I'm sure it comes to no surprise to a lot of people, but there have been a number of phrases/slogans recently that have nuanced meanings that don't come across well (especially in mediums like...
Exemplary
I'm sure it comes to no surprise to a lot of people, but there have been a number of phrases/slogans recently that have nuanced meanings that don't come across well (especially in mediums like twitter and facebook) - and end up making things worse.
Black Lives Matter is a prime example. The nuanced meaning is that people of color are disproportionately killed by police. However that nuanced meaning doesn't come across in the slogan. So people take it for something other than the intended meaning. Some people on the right hear "Only Black Lives Matter" and respond with the "inclusive" All Lives Matter. And even people on the far left can muddy the waters by going too far the other way and you see ideas like "You can't be racist against white people". So while reasonable folks who learn about the nuanced meaning of BLM are supporters of it - you have people on the right insisting that BLM is exclusive and ignores other races. And also people on the far left agreeing with them. I think the conversation would be a lot different if the phrase that had caught on was different. Black Lives Matter Too (#BLM2) would be my pick. Adding that single word cuts away ambiguity while still being catchy and concise. Amusingly, if the movement had actually coined All Lives Matter as a response to targeted police brutality, it would have probably worked well.
Instead - we have the "gotcha" political question: Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? No room for nuance. No room for explanations. If a politician answered with "While All Lives Matter, but not all lives are being unfairly targeted", they'd probably be shamed by the more radical BLM supporters for not being a simple response of "BLM".
This has come up before on Tildes on the subject of Notch (the creator of Minecraft). Notch's descent from rational person to QAnon-spouting alt-right isn't too uncommon in the twitter world, and its mostly notable for the tie to Minecraft. But it shows a good example of how twitter's un-nuanced medium combined starts a feedback loop. Some of the memorable ones (from memory, forgive any inaccuracy) are:
In the midst of GamerGate - he ends up calling someone a "cunt". That word is pretty extreme in the US, but is much more common in Europe and Australia - where it would be more similar to "bitch" in the US (still gendered and potentially problematic, but much less vulgar. I believe he later (half-)apologized for how it was perceived. But theres a lot of unnuanced responses as well that pushed him further down the hole.
He ends up tweeting "its ok to be white" or something along those lines. Another one of those phrases with nuanced meaning. On the surface, it is okay to be white - that phrase in a vacuum is perfectly fine. But in the midst of other BLM and race issues, it was a common phrase that was used by the alt-right and white supremacists as a response to black activism. Again, twitter does its thing and lots of people yell at Notch for being racist. Notch, who is like many "rational" people, saw nothing wrong with the phrase by itself, and got shit for it (without the nuanced explanations). What happens when you think that you say something reasonable and get yelled at for it? You get pushed away from the yelling side right into the hands of very welcoming alt-right and conspiracy theorists who end up being accepting and reasonable.
Before you know it, he is spouting QAnon statements and continuing to be a general alt-right troll on twitter. Last I check he deleted his twitter on a dare or agreement or something. Hopefully he (and the world) are better for it. I don't know if he was always destined to go down that path, but to me he represents a lot of the reasonable/rational people who are generally moderate - and some of the "encoded" phrases of the left don't make sense while the right/alt-right has done a much better job with phrases that make sense and are technically correct. There are tons of articles on how teens get sucked into the alt-right rabbit hole and find a welcoming community...as long as they believe what the group believes.
Anyways that was a bit of a tangent. But there are a number of phrases that definitely fall into that category. I believe one of the stories that has come out of the election is that Trump did very well with the Cuban population in Florida - and the presumed reason is that the Trump campaign (specifically Marco Rubio) were very good at painting democrats as socialists. Theres been a lot of talk from my left-leaning friends along the lines of "reclaiming" socialism - or even talking about being outright socialist or communist. Or things like "if free healthcare and a living wage are socialism, then yeah I'm a socialist". Of course - these terms don't mean the same thing to older folks or someone who has been affected by socialism/communism. The socialism bogeyman has been used in US politics for as long as I can remember. Its a single word and already has a negative meaning for many people. And the left doesn't help by leaning into it. Florida went very red due because of those fears - despite Bidens policies being only slightly left of center capitalism and nowhere close to actual socialism.
As one of the reddit comments puts it, "If you're explaining, you're losing." MAGA is a good example. No explanation needed. Its simple. Its easy to understand. Its all positive. And explaining to someone the nuances of nationalism and fetishizing the past is losing. Explaining that it used to be a KKK slogan is losing, since people don't have that in their memory.
I think you're bang on the money. (Although I'd have gone with "Black lives also matter") An eternity ago in middle school, I wrote an essay about sloganism - the idea that if you can't make your...
I think you're bang on the money. (Although I'd have gone with "Black lives also matter")
An eternity ago in middle school, I wrote an essay about sloganism - the idea that if you can't make your policy a slogan, you've got to change the policy.
That's taking it too far, but the idea is sound: The Democrats may have as good a public policy they want, but when they call it:
Defunding the police
"public option" healthcare
Medicare for all
"Secure our values as a nation of immigrants"
"support educators and students"
The Biden plan to scale up employment insurance
The Biden plan to secure environmental justice
You've already lost when that's your policy.
In 1946 the Republicans turned the Senate after 16 years on the slogan "Had enough?"
I would have stolen that. Who hasn't had enough Trump who would ever consider voting for someone besides Donald in 2020?
I'm so incredibly glad to see others saying this. Branding is critically important, and the authoritarian contingent are often extremely good at it to start with. Combine that with billions of...
I'm so incredibly glad to see others saying this. Branding is critically important, and the authoritarian contingent are often extremely good at it to start with. Combine that with billions of dollars of amplification from Murdoch, Koch, Zuckerberg, et al, along with the probable interference of foreign powers, and there's a vast uphill battle to fight. Seeing those stacked odds and then going in with a slogan like "defund the police" is a losing proposition for what could otherwise be an enormous positive change for essentially all of American society.
Steering and unifying the message, monitoring social media, and guiding grassroots organisations on their communications would be a very good use of funding for one or more progressive groups.
I hear a lot of agreement in this thread, and while I agree to an extent, I have something to offer of a counterpoint. Trump spent his entire presidency, including his initial run, saying...
I hear a lot of agreement in this thread, and while I agree to an extent, I have something to offer of a counterpoint.
Trump spent his entire presidency, including his initial run, saying absolutely inflammatory shit. Black lives matter is nothing compared to grabbing someone by the pussy, saying that a congresswoman had 'extraordinarily low IQ', calling other countries shitholes, being a vocal birther, saying that a parent of a fallen soldier had 'sacrificed nothing', having an extensive wikipedia page on racism, and well frankly I have to google all the fucked up shit he's said to even begin to scratch the surface.
How can this kind of hate speech still almost get him elected and yet we sit here talking about 'messaging' and 'phrasing' of something magnitudes less inflammatory? I've become increasingly convinced in recent years that the voter the left is 'trying to sway' is actually a lot less mutable than previously thought. They were exposed to perhaps the most directly and openly racist president since before the civil war and arguably the most controversial and inflammatory in all history, if not since Jackson.
Where is the proof? We have anecdotal evidence when we look back at someone who ended up radicalized, but were they pushed or did they simply figure themselves out? Furthermore, do we have any evidence that multiple narratives, both the more extreme and the less extreme, are more hurtful to changing someone's opinion than a single narrative? I think if ever we need to critically re-examine the efforts we are making, now is the time.
I think it's also important to stop for a second and consider how the rest of the world views what's going on in our population. These kinds of tactics and phrasing are not viewed in the same light in most European countries, where they struggle to understand how our country can be so conservative about some matters. There's something to be said about the population as it exists right now within the states and what will work on them as compared to humans in general. I think this is an extremely complicated issue, made only even more difficult by our entrance into an unprecedented age of disinformation.
The people who vote for Republicans who say these things and the people who do not are fundamentally different people. Just like those who're fundamentally against the death penalty will not be...
How can this kind of hate speech still almost get him elected and yet we sit here talking about 'messaging' and 'phrasing' of something magnitudes less inflammatory?
The people who vote for Republicans who say these things and the people who do not are fundamentally different people. Just like those who're fundamentally against the death penalty will not be swayed by those who fundamentally support the death penalty because they're different types of people.
Wording and messaging is important if you're trying to sway those who could potentially vote Democrat, who are a completely different group of people to those who don't mind Trump and Republican bigotry.
Are they? Who is this 'potentially vote democrat' crowd, exactly? How can we be sure this messaging is actually going to sway what they do and not what they say they will do? While I agree that...
Are they? Who is this 'potentially vote democrat' crowd, exactly? How can we be sure this messaging is actually going to sway what they do and not what they say they will do? While I agree that phrasing is important and should be considered, I do not believe it is at the heart of the issue anymore, particularly in the US. The world is not how it used to be and I do not believe older scientific methodologies are pertinent with today's population. Asking what someone will do and observing what they actually do are two wildly different things and I think the dissonance between the two is a gap that has been increasing in modern times.
Just to add, Trump just received a Republican-record-breaking 70 million votes. That's a big chunk to just reduce down to lost-cause bigots. And if they are, is this the end of politics, it's just...
Just to add, Trump just received a Republican-record-breaking 70 million votes. That's a big chunk to just reduce down to lost-cause bigots. And if they are, is this the end of politics, it's just 'bigot or not' from here on out?
Those who aren't part of the 43% who approve of Trump's job as president, but clearly still viewed him as the lesser evil when they voted for him anyway. I think that group, many of whom are...
Who is this 'potentially vote democrat' crowd, exactly?
Those who aren't part of the 43% who approve of Trump's job as president, but clearly still viewed him as the lesser evil when they voted for him anyway.
I think that group, many of whom are deeply religious, many volunteer their time in their local communities, many are way worse off now economically than they were pre-pandemic and so on.
There's also the group who did vote for Trump but could have voted for someone else than Biden. I think that group is harder to sway, but view Trump's greatest success as either a) getting rid of the political elite/being a businessman or b) conservative judges securing their values.
If those people were convinced it wasn't another one of those darn politicians being elected, or that some superliberal judges weren't the risk, would consider voting for someone who would help their own situations more.
If we don't view these people as reasonable people trying to vote for what they believe in because we don't understand them or believe they hold genuine beliefs, we won't understand where they're coming from, imo.
Sure, a lot of people who say they're independent clearly aren't, but many can be swayed, or the election results would be change much less from election to election.
Biden is as far right as the democratic party goes. If they still chose Trump over him, I'm not sure how these voters are accessible at all. They saw all the hate that Trump spewed and they...
Biden is as far right as the democratic party goes. If they still chose Trump over him, I'm not sure how these voters are accessible at all. They saw all the hate that Trump spewed and they decided to still vote for him.
A lot of the solutions you pose have absolutely nothing to do with messaging and everything to do with appealing to what they want or what they are afraid of. How does this have anything to do with the messaging of "black lives matter too" versus "black lives matter" when the person they voted for has repeatedly endorsed racism and said openly racist things?
I fail to see how this discussion has any bearing on how 'reasonable' these people are. My comment is focused on this mislead idea about the messaging itself being problematic; this idea that the right has their messaging down better than the left.
The Christian fundos are not gettable. They think Trump was selected by God to save us. And they'll never vote Democrat because of abortion. If anyone had a sliver of hope of getting them, it was...
Those who aren't part of the 43% who approve of Trump's job as president, but clearly still viewed him as the lesser evil when they voted for him anyway.
I think that group, many of whom are deeply religious, many volunteer their time in their local communities, many are way worse off now economically than they were pre-pandemic and so on.
The Christian fundos are not gettable. They think Trump was selected by God to save us. And they'll never vote Democrat because of abortion. If anyone had a sliver of hope of getting them, it was Catholic Joe Biden, and he didn't. Not happening. Not gettable.
There's also the group who did vote for Trump but could have voted for someone else than Biden.
Who is this group and who might they have voted for in Biden's stead?
If we don't view these people as reasonable people trying to vote for what they believe in because we don't understand them or believe they hold genuine beliefs, we won't understand where they're coming from, imo
Many of these people are good-faith actors who really are voting for what they believe, but sadly winning them over is a lost cause. When pastor/priest tells them God wants them to vote for Trump, it's a done deal. I hate to write off such a huge demographic, but I sincerely doubt there's a way forward.
A) you are painting with very broad strokes, I don't think the majority of Christian fundamentalists think Trump was selected by God. Many, but not most. B) The majority of fundamentalists in the...
The Christian fundos are not gettable. They think Trump was selected by God to save us. And they'll never vote Democrat because of abortion. If anyone had a sliver of hope of getting them, it was Catholic Joe Biden, and he didn't. Not happening. Not gettable.
