It’s absolutely a deliberate tactic: all of the jokes about Nazi punching and defining large swaths of the GOP as fascist. Old 2+2 pol said over and over that deplatforming, AOC style dunks etc are good.
The above is toxic to democracy.
It’s understandable that leftists would do it anyway because they believe that Trump or Reagan or someone killed democracy anyway. Also that they believe that being toxic is the best way to push leftist policy by trying to shrink the right end of the Overton Window. I lean toward agreeing with them as far as effectiveness.
So the question is whether one cares more about democracy or leftist policy. I lean toward the former, but both are good. Like most seemingly intractable political disputes, the sticking point is different people valuing different things. There is very little logic behind what people value.
Nothing would save democracy more than getting money out of politics and so far the Bernie wing is the only one that wants to do that.
I mean how much of Jmans incorrect view on M4A was due to big pharma etc putting out complete horseshit about it? He had a bunch of factually incorrect views on M4A and I think a lot of that was probably propaganda. If he had the truth from the beginning I don’t think he ever would have held the opinion he did.
If he had known he would also be getting dental/vision and all the other good shit Bernie wants in M4A and he would be going to the same hospital, and that his union could then renegotiate for better wages or other good benefits etc I think he would of been like fuck yeah lets do this.
This. And like the thing is, it’s easy to be polite and civil when you’re a supporter of the status quo. When you don’t want major change, of course anything is acceptable to you and you’re mystified by vehement opposition to it.
Centrists get offensive as well, they get offensive about trangressions against The Discourse. On this forum we had several people, including skydiver, be like “brahs this looks like sexism to me” for people calling out Warren’s awful behaviour, which is an offensive accusation. “Your opposition to Warren is sexism, frat bros” is totally fine, all in the game, but “your opposition to M4A is selfishness and your candidate is a creep”? SHRIEK! GASP! MUH CIVILITY! Give me a break.
It was the same thing with Rogan. Polite liberal discourse is absolutely sacrosanct and you’re allowed to shriek hysterically* on Twitter about transphobia and toxicity and “straight white men” and whatnot for even mild offences against this orthodoxy, but getting animated about policy distinctions, including questions like whether people have a right to healthcare, is a mystifying offence against civility. Can’t we all just get along?
The function of this is to maintain the hegemony of the educated liberal class in the Democratic Party. The only capital offence is to not be a Good Person, meaning an educated person who pays homage to all the correct liberal pieties. As long as you’re in the club, who gives a shit exactly what policy you support, or if you’re friends with Henry Kissinger, or supported the Iraq War, or ran an explicitly racist police state while a Republican mayor of New York.
if you thought even briefly about calling this out, you’re part of the problem
I think that’s just the nature of social media. It’s designed to exacerbate our anxiety and impulsiveness, but even if it was an accident, I can’t help but go on Twitter and perceive the scope of the audience. It’s hard enough for people to engage with ONE opinion. Now they’re suddenly confronted with (the perception of) hundreds or thousands or millions of opinions at once.
And man are we all guilty of the assumption that if we experienced it, then everyone has experienced it. And if we’re not aware of it, it never happened. Gravity was not discovered until I read about it. And if every experience I’ve had with a Bernie bro says they’re assholes, well, maybe I should stop saying hey why pay now when you can KLOBUCHARGE it
The GOP is Trump and 50m+ racists but tell me more about how “toxicity” from the AOC/Bernie Bros is how we got here. Was a dumb take after the 2016 election (the media was too mean to the racists) and it’s dumber now.
Neo-Liberal Dems absolutely need to get called out and shamed for what they really are which is a major part of the problem.
The other thing is, I think most people do see through this bullshit. They don’t like the status quo, establishment politicians. I dont think Bloomberg can spend his way out of his terrible history, but he will try.
Trump gave everyone to his left the moral high ground like hokie said. Once you support Bloomberg or oppose m4a, that’s gone.
