a big takeaway from all of the Biden drama is that huge swathes of the public — including reasonably engaged people — think that political parties are a small cabal of elites who select candidates by hand
I mean, "Biden should drop out now to save democracy" has big echoes of "Hillary should drop out now because only Bernie can beat Trump in the general"
Also US history is basically all taught as one person doing things so you can’t blame normies for thinking that’s how it works
Heck Ginny Thomas thought / thinks there is some secret powerful cabal of “them” not realizing she’s IN the cabal
Cigar smoke-filled backrooms describes the 1968 Democratic convention, as well as the legacy media offices which have refused to cover Trump and Epstein connections due to liability.
It certainly doesn't help that a lot of members of the party and the media act like that is in fact how it works.
Mostly by intoning that they can end careers and such but also partially with weird statements about what primaries are for and who they need to impress.
I lived in NY and now NJ, two reasonably large states that have close to no say in who the presidential candidates will be due to how the calendar has been set the last several election cycles.
These cabals are called the DNC and RNC, as well as the affluent, invite only, hundreds-to-thousands of dollars - per - plate donor dinners, and K Street
Eh
"It's a big club, and you ain't in it" from Carlin seems to capture the state of things increasingly well.
Also his explanation that 'you don't need a formal conspiracy when everyone at the country club has the same interests'
Peter, you gotta admit the major players seem to only be multimillionaires from a VERY small clique certainly gives off the stench of YSL denture glue and Versace foot powder.
Get a lot of this from Bernie campaign ghouls and disengaged doomer left types, ironically it hurts their cause because the story it tells is “why bother voting?”
YOU COULD GET MORE OF WHAT YOU WANT IF YOU STOP MEMING AND START VOTING
Why don't you want the same things?
Or are you not really on the same team?
You realize that progressive folk tend to be in the most voter voter suppressed areas and most suppressed economic class?
One surprising takeaway from Trump's ascendance for me was this idea that the parties are cabals that control the candidates and that primaries are ineffective or rigged. The GOP loathed Trump, and he rolled over them on the backs of his voters.
They're bigger clubs than people imagine and they basically lost the ability to reliably do the hand picking in the mid 20th century, but the institutional memory is still there. I imagine most senior politicos pine for the days of more naked machine politics.
To be fair, they still are on the local, regional, and state level in some places, which are the minor leagues feeding up to local politics. And this is also basically how both parties worked until pretty late in the mid century.
That’s what I took away from the 2020 primary. Though I think it’s less true when all of the competitive candidates are within the acceptable ideological range.
Ah, I have a friend who says that Biden is too old so they should bring in Bernie. I have tried to explain that he is OLDER and also had a heart attack but she says he feels younger so…
I'm old enough to remember 2008, when THE political book you had to read to be a Smart Person was "The Party Decides." Obviously that was wrong but the people who absorbed it weren't stupid - this was the prevailing school of thought!