A) you are painting with very broad strokes, I don't think the majority of Christian fundamentalists think Trump was selected by God. Many, but not most.
B) The majority of fundamentalists in the US really, really, really dislike Catholicism. There's a reason that Kennedy's single biggest electoral challenge was overcoming the bias against the cat-licks.
Perhaps. I admit this is an area in which I'm in something of a blind spot because I don't know many people who are religious. However, the handful of people that I know who are the least bit...
Perhaps. I admit this is an area in which I'm in something of a blind spot because I don't know many people who are religious. However, the handful of people that I know who are the least bit religious are fully, inseparably in the tank for Trump, and really do think that this is all God's will, even moreso now than in 2016.
For better or worse, I know several tons of pentecostals, a group that's more more fundamentalist than most, and overtly suspect of any secular institution. My general read is that Trump wins them...
For better or worse, I know several tons of pentecostals, a group that's more more fundamentalist than most, and overtly suspect of any secular institution. My general read is that Trump wins them overwhelmingly just on Abortion, and they will either avoid talking about the man's personal deficits, or gladly agree that he's pretty much a slimy whoremonger but at least he isn't interested in killing babies.
It's a very single-issue audience, and I do agree with the part of your post above about abortion being the entire unfixable lynchpin. The grand irony of all of this is that Catholics are largely responsible for the anti-abortion movements power and presence in the US, and the protestants bought in heavily in the 60's and 70's.
I'm not American, and I'm not particularly a fan of Bill Maher, but the other day I watched him make a comment in a YouTube video that I thought made a lot of sense: To paraphrase, when you are...
I'm not American, and I'm not particularly a fan of Bill Maher, but the other day I watched him make a comment in a YouTube video that I thought made a lot of sense:
To paraphrase, when you are stuck with what is effectively a two-party system, each side is forced to own the excesses of its extremist wings.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, and I don't actually think any of it contradicts what I've said about messaging or branding. Engineering the message needn't mean sanitising it - Trump sure...
I mostly agree with what you're saying, and I don't actually think any of it contradicts what I've said about messaging or branding.
Engineering the message needn't mean sanitising it - Trump sure as hell proved that one - but it does mean packaging it in a way that speaks to the audience you need it to reach.
Is there such a thing as a mutable voter in modern America? I honestly don't know. But there are, at the very least, voters who can be convinced to stay home or to come out for the side they nominally support - 2016 and 2020 proved that one.
Can effective messaging change minds, at least enough to nudge that ratio? I've seen enough posts and articles about people who "lost" their previously reasonable parents to Fox News propaganda to believe it already has. So why can't that work in the other direction as well?
Expecting random activists in the streets to have perfect, focus group tested slogans that are pre-cleared to not be taken out of context or abused by right wing media is never going to happen and...
Seeing those stacked odds and then going in with a slogan like "defund the police"
Expecting random activists in the streets to have perfect, focus group tested slogans that are pre-cleared to not be taken out of context or abused by right wing media is never going to happen and people need to stop asking for it.
This is just unproductive hand-wringing by the neurotic sectors of the media. It's never going to happen. One might as well complain about how the weather affects their plans for a picnic. There's nothing you can do about it but plan around it. Anything else is just assuming the Right Wing should always get to set the agenda. That's a loser's mindset.
I'd meant for the second paragraph to contextualise that a bit. It's about managing the media, not the activists on the street. It's about presenting the message in a way that's digestible to...
I'd meant for the second paragraph to contextualise that a bit. It's about managing the media, not the activists on the street. It's about presenting the message in a way that's digestible to those who need convincing, not just those who already agree. Perhaps most of all, it's something I see as totally realistic and achievable, as well as incredibly important.
I don't think any of that is defeatist, nor do I think it's letting the right wing control the message.
I agree here. But the key thing to me is that managing the media has more to do with having the right people at the table and building organizing power to articulate those nuances to people. I...
It's about managing the media, not the activists on the street.
I agree here. But the key thing to me is that managing the media has more to do with having the right people at the table and building organizing power to articulate those nuances to people. I don't think it has much, if anything, to do with making sure the slogans are just right. Right Wingers have been shouting "ABOLISH THE IRS!" for years and nobody really bats an eye. They know it's histrionic and not serious, even if you bring up clear evidence that the person in question means it very seriously.
So the solution to "we're getting killed on this 'defund the police' thing" isn't to say we need to sloganeer better or not say "Defund the police." It's to ask "Why are they able to frame anything we say or do in the most ridiculous caricatures regardless of what we're actually trying to say? And how do we counteract or neutralize this disinformation?"
Indeed! A number of presidents have used MAGA before Trump, notably in 1940, but also as recently as Bill Clinton in an ad for Hillary in 2008 (!) (There's nothing wrong with pertinent, short...
Indeed!
A number of presidents have used MAGA before Trump, notably in 1940, but also as recently as Bill Clinton in an ad for Hillary in 2008 (!)
(There's nothing wrong with pertinent, short comments)
The thing is it's difficult to discern if a soundbite/phrase is effective until after the fact. "Had enough?" has the same potential for people to ask for greater explanation as they do for...
The thing is it's difficult to discern if a soundbite/phrase is effective until after the fact. "Had enough?" has the same potential for people to ask for greater explanation as they do for "Defund the police", it's only an effective example because hindsight is 20/20.
On the one hand there's the political adage "if you have to explain something, you lost" and on the other you won't know if people are too stupid to understand a simple statement until after you've said it.
Side note: "Black Lives Also Matter" becomes the acronym "BLAM". BLAM is the older comic style of shooting someone. Not a good fit.
"Had enough?" lends itself effectively to moving advertising: Had enough? Had enough chaos? Had enough lies? Had enough cronies? Had enough covid? Had enough Trump? (I'm sure cleverer people than...
"Had enough?" lends itself effectively to moving advertising:
Had enough?
Had enough chaos?
Had enough lies?
Had enough cronies?
Had enough covid?
Had enough Trump?
(I'm sure cleverer people than me could do much better)
I specifically think the BLAM acronym is a strength and specifically a good fit because of the shooting history:
Back Lives Also Matter , not [insert picture of shooting cop here]
Reclaiming words is key for the whole social justice struggle.
Yes, a million times this. I couldn't agree more. The left has the most infuriating branding problems, and it's probably one of the biggest factors in why we always lose. Some additional thoughts:...
Yes, a million times this. I couldn't agree more. The left has the most infuriating branding problems, and it's probably one of the biggest factors in why we always lose.
Some additional thoughts:
I don't understand why Democrats are so shy about calling Republicans "fascists" when Republicans are so casual about throwing "socialist" and "communist" around. Republicans are acting far more like fascists than Democrats are like socialists, but Democrats are so timid on this front. I think this would do more to defuse the "socialist" situation than trying to calmly explain "no this isn't socialism and here's why". Explain, lose.
The left's tendency to eat itself is also problematic. My friends here in DC are losing their minds over Joe Manchin saying he wouldn't end the filibuster (thus making DC statehood impossible) despite the fact that (1) him saying that right now is strategically important before the GA runoffs, and (2) his answer to the direct DC question was much more equivocal and hinted that he actually might consider that. It's like we have no sense of strategy at all.
I think it'd be a huge mistake to try to demonize the Republicans to accomplish anything. 4 years of Trump have shown that they don't need to have shame. Those who votes Democrats, however, expect...
I think it'd be a huge mistake to try to demonize the Republicans to accomplish anything. 4 years of Trump have shown that they don't need to have shame.
Those who votes Democrats, however, expect at least a modicum of basic decency, and integrity.
If you just insult others, you end up talking about them and their politics. If the discussion is whether you're socialist or not, you have to talk about those supposed socialist policies that you then can sell to others and expalin.
That's the better strategy, although it's a lot less satisfying than just calling others names.
It's still very early to analyze what the 2020 election shows. However, with 75 million votes for Trump, it's obvious that moving more to the left is not the answer, whatever the answer turns out to be. Gain a foothold in the center and make Republicans look like extremists and you as the only reasonable (and therefore moderate) option.
This election was a massive, resounding defeat of the far left. The far left needs to own that and recognize that in a two-party system, they need to sit clearly inside the Democratic tent and eek policy leftwards one issue at a time. Sanders lost resoundingly. AOC and others getting reelected in super leftist districts comparatively do not instruct sane national policy positions and voter trends.
This is political reality. It's tough for the left to accept (my own views lie there). A two-party system as polarized as the US is currently will always be about voting against the other party, not voting for your party. That lesson has been learned in every social democracy in Europe post-1945. The US is not exceptional. We must learn from those who actually have strong social safety nets and how they got there from literal fascism in the 1930s and 40s.
As for calling Republicans fascists, it's not about insulting them. It's about branding, which we've seen is critically important. And when one side are fascists and the other side are socialists,...
As for calling Republicans fascists, it's not about insulting them. It's about branding, which we've seen is critically important. And when one side are fascists and the other side are socialists, it takes the teeth out of both brands and forces you to focus on something else (hopefully policy).
Gain a foothold in the center and make Republicans look like extremists and you as the only reasonable (and therefore moderate) option.
This is why I think Democrats need to point out that Republicans are acting like fascists (extremists).
This election was a massive, resounding defeat of the far left.
This argument, along with the previous one about the need to move towards the center, are very tired in response to the data. Polls constantly show all the "far left" policies to be wildly popular. Florida enacted a $15 min wage and restored felons voting rights. Government-run healthcare polled at something like 70% favorable in last week's Fox News poll. Numerous states legalized various drugs. If left policies were on ballots as referendums, they'd pass all over the place. What's wildly unpopular, however, is the brand "Democrat".
Florida was resoundingly won by Trump in the same election they enacted the $15 minimum wage and restored felon voting rights. If these issues were winning issues for the Democrats, how couldn't...
Florida was resoundingly won by Trump in the same election they enacted the $15 minimum wage and restored felon voting rights.
If these issues were winning issues for the Democrats, how couldn't they capitalize on them to win the sate? It wasn't even close.
Why can't the Democrats win the seats to enact universal healthcare despite there being so huge a majority for implementing it?
I've lived in a country where a universal right to child care (max legal fee is around $500 per kid per month) was enacted, where paternity leave is 15 weeks of full pay, whatever your salary is, not to speak of maternity leave and the Christian conservative party is one of the largest supporters of paternity leave.
The left side of national politics won all those issues when they postured in the center. They aren't leftist views at all, and when they were braded as that they never got close to being enacted. When they're branded as centrist, common sense policy, who can vote against them?
Most Americans don't have deep exposure to multiparty politics, or to understand the dynamics of how actually getting their wanted policies enacted can work. How do you get the votes you need? The pattern is pretty similar in every country in Europe where this happens:
Win an election and take power in government.
Win a second election while in power
The other party needs to close towards your platform to stand a chance in next elections. This is the time to move the Overton window in your preferred direction. That's what the Republicans keep trying to do in The Senate, pushing it evermore towards the right.
Gradually move all national politics in your direction through elections again. Since you've got the majority, the party(ies) out of power need to realign so they can take credit for all the things that do get enacted and that are demonstrably popular.
Congratulations! You've now got broad majorities for huge social programs. Thus the other party won't just dismantle them when the pendulum eventually swings: They were part of enacting them!
The US is headed for a political shift as demography changes over the next 10-20 years. The left seems to want to jump past the first steps in what that entails. That keeps being a losing platform.
What would have happened if the US had consolidated the gains under Obama under Clinton instead of having 8 years of progress mostly torn down in 4 Trump years? Biden pushed too far, too early and left the race WAY WAY too late.
If you get substantially attacked from both the left and from the right of your party at the same time, you get squeezed in the middle. You look weak. The media pummels you all the time. Those on the left and righ side of your take on the issue might even explicitly agree that your policy is dumb. Congratulations! You're inedible for voters all over the place. You've lost this issue completely irrespective of policy.
This also happens all over Europe all the time. We know these mechanisms. Go center. Steal voters. Gradually move as you consolidate power by showing you've got the answers and build policy it becomes impossible to reverse. To do this, you need to win elections every two years over and over.
That's exactly my point. The Democrat brand is completely toxic while the policies are not. The Democrats ran a horrible strategy. They didn't even try to tie themselves to any popular policies in...
Florida was resoundingly won by Trump in the same election they enacted the $15 minimum wage and restored felon voting rights.
That's exactly my point. The Democrat brand is completely toxic while the policies are not.
If these issues were winning issues for the Democrats, how couldn't they capitalize on them to win the sate? It wasn't even close.
The Democrats ran a horrible strategy. They didn't even try to tie themselves to any popular policies in any states. The messaging was essentially: "Donald Trump is singularly bad, Republicans are mostly good" The message worked: Donald Trump lost, other Republicans didn't.
