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It's not merely that she's relatively young, it's that she's much younger than the two presidents who'll have preceded her.
You can also name about a dozen potential issues, can't you? The college debt bubble, the NIMBY vs. YIMBY struggle, the opioid crisis, economic stagnation, the housing bubble, Medicare, women's rights etc.
We can all name issues present in society, but is Kamala Harris going to solve any of them? Is she even going to try?
She strikes me as a political opportunist who wants to be President just so she can be President. Does she even have any policy proposals? You would think that, if she did, she would be putting them into action right now as the de-facto leader of the Democratic party.
I think she’ll have every conceivable incentive to try. She’ll be pimped by the MSM and the Dem establishment as the first woman of color to become President, and they’ll push the narrative that she’s set to leave a great legacy and accomplish great things for a society still tainted by the vestiges of structural racism etc. Also, the polycrisis (I wasn’t even aware that such an expression exists!) will probably continue and worsen, so the overlapping negative socio-economic tendencies will reach a point of escalation sometimes between 2025-28 where Kamala’s supporters will compel her to act – if she doesn’t initiate reforms herself first, that is. Also, she derives whatever level of political legitimacy she has from not being an old white fart who failed to cure the nation’s ills i.e. Biden and Trump. She’ll have to continue to demonstrate that she’s different from both of them.
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I do not see concrete proposals from Harris that realistically will be enacted for any of these issues you mention except for abortion access (same for the other candidate). I think you might be buying what the candidate is selling a little too much. If she solves all these issues, then great (except abortion access I differ from her viewpoints on that) but don't tout her as a greater reformer rather than standard democratic candidate 2.0 especially before she's done anything of substance. Its possible I just don't have the information, can you elaborate on Harris solutions for college debt, housing, the opiod crisis or fixing Medicare? Economic stagnation has J. Powell on the job. To me it sounds like every Presidential state of the union type of address where grand vague future plans are proclaimed, but the issues linger year after year.
See my reply to Sunshine.
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Who cares? John Q. Adams was younger than every previous President. Then Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, Pierce…I’m too lazy to count up the “two old, one young” pattern, but it’s so specific. Congrats to Joe Biden for breaking the website curse!
Also, all of Gorbachev’s predecessors died in office. I hope to God that doesn’t apply here.
As for issues—I can think of plenty. They’re just not particularly textbook-worthy. We’re taught about perestroika because it represented the decline of Cold War ideology. Glasnost for similar reasons. It has to be a pivot of the political landscape, and nothing Harris has said fits the bill. She’s stumping for the same old Democrat stance on all of your example issues.
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Gorbachev wasn't that much younger. Andropov was 1914, Gorba 1931, barely 17 years difference. Why fixate on Gorba? There have been younger presidents since forever. TR had 15 years on his predecessor, JFK 27 years, both promised plenty of new policies. (Kennedy was born during WW1 while Eisenhower and Truman fought in it).
The Soviet gerontocracy problem was not simply about age of the general secretary. The problem that in 1980s, the politbyro had been staffed by generation of Brezhnev, implementing Brezhnev policies since Brezhnev. Then Gorba decided to try to implement large-scale changes to the Soviet state that weakened the authority of the dictatorship.
True, but Kamala isn't that young either, in fact she's 5 years older now than Gorbachev was in 1985.
Again, true, but the political environment was rather different from the current one in both cases, wasn't it? There was no sense of vibecession/stagnation, disillusionment in the party leadership, general anomie etc.
I suppose one can make a similar point about the Dem party leadership?
This is very wrong; both presidents were elected as countermeasures to perceived (and actual) vibecessions.
Especially in Kennedy's case, his cult of youth and personal example were so powerful precisely because they provided an outlet for this broad but unfocused and aimless search for an alternative to what was thought to be a depersonalized, cog-in-a-machine, stagnant society. The late 50's had spawned an intense critique of percieved conformism and rigidity in culture and economy. "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" came out in 1956, the same year Mills published "The Power Elite" and Whyte (who had coined the term "groupthink" in 1952) published "The Organization Man." The Beatniks reached their apex in the 50's, and were clearly reacting to a vibecession avant la lettre: "much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program ... It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind." Ginsburg's "Howl" (most famous in this community as the inspiration for the True Caliph's "Meditations on Moloch") was written in 1954-5 and published in 1956 (what was in the water that year?!?).
I don't have my sources at hand to fully dive into the eighteen nineties at the moment, but the fin-de-siecle decades were also stuffy and conformist, which spurred cultural backlash. TR's progressives were just as much a reaction against corruption in government and established political machines as TR himself was an icon in the cultural charge against perceived Victorian over-domesticity...not for nothing were TR's progressives smeared as "goo-goos" (short for "good government").
I didn't know that goo-goos was that old. I thought it was from the 1990s.
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Note also that the 1910s and 1920s were perhaps an even more woke time than the 2010s and 2020s; Prohibition and sufferage being the most famous wins for that faction, but Charismatic Christianity has its roots in that time as well. Indeed, the opinion of women was indeed taken so seriously in the WW1 years that they could get men to kill themselves [by signing up for some stupid European war] simply by performing certain gestures, which is not yet a power woke women enjoy quite so directly today.
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If I had to guess, it was probably radioactive.
I can confirm that Roosevelt’s Progressives were relatively extreme reformers. We take most of that era’s changes for granted, but people were understandably upset about Gilded Age excesses. Externalities, as it were.
I would have guessed LSD, personally.
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