You’re absolutely right. We should elect more Democratic congress people in both the House and the Senate.
What’s you’re plan to go about that?
ETA: Sarcasm aside, you fight with the troops you have, not with the troops you wish you had.
Pass the bill they can, and then advertise the hell out of it literally everywhere. Show people actual improvements in their lives, even if they’re not as great as we’d hoped they would be.
Then ask them, “What do you think we could do if we had 60 Senators?”
Ultimately this all comes down to convincing enough voters to vote for them in 2022. Just like all politics. And there’s no way they can do that if they don’t do anything, so do what you can, and then work the problem of replacing the assholes.
Okay, but in your previous post you said:
Which is in contrast to what you’ve just posted.
I’m explaining that there are two different strategies that can be employed. Yes, they are mutually exclusive, so they have to choose one. So far they’re focusing on the “We can’t have dessert unless we hold pizza hostage” strategy. And in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma fashion, they’re likely to end up with nothing.
I’d rather they focus on the “Take what we can get and try to build on it” strategy, but I’m not in charge, am I? Ultimately, I can offer advice, but I can’t make them take that advice.
I see a massive failure in the over/under-promise vs over/under-deliver principle — which is a leadership failure.
Now, sure, it is no anomaly that to get the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill through, they let everyone and anyone throw in anything and everything they wanted into the reconciliation bill, with the understanding that would then be distilled down to what can pass, what normally happens. BUT somehow they allowed the narrative to become, that ALL of it, the whole megillah, IS the Democrats’ platform, and every whittling down is a defeat and failure and a step closer to doom, for the GOP to crow over and for the Dems to wail about.
And let’s face it, every single time they’ve cut out something and reduced the cost, the two Mc’s just move on to find some other of the remaining articles to decry about it being unprecedented billions for un-American socialism.
Got it. Yes, ultimately most of us would like to see them take the wins where they can get them and continue to fight for more another day.
There’s a real frog-boiling problem for progressives, the way I see it. The thing that makes them progressives, and not just Democrats, is that they have specific policy ideals. They ran on them, they promised them, they were by and large elected in order to enact them. They represent a constituency that is going to hold them to that, because that’s what makes them their constituency. The whole point of them existing as a political entity is not to make sure Democrats win, it’s to get those policies actually enacted for real human beings, and them wanting Democrats to win is purportedly a means to that end.
2021 isn’t the beginning of a conversation where they’re being told now is not the time for them to actually stick to those principles, it’s the next one in a long line of them. If they conclude “I guess Democrats don’t really believe what I believe, so I’m no longer a Democrat,” they are villains because now it’s their fault that Democrats don’t win elections. If they conclude “I guess I can’t be a Democrat and advocate in any meaningful way for the policy outcomes I ran on, so I’ll stop advocating for them in meaningful ways,” then why did they run? If they stick to their guns and do what they promised they’d do in order to get elected, they’re villains because we have to take what Manchin is willing to give us.
But each successive time that happens, it becomes harder to convince people to vote for you on the promise that it isn’t going to happen the next time. Because next time it won’t be the next time anymore, it will be now, and now is always the time we can’t afford to be progressive.
I mean, if you’re willing to at least imagine that people on the far left actually have deeply-held ideological principles at stake in these transactions, it becomes pretty obvious that none of their options are particularly palatable. Simply not being progressive would be extremely convenient for people who are not that progressive, and ruthlessly politically effective for Democrats, but, like, duh. No amount of doing that will ever accomplish any of their own goals.
That assumes that progressives can be legitimate.
Spoiler: they cannot.
That’s the part I don’t really agree with.
Sure, right now, the progressive wing doesn’t have enough votes in Congress to do anything, but there’s no reason that will always be the case.
But if you look at how popular these proposals are with the electorate (70% support, with strong support even among Republicans), they may have enough votes in the population.
So what we need is to show they can get something done, even without having complete support in Congress, and then make the case, “If you elect more progressives, we’ll be able to do even more!”
And I think the time is ripe for that. In fact, they have more support in Congress now than we’ve ever seen before. Success of people like AOC shows it’s possible to get more progressives into Congress, and with all the pandemic business creating chaos, this is the time to really try make changes in the system. Changes are going to happen, they pretty much have to. It’s just a matter of striving for the changes they want.
There is a potential reason that will always be the case, though: the incredible political forces that turn popular sentiment into an afterthought when it comes to how policy is made. I think you are very dramatically underselling how much different these bills, in their final form, would probably look from what the constituency of these politicians wants and expects.
I mean, you’re saying “this is the time to really try to make changes in the system,” you know? But from context, that is not what you mean. You mean a little later from now would be the time. Now is the time to do the opposite of that.
