I always feel 2000 was one of the biggest turning point elections our country had. Even though it was almost 20 years ago I feel our country is still feeling the effects of it and the policies of the Bush administration.
It was such a close election and the recount was handled in such a partisan way it comes as no surprise that a lot of people to this day feel George W. Bush was not the genuine winner.
I feel Al Gore was the genuine winner of this election and it's a shame we were deprived of someone who was a staunch climate change believer. some younger people at the time thought Gore wasn't progressive enough or too much of a corporate democrat so they either stayed home or voted third party not fully realizing what that would lead to (sound familiar?).
I sometimes wonder what kind of an impact an Al Gore presidency would have had on our country. As much as one can speculate it's still worth noting most people (both republicans and democrats) feel a Gore presidency would have been better than the one W. Bush had.
I was one of those people that did not pull the lever for Hillary, and I still don't regret that, not one bit. I also would have voted for Al if I hadn't been only fifteen at the time. I'm not aware of any sort of prevalent anti-neoliberal sentiment going on at the time of that election. The first time I noticed any such sentiment was towards the end of the Obama administration. I became dissillusioned with the Democratic party as time went on, as public discourse started to veer more to the right, and as the Democrats chased the Tea-Party/Republicans off of a cliff, and I began to notice a pattern in the major parties changing hands.
Had the Democrats a viable message, and had they given the public more to chew on than 'we're not Republican', we might, at the very least, not have seen George W win his second term in office, and we sure as hell wouldn't have elected Donald Trump. Sanders excited the base and brought people out to vote in the primary that would never have otherwise voted. People can gripe about the Sanders supporters who didn't vote, or didn't vote Democrat in the general, but that was never going to happen, anyway, especially with how politically tone-deaf Clinton was/is.
You want to stop Trump in the next election? Great, give independants and people who normally don't bother with politics a reason to feel that they should. You can't shame most of these folks into submission, and neither will appearing to fear, regardless of how many this president steps into deeply authoritarian territory. The only way to win these people over is to convince them that 1) getting out of bed to vote will have a real and measurable impact on their lives and 2) the candidate in question has what it takes to win credibility for both the left and the Democratic party.
The main reason why we can't simply focus on defeating Trump . . . is because we'd be kicking that can down the road. Back in 2000, a lot of us couldn't imagine a warmonger-in-chief worse than George W. To be fair, George's death-count is far higher, but now we've got supposedly left-leaning outlets waxing poetic about the visage of bombs.
That said, I'll be voting Democrat regardless of whether or not a yellow dog is running as the nominee. I felt that rejecting Hillary was vital for the future of the left, but rejecting the 'lesser evil' this time would not reap any benfits worth giving that asshat another four years. I think, however, that our best hope in beating Donald Trump is through a candidate with the policies and credibility to light a fire under the asses of those who would otherwise feel that their participation is worthless. If we nominate someone who substitutes platitudes and claims of their character in the place of of substitive policy proposals and a consistent history with being on the 'right' side of the issues.
