Gabriel Conroy:

So, where are we? I accept the legitimacy of the point you bring up, but there’s also a sense of inevitability. So yes, I’m worried about it, too. But don’t know where to go from there.

I think a good start would be a reassessment of attaching criminal jeopardy to what amount to minor, unintentional regulatory violations. Culturally we seem to have decided that the best way to handle every problem is prosecution and through the criminal justice system without taking into account things like cost and diminishing returns. The strongest point in the previous post on this issue I thought was that while the OP is well equipped to navigate these types of problems without ending up behind bars that isn't true for many or most people.

It doesn't mean that we don't need regulatory systems or even that the trade offs aren't ever worth it if such systems will inevitably produce some arbitrary outcomes. It might mean however that such systems shouldn't be connected to the criminal justice system, or if they are it should be very difficult for the state to escalate these types of incidents to that level.

I think that is an overstatment. Obama is certainly better than, for example, George Bush was in that he has not overseen an unmitigated disaster on par with the Iraq invasion but that is a very low bar. He pushed hard for involvement in Syria and was only thwarted by a mix of hostile public sentiment and the fact that Republicans in Congress wouldn't approve intervention on the terms he wanted. The intervention in Libya has been a miserable failure for all of those Libyans we were supposed to be protecting and has left a barely contained vortex of chaos in North Africa. His drone warfare policies are problematic from both an executive power perspective and the fact that they're contributing to the further destabilization of already fragile or disintegrating countries like Yemen and Pakistan. I will give credit where credit is due on Iran and Cuba but I think his record is at best very mixed.

But all of that is besides the point. The point is that one can agree with the Democrats on some policies but still refuse to support them based on where they set their priorities and the manner in which they often govern. Take people whose main interest is reigning in Wall Street and fighting to ensure a reasonable standard of living. Sure, they're not going to vote for Marco Rubio but are they really supposed to support Hilary Clinton, a politician who based on her record and associations is as in the pocket of Wall Street and corporate money as any other establishment politician?

It's all a question of priorities and it's perfectly grounded to chose not to vote for a politician who puts yours low on their list, regardless of what else you might agree on.

I would agree that they don't deserve 0 credit just that the heavy lifting was done by people other than the establishment (maybe national is a better word) party. They definitely got on board once it became safer to do so politically and good for them but it's the folks who were filing challenges in court and making the case for it before it was popular who should get the props.

@saul-degraw I guess I would object to the characterization of pragmatic versus romantic (at least in this particular context). From my perspective it's more a question about priorities and what a given voter or group finds to be most important.

The most important issues for me, for example, could broadly be called civil liberties and oposition to endless military adventurism. I may generally agree with many Democrats on the need to maintain a social safety net and for government programs to ensure a sufficient level of economic well-being among all for democracy to function. However the Democratic party is, at best, an extremely unreliable ally on those former issues that are most important to me. The issues I agree with them most on in theory are the same issues they are most willing to compromise on in practice.

Now you're absolutely correct that at some point politics is about rolling up your sleeves, making compromises, and doing the best you can with what you've got. But that can be a hard pill to swallow for those whose priorities are always the ones that are given away at the bargaining table and I dont think finding it offputting is just the result of romanticism.

Fair enough points, the reason I thought you were making that assumption was based on the Nader reference. And maybe you're right, that the hard left doesn't give the Democrats enough credit for those things they do achieve. Of the two you listed I think the D's do deserve a lot of credit for moving the ball in a big way on healthcare but I'd actually give them a lot less on SSM. My recollection is thats an issue Obama and most powerful Democrats evolved on. The heavy lifting was done by activists at the state level, even if most Democrats ultimately embraced it.

I'm not a Democrat but I hear this sentiment often and don't really understand it. From the perspective of people further to the left the Democratic party takes their votes for granted then forgets about them once they're in office.

