The man has that silly rose emoji in his twitter bio. He is not out to demonize the “Far Left” as far as political beliefs are concerned. His focus is messaging. One highlight in a long interview especially relevant to this thread:
Except there isn’t a lot that can be done, not right now, not without those Senate runoffs in Georgia.
The presidential result is so startlingly positive for the country as a whole that I think some people are having trouble seeing how ridiculously good this election was for the GOP, at least as long as they win those Senate runoffs.
This was a MASSIVE win for the Republicans, if Georgia goes red for the Senate.
The Republicans would have just won a Senate that should have gone the other way, secured SCOTUS, ensured policy gridlock for four years cementing their previous agenda, dumped a highly divisive and incompetent president, and positioned themselves to take the House in two years, and very likely Congress and the presidency in four. Someone like Ted Cruz now knows exactly what stupid shit he needs to say to rally the base behind him.
I don’t think people should trust every little thing David Shor says in that interview, but Obvious Point Is Obvious: campaigns should emphasize the points where they’re popular and can win votes, and not emphasize points where they’re unpopular and can lose votes.
Win the median voter and you win. That’s how an election works.
It shows where US Democrats and Republicans stand on a range on indicators, compared to each other, compared to where they stood in 2000, and compared to all other parties in democracies around the world.
Gray bars are world parties, ruling parties (in 2018) above the line, others below. The dark vertical lines are the median values.
As you can see, the Democrats are about center-left on most indicators by world standards, and the Republicans are far…far… to right of median world standards on every indicator, and have become far more extremist since 2000.
Definitely. Democrats flipped the Presidency. Republicans flipped New Hampshire. Nothing else changed. If it had happened to the Democrats, we’d consider it a big loss
Thanks, a useful cite and commentary. The median voter (in the actual USA) I think embedded in this article is a similar lesson about focusing on the median, Liberals envisioned a multiracial coalition, voters of color had other ideas, along with other data showing the Democrats under performing among Latinos because they fooled themselves into thinking political activists = broader population. Same with youth (same error of the 60s and 70s mistaking coastal university profile for all youth). Fallacious thinking, confusing a subset as broadly representative.
The advice in that comment is about not alienating the middle and not being completely tone deaf in marketing to the pre sold rather than bringing in new customers. People like me, I can’t stay in the Republican party the way it is now, but a party that thinks Twitter Activists and MultiCulti academic leftists are great to follow is going to lose. As I’d like to see the sick fever called Trumpism cured, this disappoints me since the Far Left is blowing it.
And hair splitting or special pleadings about what is far… whatever, non Americans don’t vote here so you play the field you’re on, not dream of the one you want.
This is a wise and pragmatic post, the last paragraph in particular.
I read somewhere in reading this Spring an article at some center Left site talking about the difference between the Activist approach, all about drumming up outrage and motivation among the converted, and Organizers (using union organizers as the example) who learn and have to build an approach to “convert” (my words) the doubtful. The article called for more Organizers work, less movement activist approaches.
You have an odd sense of “popular”. I guess you are meaning it only in the very strictest sense.
But let’s face it. If you were hosting a party with 100 guests and 51 loved the shrimp rolls and 49 vomited after eating them I do not think anyone would say the shrimp rolls were “popular”.
As for other issues on the list, as I said, many remain controversial even now. Vice President Pence has spoken out against women in the military. Gay men in the military remains an ongoing issue. Attempts to overturn gay marriage continue. I showed you that even women voting has some pundits speaking against that. I didn’t list the Voter’s Rights Act but when the Supreme Court nerfed it I think it took a few states literally only days to undo those protections.
Your sense of what is “popular” is skewed and your sense that everyone should shut-up until something is popular is even more strange.
It remains that rights are not corrected in this country because people waited until it was “popular” to do so. They had to fight for their rights the whole way and always started from an unpopular position.
I think this view suffers from ‘recentism’ and is a bit overstated. I think a longer-term perspective is worthwhile - a year or so ago few thought the DP had a good shot at the senate. This election was not a massive defeat for the Democrats - it wasn’t really a defeat at all. It was really more a reversion to the political mean. The DP won the presidency, went +1 on the Senate and lost ground in the House, but didn’t lose it. A number of the House losses (certainly so in CA) are long-time safe red seats that flipped back from the ‘Blue Wave’ of 2018.
It’s a disappointing result only because “everyone” was hoping for a massive repudiation of Trump and a related down ballot pummeling of the RP as a whole for backing him. That didn’t happen. Which is a little existentially sobering, I suppose. I’m not exactly doing cartwheels as I look at the state of the currently polarized USA. But it also isn’t worth getting depressed about. You just have to take the modest win you have and try and build on it.
Just above, you called Ann Coulter a “popular” pundit when I’d guess an outright majority of people who know who she is dislike her to the point of near vomiting. Is she popular, or not?
This new example is inconsistent, too. If 51 people loved them, and 49 vomited after eating them, then the shrimp rolls were insanely popular. Literally every single person at the party chose to have some. A reasonable person would suspect food poisoning, and would be lamenting their previous popularity, not denying it.