The left side of national politics won all those issues when they postured in the center. They aren't leftist views at all, and when they were branded as that they never got close to being enacted. When they're branded as centrist, common sense policy, who can vote against them?
Completely agree. Branding problem. As you said, these issues aren't leftist views, they're extremely popular across the spectrum. But the branding is terrible.
Go center. Steal voters.
Agreed. And I define the center as "policies that overwhelming majorities of Americans support."
You need to establish your party and politics to be in the center before you can pass off policy as centrist without just being attacked for being "socialist" or otherwise running extremist issues...
You need to establish your party and politics to be in the center before you can pass off policy as centrist without just being attacked for being "socialist" or otherwise running extremist issues on your platform.
That's why you need to play the game and go through all the motions. The Republicans have to own the solutions, at least to some degree, so they won't just get reversed later. That's why so many folks are interested in compromise and consensus. It provides inevitability: The battle is lost once and for all.
Once you implement affordable, universal healthcare, that can never be taken away from you.
Once you establish the right to affordable childcare, that can never be taken away. Every subsequent administration in the foreseeable future have to pay what that costs: Too many people will hate them if they're the ones to cut it.
Again, the only way to reach the position where you're in a position to do this effectively is by going to the center first, not by pandering to the left, who already have to choose your party unless they're willing to vote against their own interests (or stay at home which is effectively the same thing).
Right now, if the Democrats would run any of these issues nationally as a coherent platform, they'd get slammed as leftist and lose the election terribly.
The Democratic party has at least a three decade history of playing to the center. Specifically what would you do differently that would make people see them as centrists now when they haven't...
The Democratic party has at least a three decade history of playing to the center. Specifically what would you do differently that would make people see them as centrists now when they haven't after all this time?
There was a golden opportunity in 2012 had Sanders had suspend his campaign when he had no way of becoming the nomination instead of spending a month (being extremely generous here) attempting to...
There was a golden opportunity in 2012 had Sanders had suspend his campaign when he had no way of becoming the nomination instead of spending a month (being extremely generous here) attempting to get concessions from Clinton as she was being pummeled from both the left and right instead of the party coalescing behind her.
I'd argue the result of that was a Trump presidency. Clinton is obviously to blame, but Sanders and everyone supporting his strategy are too.
The golden opportunity was facing the weakest presidential candidate in modern history to win a third term in a row. Judicial appointments, minimum wage and all sorts of things would have started shifting politics to the left. You shift politics little by little. That's why the Republicans have been so effective at dismantling and sabotaging government little by little and then complaining that the government shouldn't do things because they do a bad job because the Republicans have made it impossible for them to do a good job.
Now matter how far the Republicans manage to swing the political window to the right before the Democrats can do the same thing over the course of several terms. The Democrats need to steal Republican voters to win elections resoundingly.
If the Democrats are to be seen as centrist, they need to drop untenable language like embracing being socialists, like advocating for defunding the police.
The Democratic party managed to lose the working class in the middle of a pandemic and massive economic downturn where a president has done absolutely nothing, and enriched the rich even more! Why in the world didn't the democrats run a campaign on a few hugely important issues like competency, jobs/worker rights, police/legal reform, economic and pandemic relief, and taxing the super-mega rich for example?
What's to the right, in the center and to the left is relative. All of US politics is far to the right. That takes time to change.
The power the Republicans have had over the last decades is unity. The Democrats have the more popular agenda when you poll the issues. The party needs rebuilding from the ground up as a strong unified team.
I mean, the answers seem simple. I fully understand this is extremely difficult. While we're talking of the impossible things, I think the Democrats could play the center much more effectively if they weren't funded by large corporate interests. Then the other party being funded by those interests would clearly be the extreme.
I asked specifically what you would do differently. Saying we should have won rather than lost isn't a strategy. How would you position yourself as a centrist? Clinton was the center. Bingo.
Section 1
I asked specifically what you would do differently. Saying we should have won rather than lost isn't a strategy. How would you position yourself as a centrist? Clinton was the center.
I think the Democrats could play the center much more effectively if they weren't funded by large corporate interests
I'm saying Clinton's center strategy was sabotaged by the left in her own party. I'd consider that important context to consider. If you think it's irrelevant and her policy should be viewed in a...
I'm saying Clinton's center strategy was sabotaged by the left in her own party. I'd consider that important context to consider. If you think it's irrelevant and her policy should be viewed in a vacuum as a "centrist loss" without that context, we disagree. The left wing of the Democrats tanked her chances. They knew they were doing it, but viewed it worth the risk.
My whole argument boils down to the fact that positioning oneself as a centrist has less to do with policy than process, messaging, party build and a platform based on issues with broad support throughout society that isn't viewed as being policy options "owned" by one side or the other politically.
Okay, but how would you do that? None of the supposed centrists did that. Biden ran predominantly on "I'm a nice guy" and Clinton ran on "I'm not Trump". How do you act as a centrist while...
My whole argument boils down to the fact that positioning oneself as a centrist has less to do with policy than process, messaging, party build and a platform based on issues with broad support throughout society that isn't viewed as being policy options "owned" by one side or the other politically.
Okay, but how would you do that? None of the supposed centrists did that. Biden ran predominantly on "I'm a nice guy" and Clinton ran on "I'm not Trump". How do you act as a centrist while building a platform based on issues with broad support that isn't viewed as being owned by one side or the other?
I've already outlined what the popular policies with broad support are. If you disagree with them, what do you think they should run on instead?
I tried to answer in part above. There are surely many more issues, but I think the right strategy would be going with a few clear, simple goals. Things that should be closed, like green energy...
I tried to answer in part above.
Why in the world didn't the democrats run a campaign on a few hugely important issues like competency, jobs/worker rights, police/legal reform, economic and pandemic relief, and taxing the super-mega rich for example?
There are surely many more issues, but I think the right strategy would be going with a few clear, simple goals.
Things that should be closed, like green energy reform since solar is cheaper than coal/gas/nuclear power, or the need to cut down the excessive military spending, the need to reform healthcare to a public option that will give more people care for much less money than the gigantic funding of healthcare profiteers - Those are among the issues I wouldn't mix in due to strategy. That has to come later.
Board economic issues that affects folk's wallets created taxation above 60% on the ultrarich decades ago. Politics for normal people again, so that people understand that politics affects them directly, their wallets, their futures, their children's' opportunities, their future retirements, help when they need it in their lives etc.
Workers rights, economic relief for regular people, and taxing the super-mega rich are considered "far left" by the supposed centrists. The centrists fundamentally don't believe in any of those...
Why in the world didn't the democrats run a campaign on a few hugely important issues like competency, jobs/worker rights, police/legal reform, economic and pandemic relief, and taxing the super-mega rich for example?
Workers rights, economic relief for regular people, and taxing the super-mega rich are considered "far left" by the supposed centrists. The centrists fundamentally don't believe in any of those things.
It may be tired but I think it is accurate. Dems lost how many seats in the house? How badly did they do in the senate races? How badly did the Dems do in the State House and Senate races? All...
are very tired in response to the data
It may be tired but I think it is accurate. Dems lost how many seats in the house? How badly did they do in the senate races? How badly did the Dems do in the State House and Senate races? All that but they won the Presidency? That means that we had a lot of people splitting the ticket. Voting for Joe but choosing Republicans on the down ballot. What does that tell you about the Dems overall messaging.
You are correct that the "progressives policies" have a done well when disassociated from that socialism or "Demoncrat" moniker. And that is something to think on.
Interesting thought experiment: I wonder if instead of trying to get people elected to implement Progressive strategies it would be better to fund ballot initiatives.
To me, this shows that the Democrat's messaging worked in a very literal sense. The message was: "Donald Trump is singularly bad; Republicans are mostly good." Democrats made zero effort to tie...
Dems lost how many seats in the house? How badly did they do in the senate races? How badly did the Dems do in the State House and Senate races? All that but they won the Presidency? That means that we had a lot of people splitting the ticket. Voting for Joe but choosing Republicans on the down ballot. What does that tell you about the Dems overall messaging.
To me, this shows that the Democrat's messaging worked in a very literal sense. The message was: "Donald Trump is singularly bad; Republicans are mostly good." Democrats made zero effort to tie themselves to popular policies, and shockingly little effort was made to paint Congressional Republicans as enablers of Donald Trump. The message should have included: Susan Collins is Donald Trump. Lindsey Graham is Donald Trump. David Perdue is Donald Trump.
Interesting thought experiment: I wonder if instead of trying to get people elected to implement Progressive strategies it would be better to fund ballot initiatives.
I'd definitely like to see more of this. Non-partisan ballot initiatives.
The danger with any kind of name-calling is that you brand yourself as not worth listening to. That's what I think when I see people using "fascist" a lot. Do they know anything? Is there likely...
The danger with any kind of name-calling is that you brand yourself as not worth listening to. That's what I think when I see people using "fascist" a lot. Do they know anything? Is there likely to be any signal there?
Throwing around words like that isn't data and it isn't telling the story of your own experience either. As strangers on the Internet, it's up to us to show that we're not just another idiot screaming into the void.
I think that's an... interesting way to interpret this election. One where a coalition of centrist candidates banded together to defeat a popular progressive candidate and then their guy barely...
This election was a massive, resounding defeat of the far left.
I think that's an... interesting way to interpret this election. One where a coalition of centrist candidates banded together to defeat a popular progressive candidate and then their guy barely squeaked over the finish line against a historically unpopular president, in the midst of an economic collapse and a totally botched response to a lung-melting pandemic, with near-zero downballot support. Like, I honestly don't see any way you could call this election a defeat of the "far left" when the candidates who failed the hardest at winning what should have been the easiest election win since 1932 were the centrist democrats more interested in distancing themselves from the left than from the Republicans. I don't know how much more evidence we need that the old guard corporate triangulation bunch are garbage politicians who can't win elections.
Bush got 271 electoral votes and -0.5% higher turnout than Gore in 2000. Bush got 286 electoral votes and +2.5% higher turnout than Kerry in 2004. Obama got 365 electoral votes and +7,2% higher...
Bush got 271 electoral votes and -0.5% higher turnout than Gore in 2000.
Bush got 286 electoral votes and +2.5% higher turnout than Kerry in 2004.
Obama got 365 electoral votes and +7,2% higher turnout than McCain in 2008
Obama got 332 electoral votes and +3,9% higher turnout than Romney in 2012
Trump got 304 electoral votes and -2,2% higher turnout than Clinton in 2012.
If Biden wins Georgia (as things look like now) He'll win 306 electoral votes and after final counts will end somewhere in the +3.8-4.8% higher turnout than Trump this year.
When the votes are counted, This election was never a close election. A ton of people will be left with a different impression. That is not true. Election night and the days after were close, the election was never close.
Biden and Sanders were my two least favorite democratic candidates this year. They're simply too old. They have too much baggage. Sanders was absolutely thrashed in the primary in 2016. when he got 43% of the vote and lost to Clinton by more than 12 percentage points.
This year, Sanders got 26% and was defeated by Biden by more than 25 percentage points. Let that sink in. Almost twice as large a turnout for Biden as Sanders. Sanders ruined any chance another candidate could win. He tanked it. Destroyed, obliterated, pulverized are adequate words in the political landscape to describe what happened.
If you can't win the party, you don't stand a chance winning the American people. It's arithmetic.
This year's election saw record turnout. Where are all these people who'd supposedly be energized to vote? Wouldn't they show up for practically anyone given the completely correct assessment you have of the terrible state of the country after 4 years of Trump.
Those supposed left voters don't exist. That's what this election shows. They aren't there. Just like the supposed Bernie-bros who ended up voting for Trump instead of Clinton don't exist in an amount that would make a difference. That narrative runs contrary to facts.
I completely agree that the old guard Democrats can't win election and are a bunch of garbage politicians. After his decades of political experience, Sanders is placed clearly right in the middle of that group. Biden is in the middle of that group.
The solution isn't younger people from the left, but younger people in the center. The millions of voters show that. Obama sure energized that group and won two elections from the center.
Those who've stayed at home in previous election also turned up for Trump this year instead of supposedly being winnable for the left. They weren't. That group of possible leftist voters doesn't exist if they in the middle of a pandemic wouldn't bother to vote for a party who're promising them a strategy for feeding their families.
The downticket massacre that happened this year from a terribly weak campaign is owned by the whole Democratic party. It's a farce and a travesty when you look at results in government of these last four years in congress.
I guess we're just going to completely ignore how every other centrist candidate dropped out just before Super Tuesday while Bernie was still splitting the progressive vote with Warren then? Or...