Maybe if pressed lefties of that variety would see a centrist Democrat as the lesser of two evils but if they fall in line without getting anything in return don't they render themselves electorally impotent? You're also making the assumption that the left really identifies with the Democrats which I'm not sure is true. Republicans may treat the Democratic party as the red vanguard but really it's a pretty muddled somewhat conservative (in the small 'c' sense) party by international standards. That's how I'd imagine the hard left sees them anyway.

I don't agree with where that logic leads. These people who run our government are given a lot of power and with that power comes responsibility.

I won't disagree with you that American democracy is flawed. Our citizenry is far too susceptible to propaganda and fear mongering. We aren't as sophisticated as we should be. We're fickle and short-sighted. None of that means we shouldn't strive for something better, even if we'll never have providence. That war killed 100,000 people, resulted in catastrophe for an already troubled region, damaged our international reputation in ways that are hard to reverse and cost a trillion dollars.

You shouldn't be able to give your approval to a disaster of that magnitude and still have a career, much less be rewarded with even more power.

Agreed. The fact that so many politicians who were on the wrong side of that issue still remain viable is a sad statement about American politics.

I think there are plenty of principled reasons to oppose Hilary Clinton for the presidency. My opinion has long been that anyone who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq is not qualified to be the chief executive.

She's an accomplished politician and there's no denying she has a certain type of competence but her brand of liberal interventionism is in practice neoconservatism-lite. I don't care about the idiotic theories spouted on talk radio. Its quite clear that she would carry the torch for everything that is wrong with American foreign policy and for me that's a dealbreaker.

I thought the Alien 3 this-is-not-a-directors-cut included in that set is actually pretty good. Not good loke the first 2 but you at least can get a sense of the vision. The movie disappointed me greatly when I first saw it but over time there are elements of it I've grown to appreciate. Fincher really got screwed in that whole process though.

@jennifer As with your below comment, I don't have any substantive disagreements here in regards to the challenges behind building that coalition. I do think that people in states where the Medicaid expansion is being denied will eventually get angry enough to do something about it though. I've read some news articles suggesting that is already happening, though as you note it hasn't led to any actual change yet.

@jennifer I find nothing to disagree with you on there. Maybe it's wishful thinking but I do hope Sanders finds a way to incorporate those views from BLM. I shudder at the idea of another corporatist Democrat with hawkish foreign policy views, though it does look like that will be one of the two realistic options come the general election.

@kazzy First I don't see how the argument that the next law will also be racist addresses my point. I mean, if we concede that then why not just give up altogether? The biggest advances this country has been able to make on race have been through a mix of outreach and public policy via statute and legal challenge. What is the alternative path in our current form of government?

Also where have I advocated not rushing to judgment? I readily concede that racial inequality is a serious and challenging problem to deal with and that we should be doing things now to deal with it. I guess I'm not understanding what realistic options are out there that don't involve working through our political and legal process as they actually exist.

Lastly I don't see where I've been dismissive of @jennifer. I'm just discussing the issues she's raised. I'm not a Republican nor do I have republican sympathies so I don't know what the reference to the SSM debate has to do with this.

@jennifer Respectfully, I never said my proposed approach was easy, only that I think it's more feasible than laws explicitly targeting the issue of race. See my above comment to Kazzy about a natural coalition that can be built around the paritcular issue with Medicaid. Also, on that matter, in theory the only thing that would need to change would be the governors of the states that have declined the expansion funds. Not easy, but it could be done in a single election.

Bringing this all the way back to the OP I think the reason Sanders is even on the radar, is because he understands such a coalition could he built.

I understand how facially neutral laws can still operate to have a disparate impact on racial minorities, and that some laws are intended to do just that. I'm just stating my opinion on the best (but certainly not the only) means of combating those types of outcomes. The voter ID laws to me, for example, are the types of things that I think are ripe for constitutional challenges.

@kazzy You'll have to define whack-a-mole racism is in this context for me to be able to respond on the first question (not trying to be snarky just debating in good faith since apparently that doesn't seem to be clear to everyone).

