Yes they do. I live in Fairfax County VA. The county Boards of Supervisors, while nominally non-partisan, is nearly all Dems. We have great schools, roads as good as we can given VA’s budget realities, honest and efficient government. Taxes are high, but not that much higher than neighboring jurisdictions with less good schools. The Board’s been majority Dem for years, and the governance has been good to great that whole time.
[insert your own Yakov Smirnoff joke here]
I don’t think establishing grassroots campaigns in all 50 states is all that expensive. It’s the big media buys that are expensive. The Democrats will have to be careful there, to a much greater extent than the Republicans, but it WILL force the Republicans to spend, spend, spend.
This is where you and I part ways. The American people are much more pragmatic and progressive than you think they are. Brainglutton has some nice cites along those lines. And they will get nothing but MORE progressive as the One Percent continue their economi rapine of the middle class. Here’s a nifty article for you to think about. This will make progressivism grow WAY faster than any amount of ad buys, and at the grassroots where it can affect state and local elections, especially. Because they are not NEARLY so ideologically oriented as federal elections.
It’s not nastiness that makes people mad at Republicans, it’s their bigotry, racism, sexism and obstructionism. Ever so nicely expressed, it still sucks.
Otherwise known as ‘Americans’.
Nasty wrong and nasty right are two wholly different things. Voters see through the GOP BS because they are hyperpartisan and stupidly incorrect all the time, like calling a woman who wants birth control a slut, or saying one of their numerous things about rape, or paying off debts with chickens.
Democrats can get nasty and still be right, and I think they should do it. Being nasty isn’t entirely about being mean, its about not letting up and making sure you pounce on every little thing. When you’re wrong, it makes you look like a mean jerk. When you’re right, it makes you look determined. The Democrats have the advantage of being right most of the time and that would translate into a great nasty campaign
No, it’s one of the reasons they don’t lose their base.
To have a local strategy it might help if you actually wanted to accomplish things at the local level instead of attempting to gain national hegemony so you can bring 100% of the populace under your social-democrat fist.
Oh, there have always been things lefties find worth doing at the local level. Millions of Americans today enjoy the fruits of those things without realizing who brought them.
Do you have any idea how amusing it is to see those words combined?
Nobody thinks of Sweden and pictures a fist.
Republican policies create poverty. The old New Dealers diminished it, while present Democrats (DLC, Clinton/Obama “Blue Dogs”) seem to be (literally, small c) conservatively holding steady, if they do anything at all.
As for the rest: Scarcity creates aggression. Aggression finds scapegoats, purges are carried out. We need only look at Rwanda and Yugoslavia in the 1990’s to see Christian nations turn to genocide. The rhetoric is already there. The radio network to disseminate propaganda and give marching orders–exactly like Rwanda–is certainly already there.
A study of history leads us to this conclusion. There will be purges to maintain power. They will be concocted on pretended “Christian” or “civilization-defending” premises. The rest is details.
:rolleyes:
OK, let me back away from my morbid projections of future civil oppression for a minute.
If the two parties are to stand for anything other than abortion, then there shouldn’t be a pro-life party and a pro-choice party. The GOP’s core value for a long while now has mostly been the end of the New Deal: deregulation of business and a less progressive tax code.
(We are perhaps seeing that shift to a “holy warrior” ethos that paints itself as anti-birth control [“pro-life” is just branding] but also appeals to white supremacism. It is those “holy warriors” who could become the advocates of brutal purge. The business class, largely, don’t want a civil war of extermination, because it would be messy.)
So what do deregulation of business and a less progressive tax code have to do with anti-family-planning policies? Not a thing. There is no logical correlation. If anything, anti-regulation types should be just as pro-birth-control as liberal social democratic types.
