5321

Centrism with popped collars.

5322

A moderate candidate loses and that means Americans reject progressive policies.

A moderate candidate wins and that means Americans reject progressive policies.
\o/

These two pieces get to the problem with the Democratic party and why they’re so bad at messaging: Consultants and strategist. IMO, they would rather lose than cede any ground to progressive policies. (Second piece is a guy who recently joined the DNC.)

The problems with doing things this way are obvious:

  1. self-dealing by consultants
  2. unwillingness to change
  3. lack of personnel capacity to change!
  4. fear of losing a tightly held circle of power
  5. groupthink and path dependency
  6. inability to confront new ideas

The biggest issue is that assumption that the best primary candidate is the one who can raise the most money. We know this isn’t true! We outraise GOPs 3-1 but lose.

But it’s hard to teach old dogs new tricks–especially when they’re paid consultants who like the money!

Oh…and I should mention: doing things this way incentivizes pure careerism, which in turn incentivizes gerontocracy.

It is not accident the average age of a dem party leader is over 70 years old–20 years older than for the GOP.

Even though we’re the party favored by youth.

5323

I’m more of a gnarly centrist, myself.

5324

Extra medium

5325

There is a moderate and there is a centralist

A Moderate is a particular point of view of what is necessary and is moderate only because the views of the right and left happen to put them there.

A Centralist is some that keeps trying to be in the center of the spectrum regardless of what is necessary. They shift their talking points to always be in the middle to score some political points. Centralists are hacks that have no beliefs of their own and instead allow the country shift to the right as they shift along with it, instead of being a counter balance because of their need to be a political opportunist and be in the middle.

Centralists are assholes, unlike moderates.

5326

This right here is what will cause fascism in America.

Specifically, for those bitching about Cal Cunningham, Chuck Schumer made sure Jeff Jackson wouldn’t run in 2020 instead. Jackson would have stomped Cunningham in the primary. Cunningham’s only competition instead came from Erika Smith, who was too left for North Carolina, and had only decent political chops. (better than Cunningham’s though)

The gerontocracy is precisely why we need a hostile takeover of the Dems, and why I support politicians like AOC despite her views being more left than I like. We need folks who will fight to win, not just fight to retain their spot then just fundraise all day.

5327

Or, you can go with David Schor, who at least backs his statements up with data points from elections who has shown that it is Republicans – not Democrats – who are building the multicultural (yes), working class coalition that Democrats thought in 2008 and 2012 permanently belonged to them.

And I know Schor is a bete noir to the capital L left. I find him and Catalist research director Jonathan Robinson to be the two most compelling people worth listening to right now for actual straight talk on where Democrats go from here.

Hint: the postulation that Democratic political consultants are somehow blunting the progressives towards the center is feels absolutely crazy wrong to me. It goes against everything we know about them, and we know who Democratic political folks behind the scenes are. This group of Democratic political consultants are, by and large, among the most liberal, left-thinking members of the Washington cognoscenti, which already leans leftish. They’re overwhelmingly white, college educated, under 35, and male. And they make the the lean of the Twitter Left look like Ted Cruz by comparison.

They’re the ones who thought a certain phrase about much-needed re-thinks of police and policing reform and overhauls was catchy enough to elevate to national political media. (We desperately need these reforms, but having political consultants call the USA Today and tell them "Ask my candidate about ‘Defund the Police’ means that no matter how smart, thoughtful, and nuanced the answer is, the headline the next day is “Candidate X speaks out on Defund The Police”. And yes, I know of at least 4 or 5 situations where something like this happened with candidates in 2020 who lost.) They’re the ones who thought elevating immigration in 2016 was going to be a national, uniform-swing issue (it wasn’t; it killed Democrats across the upper midwest).

Democrats need a progressive wing. And they need a moderate wing. And they need both to understand that centrism for the point of centrism is actually a thing that a large, large majority of the 5-10% of persuadable voters believe in and find a way to continue to persuade them. (Hint: when Joe Biden talked all through the 2020 campaign about working with Republicans in congress, a whole lot of Democratic political consultants cringed. But Biden was talking directly to those voters who are in favor of centrism for centrism’s sake. They exist. And they’re fairly important.)

5328

An interesting thing, by the way, on BBB negotiations from JRob, since I brought him up:

2.75 trillion between the two bills may have been what Democrats expected to get all along, but when you start at lofty heights like 6 trillion and then negotiate down, it’s going to look like a loss, no matter what good stuff is in it.

