If anyone really wants to dive in this seems to come from here:
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.
We are a team of over 50 social scientists on six continents. We work with more than 3,200 country experts and a truly global International Advisory Board. Read more about the work we do here. SOURCE
Today I found out people marching with Nazi flags and iron crosses while chanting “Jews will not replace us” are in fact not Nazis but very fine people. Meanwhile, people who hang a poster of Che in their dorm room are vile Statist Socialists who are already plotting our path to the gulag.
If you call yourself ‘anti-capitalist’, as BLM and the DSA do, you are far, far to the left of the ‘Nordic Model’, which us just Capitalism with a slightly larger safety net.
There is a DSA member in this very thread calling out Democrats who keep trying to make them sound more moderate than they are. They are explicitly NOT ‘social democrats’. They are socialists who want the means of production taken away from the capitalists and given to the workers.
The only countries that ever tried this ended up as despotic shitholes with very high death counts.
The DSA and Black Lives Matter are not a tiny bunch of flakes like the John Birchers. They have representatives in Congress, in state houses and city councils and mayorships. They get headline news. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a rock star among young Democrats. Portland almost elected a mayor who calls herself ‘antifa’ and who wears skirts with the pictures of left-wing dictators and murderers on it.
“I have condemned neo-Nazis. I have condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” Trump said.
“Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest taking down of a statue, Robert E. Lee.”
Yeah, not all were Nazis, some were defenders of a white supremacist general, they were as pure as white snow… /s
Well, not everyone in support of a particular statue is a Nazi! Just like not everyone at a so-called peaceful protest is a looter or arsonist. Some are and some aren’t. Not a hard concept.
If I am at a rally hanging with and supporting people carrying Nazi flags and espousing white supremacy then I am probably a Nazi or, at the very least, a Nazi sympathizer which is close enough.
If I am at a rally with 1000 people who are peaceful and a couple people in the group set fire to a store I am not a sympathizer with or supporting arson.
The bottom line being less what the protestors do and more what the protestors are about. Why are you (general “you”) there?
That’s absolutely ridiculous. First, you have no control who shows up at a rally or an event. Second, every person’s viewpoint is personal to that person. So if groups a, b, c, d and individual 1-10,000 show up at an event each person’s and group’s purpose is unique to that person and/or group. The most one can honestly say is that there is some degree of alignment on a particular issue.
So if the particular issue is opposition to mob violence and vandalism with regard to historical monuments then yes there may be some agreement between differing groups. By your logic, you couldn’t listen to Wagner.
During the Friday night march of United the Right in Charlottesville ( the day before one of them murdered a young activist) - the organizers led everyone marching in this chant
You will not replace us Jews will not replace us
This chant is explicitly anti-Semitic and references the conspiracy theory that forms one of the core philosophies of the neo-Nazi movement. That makes them, you know, neo-Nazis.
The day the members of Black Lives Matter deny being black activists is the day you can call us hypocrites. But not before.
What if yoh are at a rally beside someone waving a hammer and sickle flag? Are you a Communist? If you are at a rally with people wearing Che Guevera T-shiets does that make you sympathetic to murderers who enjoy personally executing ‘enemies of the people’?
Why is it only Republicans who must answer for the actions of a small minority within their group? Because just about every left-wing rally I see is full of people waving flags and symbols of totalitarian murderers and philosophies. Then there’s just the garden variety anarchists who want to ‘burn it down’, and violent groups like Antifa. Hell, Democrats embraced Bill Ayers and his wife, who are literally do,estic terrorists. Barack Obama kicked off his state Senate run in Ayers home.
Have Democrats condemned Black Lives Matter, whose leaders claim they are ‘trained Marxists’? Because the death count of the 20th century due to Marxism dwarfs Hitler’s.
Let me know when a Republican kicks off his campaign in the home of a grand Kleagle in the KKK or an Obergruppenfuhrer’s house and we might have an equivalence.
Video post-election of a far right Trump supporter literally quoting a Hitler speech getting cheers of USA USA USA after saying “we will not fall for the lies of the Jews this time”.
There’s more than one axis for measuring appeal to voters, but pretending that there is only one is core to the beliefs of the DNC and its adherents. This argument makes sense if appealing to voters can only be measured on the “Far Right → Far Left” politcal spectrum. We like to forget about the Sanders-Trump voters while at the same time using them demonize the far left. We like to forget about those back in 2016 who said that they would be Trump-Sanders voters if the cards fell the other way, despite the raft of articles in the NYT and other rags that wondered how such people could exist and whether they were just pulling our legs and lying to pollsters.
I confess, I was a proponent of “Third Way” politics in the 90s. They worked. But that strategy can’t work forever. The Democratic Party can’t win forever by chasing the right rightward. But here we are, barely electing yet another 90s-era candidate, after the election-to-be-forgotten that left us wondering why yet another Clinton failed to appeal to the masses against the he-can’t-possibly-win Trump. This can’t go on – those 90s voices are approaching their 90s. We’re going to run out of them.
It’s maddening to see the couldn’t-quite-bring-myself-to-vote-for-Trump right wing voices in this thread tell us that they’re who we need to appeal long term. If only Democratic policies more closely matched Republican ones, you guys will appeal to us and win! And we nod along, as if voting for a more tepid version of the party is what they’re going to do in the next election. Yeah, we need to be that.
If you want to be the next-generation James Carville, find an outsider candidate who can play to the far left who is appealing but not well-known. Someone like Buttigieg would have done, but probably won’t work now. Get a communications team that’s smart enough not to “defund the police,” and doesn’t still refer to the Internet as “the Net.” Have that candidate go be the left-wing version of Trump, the love child of Bernie and Donald. Basically, build a better Trump with a left-wing slant – it’s not like Trump was a true believer in anything and it’s not like the left is immune to populism. We fucking invented it.
And, God help me, I’ll vote for that candidate. And so will all of you, because he’ll be running against Donald Trump, Jr.
One more time. No, we’re not talking about appealing to Republicans except secondarily. We’re talking about appealing to the majority of Democrats, who are - like or not - centrist. The progressive wing of the party is a minority, except in volume. That doesn’t win elections generally, merely some here and there.
Are many of the progressive policies worth boosting? Absolutely. Will they pass in any foreseeable future? Absolutely not.
So what to do? Get more Democrats into office at all levels. Flip the cities, the counties, and the states. Put in young progressives. Follow a bottom-up strategy. It will take time, to be sure. But in the meantime, those awful dumb backward centrist Democrats will be getting all sorts of wonderful things done that the Republicans would never ever do. Why? Because they’re in office. Because they are the majority. Because they will listen and support progressive policies - not all of them, and not all at once - but they’ll start incorporating them because the party is moving that way. And we’ll all be better off.