Jeb Bush would have made a fine POTUS, not great not bad, just fine.

change my mind.

the younger brother finishing the wars his older brother and daddy started. by finishing we mean starting another one

i think he learned from big bros mistakes. Bush 1 had the grand legacy of a quick and painless iraq war, bush 2 got a drawn out war and afghan war to boot that was even worse. bush 3 was gonna make amnesty available for illegals and probably fuck off for 7 years. maybe he'd undo the obamacare mandate and let the system crumble with a few bland tax breaks. afterall his energy was too low to do much more.

and all it took to achieve those 7d underwater chess objectives was to kill tens of thousands of americans, ruin america's reputation and reliability in the world, divide the country, have his business partners and friends ruin consumer and environmental protection, and enrich himself and his corrupt ilk like no other president before him. seems like a good deal.

1) What insane, unpopular policies have liberals as a whole adopted in response to Trump? I feel like the insane left has always existed regardless of Trump but maybe that's just me. I don't think they have or ever will have any real political power.
2) Yes, he absolutely exposed the corruption and spinelessness of the GOP. But the GOP has always been spineless compared to the Dems because they allowed the Tea Party to cuck them. Say what you want about Pelosi, but she keeps the Democrats in line. Boehner, Ryan, and McCarthy are too weak. McConnell runs a pretty tight ship though so I'll give him credit. I think social conservatism and populist conservatism are actually the same thing. They are culture warriors who don't really care about government policy. Similar to Bernie supporters, they like very simple, often contradictory, ideas. Fiscal conservatism is certainly dead but I think that's just a bludgeon used for opposing the majority. I don't think there are many Republicans who actually believe in it. I'm not convinced that neoconservatism is dead. Jingoism is part of the culture war and I think neoconservatism is the manifestation of competent people running an aggressive foreign policy.
3) For the most part, I like Trump's judges. There have been a handful of truly incompetent, dreadful judges but overall he gets a solid A- from me. I don't think Obama had a bloated federal bureaucracy either. If anything, our government is severely underfunded in a lot of areas. There's fat people, fit people, and emaciated people. I'd argue that a lot of critical areas are emaciated which is a big problem.
4) He's definitely widened the Overton window but I don't think that's a good thing. I think that's acceptable in systems that support multiparty representation but we don't have that at all. Our coalitions are formed during the primaries and it leads to a lot of ill will and gridlock.
5) I don't think Trump is necessarily the cause of realignments but he definitely exposed some very interesting elements that I'd argue were already there. I don't think the changes are good at all in the long run. American diplomacy is going to take decades to repair, faith in our institutions are at an all time low, and the people are polarized more than ever. MAYBE that will force us to do the right thing but it could also end this country and put us at a competitive disadvantage. I'm pretty risk averse so this level of uncertainty is pretty unnerving. We'll see what the world looks like in half a century.

closest i can get to agreeing with black is that a rise in the fringe right (trump cult) has caused a rise in the far left (bernie bros, AOC simps, etc).

the democratic party does seem intent on fighting fire with fire when it comes to extreme rhetoric and vitriol. rather than centrism. this is of course generally, not on the whole, as the DNC candidate is milktoast Joe who only panders to the fringes. but Bernie got close, and if the DNC stayed all in like the GOP did with Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich it may be Bernie vs Trump.

I think Bernie got close in 2020 but he wasn't close at all in 2016. Bernie failed because he didn't do some very basic stuff in terms of coalition building. But yea, there's been something brewing ever since the financial crisis and we definitely had a mild eruption in 2015. I think if the Democrats control the suburbs, it's game over for the radicals all together. They can be safely ignored.

it's a tight line to walk, make them feel heard but dont give them actual legislation. luckily in a 2 party system its a matter of them voting dnc or not voting.

It depends what you mean by actual legislation. We absolutely shouldn't give in to poppycock ideas like medicare for all, wealth taxes, green new deal, etc. We CAN give them things that are beneficial and sensible though. Progressives like to shit on Obamacare but MILLIONS of people benefited from it and it was the furthest you could go at the time. You gotta give credit where credit is due.

it's a paradox, sensible ideas are just cucking to corporations to them, if they did get what they wanted and it failed it wouldnt be their fault it would be some vague excuse of moral failings of the rest, and if they got what they wanted and it wasn't catastrophic they'd move on to something new without missing a beat.

it's the illogical side of progressive ideology, whereas things like civil rights are more logical, generally. it makes sense to move from stopping lynching in the 50s to stopping job discrimination in the 2000s. but at the same time there's racial quotas for Oscar nominations and screaming at hippies in dreads for cultural appropriation. the fringe will literally never be happy, a 99% full glass even will always be 1% empty to them.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Sep 10 2020 02:13pm