If you’re taking Armando as your idea of the common Democrat and why the party is d0med I suggest a bit more looking around.
(No offense meant to Armando but he clearly and repeatedly describes himself as far left)
The whole argument about Left vs Right when it comes to fascism is like arguing you can’t get to New York from San Francisco by going West. Maybe it’s not the path most people would think of, but you’ll get there if you keep going.
Edit: It bugs me they left Anarchy off the very top of it, but I honestly don’t even know who made it. I’m sure they had some agenda they were pushing.
Fair touch re wikipedia. However I still don’t believe it. This both-ends-meet thing is a facile and even a fatuous way of dismissing ideology in favor of pragmatics.
Surely Wikipedia and GOVERNMENT <> TYRRANY memes will solve this!
Describing ideology in terms of right and left is facile and fatuous in the first place.
The whole thing breaks down when you roam into authoritarianism realms. Any dictatorship is technically conservative in that the idea of democracy is a liberal one, hence the whole liberal-democracy thing. That doesn’t really mean modern conservatism is pro-dictators. Modern conservatism is more like classic liberalism at least on paper.
Fascism is generally regarded as right-wing authoritarianism while communism is regarded as left-wing, but really… they’re basically the same thing. The details of how they justify killing you and dumping you in an unmarked mass grave doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.
Exactly. Something as complex as socio political ideology isn’t defined by a single axis.
Trump won the election by a total of 77,000 votes across three states. That’s his “mandate.” (In a rational world Trump would have lost to a cabbage, but we don’t live in a rational world.) If I didn’t know any better, reading some of these posts I would think Trump won in some kind of mammoth landslide. But if people think the answer to Democratic woes is to become more Republican to appease those Trump voters then never has “you’re doing it wrong” been more appropriate.
Democrats have to reach the people who didn’t vote. They have to figure out why they didn’t vote and find ways to motivate them to vote. The “persuadables” I guess you can call them. I don’t know what the answer to that is or how to reach them. Hell people on this board who are (for the most part, ta da dum) rational and well informed seem to think Democrats are pro free trade and anti union and will raise your taxes by 2k a month (c’mon, seriously?) That’s a messaging problem, but messaging itself isn’t quite obviously enough. A real danger that I see is the left will fracture. The far right took over the Republican party, but the left (or far left if you will) doesn’t want anything to do with Democrats - but until and unless we change our political system that will get you exactly jack and shit.)
Just for the record as a self-identified far left individual I don’t have a problem with fiscal conservatism per se but strongly believe we have a moral obligation to help those that are less fortunate than ourselves (and for me, the moral and ethical extends to the natural world but I won’t get into that.) There isn’t any reason the richest country in the world (by far) can’t do that. (We need to throw out our current tax code and completely re-do it, add a VAT and a carbon tax and implement UBI. That will never happen even if we have one party. The other thing that needs to be done is getting rid of FPTP but yeah ok enough already.)
Sorry for the long winded post.
Haha what a ridiculous graph! But did you see how far out they put the politically correct! Either way it appears we’re all on the laminar flow to tyranny.
I could make the same argument for social moderates who are fiscal liberals, which is the core of Bernie’s support.
I think the group I’m describing, at least out here, is larger than the group you’re describing (though your group might be bigger in blue states)
This is the real curse of the Dems. Even when they win, they’re such a big tent it’s hard to get stuff done- The Republicans have the advantage of a narrower tent.
That said, at this point I’d vote for someone I completely oppose to stop Trump- I voted for Hillary after all.
I am at the point where I agree with Armando it’s going to take some dirty tactics to stop the deplorable core (that’s not all Trump voters- but it’s those folks who are sticking with Trump now). That’s about 35% of the population- you gotta win enough of the other 65% to get real change.
Our biggest hope right now is the SC anti-gerrymandering case, which has a shot. We get that, and the Court might be in a democracy-saving mood given what Trump is doing (I think the 5 votes are there now), and we got a real shot to get out of this mess without massive damage.
