Bruce beat me to it, but I think the important bit is for the leadership (particularly the presidential candidate) to forcefully push back against it.
This isn’t as easy for Democrats, granted. But imagine you’re a low info voter. You see a million Republican ads about trans women in sports or defund the police or open borders or whatever. And you go online and yep, you see what seems like a sizable number of liberals advocating for it. Huh. But ok, is this really what the Democrats stand for, or is this a fringe position? So you go see what the leaders are saying. And what do they say? It’s some incomprehensible, mealy mouthed bullshit because they’re too afraid to make anyone mad. So you’re left with this confused feeling that well, maybe the Democrats really do support this, I’m not sure but I certainly know where the Republicans stand.
The problem isn’t purity testing, it’s purity testing too much. It’s obvious that Dems should purity test on something like January 6.
One of my arguments about the left is that they are bad at setting priorities. Everything becomes a priority to them when they aren’t even strong enough to wrest control of the nomination away from the party establishment. They should pick one issue and make that their one hill that they are willing to die on. I think it should have been billionaires/class warfare. I don’t think it should have been social issues and definitely not Gaza. It also shouldn’t be climate change because that’s something that you don’t run on but implement anyways.
That doesn’t mean those issues aren’t important or that you can’t have a strong opinion on them, just that they are not the stuff of purity tests. You find some way to co-exist with people who disagree, so long as they agree with you on your one big issue.
But as far as last night’s speech, I have one major complaint. He listed all the people that another Trump administration would be hard for: women, children, immigrants, poor people, seniors, the middle class, the media, the justice system, and Ukraine. He didn’t mention the people in Gaza. We can’t be picky and choose who we want to have support for during this time and I felt like that was intentional.
Let’s not pretend these people aren’t completely insufferable.
This is what single-issue activist organizations were SUPPOSED to be for, until they started trying to weigh in on things outside of their purview. Stick with the one issue, and it makes a bigger tent.
Instead you have Planned Parenthood making a statement about Oct. 7th, then having to retract it because other people got pissed, and now a sizable chunk of their coalition is gone and their focus is scattered.
Like, someone can be pro-choice and pro-Israel, and exist in Planned parenthood activist circles alongside someone who is pro-choice and pro-Palestinian, as long as the planned Parenthood work stays singularly focused on abortion!
The YIMBY movement does it right. Consequently, there are folks from across the political spectrum that are YIMBY activists. CA YIMBY is one of the biggest and most effective housing activist groups in the state, because they are singularly committed to their issue and don’t stray outside of it.
What are you talking about though? The thing that drives people away from what most people consider the left in the USA (which just means Democrats) is the purity testing of what they call “political correctness”. You still want to do that purity testing don’t you?
I think you’re kinda mad because you get purity tested for being a business owner or a capitalist, but you purity test people for not being sex positive enough. You might even purity test anyone who is at all religious out of the tent.
Also, the right does the same thing among themselves, it’s just happening in a bubble you’re not looking into.
I can’t stop having the takeaway that after all of this joe biden may go down as one of the worst presidents OAT. He had a complete and total mandate to go after trump after Jan 6 and did nothing with it, wouldn’t be seen in public, etc. Then resigning at the latest possible second which I think was definitely a variable in this landslide. I liked the direction the FTC was going (all of which is surely going to be dismantled quickly after trump takes office if not sooner) and lina khan’s direction was awesome. I never once believed though it’d result in big anti trust judgments like the one google was supposedly heading towards - to the point where it looked like the company could be split up - because in this country, bribery is essentially legal as long as you can maintain the most threadbare excuse of plausible deniability or even more lately just declare it as a “tip.” Do you think that wasn’t a factor in trump’s sentencing delay? Of course it was. They could easily do it so I must assume they would just do it because it’s in their extreme interest and they can. These companies have unlimited money. Of course they’re in the pockets of decision makers.
So for me, a disillusioned biden voter, even before the drop-out I was already ready to call it quits because of the way this had been going. I signed up for none of it.
That’s dumb as hell. I know he’s blaming the results on minorities like so many people are, so explain what it is that Kamala did that drove off the more conservative minorites there?
He might be shocked to find out what Kamala said about border security and enforcement for example.
