The Threat of Socialism Is Dividing Miami Cubans Ahead of the Election

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Cubans in Florida they say are anti-Afro-Cuban, because Fidel wanted to liberate Black people.

Older Cubans are conservative, younger Cubans are swingy.

Imagine if the outcome of the US Civil War had been a Confederate victory and a permanent country in the southern States. Over time, they banned slavery but still maintained a hierarchical system resembling feudalism (not very different from the Jim Crow south.) Then there was a revolution in the 20th Century with massive support from the black population and poor whites. Many of the upper class and middle class whites who benefited from the unjust system flee to the Northern states (who had tacitly supported the Confederate dictators because they were a useful ally in the Caribbean against Communism.) Sure, Castro had his problems but in the eyes of the Afro-Cubans they had finally achieved a transformation in society and so very relatively very few of them ended up expatriating. That's not an exact analogy, but it describes a sizable percentage of the Cuban ex-pats in the US.

But a lot of those Cuban exiles are very old at this point, their children and especially grandchildren don't universally buy into the narrative.

If the white sugar plantation owners had just paid their laborers a few more pennies an hour and treated them with some modicum of decency, they might not have had to resort to backing a communist revolution.

The current state of Cuba is largely the fault of Cuban expats in America (or their ancestors who initially fled the country). They refused reform, so that left revolution as the only option.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I agree with the rest of your post, but one might not actually actually need to dismantle the filibuster to get universal healthcare. Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 0 could be done through budget reconciliation and should have been threatened as a response to filibustering a public option. Additionally, there are lots of executive actions a president could take to incentive lobbyists (and, by extension, their friends in Congress) to pass bills, if they were so inclined (but all too often, Congress is just an excuse for presidents to avoid taking such action anyway).

Tactically, perhaps - but you have to ask yourself why Democrats want to keep such a procedure (the filibuster) in the first place. Some might try to say that it's "to keep Republicans from doing whatever they want in the event they have unified control". Given the precedent of behavior from the GOP, that's an unreasonable assumption: if they decide they want to do such the next time they control government entirely, they'll get rid of it. Ultimately, keeping the filibuster intact is a plausible-deniability shield for those Senate Democrats who are either banking on comfy campaign contributions and post-office private sector/lobbying gigs, or don't believe in/don't have the political courage (as if anything other than national trends/midterm backlash to the in-party controls their fates now) to stand up for reforms that benefit most Americans.

Abolishing the filibuster and/or using reconciliation on such a matter would require a lot of "moderate" Senate Democrats to out themselves not as moderates, but as people who want literally nothing other than the status quo to be maintained in healthcare and insurance.

The Democratic Party faces a lot of obstacles to being able to have a significant majority in the Senate for an extended period of time, particularly if present political realignment trends continue apace.

If you're going to be in a situation with a structural Republican majority, where the best you can hope for is that when a Democrat does get elected president, their coattails are long enough to end up with 51 or 52 Senate seats, you're not going to like what happens the rest of the time.

A Republican will get elected president, quite possibly without even winning the popular vote. And then a filibuster-less Senate will let them do all kinds of ghoulish stuff.

You seem to be going off the belief that if you axe the filibuster and pass a really generous healthcare plan, the public will be so grateful that they never elect another Republican again. And that's a very rosy view of how politics works. Universal healthcare and generous social safety nets haven't stopped conservative or right-wing governments from getting elected in Europe.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I agree with the rest of your post, but one might not actually actually need to dismantle the filibuster to get universal healthcare. Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 0 could be done through budget reconciliation and should have been threatened as a response to filibustering a public option. Additionally, there are lots of executive actions a president could take to incentive lobbyists (and, by extension, their friends in Congress) to pass bills, if they were so inclined (but all too often, Congress is just an excuse for presidents to avoid taking such action anyway).

Tactically, perhaps - but you have to ask yourself why Democrats want to keep such a procedure (the filibuster) in the first place. Some might try to say that it's "to keep Republicans from doing whatever they want in the event they have unified control". Given the precedent of behavior from the GOP, that's an unreasonable assumption: if they decide they want to do such the next time they control government entirely, they'll get rid of it. Ultimately, keeping the filibuster intact is a plausible-deniability shield for those Senate Democrats who are either banking on comfy campaign contributions and post-office private sector/lobbying gigs, or don't believe in/don't have the political courage (as if anything other than national trends/midterm backlash to the in-party controls their fates now) to stand up for reforms that benefit most Americans.

Abolishing the filibuster and/or using reconciliation on such a matter would require a lot of "moderate" Senate Democrats to out themselves not as moderates, but as people who want literally nothing other than the status quo to be maintained in healthcare and insurance.

The Democratic Party faces a lot of obstacles to being able to have a significant majority in the Senate for an extended period of time, particularly if present political realignment trends continue apace.

If you're going to be in a situation with a structural Republican majority, where the best you can hope for is that when a Democrat does get elected president, their coattails are long enough to end up with 51 or 52 Senate seats, you're not going to like what happens the rest of the time.

A Republican will get elected president, quite possibly without even winning the popular vote. And then a filibuster-less Senate will let them do all kinds of ghoulish stuff.

You seem to be going off the belief that if you axe the filibuster and pass a really generous healthcare plan, the public will be so grateful that they never elect another Republican again. And that's a very rosy view of how politics works. Universal healthcare and generous social safety nets haven't stopped conservative or right-wing governments from getting elected in Europe.

And how often are universal healthcare systems dismantled these days in Europe?

I'm not sure what your point is. There are other bad things a Republican POTUS and 51 Republican senators can do.

And let's be honest, would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump in charge of your health insurance and the hospitals and clinics you use? Do you not think some Louis DeJoy type would be coming in and screwing everything up? Or some nutjob saying from now on, hormone therapy for trans people won't be covered, or that all race-based health risk screenings are forbidden because that would be "affirmative action" or something?

The whole USPS situation is proof positive that even services literally everyone uses aren't exempt from their malignant neglect.