Wrong on both counts.
It’s generally best to use the most updated information available – erroneous as it happened to be in this particular case. But even more than that, a year ago I still would have called losing a winnable Senate, when Trump lost the presidency, a major win for the country even as it was a major loss for the Democrats, regardless of what the current projections were at the time.
But I tried to avoid talking about politics here for the last four years, to avoid being banned from posting in rage. I’m not “depressed” right now. I’m still elated with the presidential result.
But without the Senate, the Democrats are fucked for at least four years. Maybe even eight or twelve.
Just a fact. Bloody obvious one, too. Does anyone here think McConnell is going to allow the same court rubber-stamping he has been doing the last four years, not just for SCOTUS but also the lower courts, if he remains majority leader?
I’ll let @Whack-a_Mole answer for sure on that one, but I think the point was that he was using your definition of “popular” specifically as an example to show that it was not a good definition.
Except that we are talking about our democracy here, where everyone is required to eat a shrimp roll.
Would you say that paying taxes is insanely popular, since everyone does it? Visiting the BMV, the Dentist?
If nearly half vomited after eating them, then a reasonable person would be looking into what is wrong with them, and make sure that the next time they have a mandatory appetizer, it is not contaminated with Cryptosporidium.
Funny how it takes a conservative to point this out to liberals. They continuously try to downplay our views and the policies we support because they don’t want to be associated with us. It’s insulting and aggravating.
The DSA is Marxist and anti-capitalist, with the ultimate goal of collective ownership of the means of production and we have many communists and anarchists in our ranks, along with more moderate social democrats who support us more for the policies we support rather than the end goal. We recognize that we need to take things one step at a time in such a conservative and capitalist nation, and so we engage in the system to make things better for the people in the meantime, to the chagrin of other leftists who think it is a waste of time and we just have to wait for the revolution to happen, or some crap like that.
People like Bernie and AOC are very influential in the DSA, but they have to moderate their positions and views in order to better fit into the centrist Democratic Party and so they aren’t a great example of who we are. That’s a big part of the frustrations I feel towards Dems, because we viewed Bernie as a moderate among us who could more effectively deal with them and reach a compromise. But they weren’t having it and instead chose a neoliberal who would just continue the same ineffective and inadequate policies of the Obama administration that inevitably set the stage for the coming of Trump and fascism.
So yes, I and the DSA are Marxist and anti-capitalist. But we are a big tent so we have a very diverse collection of views outside of that.
The only way to build on a modest win when one was expecting a huge victory is to analyze, understand, and work on correcting what went wrong. There is no way to avoid criticizing behaviors that resulted in worse outcomes and calling upon people to change them and work for better results. This process is not “demonization” and anyone who claims it is needs to be shut down immediately.
We have discussed this in the DSA, and I agree. We have been playing defense too much with Trump as President, constantly having to react to the things he did rather than pushing our own agenda.
While activism will still be important in the coming years as we will continue fighting for and protesting for Black Lives Matter and other important movements and issues that the Dems will definitely forget about once they are in power again, we need to start focusing more on outreach and education. Too many people in this country are suffering under capitalism, but we brainwash our citizens with the hope of an increasingly non-existent “American Dream” that is becoming untenable as capitalism becomes more unsustainable. We need to point this out to people more and help them see where the injustice truly lies and what the solution is.
I always believed Bernie, or just about anybody, would have a better chance than the human wooden stump. The results of the Democratic wins and losses have shown that when candidates advocate for progressive policies like Medicare for All and Green New Deal, they win. The centrists who ran away from meaningful change and supported the status quo lost. And then they have the nerve to blame us for their failures.
The lackluster showing of Biden has shown that people don’t want more of the same, so I absolutely believe Bernie would have done better.
Yeah, because when they advocate for those, they are running in a deep blue district with the only opposition is during the primary.
Most people think Medicare for All is- The program called Medicare for everyone. It isnt. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Medicare. Sanders crazy plan is unfeasible. He gave it that name to conceal it’s true purpose.
Exactly. I recall hearing that so far statistics show that the percentage of conservatives has increased among the American population in the last four years. People claiming the labels liberal or left is smaller than both self-style moderates and conservatives.
Yes, I am on the left and I want liberal policies enacted, but we are in an existential fight against fascist authoritarianism. We will lose if we move to the left. The Trump presidency has brought us to the brink of destroying our democracy. Biden’s victory is but a respite.
Our institutions are shaken, and anything that would lead to even temporary Republican gains would put more chinks in the walls. Moving to the left would destroy leftism in America for a generation. There isn’t enough support to win enough elections from the left and each loss to the Republicans is devastating.
No, I know that it is an ambiguous enough of a weasel word that you can make it mean more or less anything you want it to mean, or need it to mean in order to score your points. Even different things within the same post, as you have done.
The problem is, is that that means that you are not saying anything of substance, just meaningless platitudes.