I guess we're just going to completely ignore how every other centrist candidate dropped out just before Super Tuesday while Bernie was still splitting the progressive vote with Warren then? Or how 2016 was essentially a protest candidacy that wildly overperformed? Or how those popular vote margins don't matter at all and the election was actually decided by a couple hundred thousand votes in squeaker elections in a handful of swing states? I mean it is pretty clear at this point that Democrats have a solid strategy for winning the popular vote I guess.
I am baffled both that you think there's a larger base of centrist youth than leftist youth, and that this is a more viable long term strategy. Obama won by (among other things) energizing the progressive base, even if he did end up governing like a centrist. Buttigeig lost, hard, by explicitly trying to tap in to that non-existent centrist base. I'd say there's a pattern to these types of candidacies, between Obama, Macron, Trudeau, maybe Clegg, and it's that they ride into office on a wave of dissatisfaction with the previous government, running insurgent candidacies buttressed with vague platitudes about 'change', 'hope', 'progress'. Then, they get into office, prove they're not really worth a damn by governing like the pluralistic conservatives they are, and their support fades as the only argument for their position becomes something like 'we're better than the actual conservatives'. It may or may not be enough to win reelection, but so far, after these sorts of candidates and parties have left power, the electorate has not treated them kindly.
Centrism and triangulation are dead end political strategies in the United States, probably in most of the English-speaking world and beyond, and I don't know how many more decades of resounding losses are needed to make that clear. Have you talked to people, swing state voters in historically red areas? I have, I live in one, and did a lot of work pushing Biden. People like bold, unabashedly progressive candidates, who they think will fight for them. That's what a lot of people saw in candidate Obama that didn't really bear out. What they don't like are mealy-mouthed centrists who pay a lot of lip service to progress, but think you have to do tepid social reform quietly in the dead of night, if at all.
To win the Senate, the Democrats need to win red seats in Republican states consistently. The US is the one country I can think of where you have the most to gain in elections by being centrist...
To win the Senate, the Democrats need to win red seats in Republican states consistently. The US is the one country I can think of where you have the most to gain in elections by being centrist simply due to the Senate.
Then there's Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania. Essentially the means to win the presidency and House majority.
Have you talked to people, swing state voters in historically red areas?
My friends and family largely live in Florida, Pennsylvania (and California). My crowd is clearly not the same as yours. Clinton won a lot of votes in my circle from traditional Republicans in 2016, Biden won way more in 2020 than that, despite all the conservative Trump judges.
Candidates are a package. If Trump has shown us anything, it's that the US is still a bigoted place. The Us isn't ready for Buttigieg. He's also too inexperienced politically to win older voters who generally value experience. there's still a huge penalty in races for president /vice-president from being a woman, or a minority of any kind. This is deeply rooted in the American psyche and I can't wait for it to die out as years pass.
Labour in the UK was decimated by going too far to the left under Corbyn. He showed a clear need for centrism. They lost to Boris Johnson! Resoundingly as the Conservatives have bungled Brexit over years.
I wish I were persuaded by your arguments. I'd want nothing more for it to be true so we could build a finely masked social security net through all parts of US society, have the super rich pay their fair share to pay for it and to go there tomorrow.
Radical policy gets reversed. Two steps forwards, often three steps back. Normalize a position, implement with broad support, build on that position and gradually push society in the right direction little by little. Social democracy isn't built in a decade. At least historically, it's built over the course of half a century or more.
I'm probably going to leave it off here, but I'm honestly curious what it would take to convince you of the abject failure of centrism that the last few decades haven't provided. What does a...
I'm probably going to leave it off here, but I'm honestly curious what it would take to convince you of the abject failure of centrism that the last few decades haven't provided. What does a failure of centrism even look like that isn't this?
Personally, I think the reason that Democrats and Labor have lost so hard and so often is that they view the left wing of their parties as bigger enemies than their actual political opponents, and only ever run on what they aren't rather than what they are. Actual, left wing policies are wildly popular, and if these parties had the stones to own them, campaign on them, maybe we'd remember how and why democrats practically ran this county for the bulk of the last century. But as unteachable as the democratic party has proven to be, I'm sure I'll still be hearing about how it's all Bernie and AOC and BLM's fault for spooking the moderates while being I'm loaded into a boxcar.
Candidates are a package. If Trump has shown us anything, it's that the US is still a bigoted place. The Us isn't ready for Buttigieg. He's also too inexperienced politically to win older voters who generally value experience. there's still a huge penalty in races for president /vice-president from being a woman, or a minority of any kind. This is deeply rooted in the American psyche and I can't wait for it to die out as years pass.
Buttigeig didn't lose because of bigotry or lack of experience, he lost because he had no base. Nobody wanted the round two of faux-progressive centrism he was selling, they either wanted a return to normalcy, or the real deal.
Re: your first point, I really don't think that's a winning strategy. The value I place in someone's political opinion rapidly approaches zero with every use of describing their political...
Re: your first point, I really don't think that's a winning strategy. The value I place in someone's political opinion rapidly approaches zero with every use of describing their political opponents as communists or fascists. Straight up, the Republicans aren't looking to Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism for inspiration, nor are the Democrats drafting up policy while cross referencing Marx's Capital. I think a lot of people see that kind of behavior and think less of the people engaging in it.
I think there's a chance that starting to take the tact of calling them fascists could help to ultimately curtail the practice of using these labels as insults. Right now, Republicans pay zero...
I think there's a chance that starting to take the tact of calling them fascists could help to ultimately curtail the practice of using these labels as insults. Right now, Republicans pay zero political cost whatsoever when they throw around socialist and communist. If they start getting called fascists--and they do not want to be called fascists--they might have to change their approach.
I don't know whether this would actually work in practice, but I do know for sure that the current Democratic approach is not stopping them from calling us socialists.
I think in practice, people just become more distant from each other. While this doesn't happen at a national political level, it does happen in communities all the time, and the result is usually...
I think in practice, people just become more distant from each other. While this doesn't happen at a national political level, it does happen in communities all the time, and the result is usually pretty toxic and isolating - not exactly something that seems good to bring to the national stage. It would be nice if the RNC would stop beating the drum of "everything I don't like is socialism", but I don't think this is a good solution.
The only thing I've found that was the slightest bit effective was emailing the state RNC chair for my district, and telling him if he kept sending me those cringe inducing fliers about how Biden was the puppet of the far left socialists, that I would vote straight blue ticket.The impact is tiny, but at least the fliers stopped, and someone with some vague party authority had to deal with at least one complaint.
I just came to this thread to essentially type your post, exact same content, just worse grammar (which isn't good for discussions on linguistic nuance). Ignoring context is a powerful tool that...
I just came to this thread to essentially type your post, exact same content, just worse grammar (which isn't good for discussions on linguistic nuance). Ignoring context is a powerful tool that is all too easy to abuse, especially on the internet.
The only small detail I would add is that over the past few years, we have entered an era where in a select few areas, progressives are now a big enough majority to be the "power" they were fighting in previous decades. Certainly not in society at large. But in some urban centers, college campuses, many branches of media, etc. Yet it seems like language used is still that of an underdog fighting upward. IMO much of the problems progressives face comes from their "fight the power" rhetoric suddenly feeling abusive since in certain positions, it comes off as oppressive/abusive. There seems to be a very slow but notable shift for the "rebellious"/underdog stance that's so appealing to young people to move to the right.
No, to make that clear: I don't think that all the alt-righty white kids are in actual danger of being oppressed. That's not the issue. The issue is language.
Agreed. Social media is where nuance and context go to die. It’s no surprise that lacking those things it ends up pushing social media consumers towards the extremes.
Agreed. Social media is where nuance and context go to die. It’s no surprise that lacking those things it ends up pushing social media consumers towards the extremes.
I'd argue that "Black lives matter" and "it's OK to be white" are at about the same level of sloganeering. BLM is shorter and has a better acronym, and they both might seem technically correct as...
I'd argue that "Black lives matter" and "it's OK to be white" are at about the same level of sloganeering. BLM is shorter and has a better acronym, and they both might seem technically correct as written, if by "be white" you mean have a certain skin tone or one or several ancestries in a certain category.
I might argue that "being white", interpreted as trying to make "white" happen as its own political coalition, distinct from all the different more specific component ethnicities that actually have associated cultures and histories, is probably not OK.
I'd still argue that Black Lives Also Matter (BLAM) would work really well, when the outset is partially police shootings. The whole idea of the BLM-movement is that black lives also matter, so...
I'd still argue that Black Lives Also Matter (BLAM) would work really well, when the outset is partially police shootings.
The whole idea of the BLM-movement is that black lives also matter, so it's just silly that isn't the slogan.
Occupy Wall Street is another movement like this where the slogan is horrible. Then even more than in the case of BLM, the slogan meant they never managed to get a clear message across about anything. People just kinda occupied Wall Street, and nothing happened. Why were they occupying Wall St? If you asked normal people, most wouldn't have a clue.
Occupy Wall Street was effective at doing exactly that. In terms of causing policy change the slogan wasn't that effective, but if they started with "tax the rich" they might not have so saliently...
Occupy Wall Street was effective at doing exactly that. In terms of causing policy change the slogan wasn't that effective, but if they started with "tax the rich" they might not have so saliently occupied Wall Street. They also had the "99%" meme, which maybe was supposed to be doing the policy work.
BLAM is definitely easier to yell. But I think there's value in BLM's slogan being a very compact statement only about Black lives. The fact that many non-Black people are hesitant to state that Black lives matter, specifically, without adding themselves to the statement, illustrates the problem (namely, that people have trouble caring specifically about Black people and seeing them take up rhetorical space), and it makes the slogan a passable shibboleth. From a semantics point of view it matters little, but from a pragmatics point of view, where you think about things like what you're saying by what you don't say, the difference is important.
Come on, why do I have to defend someone who has fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole. I don't even play minecraft. This is an obvious Photoshop even back then, it is even in the wrong font
Exemplary
Come on, why do I have to defend someone who has fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole. I don't even play minecraft.
Whelp. Didn't know about that one. Maybe he was better pre-twitter - either way its still jarring to see someone who had fame from a kids game falling so far.
Whelp. Didn't know about that one. Maybe he was better pre-twitter - either way its still jarring to see someone who had fame from a kids game falling so far.
The thing that really annoys me with people complaining that "defund the police" is a bad slogan is that in activist/prison abolitionist circles, it has never stopped meaning "defund the police"....
Exemplary
The thing that really annoys me with people complaining that "defund the police" is a bad slogan is that in activist/prison abolitionist circles, it has never stopped meaning "defund the police". Please read https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/s/Defund-Toolkit.pdf for a good overview.
From my perspective, it seems like centrist progressives who don't think we should defund the police saw the phrase gain traction during the protests, boosted it, and then tried explaining that it meant something else (see: 8 can't wait). Of course random people are going to think that doesn't make any sense! People can tell when you aren't saying what you mean. I think if someone wants to see Reform The Police be the police protest slogan of choice, then it's on them to go build an activist movement around that goal.
This is really how all ideas spread if generalised. Someone - a person who's dealt with the issue, a politician, a scientist, a philosopher, etc. - comes up with it, and then it percolates...
This is really how all ideas spread if generalised. Someone - a person who's dealt with the issue, a politician, a scientist, a philosopher, etc. - comes up with it, and then it percolates outwards into society. If it becomes popular enough, it is mainstreamed, and is often watered down or changed by people less acquainted with the original notion. I don't mean "less acquainted" in an exclusively negative manner though - it's a chief part of the process through which ideas spread. You could say that nobody really comes up with an idea ex nihilio, they merely composit and change existing ideas based on the cultural fabric and their lived experiences. Science stands upon the shoulders of giants.
In this case, though, I personally don't think the "sanewashing" is right per se. If you have trouble advocating your version of ideas, use your own slogans, rather than using the clout of successful activists. They complain that the original ideas aren't "popular" enough, while taking for granted ideas promulgated by current radicals' intellectual predecessors. Universal healthcare was once an extremely left-wing idea constantly derided as communistic; its creators in the UK, Canada, and New Zealand were all avowed socialists.
It's funny how what's "too radical" is always what's considered radical today, but the radical policies of the past are OK. I understand why to a certain extent - most people don't think about historical perspective too much, and humans are naturally averse to change - but that doesn't make it right.
While the original post points out that such policies aren't popular with the general public. But the public isn't always right. Ask what people in the antebellum South US thought about Black people. Or those in medieval Europe about the humors and vitalities of the body, or the efficacy of bathing. Or the public a few years ago about Black Lives Matter. It would be egotistical and myopic to deny that many principles that we take as given or hold dear will be considered backwards and absurd in the future.
