2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forum"Here comes the Berniebro"
The Berniebro is posting a video on his Facebook wall: You really have to watch this. Bernie Sanders says things that no other candidate would ever consider. These are real policy proposals that just might change the country.
The Berniebro doesnt really have a good answer when you ask why the Democratic Party, which has spent six years explaining how its market-based health-care policies arent socialist, would ever find national success nominating an actual democratic socialist.
The Berniebro had an equal chance, four years ago, of being (a) an Occupybro or (b) the kind of bro who asked, repeatedly and insistently, what Occupys concrete policy proposals were.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/here-comes-the-berniebro-bernie-sanders/411070/
---I KNOW this guy!
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)vt_native
(484 posts)Armstead
(47,803 posts)Thought you were above this dismissive kind of crap.
THIS 63 year old "Berniebro" has a very simple answer to why "the Democratic Party, which has spent six years explaining how its market-based health-care policies arent socialist.." refues to accept any real reform, regardless of whethr the person representing it happens to call himself a social democrat.
healthcare is a complicated subject. But there is a basic premise. It is a basic necessity, and should be a basic right for everyone. A lack of money should not kill people.
But the Centrist Democratic Party undercut itself when it trotted out a bunch of convoluted nonsense that is the worst combination of bureaucratic socialism and crony capitalism imaginable INSTEAD of offering and aggressively selling a very simple compromise alternative like a public option. But the Democratic "Centrists" chose to kill off the idea of true "social insuranc" due to the combination of fear of the GOP and their own corrupt ties to Big Insurance and Big Pharma.
There was a very simple way to counter the right-wing corporate insurance propaganda.
"We going to offer you an affordable choice for basic health insurance that's not tied to your employer. We're going to open up Medicare to more people as a basic affordable health plan that's available to everyone who wants it. You can choose to sign up, and pay based on a percentage of income that's guaranteed to be affordable, and will be lower than what you have to pay for private insurance. But IF you prefer private coverage, you can still get private coverage. This gives you a choice."
If the Democrats had bothered to use a simple sales pitch, a lot of people would have responded "That sounds like a good deal to me." They could have countered the right-wing corporate propaganda. After all, people like choice, and they also seem to support Social Security and Medicare, those otehr two "socialist" bedrocks.
Instead the Dems brought out this awful hybrid nightmare that forces peope to buy an overpriced product, without the protections a truly public system would provide against gouging.
So yeah, people are going to be angry abut that "socialist" intrusion for a relatively modest benefit.
This "Berniebro" meme is another example of distorting things that should be straightforward, and once used to be the idea of liberalism and the social safety net and reasonable regulation and all the rest.
ellenrr
(3,864 posts)Armstead
(47,803 posts)But I'm sick of all the stereotypes being tossed around to make what started out as a relatively high-minded election season into the worst form of stereotyping, identity politics, Tiger Beat trivia.....and more marginalizing of all efforts to bring about a course correction in the disastrous course nation is taking.
I had hoped this election would bring a collective push of the pendulum away from the 30 year swing to the right and stop the move towards further empowering the Gilded Age of Robber Barons.
But we've devolving backwards. Sounds a lot like the worst of the 70's and its divisiveness.
Your own candidate, who I generally admire, is also getting the blowback from this. His efforts to bring out substance is being overshadowed by the Reality TV bash-pit this has degenerated into.
deutsey
(20,166 posts)ms liberty
(8,620 posts)demwing
(16,916 posts)99Forever
(14,524 posts)You recycle this insulting crap after all of the positive comments Sanders supporters have given you about O'Malley?
Snotcicles
(9,089 posts)99Forever
(14,524 posts)Thanks for pointing it out.
Sure seemed totally out character, now I know why.
PowerToThePeople
(9,610 posts)Because we are going to purge right wingers and right wing thinking from the party.
Fuck right wingers!
CharlotteVale
(2,717 posts)going after Bernie's male supporters? Are you saying they are different from the female ones?
This female Bernie supporter wants to know.
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)This kind of writing belongs in File 13.
Chan790
(20,176 posts)Basically, the statistics bear out that the "Berniebro" doesn't really exist any more than Hillary voters who only support her because she's a woman do. They're certainly out there as anomalous individuals, but they're not really even a "thing", let alone a force or something worth talking about.
They're convenient memes for the media and partisans to latch onto which topically and anecdotally people affirm knowing one or more such people...but the data bears out the bullshit of editorial pieces like Amanda Marcotte's at Salon and this one by Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic. It's not about commentary or reflection of reality...it's just about grinding their ideological axe.
...
Of course, my points here all assume that election takes are actually about the election. Its clear in the case of pundits like Marcotte that election analysis is just a continuation of their normal personal political blogging. It is a new frame within which they hash out their same themes and grind their same axes, not a genuine effort to figure out whats going on out there in the vast world of the Democratic electorate. Its not just her who does this. I would say the majority of election punditry is like this, including on the Right.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/clinton-sanders-democratic-presidential-primary-caucuses/