The great 2020 election thread....

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Politics is fleeting, ever changing. Symbolism, the right kind, lasts forever. And that gender barrier remains as elusive as ever because we're just unused to a woman with that much power. And the way things are shaping up, no woman is ever going to be legitimately elected by the people and not have it handed to them in my lifetime. That's both sexism and privilege, strangely enough.

Oh, stuff it, will you? She got 3 million more votes than Trump.

[Yukaphile]

And yet she didn't get to the office itself in order to make the laws. And now a bunch of dumb men are talking about choosing a female Vice-President in a blatant case of pandering and tokenism in a secondary support role, and there's talk Pence and Trump are being impeached, which means Nancy Pelosi gets the office handed to her and doesn't get the full eight years in order to show women are competent and to show they can do the job their way, and having had it handed to her and not chosen by the people, it will be used as an excuse by people who both like her as well as hate her. "She wasn't elected, the system chose her!" No, I have every reason to be bitter about this. Again, politics is fleeting, ever changing, and the battles of today will be the battles of tomorrow, just subtly altered. But you elect a black man president, they'll remember that 100 years from now. You "help" a woman reach the White House by a man or the elite power system, they'll also remember that too, as yet another way society wants women in a support position, not in any places of actual authority. We have problems with women with authority.

[Admiral X]

The Dems sure are working hard to guarantee moderates won't back them. I'm sure that'll work out well for them...

[Yukaphile]

Can't disagree.

[CmdrKing]

The argument then is ... "moderates" are highly in favor of not using the law to seek established legal remedies for crimes committed by a criminal (who happens to be the president)? Yeah, anyone who says they believe that is full of shit.
And frankly if we are at that point, moderates no longer exist, they're pure partisans pretending otherwise, and should rightly be ignored.

Yuka: alrighty. Let's pretend for a moment that decades of voter suppression, a media more focused on a false parity than ethical reporting, the very design of the electoral college, and James Comey specifically didn't contribute, individually, to enough swayed votes to change the outcome. We'll also set aside that economic distress and a relentless campaign of blaming economic distress on immigration and other broad appeals to nationalism have been the baseline rhetoric of the right for ten years and thus saying so out loud is a highly motivating factor.

We'll focus, very specifically, on misogyny.
Is the mere fact that Hillary Clinton was a woman, and that many voters literally don't think a woman can be president, a decisive factor in the election? Sure. The margin was so infinitesimal I wouldn't rule that out.

But here's the bigger problem: the way society has tried to "solve" misogyny perpetuates misogyny.

Once we hit the 80s or so, and we fancied misogyny solved, you start to see an increase of women in roles of power (management, business owners, staring roles in film, that sorta thing). It's not much at first, but does increase in leaps and fits from that point forward.
Cool. But here's the thing: society was increasingly willing to tolerate women in positions of power, but they did so conditional on their "earning" the positions. But this goes a bit deeper than double standards, because earning a position of power... specifically means acting like a powerful man.

We've tried to combat misogyny by more heavily valuing masculinity (by valuing it in more people). The problem there is pretty self-evident when you phrase it like that, no?

Bringing us back around, where this figures into 2016? Trump is a fucking walking caricature of masculinity. He publicly brags about his sexual exploits, insists he's the toughest fucker on the block, proudly proclaims he doesn't take no for an answer and always gets what he wants.
Without a public that's willing to challenge old ideas of masculinity, you were never going to out masculine the image of himself Donald Trump was projecting, and because we evaluate men and women based on their projection of masculinity, of course Trump had the advantage.

This trick is only going to work less over time however. More people now look at those old ideals and say "that's gross! That's not a man, that's a child!" And they're right to do it. You seem to simultaneously believe the world is meaningless and ephemeral but also that literally nothing changes, but those kinds of trends tend to have some sticking power.

[Yukaphile]

I don't care about the politics of today. They will change in 100 years. The same, only with new players, and the perception of having changed. That's the impression I get from reading old news articles or political struggles from 100 years ago. Technology is the wild card here, but so is doing certain things the proper way and at the proper time. And I notice a lot of letists are employing the slippery slope argument with regards to Trump. Yes, he's bad, but of course, the system holds him in back. That may change, but I won't lie, entering 2017, I thought we'd have a nuclear wasteland before year's end. We did not. I think electing the first woman properly is just as important as the first black president, instead of having it handed to women. That's both privilege AND misogyny, ironically. Women are only good at a support role, but they always have things handed to them they can't win on their win. People will still remember and talk about Obama 100 years from now. Will they talk about the first woman President who had it handed it to her by the system or a man and spent only three, five years in office? Don't think so. It's more of the tokenism that forces women into a secondary support role, always has. Grand symbolic gestures are all that survives the ever-turbulent nature of world change and the stagnant whirlwind of politics that remains fixed even centuries later. Those make history. Those change the perception.