So why make being “pro-life” a thing? Because anti-birth-control hardliners want a party of their own, and they entered into an unholy alliance with anti-regulation types. This worked because they could tap into a myth of “conservatism” and regression to an idealized pre-New Deal social order; also, maybe, because some proportion of the anti-birth-control base were unsympathetic to “progressivism” and covetous (or jealously protective) of the privileges of an unregulated capitalist class; or maybe because Francis Schaeffer, who spread “pro-life” thought outside the Roman church, was a conservative in his own mind.
So we took one of two major parties in a two-party system and make it hardline “pro-life” (that’s against subsidies for prenatal care and education; against sex ed; against any government expenditure, even indirect, for birth control; as well as against abortion in most circumstances) while keeping it hardline anti-New Deal.
Who represents any other combination of opinions? Weirdly, unless one is both pro-abortion and pro-New Deal, the GOP is your representative, politically. That seems counter-intuitive, but it makes sense, because the GOP sell both these stances as moral absolutes. Even if you disagree with one stance, you are *morally compelled *to vote GOP as a way to oppose the “evil” Democrats. That’s just bonkers! But it works, because there’s a two-party system. And the Democrats can’t fight it, because the propaganda is so successful that, assuming a perfectly uncorrelated distribution of New Dealer and pro-choice sentiment, and pro-life sentiment in half the populace, the GOP can get over half the populace to distrust the Democrats as a matter of prejudice.
:eek:
Being perceived as “nasty” to constituents is very different from *being *“nasty” enough to undermine one’s rivals. Basic Machiavelli.
A country where a great proportion of apparently reasonable people can unironically use the phrase, “attempting to gain national hegemony so you can bring 100% of the populace under your social-democrat fist,” is pretty near hopeless.
So who’s gonna get purged here? That’s a pretty important detail.
The reality is different. It was especially different in the heyday of Swedish socialism. Two TV stations, both state-run, ensured that citizens didn’t hear subversive ideas. The tax burden was so high that the average worker had no options and had to rely on the government for everything.
It’s not a fist, but it is a major restraint on people’s freedoms. And I have yet to see a social democracy that didn’t involve major controls on information. One good thing about the EU is that it’s made these insular countries like Sweden open up their markets to outside entertainment and news, which has led to the rise of genuinely conservative parties, as in American-style conservative parties. These parties are still fringe, but growing all the time. The fact that they didn’t exist at all in the 1970s and 80s is a tribute to how efficiently social democracies used to control information.
Really?
Thats now. It was different in the 70s. And you’ll notice now that Sweden is a lot less socialist and the government changes hands more often.
Is it?
:shrug: “Non-whites,” probably, or “progressives” if Glenn Beck is the key influence.
Meanwhile, here’s what the Tea Party is doing at the local level.
Keep reading, it gets even worse.
If the social democrats can be removed from office so easily, then their government never was all that iron-fisted to begin with, was it?
OK, I’ll try to give the OP a better answer:
There are a few major gradients of public opinion intersecting here; let’s pick the two I mentioned earlier:
Abortion rights, which is a true gradient with most opinion soft and somewhere in the middle.
Business regulation, which is a hot button for a very few activists (including professional pols), largely ignored by many, but also a true gradient.
These two gradients are basically uncorrelated; people who are pro-life are not necessarily anti-regulation, and so forth. Defending a “Democratic Party set of views” can be as alienating to people who disagree with only some of party platforms as insisting on a “Republican set of views.”
And both parties have both fanatics who insist everything be done their way and other members who insist that *their *party is the font of tolerance and diverse opinion. :rolleyes: Moderates know this, they’re not going to be completely fooled.
For the Democrats to win more votes, they have to embrace a paradox: Win moderates by pushing against hardline GOP policies, but also find candidates who can make a defense of policies other than moderation. A moderate for moderation’s sake will merely moderate GOP policies, and what’s the use of that?
So you have to have three things: advocates to the “left” of candidates making the case for leftism on its own merits, advocates against “right-wing extremism,” and actually somewhat left-of-center candidates. I think often Democrats settle for one of these.
But at this point it’s not about winning votes, is it? It’s about gerrymandering.