Democracy is good because it provides the public with a tool to prevent corruption and out-of-touch decisions, not because they are always right about everything. People's opinions are never come from nowhere; they are shaped by the friends, family, and more. But most of it eventually makes its way back to the media, a fact that those on both the left and right frequently love to bemoan, and for good reason. While many reporters and journalists do highly admirable work, media by its very nature favours a certain perspective. If an idea is "out of the norm", it is often more likely to be dismissed. This can be both a good thing and a bad. This is why activists work tirelessly to mainstream ideas - well, until attempts at change are frustrated by a regression to the mean.
This isn't a forum I normally read and I'm out of touch, so I don't know about the communities they talk about. But perhaps someone else can share their experiences?
This isn't a forum I normally read and I'm out of touch, so I don't know about the communities they talk about. But perhaps someone else can share their experiences?
I'm not quite sure which communities you mean. Since r/neoliberal is socially very progressive but is still rooted in older communities (like r/badeconomics) where many people still remember the...
I'm not quite sure which communities you mean. Since r/neoliberal is socially very progressive but is still rooted in older communities (like r/badeconomics) where many people still remember the "culture war" between the "SJWs" and the Alt-Light/Alt-Right that took place, but since it leans economically to the center/center-right there is a heavy disdain for rose-twitter and other socialist leaning spaces (especially on reddit with fringe communities like ChapoTraphouse, FullCommunism, the BernieBro Subbreddits that refused to acknowledge that Bernie endorsed Biden, etc.).
Sometimes even outright "wars": One of the earliest things r/neoliberal did that gained attention was to "challenge" socialist subreddits to a charity marathon to prove their moral superiority.
The sub spent it's whole existence complaining either about trump or about socialists/"progressives" and how both their proposals and their messaging would alienate voters and are out of touch with most of the electorate. This election basically proved their point with the moderate Biden winning the presidency, but left-wing democrats downballot heavily underperforming Biden. Ilhan Omar for example only managed to get 65% in her district while Biden got 80%, in a blue-collar district that, as Pelosi once put it "could be won by a glass of water for the democrats".
If we take the past two elections as our sample size, there truly isn't any evidence that center-right liberals outperform progressives, as the situation was reversed in 2016. If anything, this...
This election basically proved their point with the moderate Biden winning the presidency
If we take the past two elections as our sample size, there truly isn't any evidence that center-right liberals outperform progressives, as the situation was reversed in 2016. If anything, this election was a reflection of how one viewed Trump's presidency. Anecdotally, I haven't heard a single issue that mobilized liberal voters other than "getting Trump out" or "undoing the damage Trump's been doing." Again, anecdotally, every leftist I know from democratic socialists to anarchists voted for Biden (not out of a love for rightist liberalism, but as a risk calculation.) Many didn't in 2016, which seems to prove the importance of the progressive wing for democrats to win.
BernieBro Subbreddits that refused to acknowledge that Bernie endorsed Biden, etc.
I've not seen any evidence in the subreddits you've listed that they fail to acknowledge that Bernie endorsed Biden. They largely viewed Bernie as a possible instrument for more material politics, not a savior or some sort of cult of personality. This has been a pretty common strawman by right-wing democrats to smear progressives.
And yes, having never head a single issue that mobilized liberal voters other than getting trump out is truly anecdotal. Healthcare, Immigration Reform and housing costs are all issues that liberals also care about, there is just a different perception on how they should be solved.
In fairness, those listed subreddits weren't the one's you claimed had push this agenda before, and I don't participate on Sanders-focused subreddits, so I have no way of evaluating the validity...
In fairness, those listed subreddits weren't the one's you claimed had push this agenda before, and I don't participate on Sanders-focused subreddits, so I have no way of evaluating the validity of the claim on those subreddits. The CTH podcast encouraged its listeners to vote, I don't know anything about the subreddit.
Onto your claims about 2018, progressives did win multiple key races. 2018 wasn't as great as I'd have hoped, but AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, among many others won. Your own source lists more progressive wins than losses. Even if I concede the point, we have a sample size of... 2 and a half now, where nearly half of our sample size contradicts your claim? A Biden win isn't a huge win for conservative democrats. Trump should be a softball pitch for any non-Trump candidate, and right-wing democrats can only beat him half the time.
Healthcare, Immigration Reform and housing costs are all issues that liberals also care about
Just a decade ago, we had every branch of government controlled by right-wing democrats, and the needle hasn't moved on healthcare, housing costs, or immigration reform. For many working-class folks (myself included,) healthcare costs went up, as well as housing costs! The only liberals meaningfully talking about healthcare are progressives and the rightists who attempt to sanewash them.
? which subs did I claim push this agenda in a comment before? I only talked about r/neoliberal and r/badecononomics which are centrist subs. And regarding house-seats, I should have maybe said...
? which subs did I claim push this agenda in a comment before? I only talked about r/neoliberal and r/badecononomics which are centrist subs. And regarding house-seats, I should have maybe said "swing districts", because these districts are so blue that democrats could nominate a glass of water and it would still win. AOC runs in New York City, Rashida Talib in Detroit, claiming that it is their progressiveness that won these districts is a very bold statement.
Also, did you even read what I wrote in the first comment? I explicitly mentioned Ilhan Omar as an example were a very progressive underperformed Biden by 15% in her own district.
EDIT: Indeed, I referenced CTH, FC and "BernieBro" subs, which I forgot I mentioned. I won't dig through FullCommunism but I think It's not a big secret that communist are not particularly fond of Biden. CTH and "BernieBro" subs I think I explained sufficiently.
I don't think the Omar/Biden example is very good evidence of your point. It just shows that there were more centrist or rightist Democrats that were willing to defect down-ballot than there were...
I don't think the Omar/Biden example is very good evidence of your point. It just shows that there were more centrist or rightist Democrats that were willing to defect down-ballot than there were leftists who were willing to defect up-ballot, which isn't surprising given the circumstances.
depending on the community and topic, yes. Defund the police was a strong one, where everyone (the more left-wing people that I follow) on twitter tried to explain what it actually is supposed to...
depending on the community and topic, yes. Defund the police was a strong one, where everyone (the more left-wing people that I follow) on twitter tried to explain what it actually is supposed to mean. I can't pinpoint it down to specific persons though.
I'm sure it comes to no surprise to a lot of people, but there have been a number of phrases/slogans recently that have nuanced meanings that don't come across well (especially in mediums like twitter and facebook) - and end up making things worse.
Black Lives Matter is a prime example. The nuanced meaning is that people of color are disproportionately killed by police. However that nuanced meaning doesn't come across in the slogan. So people take it for something other than the intended meaning. Some people on the right hear "Only Black Lives Matter" and respond with the "inclusive" All Lives Matter. And even people on the far left can muddy the waters by going too far the other way and you see ideas like "You can't be racist against white people". So while reasonable folks who learn about the nuanced meaning of BLM are supporters of it - you have people on the right insisting that BLM is exclusive and ignores other races. And also people on the far left agreeing with them. I think the conversation would be a lot different if the phrase that had caught on was different. Black Lives Matter Too (#BLM2) would be my pick. Adding that single word cuts away ambiguity while still being catchy and concise. Amusingly, if the movement had actually coined All Lives Matter as a response to targeted police brutality, it would have probably worked well.
Instead - we have the "gotcha" political question: Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? No room for nuance. No room for explanations. If a politician answered with "While All Lives Matter, but not all lives are being unfairly targeted", they'd probably be shamed by the more radical BLM supporters for not being a simple response of "BLM".
This has come up before on Tildes on the subject of Notch (the creator of Minecraft). Notch's descent from rational person to QAnon-spouting alt-right isn't too uncommon in the twitter world, and its mostly notable for the tie to Minecraft. But it shows a good example of how twitter's un-nuanced medium combined starts a feedback loop. Some of the memorable ones (from memory, forgive any inaccuracy) are:
Before you know it, he is spouting QAnon statements and continuing to be a general alt-right troll on twitter. Last I check he deleted his twitter on a dare or agreement or something. Hopefully he (and the world) are better for it. I don't know if he was always destined to go down that path, but to me he represents a lot of the reasonable/rational people who are generally moderate - and some of the "encoded" phrases of the left don't make sense while the right/alt-right has done a much better job with phrases that make sense and are technically correct. There are tons of articles on how teens get sucked into the alt-right rabbit hole and find a welcoming community...as long as they believe what the group believes.
Anyways that was a bit of a tangent. But there are a number of phrases that definitely fall into that category. I believe one of the stories that has come out of the election is that Trump did very well with the Cuban population in Florida - and the presumed reason is that the Trump campaign (specifically Marco Rubio) were very good at painting democrats as socialists. Theres been a lot of talk from my left-leaning friends along the lines of "reclaiming" socialism - or even talking about being outright socialist or communist. Or things like "if free healthcare and a living wage are socialism, then yeah I'm a socialist". Of course - these terms don't mean the same thing to older folks or someone who has been affected by socialism/communism. The socialism bogeyman has been used in US politics for as long as I can remember. Its a single word and already has a negative meaning for many people. And the left doesn't help by leaning into it. Florida went very red due because of those fears - despite Bidens policies being only slightly left of center capitalism and nowhere close to actual socialism.
As one of the reddit comments puts it, "If you're explaining, you're losing." MAGA is a good example. No explanation needed. Its simple. Its easy to understand. Its all positive. And explaining to someone the nuances of nationalism and fetishizing the past is losing. Explaining that it used to be a KKK slogan is losing, since people don't have that in their memory.
I think you're bang on the money. (Although I'd have gone with "Black lives also matter")
An eternity ago in middle school, I wrote an essay about sloganism - the idea that if you can't make your policy a slogan, you've got to change the policy.
That's taking it too far, but the idea is sound: The Democrats may have as good a public policy they want, but when they call it:
You've already lost when that's your policy.
In 1946 the Republicans turned the Senate after 16 years on the slogan "Had enough?"
I would have stolen that. Who hasn't had enough Trump who would ever consider voting for someone besides Donald in 2020?
I'm so incredibly glad to see others saying this. Branding is critically important, and the authoritarian contingent are often extremely good at it to start with. Combine that with billions of dollars of amplification from Murdoch, Koch, Zuckerberg, et al, along with the probable interference of foreign powers, and there's a vast uphill battle to fight. Seeing those stacked odds and then going in with a slogan like "defund the police" is a losing proposition for what could otherwise be an enormous positive change for essentially all of American society.
Steering and unifying the message, monitoring social media, and guiding grassroots organisations on their communications would be a very good use of funding for one or more progressive groups.
I hear a lot of agreement in this thread, and while I agree to an extent, I have something to offer of a counterpoint.
Trump spent his entire presidency, including his initial run, saying absolutely inflammatory shit. Black lives matter is nothing compared to grabbing someone by the pussy, saying that a congresswoman had 'extraordinarily low IQ', calling other countries shitholes, being a vocal birther, saying that a parent of a fallen soldier had 'sacrificed nothing', having an extensive wikipedia page on racism, and well frankly I have to google all the fucked up shit he's said to even begin to scratch the surface.
How can this kind of hate speech still almost get him elected and yet we sit here talking about 'messaging' and 'phrasing' of something magnitudes less inflammatory? I've become increasingly convinced in recent years that the voter the left is 'trying to sway' is actually a lot less mutable than previously thought. They were exposed to perhaps the most directly and openly racist president since before the civil war and arguably the most controversial and inflammatory in all history, if not since Jackson.
Where is the proof? We have anecdotal evidence when we look back at someone who ended up radicalized, but were they pushed or did they simply figure themselves out? Furthermore, do we have any evidence that multiple narratives, both the more extreme and the less extreme, are more hurtful to changing someone's opinion than a single narrative? I think if ever we need to critically re-examine the efforts we are making, now is the time.
I think it's also important to stop for a second and consider how the rest of the world views what's going on in our population. These kinds of tactics and phrasing are not viewed in the same light in most European countries, where they struggle to understand how our country can be so conservative about some matters. There's something to be said about the population as it exists right now within the states and what will work on them as compared to humans in general. I think this is an extremely complicated issue, made only even more difficult by our entrance into an unprecedented age of disinformation.
The people who vote for Republicans who say these things and the people who do not are fundamentally different people. Just like those who're fundamentally against the death penalty will not be swayed by those who fundamentally support the death penalty because they're different types of people.
Wording and messaging is important if you're trying to sway those who could potentially vote Democrat, who are a completely different group of people to those who don't mind Trump and Republican bigotry.
Are they? Who is this 'potentially vote democrat' crowd, exactly? How can we be sure this messaging is actually going to sway what they do and not what they say they will do? While I agree that phrasing is important and should be considered, I do not believe it is at the heart of the issue anymore, particularly in the US. The world is not how it used to be and I do not believe older scientific methodologies are pertinent with today's population. Asking what someone will do and observing what they actually do are two wildly different things and I think the dissonance between the two is a gap that has been increasing in modern times.