On the second question I've never said that I think there is a single approach to adressing this issue, only where i think the priorities should be. In a perfect world fixing racial inequality would not require perfectly constructed laws but then in a perfect world we wouldn't have this problem to begin with. In the example we're talking about here, black people disadvantaged by the failure to expand Medicaid under the ACA in impacted states should in theory have a whole host of natural allies who are also being left out of the system or who sympathize with being too poor to have access to health care. That's where you start to form a political coalition to address the problem. Building that coalition is where I think discussions about racism on a more personal as opposed to structural level can be very useful and better seve progress.

@jennifer I disagree. I don't think that the problems with social security you mentioned are comparable post de jure segregation. Government programs will probably never be perfect but discrimination in the disbursement of government benefits is now illegal.

I think your Medicaid example actually supports my argument. The reason that has happened isnt clearly due to racism (though it probably plays some role) its due to a failure in the way the law was drafted and the political maneuvering in Congress that went into passing it. The bad result of that failure disproportionately effects black people but it could be corrected in any number of racially blind ways such as changing how medicaid is distributed or continuing to push for some type of public option or single payer system.

Now you may be right that we will never get to perfect through such mechanisms. I have no opinion on that. However even if you're right I don't see why that's a reason not to attack the issue on the front where you can get signifiant improvements.

@kazzy @nevermoor My issue is that reparations are a specific well defined concept. Laying out the problems of racism and how it manifests itself is, I absolutely agree, an unfortunate but necessary part of deciding what to do about it. I think that burden has already been met when it comes to most intellectually honest people. However, the existence of these problems does not in itself mean that the best solution is reparations or even that reparations is a workable part of many solutions.

I don't think it's an unfair burden when he is the one who chose that approach.

@kazzy I answered this question for Stillwater above. His article is called 'The Case for Reparations.' I think it's therefore reasonable to understand him to be proposing that the government give money to the descendants of African slaves as recompense for what was done to their ancestors. That is a policy proposal. I understand some people read TNC's thorough recounting of racial inequities as sufficient to make that case but I do not. Others seem to think he is making a different kind of argument and maybe he is but I'm not really seeing what that other argument is.

I think a really good piece would take that next step and address some of the basic issues and obstacles CK MacLeod mentions below (who gets them, when, how do you handle competing claims).

For example, if someone wrote an essay called 'The Case for a Hybrid Car Tax Credit' I would expect not only a history of the damage carbon emissions has done to the environment, but a little bit of number crunching about who is going to get what, when they will get it, and what the results would be. If it does not include anything of that nature beyond form a committee then it isn't a very good policy proposal.

As a footnote I'll just add that I am not making a comparison between entrenched racial inequality and carbon emissions beyond how i think proposals that the government release money to individuals to address a problem should be analyzed.

@kazzy I responded to your question below (and am about to respond to your follow up). On the matter of other writers I don't see how that is relevant to a point I made solely about TNC. I did not assert that a convincing argument could never be made for reparations just that I did not like the one made in TNC's The Case for Reparations.

True but didn't de jure segregation have something to do with why that was the case? We don't have that now, we have something trickier.

I don't entirely disagree my point is about where I think priorities need to be. For me food in bellies and roofs over heads which aren't connected to correctional institutons are always going to be more pressing than the more abstract stuff. The fact that we can get there in a more or less race blind way is in my opinion a feature because it makes these changes more politically feasible.

What argument am I missing? I'm also not sure I comment here enough to have any habits.

I don't want to go onto a tangent specifically about a dollar amount (and in retrospect I can see why it may have appeared that was my only problem with the piece). However, the lack of details on that particular issue is illustrative of my larger problem with the piece.

My criticism is that he made a policy proposal that I don't think he adequately defended. Again, I don't expect draft legislation or hundreds of pages of details, just a basic idea of how we get to said policy from here, some basics about what said policy looks like in practice, and what we can expect the outcome of said policy to be.

@chris @stillwater So the response to a criticism about a particular piece that was being discussed on this thread is "your criticism is wrong because of some other unnamed writer who wrote some unnamed piece out there somewhere on the internet"?

I will take your point on my phrasing. What I should have said is that adding a dollar amount, among other specifics, would have made the argument more convincing.