I do want to say btw that I think skydiver was treated poorly ITT. The only post I’ve ever flagged in my time on this forum was a post attacking her. I just also think that a lot of the complaints about “Bernie Bros” come from people who spend their lives scolding people “X is racist”, “Y is misogynist”, “you are a bad person for not disavowing Joe Rogan” etc and then when they get told “you are a bad person for not supporting M4A” break down into tears about being viciously attacked. Even the name “Bernie Bros” is a form of attack, it goes on constantly from those type of people and they seem totally unaware of it.
Pour one out for her primary challengers political careers. Not a good idea to run against someone whose over/under to being the most powerful person in the party is 10 years. She’s also obscenely good at raising money and the best person nationally at political messaging. She won last time with no resources, this time she’s going to be a well funded incumbent.
How hilarious is it that the centrists are trying to run someone against AOC who basically raised about 6% of what the DNC did last year. Spoiler, she broke their back when she was raising basically $0 so they just want to waste her money so she will primary one less of them. In before current DNC leadership is thrown the f out.
To return to actual content, there’s a pretty good “Why millennials support Bernie in one chart” article here, and its one reason why I am like “uhhhh” to the idea that FREE COLLEGE is going to fix anything:
The percentage of Americans who are looking for a job but can’t find one is now near half-century lows. And yet, the “full employment economy” that awaits this year’s graduating class looks quite different than the one that welcomed their Gen-X and boomer predecessors. In earlier boom-times, the labor market evinced an insatiable demand for white-collar workers. Today’s, by contrast, has more aspiring professionals than it knows what to do with.
Put differently: Even as the price of a college diploma has risen nigh-exponentially (thereby forcing the rising generation of college graduates to saddle themselves with onerous debts), the value of such diplomas on the U.S. job market has rapidly depreciated. And there is little reason to believe that this state of affairs will change, no matter how long the present boom is sustained. According to the Labor Department’s estimates, the five fastest-growing occupations in the United States over the next ten years will be solar-panel installers, wind-turbine technicians, home health aides, personal care aides, and occupational therapy assistants. Not a single one of those jobs requires a four-year college diploma. Only occupational therapy assistants need an associate’s degree.
Throughout my (1990s) childhood and adolescence, leaders in both major parties heralded the arrival of a “knowledge economy,” and attributed rising income inequality to a “skills gap.” Our economic system was still capable of providing a broad middle class with high-wage, high-quality jobs; it just needed more Americans to accrue the levels of skill and education that the jobs of tomorrow required. There was an endless supply of cushy, professional-class posts awaiting those who answered our economy’s demand for highly educated workers. Economic security would come to those who did their homework.
But this story has proven to be little more than a self-flattering delusion of our (highly educated) political class. Our economy only needs so many lawyers, consultants, and financial analysts (let alone, journalists ). Nor, as presently structured, can it sustain an ever-growing caste of well-remunerated coders. We have a lot of elderly people who need help going to the bathroom, and a lot of manual labor that our robots aren’t dexterous enough to perform. Most of the work that our society truly needs to get done every day doesn’t require elite academic or intellectual capacities. And thanks to the collapse of the American labor movement, most that blue and pink-collar work pays terribly. The two occupations poised to add the most jobs to our economy over the next ten years — home and personal care aides — pay an average salary of about $24,000 a year.
I mean, is it really that the “centrists” are trying to run someone against her, or is it just some rando city councilperson with delusions of grandeur?
At least AOC will have the complete support of the party as an incumbent, and any contractors working with this guy will be blackballed. That’s how this works, right?
I don’t know if you’re @'ing me or not, but it seems perfectly fine to say that people who don’t support M4A are bad, as it is perfectly fine to say JR tends to be a sack of shit whose endorsement should have passed without acknowledgement.
You seem to be very close to saying straight up that issues like transphobia and misogyny are niche concerns invented by educated liberals to satisfy their perpetual need to feel morally superior, which seems to imply that these issues aren’t worth caring about, or that nobody authentically cares about them, which is wrong.