Just to add, Trump just received a Republican-record-breaking 70 million votes. That's a big chunk to just reduce down to lost-cause bigots. And if they are, is this the end of politics, it's just 'bigot or not' from here on out?
Those who aren't part of the 43% who approve of Trump's job as president, but clearly still viewed him as the lesser evil when they voted for him anyway.
I think that group, many of whom are deeply religious, many volunteer their time in their local communities, many are way worse off now economically than they were pre-pandemic and so on.
There's also the group who did vote for Trump but could have voted for someone else than Biden. I think that group is harder to sway, but view Trump's greatest success as either a) getting rid of the political elite/being a businessman or b) conservative judges securing their values.
If those people were convinced it wasn't another one of those darn politicians being elected, or that some superliberal judges weren't the risk, would consider voting for someone who would help their own situations more.
If we don't view these people as reasonable people trying to vote for what they believe in because we don't understand them or believe they hold genuine beliefs, we won't understand where they're coming from, imo.
Sure, a lot of people who say they're independent clearly aren't, but many can be swayed, or the election results would be change much less from election to election.
Biden is as far right as the democratic party goes. If they still chose Trump over him, I'm not sure how these voters are accessible at all. They saw all the hate that Trump spewed and they decided to still vote for him.
A lot of the solutions you pose have absolutely nothing to do with messaging and everything to do with appealing to what they want or what they are afraid of. How does this have anything to do with the messaging of "black lives matter too" versus "black lives matter" when the person they voted for has repeatedly endorsed racism and said openly racist things?
I fail to see how this discussion has any bearing on how 'reasonable' these people are. My comment is focused on this mislead idea about the messaging itself being problematic; this idea that the right has their messaging down better than the left.
The Christian fundos are not gettable. They think Trump was selected by God to save us. And they'll never vote Democrat because of abortion. If anyone had a sliver of hope of getting them, it was Catholic Joe Biden, and he didn't. Not happening. Not gettable.
Who is this group and who might they have voted for in Biden's stead?
Many of these people are good-faith actors who really are voting for what they believe, but sadly winning them over is a lost cause. When pastor/priest tells them God wants them to vote for Trump, it's a done deal. I hate to write off such a huge demographic, but I sincerely doubt there's a way forward.
A) you are painting with very broad strokes, I don't think the majority of Christian fundamentalists think Trump was selected by God. Many, but not most.
B) The majority of fundamentalists in the US really, really, really dislike Catholicism. There's a reason that Kennedy's single biggest electoral challenge was overcoming the bias against the cat-licks.
Perhaps. I admit this is an area in which I'm in something of a blind spot because I don't know many people who are religious. However, the handful of people that I know who are the least bit religious are fully, inseparably in the tank for Trump, and really do think that this is all God's will, even moreso now than in 2016.
For better or worse, I know several tons of pentecostals, a group that's more more fundamentalist than most, and overtly suspect of any secular institution. My general read is that Trump wins them overwhelmingly just on Abortion, and they will either avoid talking about the man's personal deficits, or gladly agree that he's pretty much a slimy whoremonger but at least he isn't interested in killing babies.
It's a very single-issue audience, and I do agree with the part of your post above about abortion being the entire unfixable lynchpin. The grand irony of all of this is that Catholics are largely responsible for the anti-abortion movements power and presence in the US, and the protestants bought in heavily in the 60's and 70's.
I'm not American, and I'm not particularly a fan of Bill Maher, but the other day I watched him make a comment in a YouTube video that I thought made a lot of sense:
To paraphrase, when you are stuck with what is effectively a two-party system, each side is forced to own the excesses of its extremist wings.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, and I don't actually think any of it contradicts what I've said about messaging or branding.
Engineering the message needn't mean sanitising it - Trump sure as hell proved that one - but it does mean packaging it in a way that speaks to the audience you need it to reach.
Is there such a thing as a mutable voter in modern America? I honestly don't know. But there are, at the very least, voters who can be convinced to stay home or to come out for the side they nominally support - 2016 and 2020 proved that one.
Can effective messaging change minds, at least enough to nudge that ratio? I've seen enough posts and articles about people who "lost" their previously reasonable parents to Fox News propaganda to believe it already has. So why can't that work in the other direction as well?
Expecting random activists in the streets to have perfect, focus group tested slogans that are pre-cleared to not be taken out of context or abused by right wing media is never going to happen and people need to stop asking for it.
This is just unproductive hand-wringing by the neurotic sectors of the media. It's never going to happen. One might as well complain about how the weather affects their plans for a picnic. There's nothing you can do about it but plan around it. Anything else is just assuming the Right Wing should always get to set the agenda. That's a loser's mindset.
I'd meant for the second paragraph to contextualise that a bit. It's about managing the media, not the activists on the street. It's about presenting the message in a way that's digestible to those who need convincing, not just those who already agree. Perhaps most of all, it's something I see as totally realistic and achievable, as well as incredibly important.
I don't think any of that is defeatist, nor do I think it's letting the right wing control the message.
I agree here. But the key thing to me is that managing the media has more to do with having the right people at the table and building organizing power to articulate those nuances to people. I don't think it has much, if anything, to do with making sure the slogans are just right. Right Wingers have been shouting "ABOLISH THE IRS!" for years and nobody really bats an eye. They know it's histrionic and not serious, even if you bring up clear evidence that the person in question means it very seriously.
So the solution to "we're getting killed on this 'defund the police' thing" isn't to say we need to sloganeer better or not say "Defund the police." It's to ask "Why are they able to frame anything we say or do in the most ridiculous caricatures regardless of what we're actually trying to say? And how do we counteract or neutralize this disinformation?"
Sorry for the short comment but you may like this.
Indeed!
A number of presidents have used MAGA before Trump, notably in 1940, but also as recently as Bill Clinton in an ad for Hillary in 2008 (!)
(There's nothing wrong with pertinent, short comments)
The thing is it's difficult to discern if a soundbite/phrase is effective until after the fact. "Had enough?" has the same potential for people to ask for greater explanation as they do for "Defund the police", it's only an effective example because hindsight is 20/20.
On the one hand there's the political adage "if you have to explain something, you lost" and on the other you won't know if people are too stupid to understand a simple statement until after you've said it.
Side note: "Black Lives Also Matter" becomes the acronym "BLAM". BLAM is the older comic style of shooting someone. Not a good fit.
"Had enough?" lends itself effectively to moving advertising:
Had enough?
Had enough chaos?
Had enough lies?
Had enough cronies?
Had enough covid?
Had enough Trump?
(I'm sure cleverer people than me could do much better)
I specifically think the BLAM acronym is a strength and specifically a good fit because of the shooting history:
Back Lives Also Matter , not [insert picture of shooting cop here]
Reclaiming words is key for the whole social justice struggle.
Yes, a million times this. I couldn't agree more. The left has the most infuriating branding problems, and it's probably one of the biggest factors in why we always lose.
Some additional thoughts:
I don't understand why Democrats are so shy about calling Republicans "fascists" when Republicans are so casual about throwing "socialist" and "communist" around. Republicans are acting far more like fascists than Democrats are like socialists, but Democrats are so timid on this front. I think this would do more to defuse the "socialist" situation than trying to calmly explain "no this isn't socialism and here's why". Explain, lose.
The left's tendency to eat itself is also problematic. My friends here in DC are losing their minds over Joe Manchin saying he wouldn't end the filibuster (thus making DC statehood impossible) despite the fact that (1) him saying that right now is strategically important before the GA runoffs, and (2) his answer to the direct DC question was much more equivocal and hinted that he actually might consider that. It's like we have no sense of strategy at all.
I think it'd be a huge mistake to try to demonize the Republicans to accomplish anything. 4 years of Trump have shown that they don't need to have shame.
Those who votes Democrats, however, expect at least a modicum of basic decency, and integrity.
If you just insult others, you end up talking about them and their politics. If the discussion is whether you're socialist or not, you have to talk about those supposed socialist policies that you then can sell to others and expalin.
That's the better strategy, although it's a lot less satisfying than just calling others names.
It's still very early to analyze what the 2020 election shows. However, with 75 million votes for Trump, it's obvious that moving more to the left is not the answer, whatever the answer turns out to be. Gain a foothold in the center and make Republicans look like extremists and you as the only reasonable (and therefore moderate) option.
This election was a massive, resounding defeat of the far left. The far left needs to own that and recognize that in a two-party system, they need to sit clearly inside the Democratic tent and eek policy leftwards one issue at a time. Sanders lost resoundingly. AOC and others getting reelected in super leftist districts comparatively do not instruct sane national policy positions and voter trends.
This is political reality. It's tough for the left to accept (my own views lie there). A two-party system as polarized as the US is currently will always be about voting against the other party, not voting for your party. That lesson has been learned in every social democracy in Europe post-1945. The US is not exceptional. We must learn from those who actually have strong social safety nets and how they got there from literal fascism in the 1930s and 40s.
As for calling Republicans fascists, it's not about insulting them. It's about branding, which we've seen is critically important. And when one side are fascists and the other side are socialists, it takes the teeth out of both brands and forces you to focus on something else (hopefully policy).
This is why I think Democrats need to point out that Republicans are acting like fascists (extremists).
This argument, along with the previous one about the need to move towards the center, are very tired in response to the data. Polls constantly show all the "far left" policies to be wildly popular. Florida enacted a $15 min wage and restored felons voting rights. Government-run healthcare polled at something like 70% favorable in last week's Fox News poll. Numerous states legalized various drugs. If left policies were on ballots as referendums, they'd pass all over the place. What's wildly unpopular, however, is the brand "Democrat".
Florida was resoundingly won by Trump in the same election they enacted the $15 minimum wage and restored felon voting rights.
If these issues were winning issues for the Democrats, how couldn't they capitalize on them to win the sate? It wasn't even close.
Why can't the Democrats win the seats to enact universal healthcare despite there being so huge a majority for implementing it?
I've lived in a country where a universal right to child care (max legal fee is around $500 per kid per month) was enacted, where paternity leave is 15 weeks of full pay, whatever your salary is, not to speak of maternity leave and the Christian conservative party is one of the largest supporters of paternity leave.
The left side of national politics won all those issues when they postured in the center. They aren't leftist views at all, and when they were braded as that they never got close to being enacted. When they're branded as centrist, common sense policy, who can vote against them?
Most Americans don't have deep exposure to multiparty politics, or to understand the dynamics of how actually getting their wanted policies enacted can work. How do you get the votes you need? The pattern is pretty similar in every country in Europe where this happens:
The other party needs to close towards your platform to stand a chance in next elections. This is the time to move the Overton window in your preferred direction. That's what the Republicans keep trying to do in The Senate, pushing it evermore towards the right.
Congratulations! You've now got broad majorities for huge social programs. Thus the other party won't just dismantle them when the pendulum eventually swings: They were part of enacting them!
The US is headed for a political shift as demography changes over the next 10-20 years. The left seems to want to jump past the first steps in what that entails. That keeps being a losing platform.
What would have happened if the US had consolidated the gains under Obama under Clinton instead of having 8 years of progress mostly torn down in 4 Trump years? Biden pushed too far, too early and left the race WAY WAY too late.
If you get substantially attacked from both the left and from the right of your party at the same time, you get squeezed in the middle. You look weak. The media pummels you all the time. Those on the left and righ side of your take on the issue might even explicitly agree that your policy is dumb. Congratulations! You're inedible for voters all over the place. You've lost this issue completely irrespective of policy.
This also happens all over Europe all the time. We know these mechanisms. Go center. Steal voters. Gradually move as you consolidate power by showing you've got the answers and build policy it becomes impossible to reverse. To do this, you need to win elections every two years over and over.
That's exactly my point. The Democrat brand is completely toxic while the policies are not.
The Democrats ran a horrible strategy. They didn't even try to tie themselves to any popular policies in any states. The messaging was essentially: "Donald Trump is singularly bad, Republicans are mostly good" The message worked: Donald Trump lost, other Republicans didn't.
Completely agree. Branding problem. As you said, these issues aren't leftist views, they're extremely popular across the spectrum. But the branding is terrible.
Agreed. And I define the center as "policies that overwhelming majorities of Americans support."
You need to establish your party and politics to be in the center before you can pass off policy as centrist without just being attacked for being "socialist" or otherwise running extremist issues on your platform.
That's why you need to play the game and go through all the motions. The Republicans have to own the solutions, at least to some degree, so they won't just get reversed later. That's why so many folks are interested in compromise and consensus. It provides inevitability: The battle is lost once and for all.
