The people you call “insane” have comsistently beaten us. If embracing “insanity” means getting control of all three branches of government, then call me Napoleon.
Okay, have fun over there then.
Going radical towards the right is popular under current conditions. Going radical towards the left is unpopular under current conditions.
The lefter you go, the bigger you’ll lose. First you need to win the propaganda war. Then after your ideas are popular, you can run on them and reasonably expect to win a fairly-run election.
Otherwise you’re just the People’s Judean Front arguing with the People’s Front of Judea while the Romans are stepping on both group’s necks.
You say this right after an election that Democrats lost by tacking to the right.
If Democrats had waited until equal rights for black people were popular before passing the Civil Rights Act, we’d still have whites-only businesses all over the place.
‘That hurts me.’
~ Joe Biden
I think you could argue that it’s trying to cling to the wishy-washy center that’s really unpopular.
I’m not literally arguing that all those people who I’ve never heard of should be primaried based on this one vote, but I strongly disagree with it, and it makes me suspect that if I looked into their voting records I’d find more serious things to dislike.
Would someone care to remind Smapti how many years it was between the Civil War and LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act?
There’s no singular left. Which left are people supposed to go towards? Seems like there’s at least half a dozen options, and none of them especially popular, except somewhat as a vague collective that we label the Democratic Party for lack of a better way of describing a herd of bristly, often mutually antagonistic cats. The only thing they can agree on is they all hate that one asshole more than they hate each other.
Yes, I get there’s not technically a single ‘right’, either, but effectively it’s one man’s party. The few who can’t handle that have already left, and the rest have fallen in line.
This is a sane and (IMHO) fair response.
How could we tell? Nobody’s tried it.
Not sure what point you’re making. Black civil rights were always deeply unpopular among white people, until they got enacted and (many) whites saw the sky wasn’t falling. And the Democrats paid a massive political price for endorsing civil rights, losing five of the next six Presidential elections, several by massive margins. So it looks like the lesson to be drawn is that the Democrats should have either passed the CRA much earlier (since their timidity did them no favors, but merely delayed progress) or not at all.
I suppose you could argue that, given enough time, whites would have come around in sufficient numbers that the CRA could have passed without politically damaging the party that passed it. MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is an eloquent rejection of that strategy, which was tried for 100 years and produced no significant results.
Which Civil Rights Act?
The Civil Rights Act of 1866
Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871
Civil Rights Act of 1875
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Civil Rights Act of 1960
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights Act of 1968
I’ve never heard anyone using that phrase to refer to any Act but the 1964 one. Could you please try to explain what point you were trying to make?
The point is that people were passing Civil Rights Acts for a long time before 1964. It’s not like it was all just waiting for the political climate to change.
Yup, and given “Democrats paid a massive political price for endorsing civil rights, losing five of the next six Presidential elections, several by massive margins.” maybe folks should learn a little history before they endorse the notion that what the Democrats need to do is go as far left as they can.
Because the ignorant and easily manipulated electorate might think we’re as far left as we should be. But what could go wrong with giving the Republicans the Presidency for the next twenty years?
If that’s the point, then it only reinforces what I was saying in the first place - we should be pushing policies because they’re right, not because they’re popular.
History shows that when Democrats try to win by imitating Republicans, they lose, because given the choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican voters will take the real thing every time.
Republicans act like voting is rooting for their favorite football team. It doesn’t matter what crap some of the team members do - they are going to support their team no matter what.
Democrats vote like they’re shopping. They’ll only support candidates that match what they believe in, and if the party doesn’t have exactly what they think it should, they’ll just give up.
What do you call the ACA?
IMO, the reason that Democrats lost is because they don’t market themselves properly.
Biden did accomplish things. But no one heard about it because it didn’t get any fanfare, and the Democrats kept bitching about what wasn’t getting done instead of talking about what was.
I only knew that he forced pharmaceutical companies to stop inflating cost for medicine because it was mentioned on a Tumblr post
Clinton and Obama were both centrist presidents. The democrats that keep saying that we should go farther left are ignoring the population that don’t have strong political views. And that there are other left leaning Democrats that think that their goal is good, but that other group’s goal is too far.
The consequence of valuing norms and seniority over getting things done. When Lieberman lost the primary in 2006 and ran as an independent the party backed him over their own nominee, and he repaid them by filibustering the public option.
Other than the circular firing squad, this is essentially another saying about Democrats.
Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love.