Entrenched progressives…the ones who wouldn’t know compromise if it came up and bit them.
As for the idealism thing, it’s a fact of life. Reality tends to grind out a lot of the idealism of youth. Some manage to maintain it, and many still have a streak but recognize that a lot of what they used to believe just isn’t workable. It has little or nothing to do with anyone’s level of intelligence.
Some will stay home, like they routinely do during midterms and they have as a demographic in Presidential cycles before 2008. (Not sure we should assume that 2008 and 2012 are the new normal rather than a blip.)
More of them the longer the process drags out given the ongoing demonizing of Clinton by Team Sanders.
But most will be motivated to still come out given the alternative of Trump or Cruz. Odds are. I think. (Again, yes, I want those odds as high against Trump/Cruz/candidate-to-be-named-later as possible.)
Longer term though Qin has a point buried in there. Much of the coalition that reliably votes Democratic for President, in particular large portions of various minority groups and the relative Democratic lean of female voters, are only reliably Democratic because the Republicans’ pander to the RR and the TP components of their base have made that party anathema to them. The lock the Democrats have on those groups would loosen if the GOP, in the aftermath wreckage of this cycle, jettison some of their anti-abortion, anti-gay, and hardline anti-immigration reform shibboleths and even embrace, as some on the right have, real sentencing guideline reforms. It would take a few cycles for them to rebrand convincingly, but if the so-called Progressives have their way and the Democrats move towards pandering to the preferences of their young White voters, taking the rest of the coalition for granted, or even kicking them to the curb as not progressive enough? Maybe not so many.
Saying Clinton is a candidate that appeals to your head not your heart is denigrating the other side?
I wouldn’t say that Sanders’ voters are ‘dumb’; to the contrary, they’re among the most intellectual in the race. I’ve also met numerous Sanders supporters who are Baby Boomers.
I think they’ve identified the problems correctly, but I disagree with their fixes. I don’t think they’ve really thought it all through. The assumption that Sanders voters have is that he will use the bully pulpit of the White House to persuade Americans of all stripes to buy into trading their private insurance for medicare-for-all, raising the minimum wages to $15 per hour (and beyond), and breaking up the big banks. I think Obama’s first year in office is proof positive that this has a very, very slim chance of happening, and that whatever energy he might have coming into his first 100 days in office would quickly be blunted by partisanship and media distortion of his message.
America has always had to deal with self-centered partisanship, corporate control of the system, and media distortion almost since the day we were established – this is nothing new. And there have been times when these forces have been overcome. But they were overcome by people who were devout American nationalists who could unify the country and at times when an overwhelming majority of Americans were basically so bitterly sour on American capitalism that they no longer believed that it worked for them. We’re definitely regressing, but this isn’t 1909; child labor is banned and there are at least some worker protection standards (see OSHA). It’s not 1933: people lost lots of money in the crash of 2008 but people still live in a first world country. Sanders would quickly be discredited and would become a lame duck within a year – either that, or he would ultimately make a deal with the devil and start becoming more of a pragmatist. But that wouldn’t be too popular with his fan base of idealists.
We aren’t saying they’ll grow conservative. We are saying they will grow more pragmatic. Not all of them, but some of them. They’ll start realizing that when you raise property taxes in the city on expensive homes too much, people move to the 'burbs. That when you raise corporate income taxes too much, corporations move themselves - and their knowledge worker jobs - to places that don’t tax corporations as much.They’ll realize that there are unintended consequences to actions you take, sometimes good ones, but often things are more expensive than you anticipated, or hurt a group of people you didn’t intend to hurt. That we don’t have an unlimited supply of money to address every need, we have to pick and choose. That balancing the interests of environmentalists and our needs to farm and create energy to maintain our standard of living is challenging - we can do a better job of it, but it isn’t simple.
None of that is losing or denigrating idealism, btw. It’s just learning how to actually make a positive difference instead of just talking about it and demanding that others do it for you. It’s recognizing that the perfect *is *often the enemy of the good, that politics *is *the art of the possible, that stepwise advances *are *better than none, and that resistance is often principled and reasoned rather than simply bloodyminded.
Nobody at all is implying that. We are saying they will grow up and become less idealist. I don’t think I am more conservative for supporting Clinton over Sanders, in fact I strongly believe liberal causes will be better served with her at the helm. It’s the idea that a once in a lifetime super candidate will show up and fix all the countries problems via magic wand that we KNOW they will grow out of.