[Yukaphile]

Let me ask you this. How will fighting to remove Trump from office REALLY substantially improve things today, past perception and visual optics? IT WON'T. We'll still have to wait years, decades for the changes to take place. And most of the electorate are impatient and don't have long memories. They want an instant fix, instant solutions, instant gratification, to be told things that make them feel better, that is at odds with reality. You want change, you need to settle down and prepare for the long haul, whether that's in raising kids properly, or just being the best person you can be in the world around you. But the system just seems to keep alternating in cycles. Back, forward, left, right, over and over, it never fucking stops. And I find the leftist analogue from Trump to Hitler to be really thin and patently superficial. Hell, why do you think I say nothing changes in 100 years, except as shallow perceptions? That Hitler was saying what Trump is now should prove that! Except, he actually had accomplishments, and was more learned than Trump is. SERIOUSLY. That should be telling. So yeah, why not do things properly and strike a huge blow for equality by electing the right woman, and when presented with somebody who wants to sidestep that, take a hard-line stance on that? Like Biden and his chauvinistic pandering tokenism.

[CmdrKing]

Your contention has become that Nancy Pelosi, who in this scenario has added to the existing historical accolade "First woman elected Speaker of the House" the distinctions of presiding over the first removal of a sitting president from office, which precipitates her own elevation to the presidency... would be remembered as "some lady who the men put in charge for a few months while they picked a REAL president"?
Even the shallow version of history as most people understand it allows for more complexity than that. At worst she'd be *forgotten* except by pedantic history nerds once a woman was actually elected (which, again, is a reasonably likely outcome in 2020, and far MORE likely in this scenario than Pelosi herself even choosing to run.)

There are many, many reasons to impeach Trump.

He has, within THIS SUMMER, noticeably escalated the the criminality of his crimes: recall that one ambiguity in the Mueller report was the Trump organization did not seem to initiate any deals or explicitly ask for any particular materials, making quid pro quo difficult to prove. This current scandal, in the materials the White House has released, shows a clear initiation of a "aid already granted by congress that I, Donald Trump, am withholding, in exchange for dirt on my political opponents" deal. He's getting worse in real time, it's not fallacious to suggest things are likely to escalate if they are actively, demonstrably escalating.

His crimes and lack of fitness to be president have been obvious since he took office, and he indeed should never have been allowed to take it for any length of time unchallenged. The dedication to "normal" in the face of a destructive force has seriously damaged the norms, institutions, and faith of the nation, and removing it to begin repairing the damage is essential.

Every minute he's flailing like a toddler against his "enemies" due to impeachment is a minute he's NOT digging us into an ever larger legislative, cultural, environmental, and diplomatic hole.

Because laboriously, in painstaking detail, laying out the severity and totality of donald trump's crimes, for all the world to see, to show the rot and corruption celebrated by so many and lay it bare, is perhaps likely to shame a small percentage of people into disavowing him, and nothing can be accomplished in the world so long as people are willing to show any level of support for him and men like him.

But most of all, because it is right, because people are suffering now, and we must refuse, again and again, as often and as loudly as possible, to simply "wait out" the ills of the world if we are to make it worth living in. You've complained so much about the world not changing, people wanting instant fixes and not going in for the long haul?
*ahem*
THAT IS THE LONG HAUL!
That painful, kicking and screaming process of seeing something wrong in the world, and *fixing it*? Doing that over and over, every single time you see it? THAT'S the long haul. THAT'S the work. You don't plant seeds and then wander away for 20 years and poof, a whole new crop of not!sexists, not even plants work like that, let alone human institutions formed every moment by the billion tiny choices made by people.

What's more? A lot of the awful, malicious decisions people make? Are made because they think there's no consequences, that everyone else would do it or think it. Taking that comfort away not only denies them a few opportunities to do evil, it means that those around them nodding along in silence for fear might just say "actually, that is wrong" and make better choices too.
Waiting never made the world better.

[Yukaphile]

Call it what you want. I don't want a woman handed the White House by the system or a man. She is not elected by the people in a presidential race, and yes, people will note that in the public discourse. Therefore, it feels illegitimate to me. Obama won fairly. Why can't a woman? I WANT to live to see the day a woman storms the primaries, and wins the White House on her own, as much as the electorate and the system allows. Sadly, it looks as if we are not going to do that. I will NEVER see that in my lifetime. And since I'm 31 years old, that's really pathetic.

[Yukaphile]

Honestly, the problems with Trump have been building for years to such a point that he not only feels like the logical end result, but inevitable. A gridlocked political sphere that hates compromise but ironically hates the obstruction, bred in the toxic environment of social media and the widespread proliferation of the Internet that ensures everyone has a voice in which only the loudest can be heard, and it doesn't take much to mess up the system, throw it out of whack. The 1990s culture we had, that sense of safety and security riding on the post-USSR winds of change era, shattered with 9/11, and then tax cuts and illegal wars. Everyone feeling angry, miserable, and wanting to blame everybody else, especially the mysterious "other" they are told about, for our problems. We're still paying the price for that. And I think we will still be ten and twenty and maybe even thirty years from now.