They can’t, they’d be ostracised, and risk being fired too. Most of them have bought into these ideas too far to object anyway.
Isn’t that funny? The response in this thread from certain people is “No, the Far Left isn’t being demonized. They’re lucky we don’t toss them out on their asses! Bastards nearly cost us the election [even though the evidence shows otherwise]. They need to shut up!”
Thank you @DMC for that thorough and thoughtful analysis.
As you correctly point out, I did not say “my candidate didn’t win the primary, now fuck you”. In fact, I remained steadfastly pro-Biden since the moment he was declared the nominee. And as noted, Biden isn’t the one doing most of the throwing under the bus at the moment.
I don’t know how familiar you are with my posting or politics. Generally I consider myself center-left. There are a few issues I’m further left on and a few I’m further right on. Overall I’d consider myself center left, and agree that someone like AOC or Omar falls a bit further left than I do.
Describing them as “hard left” or “far left” is pretty disingenuous and ignores how far right out politics have shifted lately (unless someone like FDR is a radical pinko lefties to you). For the last few decades we basically had our choice of Neoliberal flavors. Acting like anyone who breaks that mold is dangerously far left is exactly why we have half the country accusing Joe Fucking Biden of being a SOCIALIST! Sorry, but I’m not gonna enable that.
You are correct that I used to vote Republican all else being equal, but only a very long time ago, before I internalized what I was learning at uni 
I’m worried that the response here is typical of what the next four years will look like. If that’s the case, I’ll keep voting Democrat, of course. I just don’t think Biden will win over many former Trumpers with a neutered COVID relief package and some modest tweaks to Obamacare.
An excellent interview with AOC on why the left is not the problem, but trying to exclude the left will be a problem.
We finally have a fuller understanding of the results. What’s your macro takeaway?
Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.
We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.
But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.
Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.
There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.
If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.” And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.
I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.
How do you explain the fact that voters registration for democrats was lagging behind Republicans but caught up due to a surge following the BLM protests, if BLM scared voters away?
If progressive issues are scary to voters and moderate Joe Biden is the only thing saving the Dems, how do you explain the fact that in the deep red state of Florida the $15 minimum wage (a “radical left” issue that many mainstream democrats won’t touch) passed but Biden lost? How come four red states legalized Marijuana? In Arizona, prop 208 to raise taxes 3.5 percent on the wealthy passed with a much higher margin than Biden won by.
Here’s the thing. Right wingers and some moderates may complain about how much they hate socialism. But here’s the dirty little secret: THEY DON’T ACTUALLY HATE SOCIALISM. Social Security is extremely popular. Obamacare, for all the republican demonizing, is popular – even more so if you call it the “ACA” instead. People who complain about rising taxes aren’t actually having their taxes go up. They just listen to propaganda and buy it; but once a policy is actually implemented and benefiting their lives, all objections disappear.
What we need to do is get policies like that passed and improving people’s lives.
Honestly it seems the real backlash is about race issues, not socialism. Some things are too important not to make about race (like police reform); but when it comes to, for example, aiding the poor – I think Democrats could definitely do a better job messaging lower income white folks. Targeted advertising towards white farmers, white factory workers, etc is something the democrats should still be doing. Not INSTEAD of ads that are more diverse, but in addition to.
That AOC interview is spot on.
And when it comes to the Green New Deal – whether we call it that or not, something on that scale HAS to be done. This is an existential crisis for humanity. Putting our head in the sand because the Republicans get triggered if you bring up global warming isn’t a solution, it’s rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. As Ben Shapiro likes to say, “facts don’t care about your feelings”. This one is non negotiable.
The point is to make the effort and work towards some kind of universal healthcare. Many discussions and debates would be had before something was decided upon.
So let’s do that in congress and you and others can yell about crazy Bernie’s plan and why you think it sucks.
From James Rebanks’ new book English Pastoral (highly recommended):
What will our descendants say of us, years from now? How will we be judged? Will they stand in the dust of a scorched and hostile world, surrounded by the ruins of all that exists today, and think that we, who could have saved the earth, were thoughtless vandals, too selfish or too stupid to turn back? Will the future know us as the generation who pushed everything too far, on whose watch the world began to fall apart, who had so little courage and wisdom that we turned away from our responsibilities? Or will they lie in the cool green light of the oak trees we planted and be proud of us, the generation that pulled things back from the abyss, the generation that was brave enough to face up to our own flaws, big enough to overlook our differences and work together, and wise enough to see that life was about more than shop-bought things, a generation that rose above itself to build a better and more just world.
This is our choice.
We are at a fork in the road.
A prudent gambler would not bet his house on our virtue, because the odds say we will fail. There are a million reasons to believe that we are not big enough, brave enough or wise enough to do anything so grand and idealistic as stop the damage we are doing. We are choking to death on our own freedoms. The merest mention that we might buy less, or give anything up, and we squeal like pigs pushed away from the trough. The world of human beings is often ugly, selfish and mean, and we are easily misled and divided. And yet, despite everything, I believe we, you and I, each in our own ways, can do the things that are necessary.
