Because of progressives, who are routinely blamed for the failures of establishment Democrats. It’s the first problem that’s the real problem, cozying up to Silicon Valley and Wall Street personalities.
Imagine the climate being a middle ground issue lol.
This paper really said “We need to be the middle ground between total climate disregard, and barely averting most of the ecological crisis”
Yeah, that’s where they lost me. Climate breakdown is the most important issue that our species has ever faced. It’s literally an existential crisis, and they’re shrugging and talking about it as if it’s optional.
We really need better science communication on what climate change is, and less propaganda about it.
Science education won’t work when people are propagandized to disbelieve scientists
Yeah, that’s the second part of my statement…
Ah gotta love being told that my existence is a political liability
From the authors who predicted an emerging Democratic majority comes…“why we were wrong before but you should totally believe us this time”
On the one hand, this:
“Democrats,” they write, “need to look in the mirror and examine the extent to which their own failures contributed to the rise of the most toxic tendencies on the right.”
Is something party leadership will never even think of doing.
On the other, don’t tempt the party with this:
And two is what they call the cultural radicalism of the modern progressive movement, which they dub the “shadow party,” and that they argue is alienating working class voters on four key issues: race, immigration, transgender rights, and climate.
Here is where the party will listen. Moving to the right out of political expedience? Abandoning vulnerable minorities? Letting donors dictate environmental policy? And progressives get hosed? May as well ask if they want cocaine and oral sex.
Democrats will continue to ratchet toward the right until they can no longer win elections by doing that. There’s no incentive for them to run anything but the most corporate friendly democrat thats just a little less corporate friendly than actual fascists. Thats literally how they secure donors, by promising things like ‘nothing will fundamentally change’.
Democrats will continue to ratchet toward the right until they can no longer win elections by doing that.
I mean, that’s pretty much what happened with West Virginia.
Ratchet effect in full force
They occasionally sprinkle in human rights for the appearence of still being on the left, but a cursory look as Israel, especially now, should let you know that there’s more to the story than basic human rights.
It’s not difficult for power structures to concede things that never challenged their hold on material power. Pro LGBT doesn’t threaten the American or Isralie defense industry or Cultural status quo that upholds that defense industry.
Yes it’s great we have those human rights, but to assume that means the people behind it were doing it for any other reason that to preserve their hold on power by appeasing masses of people in the least expensive way possible for them is like assuming Apple adopting usbc and RCS had nothing to do with Europe. The parts of the government that gave us those rights did so specifically because they’re not going to try very hard to meet any other demands from people toward the left, and they still need those people to win.
The shadow party responsible for the rot at the heart of the DNC is AIPAC.
You’re right and these clowns are just deflecting. I can’t believe they actually wrote that American Democrats support any far left ideology. I snort laughed.
So why is political representation so skewed that the “left” party needs to confine itself to the middle of the spectrum? That sounds like something to discuss.
It’s not complicated. The reality is that most Americans just aren’t socialists. They’re not fascists either–at least not yet–but voting blocks that have been reliably Democratic for the last fifty-ish years (since the GOP adopted the Southern strategy) are only in the party by default. Black families have historically been relatively conservative, as have Hispanic families. That the Democrats are left of the only other major party only makes it the party of Marxists and anarchists for want of an actual left party, since the alternative for the young generation of leftists is to essentially not participate in the political process at all.
It’s a consequence of first-past-the-post elections and the way campaigns are funded, but the result is that the Democratic party includes elements that are genuinely right of center, but it can’t risk alienating them because right of center represents the majority of the country’s population. If the Democrats were to lose the Marxists on its far left flank to a true left party, the GOP would just win every national election. Similarly, if the Dems lost its conservative labor wing in the Rust Belt, same outcome. In a parliamentary government, or if FPTP were eliminated, those two wings would be separate parties and form a coalition to govern (and the fascists on the right of the GOP along with more traditional conservatives like Romney would similarly be separate parties). Since we don’t have that, the two parties basically have to try to stay as close to the ideological center within their own caucuses as possible, because any deviation in either direction hemorrhages voters and loses elections.
Listen, the only way donors are going to be combated is by destroying Citizens United. The only way real establishment change is going to happen is by a ratification by the people. Thats what Jan 6 was about, unfortunately those people wanted bigot shit. All of this shit will change, when the civilians on the left become corned in this constant rightward shift.
Show me a universe where anybody even marginally left of center doesn’t prefer to pick a fight with people ideologically aligned with them over the actual fascists.
No, seriously, please open a portal there, I want to move.
And hey, I give far left people a lot of crap for being into that kink really hard, but the liberals and centrists will do the exact same thing unless they have their own party to go be ideologically confused in.
As a side observation, I am constantly baffled that we are almost eight years into this nonsense and the centrist Dem establishment still hasn’t realized that there is no way to politically align with the fascist right. You know what their platform is? Whatever it takes to oppose the Democrats. If they advocated for giving machine guns to every citizen tomorrow Trump would call them child murderers immediately.
It’s not about the policy, it’s about being in power (for the leaders) and screwing with the people they instinctively don’t like (for the base). It took five minutes of being online in 2014 to figure this out. How is this still a mystery to these guys?
