Doesn’t follow. Competent pandemic response can save hundreds of thousands. Rebuilding the state department is good for long term international influence which is good for us. Maybe let some of the immigrant kids out of cages. No there’s no chance a Biden administration will do enough, but that’s pretty fucking far from not doing anything.
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Man, I appreciate your passion but to me this just seems like you’re out of touch with the people you’re advocating for. I could expound on all the demographics who will be most impacted (PoC, immigrants, LGBT+, women, etc.), but I can also just tell you that I have 5-6 teenagers out of ~25 total kids on my caseload who are now measurably less suicidal post-election.
Biden doesn’t change much for white dudes hoping for better health insurance, agreed. But for minority, LGBT+, and female abuse victims who have spent their whole lives terrorized and prejudiced against by authoritarian abusers, the contrast between these two presidents is immense.
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Hey guys, if we all ignore victor and his shitposting garbage maybe he’ll stop posting. That would do more to help people than he has likely ever done.
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Victor reminds me so much of the old Anarcho-Capitalists on 2+2, tbh. Almost completely indistinguishable.
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I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that’s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back — in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently — every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that’s awkward. But I think it’s a natural consequence of polarization and ticket-splitting declining. I think progressives try to get around this awkward reality by saying, “Well, Republicans are going to demonize us no matter what we say or do.” But I don’t think that kind of nihilism is justified. What they say actually does matter. Parties and candidates that say less controversial things, and are associated with less-controversial ideas, win more elections.
I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary. But moderates don’t have a monopoly on popular ideas and progressives don’t have one on unpopular ideas. There are a lot of left-wing policies that are both popular and transformational. Worker co-determination. A federal job guarantee. There’s still a lot we can do.
And we also still have a chance to limit how much we need to compromise by winning in Georgia and then passing sweeping structural reforms. But if we don’t, then the reality is that the median voter who gets to determine Senate control is going to remain a non-college-educated 55-year-old in a pretty Republican state who voted for Donald Trump. Probably twice. That’s who we’ll need to win over in order to govern.
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Victor at least has a POV that I find reasonable, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. It’s something that ought to be represented here. I just wish Victor did a better job of it.
The old ACers, on the other hand, can all die in a grease fire that doesn’t get put out because there’s no fire department which wouldn’t have roads to travel on to get to the fire if it existed.
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Ah, man, you’re right! I totally missed the nuance of this exchange. Let me go re-read everything to see what I missed.
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If you’re not, and looking for one, there’s always Kroshopkin. F’real. Woocommerce is not horrible, but it is really slow, and one of the projects I’m looking to do (even without any solid hopes of commercial success) is rolling my own software for it.
That last segment you’ve been saving for a while or you recycled lol. It’s too good to have not been used on an actual ACer from 2p2.
The fact that Donald Trump got elected seems like a very obvious counter-example.
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Trump primarily campaigned on things that were popular, especially in 2016. He picked and chose from most effective issues on left and right.
Obvious he is a fucked up dude who had no sincerity in his stated positions and he pressed the advantage to the point of grotesqueness on stuff like immigration… so squeaked out electoral college win instead of decisive victory.
Cocaine Mitch saddling him with the R plutocratic establishment agenda really fucked him up.
Trump’s main policy was building a 2000 mile wall, which was unpopular. Another of his big policies was banning Muslims from entering the US, also controversial and did not have majority support.
The thesis is false, at least applied to the general population. Maybe he means uncontroversial among white rubes from the backwaters of America, but then you have to take into account how easy it is for the rightwing machine to take a popular idea and activate whites against it culturally (“M4A? You want taxpayers to buy healthcare for illegals?!”).
The biggest popular “policy” that Trump bleated about in 2016 was promising more health care at lower cost. Sounds good! Of course it’s complete bullshit but effective specifically because the eDems are busy fighting off the left wing of their own party on this exact issue.
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Apparently lots of people actually thought the $1,200 checks with Trump’s name on them were from Trump, shit like that just drives me completely insane.
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It’s only shitty if put any weight whatsoever on the words of the edge lord spouting such shit.
Bashing Muslims and wanting to keep out people from the various Mexicos was popular.
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Except by ‘move to the median voter’ what he really means is ‘move to the median voter after accounting for the R+5 structural advantage in House/Senate/EC’. It’s legitimately hard to do that without depressing the base.
I’ve heard this argument many times, but I just don’t buy it. Trump mentioned his (fake) great healthcare plan like twice in 2016 maybe? Who even knew about this plan? Was it mentioned at the debates? When you look at the reasons people voted for Donald Trump, no one is talking about healthcare, and if they do, it’s to the effect of repealing socialist Obamacare.
From what I can find, the Muslim ban had majority support.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN19Q2FW
But Trumpism isn’t about any specific policies. It’s about being explicitly racist and making it okay for people to be a Nazi in public.
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