Once you implement affordable, universal healthcare, that can never be taken away from you.
Once you establish the right to affordable childcare, that can never be taken away. Every subsequent administration in the foreseeable future have to pay what that costs: Too many people will hate them if they're the ones to cut it.
Again, the only way to reach the position where you're in a position to do this effectively is by going to the center first, not by pandering to the left, who already have to choose your party unless they're willing to vote against their own interests (or stay at home which is effectively the same thing).
Right now, if the Democrats would run any of these issues nationally as a coherent platform, they'd get slammed as leftist and lose the election terribly.
The Democratic party has at least a three decade history of playing to the center. Specifically what would you do differently that would make people see them as centrists now when they haven't after all this time?
There was a golden opportunity in 2012 had Sanders had suspend his campaign when he had no way of becoming the nomination instead of spending a month (being extremely generous here) attempting to get concessions from Clinton as she was being pummeled from both the left and right instead of the party coalescing behind her.
I'd argue the result of that was a Trump presidency. Clinton is obviously to blame, but Sanders and everyone supporting his strategy are too.
The golden opportunity was facing the weakest presidential candidate in modern history to win a third term in a row. Judicial appointments, minimum wage and all sorts of things would have started shifting politics to the left. You shift politics little by little. That's why the Republicans have been so effective at dismantling and sabotaging government little by little and then complaining that the government shouldn't do things because they do a bad job because the Republicans have made it impossible for them to do a good job.
Now matter how far the Republicans manage to swing the political window to the right before the Democrats can do the same thing over the course of several terms. The Democrats need to steal Republican voters to win elections resoundingly.
If the Democrats are to be seen as centrist, they need to drop untenable language like embracing being socialists, like advocating for defunding the police.
The Democratic party managed to lose the working class in the middle of a pandemic and massive economic downturn where a president has done absolutely nothing, and enriched the rich even more! Why in the world didn't the democrats run a campaign on a few hugely important issues like competency, jobs/worker rights, police/legal reform, economic and pandemic relief, and taxing the super-mega rich for example?
What's to the right, in the center and to the left is relative. All of US politics is far to the right. That takes time to change.
The power the Republicans have had over the last decades is unity. The Democrats have the more popular agenda when you poll the issues. The party needs rebuilding from the ground up as a strong unified team.
I mean, the answers seem simple. I fully understand this is extremely difficult. While we're talking of the impossible things, I think the Democrats could play the center much more effectively if they weren't funded by large corporate interests. Then the other party being funded by those interests would clearly be the extreme.
I asked specifically what you would do differently. Saying we should have won rather than lost isn't a strategy. How would you position yourself as a centrist? Clinton was the center.
Bingo.
I'm saying Clinton's center strategy was sabotaged by the left in her own party. I'd consider that important context to consider. If you think it's irrelevant and her policy should be viewed in a vacuum as a "centrist loss" without that context, we disagree. The left wing of the Democrats tanked her chances. They knew they were doing it, but viewed it worth the risk.
My whole argument boils down to the fact that positioning oneself as a centrist has less to do with policy than process, messaging, party build and a platform based on issues with broad support throughout society that isn't viewed as being policy options "owned" by one side or the other politically.
Okay, but how would you do that? None of the supposed centrists did that. Biden ran predominantly on "I'm a nice guy" and Clinton ran on "I'm not Trump". How do you act as a centrist while building a platform based on issues with broad support that isn't viewed as being owned by one side or the other?
I've already outlined what the popular policies with broad support are. If you disagree with them, what do you think they should run on instead?
I tried to answer in part above.
There are surely many more issues, but I think the right strategy would be going with a few clear, simple goals.
Things that should be closed, like green energy reform since solar is cheaper than coal/gas/nuclear power, or the need to cut down the excessive military spending, the need to reform healthcare to a public option that will give more people care for much less money than the gigantic funding of healthcare profiteers - Those are among the issues I wouldn't mix in due to strategy. That has to come later.
Board economic issues that affects folk's wallets created taxation above 60% on the ultrarich decades ago. Politics for normal people again, so that people understand that politics affects them directly, their wallets, their futures, their children's' opportunities, their future retirements, help when they need it in their lives etc.
Workers rights, economic relief for regular people, and taxing the super-mega rich are considered "far left" by the supposed centrists. The centrists fundamentally don't believe in any of those things.
It may be tired but I think it is accurate. Dems lost how many seats in the house? How badly did they do in the senate races? How badly did the Dems do in the State House and Senate races? All that but they won the Presidency? That means that we had a lot of people splitting the ticket. Voting for Joe but choosing Republicans on the down ballot. What does that tell you about the Dems overall messaging.
You are correct that the "progressives policies" have a done well when disassociated from that socialism or "Demoncrat" moniker. And that is something to think on.
Interesting thought experiment: I wonder if instead of trying to get people elected to implement Progressive strategies it would be better to fund ballot initiatives.
To me, this shows that the Democrat's messaging worked in a very literal sense. The message was: "Donald Trump is singularly bad; Republicans are mostly good." Democrats made zero effort to tie themselves to popular policies, and shockingly little effort was made to paint Congressional Republicans as enablers of Donald Trump. The message should have included: Susan Collins is Donald Trump. Lindsey Graham is Donald Trump. David Perdue is Donald Trump.
I'd definitely like to see more of this. Non-partisan ballot initiatives.
Reading through your other post I think we are arguing the same side, and I must have misread some of your points in the above post.
The danger with any kind of name-calling is that you brand yourself as not worth listening to. That's what I think when I see people using "fascist" a lot. Do they know anything? Is there likely to be any signal there?
Throwing around words like that isn't data and it isn't telling the story of your own experience either. As strangers on the Internet, it's up to us to show that we're not just another idiot screaming into the void.
I think that's an... interesting way to interpret this election. One where a coalition of centrist candidates banded together to defeat a popular progressive candidate and then their guy barely squeaked over the finish line against a historically unpopular president, in the midst of an economic collapse and a totally botched response to a lung-melting pandemic, with near-zero downballot support. Like, I honestly don't see any way you could call this election a defeat of the "far left" when the candidates who failed the hardest at winning what should have been the easiest election win since 1932 were the centrist democrats more interested in distancing themselves from the left than from the Republicans. I don't know how much more evidence we need that the old guard corporate triangulation bunch are garbage politicians who can't win elections.
Bush got 271 electoral votes and -0.5% higher turnout than Gore in 2000.
Bush got 286 electoral votes and +2.5% higher turnout than Kerry in 2004.
Obama got 365 electoral votes and +7,2% higher turnout than McCain in 2008
Obama got 332 electoral votes and +3,9% higher turnout than Romney in 2012
Trump got 304 electoral votes and -2,2% higher turnout than Clinton in 2012.
If Biden wins Georgia (as things look like now) He'll win 306 electoral votes and after final counts will end somewhere in the +3.8-4.8% higher turnout than Trump this year.
When the votes are counted, This election was never a close election. A ton of people will be left with a different impression. That is not true. Election night and the days after were close, the election was never close.
Biden and Sanders were my two least favorite democratic candidates this year. They're simply too old. They have too much baggage. Sanders was absolutely thrashed in the primary in 2016. when he got 43% of the vote and lost to Clinton by more than 12 percentage points.
This year, Sanders got 26% and was defeated by Biden by more than 25 percentage points. Let that sink in. Almost twice as large a turnout for Biden as Sanders. Sanders ruined any chance another candidate could win. He tanked it. Destroyed, obliterated, pulverized are adequate words in the political landscape to describe what happened.
If you can't win the party, you don't stand a chance winning the American people. It's arithmetic.
This year's election saw record turnout. Where are all these people who'd supposedly be energized to vote? Wouldn't they show up for practically anyone given the completely correct assessment you have of the terrible state of the country after 4 years of Trump.
Those supposed left voters don't exist. That's what this election shows. They aren't there. Just like the supposed Bernie-bros who ended up voting for Trump instead of Clinton don't exist in an amount that would make a difference. That narrative runs contrary to facts.
I completely agree that the old guard Democrats can't win election and are a bunch of garbage politicians. After his decades of political experience, Sanders is placed clearly right in the middle of that group. Biden is in the middle of that group.
The solution isn't younger people from the left, but younger people in the center. The millions of voters show that. Obama sure energized that group and won two elections from the center.
Those who've stayed at home in previous election also turned up for Trump this year instead of supposedly being winnable for the left. They weren't. That group of possible leftist voters doesn't exist if they in the middle of a pandemic wouldn't bother to vote for a party who're promising them a strategy for feeding their families.
The downticket massacre that happened this year from a terribly weak campaign is owned by the whole Democratic party. It's a farce and a travesty when you look at results in government of these last four years in congress.
I guess we're just going to completely ignore how every other centrist candidate dropped out just before Super Tuesday while Bernie was still splitting the progressive vote with Warren then? Or how 2016 was essentially a protest candidacy that wildly overperformed? Or how those popular vote margins don't matter at all and the election was actually decided by a couple hundred thousand votes in squeaker elections in a handful of swing states? I mean it is pretty clear at this point that Democrats have a solid strategy for winning the popular vote I guess.
I am baffled both that you think there's a larger base of centrist youth than leftist youth, and that this is a more viable long term strategy. Obama won by (among other things) energizing the progressive base, even if he did end up governing like a centrist. Buttigeig lost, hard, by explicitly trying to tap in to that non-existent centrist base. I'd say there's a pattern to these types of candidacies, between Obama, Macron, Trudeau, maybe Clegg, and it's that they ride into office on a wave of dissatisfaction with the previous government, running insurgent candidacies buttressed with vague platitudes about 'change', 'hope', 'progress'. Then, they get into office, prove they're not really worth a damn by governing like the pluralistic conservatives they are, and their support fades as the only argument for their position becomes something like 'we're better than the actual conservatives'. It may or may not be enough to win reelection, but so far, after these sorts of candidates and parties have left power, the electorate has not treated them kindly.
Centrism and triangulation are dead end political strategies in the United States, probably in most of the English-speaking world and beyond, and I don't know how many more decades of resounding losses are needed to make that clear. Have you talked to people, swing state voters in historically red areas? I have, I live in one, and did a lot of work pushing Biden. People like bold, unabashedly progressive candidates, who they think will fight for them. That's what a lot of people saw in candidate Obama that didn't really bear out. What they don't like are mealy-mouthed centrists who pay a lot of lip service to progress, but think you have to do tepid social reform quietly in the dead of night, if at all.
To win the Senate, the Democrats need to win red seats in Republican states consistently. The US is the one country I can think of where you have the most to gain in elections by being centrist simply due to the Senate.
Then there's Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania. Essentially the means to win the presidency and House majority.
My friends and family largely live in Florida, Pennsylvania (and California). My crowd is clearly not the same as yours. Clinton won a lot of votes in my circle from traditional Republicans in 2016, Biden won way more in 2020 than that, despite all the conservative Trump judges.
Candidates are a package. If Trump has shown us anything, it's that the US is still a bigoted place. The Us isn't ready for Buttigieg. He's also too inexperienced politically to win older voters who generally value experience. there's still a huge penalty in races for president /vice-president from being a woman, or a minority of any kind. This is deeply rooted in the American psyche and I can't wait for it to die out as years pass.
Labour in the UK was decimated by going too far to the left under Corbyn. He showed a clear need for centrism. They lost to Boris Johnson! Resoundingly as the Conservatives have bungled Brexit over years.
I wish I were persuaded by your arguments. I'd want nothing more for it to be true so we could build a finely masked social security net through all parts of US society, have the super rich pay their fair share to pay for it and to go there tomorrow.
Radical policy gets reversed. Two steps forwards, often three steps back. Normalize a position, implement with broad support, build on that position and gradually push society in the right direction little by little. Social democracy isn't built in a decade. At least historically, it's built over the course of half a century or more.
I'm probably going to leave it off here, but I'm honestly curious what it would take to convince you of the abject failure of centrism that the last few decades haven't provided. What does a failure of centrism even look like that isn't this?
Personally, I think the reason that Democrats and Labor have lost so hard and so often is that they view the left wing of their parties as bigger enemies than their actual political opponents, and only ever run on what they aren't rather than what they are. Actual, left wing policies are wildly popular, and if these parties had the stones to own them, campaign on them, maybe we'd remember how and why democrats practically ran this county for the bulk of the last century. But as unteachable as the democratic party has proven to be, I'm sure I'll still be hearing about how it's all Bernie and AOC and BLM's fault for spooking the moderates while being I'm loaded into a boxcar.
Buttigeig didn't lose because of bigotry or lack of experience, he lost because he had no base. Nobody wanted the round two of faux-progressive centrism he was selling, they either wanted a return to normalcy, or the real deal.