I suppose what I really meant was, “Now is the time we have an opportunity to get people into office who will actually make changes.”
We spent the last 4 years doing everything we could to get rid of Trump, and that was worthwhile at the time. But now we need to work on getting people we want, rather than just getting rid of people we don’t want.
2022 or bust!
Gird your loins.
There is very little guaranteed in life, but one thing that is: If you never even try, you will always fail.
We might still fail despite our best efforts, but we’re guaranteed to fail if we don’t even try. I’d rather go down swinging.
At least then, when the kids working in the salt mines of the future ask me what I did to try to prevent the apocalypse, I won’t have to just hang my head in shame.
I’m not trying to talk you out of anything. I’m screaming with you, not at you.
Fair enough. There’s been so much cynicism lately you start to see it everywhere.
Oh, I’m very cynical about our chances in 2022. But not enough to curl up in a fetal position on the floor.
I think progressives simply overestimate their support, partly because the media they watch is progressive, and social media is highly overrepresented by progressives as compared to the general population. But the truth is that actual progressives make up less than 25% of the population. In the 2020 Gallup poll, 26% of those polled said they were ‘liberal’. 34% said they were conservative, and 40% said they were moderate. Progressives make up only a portion of ‘liberals’.
What has happened is that the moderates were turned off by Trump and voted for Biden. Had Trump’s idiocy not spoiled Georgia, the Republicans would have controlled the Senate.
So Democrats gained power through luck and the bad behaviour of one person, largely by promising a 'return to normalcy" and Biden as a ‘caretaker’ President who would only serve one term anyway.
Somehow, the progressives decided this was their chance to ‘fundamentally transform’ America, and despite their small caucus and low popularity in general, decided to use the leverage that a divided House can give a minority group and force through a gigantic monstrosity of a spending bill by holding up the bill the majority actually wants.
You all think that passing these bills are what will save the Democrats, by showing they are ‘doing something’. That’s ridiculous. I think Manchin and Sinema are actually protecting the Democrats from being run off a cliff by progressives, as while the ‘infrastructure’ bill is supported by the majority of Americans (barely), the same is not true with the other one. And the price tag is insane - by far the biggest spending bill ever passed by any government, anywhere.
If you pass that bill, you’d better hope inflation doesn’t get worse and supply chain problems don’t get worse, because that bill will contribute to both problems and the Republicans will hang it around the Democrat’s necks. Every time someone sees the price of milk go up, the Republicans will remind them who is at fault - even if it’s not true or hard to prove, because spending trillions of printed money while inflation is running hot and there isn’t enough supply for the demand we already have is a stupid idea and the case will be easy to make.
Bust.
There’s a lot of exhausted activist out there who are damn well done this month. The chatter on the progressive organizational groups I’m seeing is that the “just stick it, we need yet another couple Senators” voices are fewer and fewer in the last 2-3 months against people who are just disgustedly finished with contributing to national D efforts - not just ones who came on for anti-Trump, but folks who have been at this 10, 20, 30 years. No results, the only constituents satisfied are the corporate ones.
So they’re not going to be madly sending money and phoning Maine, NC, Georgia the way they did in 2020, at least not if the current bills are passed the way they’re looking. I’m one of the 20-yearers and not seen the despair this bad, even following 2016. This isn’t the “we’re going to fight back” fear of 2016, this is a “what’s the damn point” exhaustion.
I think the individual policies are popular, but maybe the ways they go about getting them?
I watch a lot of news from a lot of different places. As much as I don’t like SOME of their tactics, I think there should be more people championing these policies.
Climate Change is important right now regardless of how many people are working to end it. I worry about the energy corporations that partly own the news media. I worry about Manchin’s coal money. I like it that there are people who don’t take corporate money.
I can only make a quick post, but I’m reading the responses.
Right, and for what it is worth, the GOP largely is not built on people who function this way (I say this as someone who was deeply involved in local Republican organizing.) In a high-tempo election, most of the time, the Democrats can get far more highly enthusiastic people involved. But outside of that, the Dems frequently crater. There is a newer element of far right, rural populists that are much more prominent in the party now than when I was in it, so I’m honestly less familiar with and less certain how they behave year in and year out; but the heart of Republican activism are the kind of people who do things like run small businesses, possibly serve as a Church treasurer, possibly are members of the local Chamber of Commerce etc. These are people who aren’t as prone to flights of passion and are more likely to keep plodding along, year in and year out, regardless of what is going on.
The fact that progressives do not have the ability to do the grunt work when things aren’t exciting is a major reason they are continually unable to achieve much in their party’s coalition.