Is that a real possibility? Wouldn’t they be unelectable with a progressive Presidential candidate? I’m minded of the Labour Party’s lurch to the far left in the UK after electoral defeat, thus rendering them in the eyes of most commentators box-office poison, so to speak.
BTW was Obama considered a progressive when he secured his party’s nomination? If so I may be wrong about the unelectability of progressives, although it has to be said that Obama was special, possessing charisma in bucketloads, so perhaps one can’t judge from that.
I’d very much like to see Liz Warren take a more powerful position within the party, but I fear the next leaders will be the ones who “tell it like it is”, i.e. fill the air with chest-beating blame-someone-else thuggery rhetoric because we’ve seen it works.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have both made statements of willingness to work with Trump where their interests coincide. That’s very smart of them, as they probably realize that Trump captured a percentage of their own constituency - disaffected workers, primarily. Both Warren and Sanders have popuilist instincts like Trump, and I could easily see them working together on social programs that help the poor working class - a constituency that the increasing Democratic party emphasis on identity politics has left behind.
If so, this will give both of them far more clout as representatives of the minority party.
Nonsense. Trump doesn’t have any populist instincts: everything which sound like populism is a con. If you don’t believe this read some stories about about the people in the transition movement and the people who may be nominated for Cabinet positions. These people are all about the rich getting richer.
^This. Anyone who calls Trump a ‘populist’ is selling something.
As for the thread question: some progressives can probably rise within the Democratic party, but on the basis of their personal charisma more than their policy views.
If this election has taught us anything, it’s that charisma is crucial. (We should have learned that back in 2008, but the issue was confused by race, meaning in this case the demographics of the electorate.)
Nevertheless, among a certain sector of my Trump-voting colleagues I hear a lot of expectations that free trade agreements will be backed out of and tariffs put up to protect/rebuild US domestic manufacturing. In my mind, being opposed to free trade agreements because of the impact on domestic workers is more of a lefty position.
Not that I think any of that will actually happen, but it was on the bill of sale.
(Of course, most of my Trump-loving colleagues are more of the “he’ll lower my taxes” types.)
You mean NAFTA, which was negotiated by the Bush administration, and which Bush tried to ‘fast track’, and which more Republicans (in both Houses) voted for than Democrats?
I didn’t say that being anti-free was consistent with the policies of previous republican administrations. Just that it was something “populist” that was being sold. Trump’s supporters don’t expect him to be a typical republican in that regard.
While this is a true statement, it’s very misleading. It’s true that it was negotiated by the Bush administration, but Clinton certainly picked up the ball and championed it. It wasn’t ratified until 1994, long after George HW Bush was out of office. Bill and Hillary Clinton have both been free traders by and large, which I think is a point in their favor.
And while more Republicans did vote for it than Democrats, it was a very bi-partisan vote. Support in the House was 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats, and in the Senate it was 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats.
Yeah, a lot of the Trump fans believe this. And they also believe that after Trump starts this trade war, they’ll still be able to go down to the Walmart and pick up their week’s shopping at the same prices they’ve been paying before the trade war.
I wish I could say I’d get some satisfaction in observing their distress when they find out they’re wrong. But the fact is that we’ll all be in pretty dire straits by then.
(Besides which, their delusions will remain intact–they’ll never blame Trump for the results of his breaking trade agreements. They’ll fall for whatever line he feeds them about whatever scapegoats he decides to offer up as The Ones Who Ruined This.)
The Democrats will be erring greatly if they conclude that they need a celebrity or anti-establishment candidate in 2020 to match the GOP. By 2020, the public will be weary in the extreme of Trump’s antics and longing for someone calm, sedate, steady and “boring.” Someone like Hillary would win in a landslide in 2020. (NOT Hillary herself, that is - but someone of her mold.) Maybe a Kaine or O’Malley.
Arguably before the neo-lib takeover, though they tend to gloss over how they were getting crushed back then. They tend to prefer to style themselves as New Deal Democrats.
I think it was Mark Shields who said that after a loss, particularly a devastating loss, parties split into two factions. The first says we lost because we weren’t true to our core beliefs. The second says we lost because we weren’t enough like the other guys.
Maybe if the Dems nominate a progressive, the election will be more about politics and less about demographics and populism (although both will be important).
That having been said, look, not at the Presidential result, and at the results of the Senate, House, and various governorships. The Republicans did much better than expected. The US, for better or worse, is not a progressive country. Bernie Sanders would lose in 2020 in the general election. Garry Johnson got three times the vote that Jill Stein got in 2016.
The reason why the Democratic establishment did what they could to ensure that Hillary got the nom was partly because they recognize that socialism doesn’t sell in Peoria.
One of the lessons the media is not talking about (and we even have a thread about CBS getting the wrong lesson) is that besides winning the popular vote with a flawed candidate there was nevertheless a democratic fumble, that was in not talking about what was needed to be done to help the people most affected by international trade. And mostly in the rust belt.
Most of the Democrats that would had made a bigger difference stayed home and a few voted Trump as a protest. While one can be upset at them the bottom line for me is that to be a protest vote it does follow that the protesters ***must ***therefore become more involved to minimize the damage. Their vote was a very finicky thing and it is not likely to become a republican one from now on as some posters from the right dreamingly think that there is a new Republican “coalition” forming.