Economic security?
The dual left and right character of Trumps campaign has been done to death.
If your takeaway message is that the left is being asked to become more Republican, then you are right to despair. As long as the left remains incoherent it faces a real risk of fracturing.
Trump is incoherent, but he’s consistently incoherent and was elected on the basis, so you might just have to accept that he’s a contrarian and the voters don’t mind. They elected him to be headstrong and make some unconventional decisions.
The issue right now is the left is still fighting the Bernie/Hillary war, which didn’t get to a definite conclusion. The Hillary supporters are like “she won and only lost due to a freak accident”, and the Bernie voters are like “she lost and we would have won”.
It’s actually possible both may be right. Those two groups also have vastly different priorities.
I think the best bet personally is to go for the gusto, give both what they want, and risk being called extreme left. I think whatever the Dems put up in 2020 will be less scary to moderates than Trump, as long as you elect a candidate without too much baggage, and I really think the baggage is the main reason Hillary lost- Republicans had 20 years of hate on her, and it motivated them as much as Trump did, and demotivated many Dems who remembered the 90s, the Bernie types were also looking for a reason to spite her- and I know several who did, and they weren’t the ones you saw on the internet either- they were folks who just quietly said the Dems are too crooked this time, I’m staying home, either one is bad.
I mean, Hillary got hate for being a massive SJW and for being a Blue Dog. That’s pretty much every direction.
I tend to agree that if you want to take on Trump you take him on the economic left. Because of his left wing economic populism and opposition from within his own party, Trump is ripe for being split on the left. If an area is economically depressed, people will always vote for jobs and investment in industry. A lot will depend on whether there’s any appetite for adventurism left at the end of his Presidency.
I think the eventual candidate will end up dog whistling on xenophobia to some degree. It’s the easy option. There’s just nothing to gain from appealing to the SJW. They are rusted on Democrats and the rhetoric is polarising, in a manner that costs votes.
The most baggage Hillary carried was that she felt it was her turn to be President. Sanders was 75 and unelectable, so they have to do better than that next time round.
Fair or otherwise, yeah.
The Democrats as a party just feel so … inept. Republicans spent eight (technically six) years obstructing literally everything, but now they’ll yowling that Democrats are being obstructionists and the media isn’t covering it? I don’t know how they get away with it, but they do.
Line from a climate change essay (cross posted in that thread) kinda sums it up:
If people cannot imagine a future for themselves, all they can measure is what they’ve lost.
To me, that sums up the 2016 election.
So they nominated Tom Perez as DNC chairman, and then he made Keith Ellison deputy chair.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/25/politics/dnc-chair-election/
I read somewhere that a lot of progressives in the room before Perez got to speak got all shout-y and protest-y about Ellison losing. I’m having trouble finding that now. But there is a ton of wailing and gnashing of teeth online, it’s not hard to find. i.e.
Not that he’s exactly rolling over to the Republicans. This was his tweet response to Donald Trump’s tweet “congratulating his win”:
https://twitter.com/TomPerez/status/835622756976889857
Quotes of the tweets:
Donald Trump: Congratulations to Thomas Perez, who has just been named Chairman of the DNC. I could not be happier for him, or for the Republican Party!
Tom Perez: Call me Tom. And don’t get too happy. @keithellison and I, and Democrats united across the country, will be your worst nightmare.
One big winner of the whole thing: Pete Buttigieg. Now people might actually recognize that name moving forward. :)
That’s wittier than normal for Trump. Granted, a low bar.
Why don’t we go ahead and also include Tom Perez’s response, eh?
Special election today for a key state senate seat in Delaware, with control of that state legislative body going to the winning party.
Democrats won the state senate seat in this white working class district in 2014 by 2 points.
They won it today by 17.
Game on.
I’m hesitant to start following your optimism after election night last year but that’s still good to hear :-P
DE’s a mostly blue state already. I’ll start getting optimistic if Dems can pick up a House seat in GA, SC or MT.