The focus group in the post of "Biden-leaning Trump voters" seems to prove otherwise as does the DNC blowup about using the word socialist/socialism.
Re: your first point, I really don't think that's a winning strategy. The value I place in someone's political opinion rapidly approaches zero with every use of describing their political opponents as communists or fascists. Straight up, the Republicans aren't looking to Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism for inspiration, nor are the Democrats drafting up policy while cross referencing Marx's Capital. I think a lot of people see that kind of behavior and think less of the people engaging in it.
I think there's a chance that starting to take the tact of calling them fascists could help to ultimately curtail the practice of using these labels as insults. Right now, Republicans pay zero political cost whatsoever when they throw around socialist and communist. If they start getting called fascists--and they do not want to be called fascists--they might have to change their approach.
I don't know whether this would actually work in practice, but I do know for sure that the current Democratic approach is not stopping them from calling us socialists.
I think in practice, people just become more distant from each other. While this doesn't happen at a national political level, it does happen in communities all the time, and the result is usually pretty toxic and isolating - not exactly something that seems good to bring to the national stage. It would be nice if the RNC would stop beating the drum of "everything I don't like is socialism", but I don't think this is a good solution.
The only thing I've found that was the slightest bit effective was emailing the state RNC chair for my district, and telling him if he kept sending me those cringe inducing fliers about how Biden was the puppet of the far left socialists, that I would vote straight blue ticket.The impact is tiny, but at least the fliers stopped, and someone with some vague party authority had to deal with at least one complaint.
I just came to this thread to essentially type your post, exact same content, just worse grammar (which isn't good for discussions on linguistic nuance). Ignoring context is a powerful tool that is all too easy to abuse, especially on the internet.
The only small detail I would add is that over the past few years, we have entered an era where in a select few areas, progressives are now a big enough majority to be the "power" they were fighting in previous decades. Certainly not in society at large. But in some urban centers, college campuses, many branches of media, etc. Yet it seems like language used is still that of an underdog fighting upward. IMO much of the problems progressives face comes from their "fight the power" rhetoric suddenly feeling abusive since in certain positions, it comes off as oppressive/abusive. There seems to be a very slow but notable shift for the "rebellious"/underdog stance that's so appealing to young people to move to the right.
No, to make that clear: I don't think that all the alt-righty white kids are in actual danger of being oppressed. That's not the issue. The issue is language.
Agreed. Social media is where nuance and context go to die. It’s no surprise that lacking those things it ends up pushing social media consumers towards the extremes.
I'd argue that "Black lives matter" and "it's OK to be white" are at about the same level of sloganeering. BLM is shorter and has a better acronym, and they both might seem technically correct as written, if by "be white" you mean have a certain skin tone or one or several ancestries in a certain category.
I might argue that "being white", interpreted as trying to make "white" happen as its own political coalition, distinct from all the different more specific component ethnicities that actually have associated cultures and histories, is probably not OK.
I'd still argue that Black Lives Also Matter (BLAM) would work really well, when the outset is partially police shootings.
The whole idea of the BLM-movement is that black lives also matter, so it's just silly that isn't the slogan.
Occupy Wall Street is another movement like this where the slogan is horrible. Then even more than in the case of BLM, the slogan meant they never managed to get a clear message across about anything. People just kinda occupied Wall Street, and nothing happened. Why were they occupying Wall St? If you asked normal people, most wouldn't have a clue.
Occupy Wall Street was effective at doing exactly that. In terms of causing policy change the slogan wasn't that effective, but if they started with "tax the rich" they might not have so saliently occupied Wall Street. They also had the "99%" meme, which maybe was supposed to be doing the policy work.
BLAM is definitely easier to yell. But I think there's value in BLM's slogan being a very compact statement only about Black lives. The fact that many non-Black people are hesitant to state that Black lives matter, specifically, without adding themselves to the statement, illustrates the problem (namely, that people have trouble caring specifically about Black people and seeing them take up rhetorical space), and it makes the slogan a passable shibboleth. From a semantics point of view it matters little, but from a pragmatics point of view, where you think about things like what you're saying by what you don't say, the difference is important.
Notch tweeted "And we gave [n-word]s the right to vote, lol" in reply to some chud in 2012, so I have trouble believing he was ever "rational".
Come on, why do I have to defend someone who has fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole. I don't even play minecraft.
This is an obvious Photoshop even back then, it is even in the wrong font
Alright, I fell for that one. Thanks for correcting me. Teach me to comment before doing my research!
You fell for propaganda that was custom fit for 'you'. I have done it myself. Sorry if my response to you came across has harsh.
Wasn't that photoshopped?
Whelp. Didn't know about that one. Maybe he was better pre-twitter - either way its still jarring to see someone who had fame from a kids game falling so far.
The thing that really annoys me with people complaining that "defund the police" is a bad slogan is that in activist/prison abolitionist circles, it has never stopped meaning "defund the police". Please read https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/s/Defund-Toolkit.pdf for a good overview.
From my perspective, it seems like centrist progressives who don't think we should defund the police saw the phrase gain traction during the protests, boosted it, and then tried explaining that it meant something else (see: 8 can't wait). Of course random people are going to think that doesn't make any sense! People can tell when you aren't saying what you mean. I think if someone wants to see Reform The Police be the police protest slogan of choice, then it's on them to go build an activist movement around that goal.
This is really how all ideas spread if generalised. Someone - a person who's dealt with the issue, a politician, a scientist, a philosopher, etc. - comes up with it, and then it percolates outwards into society. If it becomes popular enough, it is mainstreamed, and is often watered down or changed by people less acquainted with the original notion. I don't mean "less acquainted" in an exclusively negative manner though - it's a chief part of the process through which ideas spread. You could say that nobody really comes up with an idea ex nihilio, they merely composit and change existing ideas based on the cultural fabric and their lived experiences. Science stands upon the shoulders of giants.
In this case, though, I personally don't think the "sanewashing" is right per se. If you have trouble advocating your version of ideas, use your own slogans, rather than using the clout of successful activists. They complain that the original ideas aren't "popular" enough, while taking for granted ideas promulgated by current radicals' intellectual predecessors. Universal healthcare was once an extremely left-wing idea constantly derided as communistic; its creators in the UK, Canada, and New Zealand were all avowed socialists.
It's funny how what's "too radical" is always what's considered radical today, but the radical policies of the past are OK. I understand why to a certain extent - most people don't think about historical perspective too much, and humans are naturally averse to change - but that doesn't make it right.
While the original post points out that such policies aren't popular with the general public. But the public isn't always right. Ask what people in the antebellum South US thought about Black people. Or those in medieval Europe about the humors and vitalities of the body, or the efficacy of bathing. Or the public a few years ago about Black Lives Matter. It would be egotistical and myopic to deny that many principles that we take as given or hold dear will be considered backwards and absurd in the future.
Democracy is good because it provides the public with a tool to prevent corruption and out-of-touch decisions, not because they are always right about everything. People's opinions are never come from nowhere; they are shaped by the friends, family, and more. But most of it eventually makes its way back to the media, a fact that those on both the left and right frequently love to bemoan, and for good reason. While many reporters and journalists do highly admirable work, media by its very nature favours a certain perspective. If an idea is "out of the norm", it is often more likely to be dismissed. This can be both a good thing and a bad. This is why activists work tirelessly to mainstream ideas - well, until attempts at change are frustrated by a regression to the mean.
This isn't a forum I normally read and I'm out of touch, so I don't know about the communities they talk about. But perhaps someone else can share their experiences?
I'm not quite sure which communities you mean. Since r/neoliberal is socially very progressive but is still rooted in older communities (like r/badeconomics) where many people still remember the "culture war" between the "SJWs" and the Alt-Light/Alt-Right that took place, but since it leans economically to the center/center-right there is a heavy disdain for rose-twitter and other socialist leaning spaces (especially on reddit with fringe communities like ChapoTraphouse, FullCommunism, the BernieBro Subbreddits that refused to acknowledge that Bernie endorsed Biden, etc.).
Sometimes even outright "wars": One of the earliest things r/neoliberal did that gained attention was to "challenge" socialist subreddits to a charity marathon to prove their moral superiority.
The sub spent it's whole existence complaining either about trump or about socialists/"progressives" and how both their proposals and their messaging would alienate voters and are out of touch with most of the electorate. This election basically proved their point with the moderate Biden winning the presidency, but left-wing democrats downballot heavily underperforming Biden. Ilhan Omar for example only managed to get 65% in her district while Biden got 80%, in a blue-collar district that, as Pelosi once put it "could be won by a glass of water for the democrats".
If we take the past two elections as our sample size, there truly isn't any evidence that center-right liberals outperform progressives, as the situation was reversed in 2016. If anything, this election was a reflection of how one viewed Trump's presidency. Anecdotally, I haven't heard a single issue that mobilized liberal voters other than "getting Trump out" or "undoing the damage Trump's been doing." Again, anecdotally, every leftist I know from democratic socialists to anarchists voted for Biden (not out of a love for rightist liberalism, but as a risk calculation.) Many didn't in 2016, which seems to prove the importance of the progressive wing for democrats to win.
I've not seen any evidence in the subreddits you've listed that they fail to acknowledge that Bernie endorsed Biden. They largely viewed Bernie as a possible instrument for more material politics, not a savior or some sort of cult of personality. This has been a pretty common strawman by right-wing democrats to smear progressives.
So that is why r/OurPresident, a Sub with over 100k Subs banned everyone that argued for voting for Biden? https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/g0e3ma/rourpresident_mods_are_removing_any_comments_that/
That is why r/SandersForPresident, a sub with nearly 500k subs told people that Bernie is still in the Primary, although he endorsed Biden?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/g0wyb9/sanders_endorses_biden_when_the_me_betrays_the_we/ ?
CTH telling their listeners that their vote doesn't matter now? (I can't link to anything on their sub because it got banned)
And because Progressives are way more appealing then moderates literally none of the house seats gained in swing states in 2018 where progressives, and all of them were moderates.... take it from https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18071700/progressive-democrats-house-midterm-elections-2018 or look up who won seats.
And yes, having never head a single issue that mobilized liberal voters other than getting trump out is truly anecdotal. Healthcare, Immigration Reform and housing costs are all issues that liberals also care about, there is just a different perception on how they should be solved.
In fairness, those listed subreddits weren't the one's you claimed had push this agenda before, and I don't participate on Sanders-focused subreddits, so I have no way of evaluating the validity of the claim on those subreddits. The CTH podcast encouraged its listeners to vote, I don't know anything about the subreddit.
Onto your claims about 2018, progressives did win multiple key races. 2018 wasn't as great as I'd have hoped, but AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, among many others won. Your own source lists more progressive wins than losses. Even if I concede the point, we have a sample size of... 2 and a half now, where nearly half of our sample size contradicts your claim? A Biden win isn't a huge win for conservative democrats. Trump should be a softball pitch for any non-Trump candidate, and right-wing democrats can only beat him half the time.
Just a decade ago, we had every branch of government controlled by right-wing democrats, and the needle hasn't moved on healthcare, housing costs, or immigration reform. For many working-class folks (myself included,) healthcare costs went up, as well as housing costs! The only liberals meaningfully talking about healthcare are progressives and the rightists who attempt to sanewash them.
? which subs did I claim push this agenda in a comment before? I only talked about r/neoliberal and r/badecononomics which are centrist subs. And regarding house-seats, I should have maybe said "swing districts", because these districts are so blue that democrats could nominate a glass of water and it would still win. AOC runs in New York City, Rashida Talib in Detroit, claiming that it is their progressiveness that won these districts is a very bold statement.
Also, did you even read what I wrote in the first comment? I explicitly mentioned Ilhan Omar as an example were a very progressive underperformed Biden by 15% in her own district.
EDIT: Indeed, I referenced CTH, FC and "BernieBro" subs, which I forgot I mentioned. I won't dig through FullCommunism but I think It's not a big secret that communist are not particularly fond of Biden. CTH and "BernieBro" subs I think I explained sufficiently.
I don't think the Omar/Biden example is very good evidence of your point. It just shows that there were more centrist or rightist Democrats that were willing to defect down-ballot than there were leftists who were willing to defect up-ballot, which isn't surprising given the circumstances.
Well, that's a very complicated way of saying that progressive downballot candidates were more unpopular on average.
That seems very reductive to me. The alternative to Ilhan Omar in that race wasn't a quasi-fascist cheese ball.
Okay, but is “sanewashing” something that you’ve seen?
depending on the community and topic, yes. Defund the police was a strong one, where everyone (the more left-wing people that I follow) on twitter tried to explain what it actually is supposed to mean. I can't pinpoint it down to specific persons though.