I genuinely missed that, assuming it wasn’t an edit, so my bad. But in answer to your question, the minority report told their viewers to vote democrat many times, I’m not sure if they explicitly endorsed Harris but the distinction is irrelevant here anyway.
Anyway, I’m glad we can stop the back and forth and just get back to the main point: the talking point of progressives losing the democrats the election is just garbage. That’s given how sidelined progressives have been, yet again, and that even those trump voters who claim they did as a reaction to the “far left” will usually list a completely false claim about what the left wants to implement.
Well, I hope identity politics isn’t that, um, black-and-white.
I’d phrase it more like: why should a person of color, or a white person that values diversity and isn’t afraid of the loss of unearned white privilege, feel that they’re represented by a party that feels obligated to kowtow to racists by only considering running white men for the top position?
(I’m an old white guy – and I admit, I voted for Biden in the '20 primary, mainly because I knew there were many racists and/or misogynists in the US, and we needed every vote possible to beat Trump that November).
I don’t watch Majority Report really at all any more but their stance for every election I’ve followed has been “this democrat sucks! Now vote for them.” If that is different this time around I would be utterly shocked.
And to be clear, I don’t think we should ban Majority Report, or something. But when the Democratic Party interacts with them, and people like them, it can no longer be a fucking friendly, casual stop by. AOC shouldn’t play Among Us with Hasan anymore.
Instead, we need to recognize that these New Media sources are not friendly; they’re basically another Fox News. You can still do interviews with them and such, but recognize that you’re in hostile territory. We need to develop our own New Media empires and signal boost those people, not tankies.
Part of the reason that the electorate takes these people seriously is that politicians interact with them in ways that lend them credibility. Politicians do that because these shows are ways for politicians to spread your message. But doing so on a platform whose stance is, at best, “you’re a genocidal monster but I hope people in swing states voted for you”, is beyond stupid.
Did AOC do that in 2024? I only know she did that in 2020, which was the race the Democrats won.
At some point this is 6 degrees of separation to the far left. Like AOC and Harris didn’t pretend to like each other. And AOC is pretty clearly in line with the Majority Report ideology, not actual terrorist sympathizers like Hasan. MR says some things that if the top of the democratic ticket said them would be a moderate gaffe, but the fact that Harris got an endorsement from the left side of the caucus of actual elected democrats who is kind of ideologically in the same lane as socialist or socialist-adjacent media who shares an audience with insane tankies.
You could say this about anyone. You can get a few degrees of separation from Republicans like Bush to the evangelical movement which gets you swimming in the same waters as the Jesus Camp stuff. Bush didn’t fight that by explicitly trying to distance himself from that whole wing of conservatism because you end up with the Streissand Effect and suddenly 10x as many people hear about all that stuff and all they know is that you are on tv trying to defend yourself from this vague unprovable association.
Right but what would you have them do? It’s a progressive channel and Harris basically ignored almost everything important to progressives. Are they supposed to lie about it?
Remember this is in the context of once again the suggestion that progressives are somehow responsible for the election loss. So we have the campaign itself distancing itself completely from progressives and giving them no voice at all, and the main progressive channels telling people to vote democrat anyway, just not lying to their viewers about the emperor’s beautiful progressive policies. And this, apparently, is the big problem.
I don’t think I will live to see an election where progressives aren’t blamed. Because in this election, that claim is as false as it’s possible to be.
I don’t expect them to do anything to help the Democratic party. Why would they? They aren’t Democrats, the policies they support are very different from Democratic policies.
What I want Democrats to do is understand this and act accordingly.
Firstly, who says they aren’t democrats? Progressives have a long history of influencing the party in social and political issues that we now take for granted as things that all Americans deserve. Ignoring progressives, and running on “Goldman Sachs approves my plan” is a modern phenomena, and is down to legacy media constantly trying to ostracise and blame the progressive wing.
Would you believe, @Babale, some people even do that for this election, when it makes no sense at all.
Secondly, I’m still not clear on what you think the party needs to do; you’ve only suggested so far that the few politicians that go on progressive channels, like AOC need to stop doing that. So a progressive shouldn’t go on a popular progressive channel. It’s like you want to sabotage any chance of the party ever connecting with people again.
And you really think this made a significant difference in this election? That when people were gaslit about democrats causing eggs to cost more and a migrant crime wave, it’s because AOC talked to Hasan?
The reason people are able to be gaslit about this is because Democrats DO pander to the far left in a way that damages the reputation of the party with normal people.
Except they don’t, they are at best indifferent and usually hostile to the far left, or even the moderate left. The idea that they are pandering to the left is a right wing talking point, not the reality.
There may have been some Dem campaigns over the years that did pander to the Left a fair amount. I don’t think there’s evidence of that being true of the Harris/Walz campaign, though. (Maybe some surrogates went further in that direction than did either Harris or Walz.)
I agree that the right’s mischaracterization of all this had much greater effect than did anything the actual Dem campaign did.
The number of times you repeat a claim does not make it more true.
So far in the evidence of pandering bucket, we have that AOC, who is a progressive, appeared on a progressive channel.
It’s not a very compelling case at this point.
Then, the other important component here, is what crazy things the far left were advocating for that influenced voters. Remember, it not only has to be well-known but also true.
To illustrate, it would be pointless saying that, I dunno, democrats should distance themselves from Beyonce, lest they be labelled Communists. Because the fact that Beyonce isn’t a communist, and republicans called them communist anyway, shows that’s obviously not going to be an effective strategy.
Likewise with something like gender transitions during recess.
Exactly this. There’s no point changing your policy or your arguments to pander to people who will simply ignore what you are actually doing and make up what they want to hear. Or the people who listen to those lies. People didn’t reject Democratic arguments and policies, they didn’t even pay attention to them and voted on lies told by the Republicans instead.
Harris had to somehow break through that wall of ignorance, but I have no idea how she could have done it.
It’s both a floor wax AND a dessert topping. Those at the top of the ticket --Harris, Walz, and arguably their top campaign people–refrain from far-left haranguing. But their surrogates and others who are at least associated with Democrats, indulge in it loudly and often. And it’s this latter group who, in the GOP distortion-field, come to stand for All Democrats.
This is what some in this thread cannot and will never accept: It is possible to stand with trans people without making trans people the centerpiece of Democratic policy and Democratic identity.
I have no doubt that the above statement, which should be self-evidently and uncontroversially true, will be greeted with the most vicious of attacks. No doubt at all. It’s the most predictable thing ever.
And if anyone here believes that with this sort of thought-policing* Democrats will ever win a national election again, they are delusional.
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* Remember, I specified that this is about standing with trans people. Supporting their right to affirming care, to being addressed as they prefer, to experiencing full civil rights in every aspect of life. Full support.
In the end, what we’ve actually seen in the last couple of years is, It is not possible to stand with trans people without making trans people the centerpiece of Republican policy and Conservative identity.