…one person’s “brand” is another person’s “progressive agenda.” Its all about the narrative and its clear what narrative you are pushing.
Keep shifting those goalposts. What are the typical policy accomplishments of other newcomers to the House who have been in office for less than six months? What is your basis for comparison?
Excuse me for not keeping up with the vagaries of the stupid nature of the appalling US Healthcare system. But you don’t seem to be disagreeing with anything I’ve said.
51% of democrats identify as liberal.
Granted they’ll never take over the party because they don’t have the financial backing of the moderates in the party. But liberals are the majority of democrats now.
Why is Seth Moulton a moderate? He supports marijuana legalization, abortion, gun control, gay rights, the green new deal.
He doesn’t support medicare for all, but he does support universal health care and a public option.
He may not call himself liberal but he is pretty liberal on the issues.
The DP has moved to the right… Support for wars, wall street, conservative trade deals like NAFTA, gutting social welfare, doing NOTHING for the working-class.
Wait for it…
Boom! There’s your example. This is just the kind of self-delusion I’m talking about, cherrypicking polls with vague wording to convince progressives that the vast majority of the public is actually on their side. (As a corollary, this spins out into conspiracy theories for why this broad majority doesn’t translate into Congress and the presidency.)
From the same publication as your cite:
Which is why I have so much respect for Nancy Pelosi:
Time for another reality check. Again: being popular on social media is not the same as being popular among the broad populace.
There it is, the conspiratorial thinking I referred to just upthread. Couldn’t possibly be that the party’s makeup actually represents the wishes of its grassroots members.
So how do you explain the following?
Why do you go by “Wesley Clark”, anyway? 
He was like the iconic avatar for the hopes and dreams of moderate/pragmatic Dems.
…Boom!
You are wrong. I used the word “suggests” for a reason. I used the word “suggests” because I concede that I’ve cherrypicked that particular poll. Exactly the same way Jonathan Chait cherrypicked the polls that he used to frame the editorial that he wrote. I picked that example as a direct counter to the narrative that you and Chait are pushing: that “cherrypicking polls with vague wording” is evidence that “progressives have NOT taken over the Democratic Party.”
This isn’t “self-delusion.” My argument was about the difference between “labels” and “positions.” When you remove that sentence from the context it was made you are deliberately mischaracterizing my argument. Stop doing that.
Not it doesn’t. The “popular vote” doesn’t matter.
I’m well aware of what the article says.
If Nancy Pelosi leads the Democrats to defeat in 2020 will you still have respect for what she says?
What a strange poll. 23 questions. Two of those questions about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. No other person gets their own question. From that poll: what is your standard for comparison? Is she more or less favourable than Joe Biden, or Hickenlooper? The mere fact she gets her own questions says a lot about her visibility.
But regardless: time for another reality check. The President is arguably massively less favorablethan AOC will ever be. But there is a very good chance he will be re-elected in 2020. I know you think you know how this all works. But in reality everything is in flux. The rules of the game are constantly changing. The people behind Donald Trump are at the absolute “top of the game” at both understanding and being able to micro-target the people that matter in the elections. Nobody on the Dems side is remotely close to the “popularity” of the President on social media. You might dismiss it: but it is really fucking important. Ignore it and you ignore everything that happened in 2016.
Says the guy who lives on the other side of the planet and is only too happy to throw that fact around when it suits him (“Excuse me for not keeping up with the vagaries of the stupid nature of the appalling US Healthcare system”).
…WORST. REBUTTAL. EVER.
Thanks for your understanding.
So we should take seriously your opinion about which American politicians support MFA vs. some other form of universal health care, even after your assertion of ignorance about our system’s “vagaries”? :dubious:
…you can do whatever the fuck you like. You’ve made it crystal clear you are never going to take anything I say seriously anyway.
You can choose to address my post or you can ignore it because I typed something while I was lying down in bed typing on my laptop and my brain wasn’t properly engaged. You are using MFA as a shield. You are welcome to do so. It won’t hide the fact that you misrepresented my arguments and it doesn’t hide the fact that the OP is built on cherry-picked statistics. It doesn’t hide the fact that what this thread is really all about is what some random person may or may not have said to you on twitter.
Whistle past the graveyard all you like. But Josh Marshall, the grise eminence of the left-blogosphere, sees it too:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/it-wasnt-a-bounce-bidens-support-is-growing
FWIW, I take you seriously when you say things that deserve to be taken seriously. (And you do frequently say such things, despite your hyperbolic claim that I don’t ever take you seriously.)
…who the fuck is Josh Marshall, and who appointed him grise eminence of the left-blogosphere?
You dismissed the entirety of my post based on something I said to somebody else because I used a word that didn’t materially change the substance of my argument. One could argue based on that not that we shouldn’t take me seriously, but we shouldn’t take **you **seriously.
But I do take you seriously. Deadly seriously. Because the world has changed. And everything is about the narrative. And framing is important. And what Chait did was take a set of facts and he spun those facts to create a narrative, and what you’ve done is take his narrative and you’ve run with it. I don’t think your narrative fits the facts. I’ve challenged you to provide proof of your narrative and the best that you can do is to spin the words that I’ve said.
Narratives matter. And if narratives don’t fit the facts then it becomes important to challenge them.
Conspiratorial? Posting an article you disagree with is conspiratorial? The % of democrats who identify as liberal keeps growing.
In the 2016 primary, there was a huge difference in how democrats over 40 vs under 40 voted in the primary.
Give it time. I predict the democratic party will keep moving to the left due to domestic problems (brutal and unaffordable health care, income inequality, lack of job security, open war on women and minorities, etc) combined with demographic changes. For a lot of younger people ‘conservative’ means white nationalism, neofascism and plutocracy.
