NPR posted an article yesterday that strongly encouraged centrism: Voters Face A Big Decision In 2020: Could A Lesson From Frederick Douglass Help?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/trump_favorableunfavorable-5493.html
It looks like he got a big bump in favorability right after the election and then it went down but his favorability the day of the election and right before was worse than it is now.
His peak favorable number from right after the election is almost the same as today although his unfavorable rating has risen
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This is just a mess of an article.
Douglas supported the moderate in 1856 who lost.
Then he supported the moderate in 1860 who won, but had no plans to actually do what Douglas wanted.
Then there was a literal civil war, which resulted in the moderate doing the thing that the abolitionists wanted to do from the beginning.
And the lesson is that picking the moderate was the right choice for… reasons?
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I absolutely hate that this narrative is just assumed to be true by so much of the population. Maybe the candidate best position to win is the same guy that is proposing sweeping change.
For fuck’s sake, what happened in 2016? The centrist lost to the radical guy proposing sweeping change.
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I’m just going by 538:
Even if Trump is as popular as he was in ‘16, Biden only has to be a slightly better candidate than Hillary and I think that’s a very low bar (though it’s not impossible he fucks it up).
They were actually talking about his decision in 1856 to switch from endorsing a pro-abolitionist random dude from New York to endorsing this hip new Republican party that started up and was for keeping slavery but not allowing it in new states. Pretty obviously using slavery as a metaphor for the current health care debate and how it’s better to make incremental change to the ACA than to make wild changes like M4A.
They covered that but it was only important enough to be a parenthetical
(The choice is not necessarily either-or; in 2016, Republicans chose the candidate who promised the biggest change, who also won.)
Dunno if it’s more likely than not, but certainly not a terribly long shot.
The word “conspiracy” is used as a substitute for thoughtful criticism all the time. There are all kinds of ways where groups with similar interests both react to each other and informally coordinate without it being the illuminati.
He’s still running? Lol boomers.
This seems like a huge dis to Biden.
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Lol endorsing Bennett. Yeah, he must really not like Biden.
Imagine being Michael Bennet and finding out you just got a new endorsement today. It must be like Christmas morning for him.
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Moderation is a continuum, though, not a binary. Douglass’s support of the “moderates” then, they were still perceived as pretty radical, just not quite as radical.
Tbh I’m not sure how much credence I give to the description of “keep current slavery, just don’t expand it to new states” as a pretty radical position back then.
Like, the opposing side considers “moderately improve Obamacare” to be pretty radical today, but that doesn’t mean we should let the debate be framed that way.
The moderate position was to expand slave and free states equally, maintaining the status quo. Slave states, perhaps rightfully so, thought that expanding free states only would inevitably result in the free states forming a coalition to ban slavery.
Maybe the middle position allowed for slavery, but characterizing it as moderate makes it sound like abolition was a brand new unimaginably progressive idea in 1860, but it wasn’t.
It wasn’t new or unimaginable, but I can’t say it had much representation among anyone with one or more levers of power.
I think we’re using the term “moderate” differently. The only sense in which having new slave states is “moderate” is in the sense that a bunch of white people on one side wanted slaves, and a bunch of white people on the other side didn’t. By that same logic having abortion in the north but not in the south would be a moderate position on reproductive rights. It is ceding the Overton window to people who are morally in the wrong.
A more reasonable way of looking at it, imo, is that the US was (and still is) a deeply conservative/abusive country with fascistic impulses that are not all that far beneath the surface, and all of the realistic options fell in that basket. Our best case scenario was killing half a million people so that we could kinda sorta free black people into lives of extreme prejudice and hardship for the next 150 years and, in many cases, still basically slavery. Like, look at Angola Penitentiary and tell me that’s not just modern day slavery operating in the open. We haven’t even come close to what a “moderate” resolution to slavery might have looked like, let alone an actual equitable remedy involving reparations and punishment/shame for the perpetrators.
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So what happens tonight? I’m gonna be pretty disappointed if Bernie rolls with “this could be a misunderstanding,” though it might be the right move politically.