So AOC shows again she knows only her narrow NYC world, and yeah you guys want to build around a snide self-centered twit who hand-waives away losses of Democrats in centrist non-Lefty districts as “They were sitting ducks.”(From <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/us/politics/aoc-biden-progressives.html)
Yeah that’s the ticket…
Winning in heavy Democratic districts doesn’t tell you anything about winning in swing districts.
She obviously like most ideologues can’t grasp that and believes only doubling down works.
Losing in edge districts and wider Democrat underperformance as compared to Biden own-vote doesn’t say that doubling down on the Left-Left rhetoric wins because safe districts you won, it says the opposite.
As for this idea of the Center not working with the far Left - that’s bullshit: what I see is basically the Far Lefties here if they don’t get total capitulation to their Causes, then the Center are the Bad Guys not cooperating. Total Purity for the True Causes or nothing. Examples in this thread, should the Centrists differ slightly from your precise (rioting bad becomes you’re against civil rights, denigrating black concerns…. Which is 100% false. We can be totally sympathetic to need to reign in abusive militarized policing and also see that rioting is not a legit form of protest and Defund Police is a fucking stupid slogan and idea. Same with Abolish ICE, one can be for a positive immigration policy and see a rational immigration policing is needed) - but no…. The far-Lefties here if you question the narrative immediately lump modest criticism of stupid rhetoric, stupid positioning in with being an opponent, being a fascist. Reductionist extremism)
That’s not cooperating - that’s petulance and demanding dominance.
I am no Democrat but I am willing to vote Dem, and did this cycle, as clearly many of my profiel did.
I suppose the Republican Party is now infected with a disease (Fox Talking Tvism) that only more losses will cure, so I am avoiding them. But Dems heading left are not going to get winning votes in these new swing districts.
The Lefties here were all down on Biden the Centrist (brought home by black Dem voters), how he couldn’t bring in new voters, how it was pointless to try to do anything but play to your base… And he has proved you wrong.
He appealed to people like me, he has retained MidWest, he has flipped center trending Western States (Arizona, Nevada), he got Georgia, and he got margins that are actually pretty fucking amazing in Texas, N Carolina - he was forcing Trump to defend territories that stole oxygen away from must-wins. He was able to do that by broad appeal out into the suburbs, not by your narrow unreliable urban Culty Lefty base in cities alone.
And I am confident he’s going to address the open wounds, and things like Race without going to the shrill and alienating rhetoric of the Left. I voted for the guy - not just against Trump - because he gave me the sense he was going to be a solid centrist, be reasonable in addressing real hurts that BLM raised without going into fucking loony land.
Or you guys can go on with your double-down model keep losing the middle and west, keep complaining on how unfair things are, how horrid the American electorate is, etc and, lose out on the opportunity to have a broader base against the far Right, the awful Neo-Confederates and their traitorous habits that have taken over Lincoln’s party.
Shows exactly why the far left is an albatross
Do me a favor and define “the far left”.
Yeah the far left is so winning when they dismiss representatives in non hard core left areas as mere sitting ducks.
Like your Corbyn
Uh, clearly they cooperated with the moderates when voting for a guy that they already know will not do all of what the “far left” in reality wanted.
My own read is that the mere slogan “reform the police” did not cost a lot of support for Democrats. I suspect there are several reasons that Democrats didn’t do as well as expected in this cycle:
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The 2018 bounce was a possible aberration and the Democratic party came back down to earth and might have fallen further had Trump not been such polarizing candidate.
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People are more focused on repairing the economy than they are social issues and might have felt that Democrats were focused on the wrong issues. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people don’t sympathize with victims of police brutality, but it means that if you’re a white - or even a black or brown - restaurant worker, you’re less concerned with police reforms because most people never have violent encounters with the police, but almost everyone has been impacted in some way by the coronavirus.
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Similarly, the shutdowns are another issue. Although educated people understand that you have to control the virus before controlling the economy, economic hardship is in the present. People assume that the virus will eventually go away but they’re worried the impact of the pandemic will be long-term. Arguing to shut the economy, and shut life, down again and again is/was probably not a very attractive idea to campaign on. That doesn’t change the medical or scientific reality, but Democrats failed to develop and deliver a message that reassured people that there would be hope coming soon. And like it or not, the lack of a stimulus package, has Pelosi’s fingerprints on it as much as Mnuchin’s, McConnell’s and Trump’s.
He’s certainly not “my” Corbyn, since a) I’m not from the UK, and b) I don’t like or agree with Corbyn.
There’s the difference between America and the rest of the world. Corbyn is far left by world standards, AOC is centre-left by world standards.
Uh yourself. The cooperation referred to is the legislative and the statements that boil down to BernieBro policies like BernieMedicare or its betrayal.
Well its America ain’t it, so unless it’s a world election supposed “world standards” are pretty irrelevant except for Leftist fantasies.
If you read the article, you’ll see that she was talking about old-style Democrats not understanding or using the internet or social media.
She was talking about the way they were campaigning, not about their message or policies. She was saying that was the reason they lost, but they were unfairly blaming the left for their own failures in using modern methods to reach the electorate.
This I can see as a sober framing