice that would avoid Covid, certainly in 2017 or whenever.
I'm less sure. Part of me thinks that if a neoliberal ghoul of a Democrat were in the white house, an HRC or a Cuomo, we would have been bullied by the mass media into ignoring all the dead elderly folks as "within natural seasonal variations" and told that everything was perfectly normal and that any other countries behaving otherwise were panicking and overreacting and that even thinking too much about COVID was racist.
The argument against that is that more or less over the weekend lockdowns went from something totally unthinkable to something every governor in America was mandating regardless of ideology. Liberals always took the virus more seriously than conservatives, but the dominant narrative among normal liberals in the wild was that this meant taking relatively conservative approaches to stopping spread, like washing hands more often, staying home if sick, and maybe banning large events at the most drastic. This attitude prevailed as recently as a week before mass lockdown, and there was a sense among a lot of people on the left even after the lockdowns started that the media was being a bit sensationalistic. The idea that businesses would shut down en masse and people would be discouraged from visiting family members was beyond the pale. From conservatives, the dominant narrative ranged from not caring at all to thinking that it was a big scam to make Trump look bad.
In an alternate timeline there could have been a stable equilibrium where things went on like this until either the vaccine came out or people moved on to other concerns, but two things happened in quick succession that I think tipped the scales. The first is what happened in Bergamo; we could write off China as an overenthusiastic authoritarian state, but seeing mass deaths of elderly people in a modern, Western country scared a lot of people, especially local government officials who didn't want their city to be next. The second thing was that we started seeing cases in people who hadn't recently traveled. This may seem like an inevitability in hindsight but remember that COVID had been in the Pacific Northwest for a while without any real community transmission, and a lot of people thought that whatever precautions they were taking there were enough to keep it from spreading.
If the lockdowns were merely a liberal reaction to Trump's apparent apathy then red states wouldn't have been likely to impose them, nor would neoliberal ghouls like Tom Wolf. If they were simply a far-left extravagance they would have been limited to the West Coast and a few large cities.
Lockdowns went from unimaginable to obvious thanks to large efforts from powerful media machines. Without claiming lockdowns were pushed as part of an anti-Trump agenda, or that Covid deaths were fake, we can say in retrospect with certainty that Covid deaths were below the level at which we as a society could have ignored the bodies if media wanted them ignored.
A hypothetical Hillary or Cuomo admin does the math and decides the marginal deaths are no big deal compared to the cost of lockdowns, and they lean on the American media. They tell social media companies that any effort to spread pro-lockdown propaganda will be considered inciting panic and will lead to the government acting against the social media companies in a regulatory capacity. They lean on the news media to keep the story on how we all need to keep going to main street small businesses to keep the economy humming. They focus on masks or ivermectin or some other bullshit to stop the spread.
The fact that no one talks about the dead people anymore indicates that we could have ignored them at the time.
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Why? Because she would have likely been less popular than Obama and thus had less ability to pass something not particularly popular like ACA?
Or is it simply timing regarding what would have even been possible in 2016?
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