Who is the Democrats’ base, in your view? They lost 6m votes between 2020 and 2024, so either their messaging got a lot worse in 4 years, or something else is going on too.
And by reach, you mean messaging from the party to voters, rather than talking to those voters to find out what they want and what their priorities are, correct?
I agree. The antidote to cultural populism is economic populism.
Wow.
So there are leading Democrats who are no improvement over Trump? Who are they?
If we are talking about Ruy Teixeira, whose article Demon Tree linked four hours ago, restarting the thread, residents of Greenland, Canada and the Canal Zone may have another take.
It wouldn’t be a leading Democrat who took such positions, it would be some outsider (probably a Republican) presently not in the running for leadership because they hate and are hated by most Democrats.
To be clear, you believe no leading Democrat could take any of these positions, and that anyone who did would necessarily be just as bad as Trump? 
Ah, but they don’t have a vote… yet.
Probably worse since they’d be smarter. But all that rhetoric is about excusing bigotry and denying reality.
If this was true, there should be at least one House district, narrowly won by Trump in 2016, 2020, and/or 2024, where the successful Democratic House candidate was an economic populist who took all the Democratic base cultural positions. Instead, winners like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez went for some degree of economic populism and cultural centrism.
The sad part being of course that it looks like the “ordinary voters” are going to get exactly the opposite of that. But alas it takes too long to explain that we can’t grow by “going back” and that the way to grow involves things that are unfamiliar to them.
They may want “abundance”, but they want bigotry more. That’s always been so in America, what kills attempts at increasing general prosperity it the perception that "those people" will also benefit from it. And most Americans would rather live in oppression and poverty than risk somebody with the wrong skin tone, gender or religion doing better.
Yes, it’s very unfortunate for all of us (including non-Americans, because it’s affecting our economies too).
The disadvantage for Democrats is that the party in favour of government action needs to be able to deliver, and over the last four years they had a great deal of difficulty doing that. I’ve heard plenty of Republican voters say they were very satisfied with Trump’s first presidency because he didn’t do much, and that’s just the way they like it. But that won’t work for D voters; you have to actually provide the abundance.
This is demonstrably untrue. Americans do not on the whole live in oppression and poverty: even the poorest US state is richer than the UK. And there are plenty of people with the wrong skin colour, gender or religion doing very well. People like that are queuing up at the border trying to get in, because the opportunities are so much better than at home.
You’re not wrong, but I wasn’t talking about what the Republicans do.
The fact of the matter is that the Democrats have staked out a position where anyone who doesn’t agree with them is “a bigot”.
Case in point:
This stuff isn’t black and white, no more so than the Republican nonsense, and by presenting it as such, it makes anyone who’s not already decided make a pretty stark choice between them. And clearly some of this stuff is pretty repellent to a lot of people.
I have a feeling that the vast majority of people find both parties distasteful in some degree, and it comes down to which one doesn’t taste as bad to your particular political taste buds.
But one thing everyone agrees on is being told you’re a bigot is a sure-fire way to push someone to the side that says they’re fine just the way they are. The Democrats need to meet these people where they are, as the therapeutic saying goes, not demand they come over here.
Cue in: “they ARE bigots who want to kill me!!!”
Because a lot of people are bigots. Probably the majority of people, given the election of trump and the Republicans.
And it is black and white. People voted for fascism because they want tyranny, persecution, ignorance and lies.
That’s a racist statement. What else could these achievement gaps possibly be due to? Scientifically, race is a meaningless concept. So if we see differences in achievements between various groups, it must mean that one group is being discriminated against. There’s literally no other possibility.
Racists like to talk about “cultural pathology” as a way of blaming Black people for their problems. But if Black people are more vulnerable to these “pathologies” than white people are, that must mean that Black people are more self-indulgent, or less intelligent, or in some way inferior. It’s euphemistic racism, but 100% racist nonetheless
Isn’t there a word for people who find other people’s identities and behaviors “repellent”, even though those people’s actions don’t harm them in any way? Let’s see, I think it starts with “B”…
Advocate pandering to bigots as a strategic necessity if you like, but there’s no need to argue that bigotry stops being bigotry simply because “a lot of people” are bigots.
I agree. But recent elections results indicate that tens of millions of American voters just don’t believe in the American ideals and institutions we grew up valuing. I guess when voters tell you what they want we should believe them. They don’t want a functioning government, a healthy economy, a sane foreign policy, or a decent people holding high office. Advocating for these things isn’t going to work because that’s not what the voters want.
Der Trihs, as is his wont, is taking the slippery slope argument to a ridiculous extreme, but he isn’t wrong. Sticking up for the rights of unpopular minorities will ALWAYS be a vote-losing proposition in the short term. If you’re seriously committed to liberalism, you need to constantly resist the temptation to pursue the short-term advantage at the expense of basic principles, or before long you won’t have any principles at all.
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to make arguments that Democrats ought to throw trans people, or immigrants or whatever, under the bus for the sake of saving the country from Trump. But those making such a case need to recognize that they are calling for a significant deviation from basic principles, and the bar for justifying such a move is appropriately set extremely high.
There’s no good evidence it’s a vote winner, either. One, you alienate the people who wanted you to stick up for the morally correct position, and they stay home. Two, if you compromise your values and offer yourself as two-thirds of a Republican, why would someone vote for you if they could vote for the three-thirds Republican running against you? Result is a net loss. The whole idea of throwing human beings to the wolves for your own personal gain is disgusting and craven.
I’m guessing that by 2028, having seen what it’s like to not have those things, most voters will realize that they do, in fact, very much want them.
From a Pew survey in 2020:
Discrimination can’t explain that, so we know there must be other possible explanations.