However, the reality is that there ARE Democratic Socialists in our coalition, and they don’t seem inclined to follow your advice to rebrand. I’m not quite sure what you think should be done about that? Kick them out and split the party? That’s going to lead to much worse results than having a smaller House majority than we would prefer.
As we’ve seen, for instance, Trumpers like to try to hijack discussions by dragging in totally irrelevant concerns about transgender people using public restrooms or playing sports or whatever. There’s some evidence to suggest that demonizing trans people has been a relatively successful strategy for them. So should we not let trans people into the Party? Should we demand that all our candidates loudly denounce the movement for trans rights in order to avoid this particular line of attack? Where does this end?
You never seem to hear Republicans saying things like “we need to never use the word “pro-life” again”, despite the fact that the pro-life position is unpopular and arguably cost their party many votes. They recognize that, while you can’t win without reaching beyond the base, you also can’t win by actively attacking your own base.
This may come as a shock to you, but most people on Twitter aren’t bots, and many of them are verified users who post as their own real-life identities. If vetting accounts is important to you, it’s not hard to achieve. In fact it’s easier than SDMB.
The Republicans are really good at framing and bounding the discussion and at keeping right-wing viewpoints in the overton window and left-wing viewpoints out. They do this by introducing concepts that are to the right of where the debate currently is at any point in time, and then castigating mainstream democratic opposition as radical. There are some built-in advantages that they’re good at exploiting such as fear of change. They also have the advantage that their media and pundits tend to unify around the approved list of terminology that maintains their framing.
The various factions among the democrats and their media allies don’t all meet and decide what the talking points should be, so you see this fractured picture of the party that is easier for the right to combat. I think introducing the concept of socialism into the mainstream 4 years ago might pay dividends years down the road when people are used to people saying it (and people who lived through the cold war being a smaller proportion of the electorate) but it’ll be harder for it to translate to an advantage for left-wingers than rhetoric like “shut down all muslims entering the country”.
I’m not sure if this will meet your standard of using it in their campaigning but Ocasio-Cortez and Omar are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America so that’s a pretty clear tie to the word Socialism. Of course, we’re talking about two congressmen and a senator so not exactly a majority of the party.
Democratic Socialism is not the same thing as Socialism; as pointed out by some, that’s a bit more nuance than can be expected from much of the electorate; but as pointed out by others, challenging people’s boundaries is exactly how we push the Overton window back to the left. And as you point out, even this is a very small fraction.
No source of information guarantees reliability. It’s on the reader to use available information to decide what’s real and fake. If you don’t feel confident that you can do this on Twitter, fine, stick with other platforms that don’t require any effort on your part. But it’s ignorant to pretend the entire platform is fake and unknowable.
Yes, it actually is. Social Democracy is not the same as Socialism, but Democratic Socialism is literally socialism. The center left parties in Europe call themselves Social Democratic parties (for example Nordic left parties are the Swedish Social Democratic Party and Social Democratic Party of Finland).
Ya, I saw everyone else beat it to death after I posted. I do think it shows that the claim of not using the word socialist in their campaigns is bullshit. At best they are using the word with others around it to try and shade the meaning and causing a lot of other members of their party to have to waste time on their stuff.
Personally, if Bernie had run I would have voted a split ticket and hopefully given Colorado’s senate seat to a republican. I’m not surprised that there are people further to the right of me who would split the ticket on Biden to castrate him while not supporting trump.
You are wiggling and dancing but it remains, Twitter is a very poor source of information and any information you get from it should be regarded with deep suspicion.
If you think you have cracked the code and only get vetted, highly reliable information from highly reliable sources that are completely trustworthy then I suggest you write a book about it.
Personally, I would not believe you if you made that claim and would find any conclusions you draw based on, “I read it on Twitter,” essentially worthless.
“Socialism”, like “Liberalism” and “Conservativism”, is a term that has been used for a very long time, and has meant very different things to different people in different times and places. You’re wasting your time if you think you can point to some particular definition and assert that everyone who doesn’t agree with that definition is somehow objectively “wrong”.
Twitter is a platform with many different sources of information of varying quality and varying degrees of vettedness. That you feel confident smearing the entire platform as a “poor source of information” only speaks to your ignorance and lack of skill in using the platform. That would be a “you problem”.
I decline to have my time wasted in this fashion, but you’re welcome to go off and write your own book of expertise on something you have no exposure to. I’ll be happy to look it over when you’re done. Off you go, now.
Well, I’m glad, and I hope you didn’t take that as a personal swipe against you.
The point is that both parties have groups in them that aren’t necessarily popular with the average voter (Democrats also get the vast majority of the atheist and Muslim votes, for instance). Dealing with this situation requires a somewhat complicated balancing act, but the simplistic idea of just throwing those groups out of the party isn’t it.
If the Dems do purge the socialists, for instance, in the next election the anti-socialist voters will be confronted with a choice between the party which has always consistently and passionately denounced socialism and the party which until recently had several prominent socialists in it. Which way do you think they’re likely to go?
An analogous situation for the GOP would be white racist voters. The obvious presence of this group within their coalition makes it hard for them to attract minority voters, which makes it increasingly hard for them to win elections.
But if they strongly denounce the racists and drive them out of their party in a bid to win minority support, well, minorities will still have the long-established habit of voting Democrat, so it would be, at best, several election cycles before they would reap the theoretical gains of that move. In the short term, it’s a bad move, and political parties are really bad at thinking in any way other than short-term.
I actually agree a lot more with people like AOC than I disagree.
I think people are very willing to adopt so-called far left policies as individual items but it’s when they are all packaged together that the leaders trying to sell the agenda fall short.
Maybe they need to do what Obama did in 2008 and be able to run on a progressive candidacy and set of ideas but in a way that relates to ordinary people by speaking on their terms. I find too many of prominent left wing activists care too much about theory and being holier than thou that it turns people away.
The issue seems to be that the self-described leftists and progressives are/were not understanding that the presidential election was NOT essentially a referendum between Trump/Trumpism and progressive policies, and that there is no mandate, other than to restore the dignity of the office, our standing overseas and restore good governance in a very fundamental and pragmatic way (i.e. not corrupt, where appointees are qualified, not based on personal loyalty, etc…)
They didn’t seem to get that back before the election- there are a whole lot of people didn’t vote Biden because they wanted UHC, racial equity, etc… They voted for Biden because they couldn’t stomach four more years of Trump’s bullshit.
And there were a whole lot of other people who might have voted Biden, but were terrified by the riots/protests and their call to “Defund the Police”, and the lack of a unified message refuting the concept from the Democratic party. Yes, some individual candidates did so, but many more were either circumspect about it, or endorsed the notion. This makes the party look dishonest, or at best scattered and ineffectual, and if people are afraid of this sort of thing, then they’re going to vote for the candidate and party that has an unambiguous message condemning it. In other words, if you have a little old lady who’s afraid of her own shadow, she might think Trump was a right asshole, and have been prepared to vote against him, right up until she sees fire, rioting, police in riot gear and angry people on TV in multiple cities, and sees the GOP unified and indignant against it, and the Democrats saying a dozen different things and generally endorsing it, while trying to talk out of the side of their mouths and basically condemn the wording without condemning the concept.
In what way is that “the issue?” I’m an “online leftist,” to the extent that’s a group you can belong to in 2020. You think I thought the 2020 presidential election was a referendum on Trump vs. progressive policies? You think that’s what would cause me to “torch” Joe Biden?
I’m struggling to make an interpretation of that that isn’t just that I’m fundamentally diseased in my brain and can’t understand simple things. Maybe you can help me. Or maybe that’s the correct interpretation; I dunno.