5329

More to the point, we need a face that people look forward to seeing and hearing from. Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama were two such faces. Joe Biden is…iffy at this stage in his life. Nancy Pelosi is not it. People want to see and hear from young, intelligent, charismatic individuals. They don’t want to hear from 80 year old politicians. You can talk policy all you want, but in the end it’s a popularity contest where charisma is a very important factor. How things are going is about as equally important as the perception of how things are going. The GOP understands this and uses it to their full advantage. The Democrats can ignore that at their peril.

5330

When the ‘centrist’ position is that preserving the filibuster is more important that ensuring that all Americans can exercise their right to vote, that’s radical centrism. In that, it is, demonstrably, the center position, and yet at the same time it is clearly and obviously batshit insane.

5331

It is not clearly and obviously batshit insane. If you have determined that neither the voting restriction legislation the Republicans are passing in the states nor the voting rights legislation that would pass the Senate without the filibuster will definitively determine who holds the Senate in to two or four years, and you think that a Republican Senate majority will continue to behave as it has in the past when it controlled both the House and the Senate and maintain the filibuster, it is perfectly sane and reasonable to want to keep the filibuster, and you may expect to be thanked for it in posterity. I think that’s a tricky political judgement with a lot of factors in play, and if you are wrong about it you are not batshit insane.

The real problem in fact is not the filibuster but the composition of the Senate, which is inherently undemocratic. Ending the filibuster will not change this (unless you think a majority of the Senate is ready to divide up California into multiple states during the next year)-- and may exacerbate it. A gerrymandered House and a bare Republican Senate majority with no filibuster means minority rule that could entrench itself while fucking up the country much more readily.

5332

Except for the actual reality where the instant you make use of the filibuster to block something they really want, they will abolish it themselves - as has already been done in recent history.

This is currently already a likely scenario, with the filibuster.

The filibuster makes an already undemocratic institution even more so.

5333

This is a big reason I’m supporting Jackson in the primary here. He is that - the only knock on him is that he’s a white male. He’s a more populist Buttigieg, who manages to have the left loving him without being super-lefty.

The Republicans don’t need to abolish the filibuster- they are fine with the current status quo, and they can use the court to roll back social rights.

Also if you started at a lower figure, BBB would likely be 500mil at most.

5334

Per Wikipedia:

On April 6, 2017, Democrats launched a filibuster against Gorsuch’s nomination. In response, Republicans invoked the nuclear option and changed the Senate rules to end filibusters for Supreme Court nominees.

How can you not know this? How can you ignore this?

5335

I don’t like it, but this is an important fact that it seems like a lot of Democrats steadfastly want to ignore. And from what I can tell (not followed it super closely), it’s borne out in the Virginia results, too. It’s not a done deal, but the trend is not going the way some Democrats probably assume. Their party is getting whiter, richer, and more elite. The Republicans are getting more diverse and more working class. They’re also getting more culturally isolated, more conspiratorial, and more antagonistic toward democratic norms, which is why I say I don’t like it!

5336

I’m hardly ignoring it. The Democrats removed the filibuster for Federal Court appointees with the exception of the Supreme Court. The Republicans retaliated by removing the exception, but maintained the legislative filibuster. That is hardly incontrovertible proof that the Republicans would in the future remove the legislative filibuster unilaterally, but it is a strong indication that they would retaliate if further exceptions to the filibuster rule are made under Democratic control.

Personally, I think the preponderance of the evidence is on the side of removing the filibuster (of course the best time to have done it was in January…). But you don’t have to be “batshit insane” to think the other way.

5337

That misstates the history and mangles distinctions in such a severe way I don’t see how it can be in good faith.

5338

Look, the Democrats started this partisan war by the crime of…giving Robert Bork an up or down vote. Everything after that is just what they deserve.

5339

Are you maintaining that the democrats didn’t abolish the filibuster for Judicial appointments?

5340

The Democrats were fools for thinking that they could abolish the filibuster “a little bit”, only for judicial appointments. It should have been obvious that the Republicans would then abolish it for whatever they then wanted to do.

Likewise, it’s similarly idiotic, some of the talk about, “abolish the filibuster for…uh… Laws about voting rights.”

Dude, you are just saying, “abolish the filibuster for whatever I want to pass now.”

Which is fine, the filibuster is no longer workable. But continuing such a foolish pretence is so idiotic as to be laughable. The GOP is going to get rid of it the instant they have 50 votes to do something they want.