Just like they will grow out of the notion that The Establishment is the enemy. They aren’t. Their interests may not fully align with yours, but that’s where the power to make changes actually lies, you need them, and they need you too. True, lasting progress comes within the system, and even actual revolutions and overthrows rarely produce better results.
That’s the highest form of idealism, isn’t it? *Making *progress happen.
I will do some research for meaningful articles and open a thread about the thesis regarding voters becoming less economically progressive/liberal and more centrist/conservative as they age some time later today, but of note Wesley the article you linked to did not address that.
It, using a cohort study, specifically stated that for some very specific social issues “such as racial issues and questions of civil liberties for communists, the researchers measured a greater change toward liberalism in older people than in younger people.”
And if you read the actual article it explicitly disputes the concept that the views of voters when they are younger “will probably stay with them for life” … their major finding was that there is more change than was commonly believed. They concluded:
The research article only measured metrics on social issues (Attitudes Toward Historically Subordinate Groups, Support for Civil Liberties, and Attitudes Toward Boundaries of Privacy), NOT any measures on the economic conservative/liberal dimension, and found that attitudes can and do change as people age.
I don’t think that supporting fiscal conservatism is necessarily becoming “dumber” even if I personally am willing to be taxed at an even higher rate in order to provide a better safety net for all and even as I am greatly concerned about the widening wealth gap.
It wasn’t intended to be denigrating. Different politicians have different campaigning styles.
Both head and heart matter. Why think otherwise, or assume that others do?
I don’t think that was the intent. I think this was a realistic observation that many people’s political ideology changes over their lifetimes. You can’t simply assume that the way people vote when they’re in their twenties will be the way they’ll vote when they’re in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Not everyone who is a progressive in 2016 will still be a progressive in 2040.
The problem is that if progressives/extreme left make up 1/5 of the electorate then the other 4/5 of the electorate aren’t progressives.
So the rest of the country needs to recognize progressives. But progressives need even more to recognize the rest of the country.
The Democrats have succeeded by acting as a coalition party that brings progressives and centrists together. Yes, centrists have held more influence than progressives in the party, but remember than centrists have represented more voters than progressives have.
Progressives might think they’d be better off cutting loose from the centrists and taking over the Democratic Party. But that’s essentially what the conservatives did with the Republican Party. The result is that the conservatives run the party but they gave up broad support among the voters. They’ve compensated by tactics like media control, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. Are progressives willing and able to do the same?
No, people are saying that their experiences and priorities will change. The things I cared about at 19 aren’t necessarily the things I care about at 43 or, even they are, I don’t see them through the same lens. I have pragmatic concerns about by family, my house and my career that didn’t exist in my early 20’s (because none of those things existed for me in my early 20’s). I also have several extra decades of experience in seeing things that have worked in government and things that failed versus people who weren’t out of middle school yet when Obama was elected now lecturing me about politics and how I’m too establishment for thinking that I’d like the bank holding my mortgage to perhaps not go under or understanding that sweeping “free college” isn’t going to happen under Sanders’ plan as much as I’d like it to (hey, I’ve got my own kids who need educating).
But that’s not “dumb” so much as it is inexperience and idealism. Unless the argument is that these people’s experiences as they age won’t affect how they see and consider things, I can’t imagine how many of them won’t find different viewpoints as they age either.
what Alan describes in this article, is precisely why I’m opposing Bernie (and supporting Hillary).
My primary vote in a nutshell.
In fact, if changing your mind as you gain more information over time is a sign of intelligence, not stupidity. I believe that the majority of young Sanders supporters will gain more information over time and moderate - not their beliefs and values - but their methodology and expectations. That isn’t because I believe they are dumb - its because I believe that young Sanders supporters don’t yet have the experience and perspective that the older Hillary supporters do.
Of course, not all Sanders supporters think this to begin with (None that I know.)
Not a good analogy: Those dominant players to do not control the game designers.
The context, though, was the contention that there’s a rift in the party. I doubt many of those Baby Boomers are going to take their ball and go home if Bernie doesn’t get nominated.
Most of the Sanders supporters I’ve met who are Boomers aren’t the most practical people in their day to day lives. They are heading into a retirement with a mortgage, credit card debt and wholly dependent on their Social Security check - which isn’t much because they didn’t work full time making a lot of money for 30 years. (cough…my mother in law…cough - who is actually a pre-Boomer, and some of my older friends - I’m post Boom by a year or two). They aren’t the people I’d want making practical decisions for me.
The unspoken implication I got was that Sanders was the opposite, he appeals to people’s emotions but not their logic.
Nemo said that wasn’t his intent though, so I probably saw something when nothing was there.