And, in that argument, you are missing something very important. The people get their agenda out to the people and get the most support are eventually the ones who will have power. If you’re someone we’ve never heard of, with positions that don’t align with the public face of your party, then that is not good.
The idea that progressives need to be a majority in the party is silly. They only need to convince the rest of the party that their ideals are aligned with theirs. And, if you look at what counts as “liberal” these days, it is clear that the moderate portion of the Democratic Party is becoming more progressive.
Democrats actually fought and achieved marriage equality. That was part of the progressive agenda. Democrats regularly fight for anti-discrimination laws against LGBT people. That’s progressive. All of the current Democratic candidates for President are discussing progressive ideas.
You make the mistake of assuming that people’s stances are fixed. You assume there are “progressives” and “moderates,” and that one cannot influence the other. But they very much can.
What you have to compare are ideas, not people in determining who has “control” of the party.
That said, the OP is correct in his title. The progressives have not taken over. That creates an image of some sort of coup. It misses the leftist ideal of being able to convince people rather than having to conquer them.
What has happened is that more progressive causes have become mainstream–including those that actually deal with the economic hardships people face. The Democratic Party realizes they dropped the ball on those issues last time.
The main thing is making sure the message does not forget about the working class. And I say just “the working class,” because there is no reason they should be separated by race. Despite Trump’s bluster, only the Dems have actually done anything to help the working (hu)man.
Which begs the question again, what is a moderate democrat and what is a liberal democrat?
As Adaher mentioned earlier, he feels Seth Moulton is a moderate. But Moulton supports marijuana legalization, abortion, gun control, gay rights, the green new deal, universal health care, a public option. He even supports abolishing the electoral college and the filibuster. These are all liberal positions
Politicians have demonized the term liberal for decades, so yeah people will recoil from it. But what are the differences between moderate democrats and liberal democrats on the issues?
People may recoil from the term leftist or liberal due to the red scare or Gingrich’s propaganda campaign. But ask them how they feel about renewable energy investment, marijuana legalization, gay rights, universal health care, etc. and a big chunk of democratic voters are liberal on the issues.
Reading this thread I’m getting the impression that ‘newt gingrich and Rush limbaugh called liberals names, so democrats are afraid to be called liberal’. How does that in any way apply to how people feel on the actual issues? Just because a lot of democrats are afraid of being called names by republicans doesn’t mean they reject liberal positions on issues like taxation, health care, social issues, etc. I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong if anyone wants to prove me wrong.
Like on health care I guess you could make the argument that liberal democrats support medicare for all or VA for all while moderate democrats support expanding the ACA.
Maybe moderate democrats support higher taxes on the rich, but not as high as the liberal democrats want.
In the past, moderate democrats supported civil unions while liberal democrats supported gay marriage. At this point gay marriage is the mainstream democratic view though.
I suppose on ICE the liberal position is abolition while the moderate position is reform. Liberals probably support more gun control than moderates. Maybe liberals want a minimum wage of $15, while moderate democrats want a minimum wage of $10 or one that is indexed to COL by area. I don’t know.
I think the big difference is that liberal democrats are much more hostile to corporate interests than moderate democrats, who try to balance the interests of corporations with the public.
Either way.
:rolleyes:
No, “Granted they’ll never take over the party because they don’t have the financial backing of the moderates in the party” is conspiratorial. Moneyed elites, thwarting the will of the true majority of the party. :dubious:
Now, what about that screen name? I’m genuinely curious, as someone who was an early backer of the “Draft Clark” campaign.
You make these aggressively dismissive comments celebrating your own ignorance, and then blame me when I hoist you by your own petard. Here’s another opportunity to rinse/repeat, as I quote the intro to Josh Marshall’s WIki entry (which I did not, FTR, edit):
Now I guess you can say “Who the fuck is Bill Moyers? Who the fuck is Hendrik Hertzberg? Who the fuck is Henry Luce?” …aaaand then I give up. :smack:
When I talk about the progressive wing of the party, I’m talking about economic progressives. And that’s what the self-styled progressives I know mean by the term as well. In fact, they show open disdain for “lifestyle liberals” who are more concerned with what Ralph Nader called “gonadal politics”.
…LOL. I can google him just fine. Time Magazine said in 2004 that TPM was “one of the most popular and most respected sites”? That was 15 years ago. Thats 15,000 years in Trump time. The blogosphere is a very different thing now than it was then.
How is it do you think you’ve “hoisted me up by my own petard?” I’ve heard of Talking Points Memo. I don’t tend to visit it often. The Time quote talks about TPM: it doesn’t talk about Josh Marshall. Time Magazine didn’t appoint him grise eminence of the left-blogosphere. Apparently you did. Thanks for clearing that up.
Why the fuck do you think it ignorant not to have heard of just another voice on the internet? And why the fuck should I care what he thinks? We are in Great Debates and you’ve expressed an opinion and I’m talking to you. I’m not talking to Josh. Josh is just as concerned as you are about framing and setting the narrative about Joe Biden “correctly.” He wrote a pretty pedestrian analysis of Biden’s polling numbers that hit all the right talking points. Why should I care?
Do you know what Jonathan Chait, Josh Marshall, Bill Moyers, Hendrik Hertberg and Henry Luce have in common? (Besides the fact that I don’t know who the fuck any of them are)
And you are still avoiding addressing everything I said in the previous post. That’s how you operate. Set the narrative, pivot when challenged. You’ve acknowledged in the past that this is a tactic that you use in debate. You can’t show that the alleged plan of the progressives to take over the party was simply repeating that they had already done so. Because it wasn’t. Everything else you are doing in this thread is a distraction from the fact that your OP has exactly zero substance. The debate is over. You’ve bought nothing to the table.