Excellent!
So this is a tangent to a tangent, but what did Mondale do to qualify as ‘crazy’? I thought he was solidly mainstream liberal, just slightly left of center. I mean he wasn’t proposing the workers should seize control of the means of production or anything
Mondale was a solid liberal, but after he was annihilated by Reagan in 1984, the Democrats concluded that the New Deal coalition was dead and started to seriously retool. The result was the ascendancy of New Democrats like Bill Bradley, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. Center left technocrats took over, displacing liberal scolds.
Mondale actually didn’t do that bad once incumbency and the economy were factored in, but that wasn’t widely understood at the time. Dukakis on the other hand did terribly against Bush the elder.
Tune in, turn on, drop out
What about the crazy? In the furthest extremes, it’s easy to demonstrate the imbalance. Liberal terrorist groups existed in the 1970s but died out; conservative hate groups gained ground starting in the 1990s. Conspiratorial leftie ideas from the 1970s included contentions like the Peace Corps was largely a front for the CIA, brainwashing is a thing and is widespread, subliminal advertising is effective, the personal is the political (as opposed to the political being largely political), and the migration of JFK assassination theories from being leftie based to the land of QAnon.
There have always been crazies on both sides, but they were sidelined on the left starting in the 1980s.
Mondale was crazy for thinking he could get elected with a woman VP in 1980. Sorry, I call 'em like I see 'em.
*1984
Touche.
Nobody was going to beat Reagan in 84.
I get there are indeed crazies on the left as on the right (as I’ve said elsewhere, prior to the GOP adopting it as mainstream policy during the COVID crisis, anti-vax craziness tended left more than right) but how were they associated Mondale? (In any way other than such craziness is associated with every Democratic nominee and incumbent by the GOP claiming they are some where to the left of Lenin and a fully paid up member of the Weathermen)
They aren’t. But after around 1984 the US center left curbed the crazy on their side. Mondale wasn’t crazy; he’s just a way of dating the process. The difficulty is documenting leftie crazy from the pre-Mondale era: mediocre thinking tends to be forgotten. I found this 1995 dissertation to be helpful in producing examples (thanks to perplexity.ai for the lead).
This is what makes me crazy. ‘Perfect is the enemy of the good.’ Yes, I’d like to have all of the Liberal things I want. But I’d rather get something – ‘eat away at the edges’ as it were – progress than to get nothing.
The face of the current progressive/left in America,
And that’s why we can’t progress.
(The link is to news article on AOL.)
And if you think cruelty is not the point, then 38% of South Dakotans have you let you know otherwise.
Nearly 40 percent of South Dakota residents said Gov. Kristi Noem’s (R) shooting of her dog was justified after the governor faced backlash over sharing the story in her new memoir, according to a new poll.
But here’s the money quote from that article.
Most surveyed Democrats, or nearly 90 percent, said the shooting was unjustified, while 22 percent of Republicans said the same. More than half of surveyed Republicans, or about 58 percent, said it was justified, while nearly 11 percent of Democrats felt the same.
In a MAGA state that votes Trump by over 60% those numbers are pretty damning for her
58% of the republicans surveyed said they’re cool with her dispatching the dog. That’s mighty close to 60%.
I’m surprised she didn’t poll higher with republicans.
Those are two different statistics. One is “60% of state voters” and the other is “58% of Republicans”.
Both those numbers are really bad for Noem. Remember this is Montana I’d bet any manner of
MAGA bs, e.g. Biden stole the 2020 election, J6 was a MAGA false flag, etc. gets better numbers than that. Hell I’d bet you can find more Montanans to agree that the Biden’s are kidnapping children and eating them than agree she did the right thing by shooting her dog
South Dakota, thankyouverymuch! Montana has its issues, of course, but she’s not one of them.
Ooops my bad. Those big square mountain-y states are all the same 