Really think it’s just not a very good analogy tbh.
Sigh, so we’re doing multi-edits, OK. If the progressives have already taken over, how come Biden’s the nominee? In what sense were the Tea Party, who famously succeeded in driving the Republicans right, engaged in “purely performative politics”? Do you think Tea Partiers didn’t vote? And, as I said the last time someone posted that dogshit article, collusion against a left-electoral insurgency is trivial to reconcile with Marx.
What any of this has to do with anything is beyond me. This one time at Band Camp, Billy Corgan made a ton of money, in conclusion, vote blue no matter who?
I’d be a lot more open to these feel-good arguments and positive thinking if the team I’m always being told I need to support had ever accomplished anything at all in the 1/2 century I’ve been on this planet. Like yo, I’m not some 20 year old who just developed these hot takes after a bong session in the dorm. I have been politically active and well informed for a very long time.
I used to believe the exact same things I’m still being told itt. I have changed my mind. If you disagree with me and don’t respect my decision that’s fine, but please spare me the same tired arguments I’ve been hearing my entire life. I am already very well aware of them and I have rejected them.
The current failure with regards to the pandemic seems to be more of a failure of the system than specifically stuff that trump is doing. The stock buybacks that have left every company broke, the fact that we have all the best pharmaceutical research companies in the world here but we still can’t actually produce a good test, dems still hemming and hawing over the deficit. biden might be doing marginally better but the country would still be falling apart.
that article is dumb as fuck and considering simp is one of the closest people to David Atkins in this forum it’s very fitting that he is spewing it over two threads
Democrats had fuck-all to do with that. The LGBTQ community fought and died in the face of outright hostility from both parties for decades. Being reluctantly dragged across the finish line isn’t leadership.
McElwee, the founder of the polling and policy group Data for Progress, is one of those young lefty insurgents, a proud limit-stretcher from the AOC-Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. But he’s a data guy as well as a progress guy, and he has some thoughts about why Sanders lost so handily to Joe Biden, an avatar of the old-school centrist Democratic thinking that McElwee yearns to disrupt.
Let’s hear 'em Big Sean.
He obviously grasps the allure of a slogan like Abolish ICE, but he also grasps the dangers of purism; he quips that he always advises politicians, like the patients in prescription drug ads, to ask their campaign managers if Abolish ICE is right for their districts. McElwee is big on metrics and policy details, and he wishes the rest of the left was, too.
If you had to boil it down to one problem, it was the belief the Sanders people articulated early on that in a big field, they could win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote. You know, elections tend to be won with 50 percent of the vote.
MOAR VOTES = BETTER. Scintillating.
If you’re not even trying to attract 50 percent to your vision, it leads to this view that you don’t need to persuade anyone, you just need to lock in the base and mobilize new voters. That’s setting yourself up for failure. And it’s inspired some very pernicious thinking in the progressive world: Those people who don’t believe what we believe, we can’t win them, so fuck them. You saw this most aggressively on Twitter, where you saw people say: “We need to crush these people, they’re forever lost to us.”
Ok, if there’s gonna be more of this I might cut this exercise short. I don’t know if Big Sean is falling in the trap or being dishonest, but it’s a common trap. It’s reversing the causality. Bernie settled for 30 because the other 70 didn’t believe the same things and couldn’t be persuaded.
It’s babybrain shit. Distilled further, it’s like when my sister and I were little and she’d troll me when I asked for a favor. She’d say no and add something mean, I’d say something mean back, and she’d say, “Well, I was going to until you just said that mean thing.”
“Bernie shouldn’t have said ‘They don’t believe what we believe and we can’t win their votes’ to the people who told him ‘We don’t believe what you believe and you can’t win our votes’ otherwise those people would have believed what he believed and voted for him.”
Just stick a brain melting ray up my nose into my sinus cavity. All the way deep like a fucking covid test.
I don’t know, but it may have been a completely viable strategy to get the nomination by gunning for a plurality of committed voters. It’s possible that the odds of winning a two-person race against any mainstream candidate were low and they had polling to indicate this. I doubt it, but it’s not automatically wrong to try and ride a plurality to the nomination in a contested field. That the strategy got blown up on Super Tuesday is not sufficient evidence that it was wrong.
Not that I think it’s what they were trying to do. But yeah of course gunning for 50% is right but since Bernie isn’t willing to say lol screw your health people that wasn’t really an option.
When we shut ourselves off from conversations about how to persuade voters, we’re making it a lot harder for progressives to win elections and deliver on progressive policy goals. Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.
Oh fuck I know where all roads lead.
You need constant feedback on your issues. I think one reason South Carolina and Super Tuesday came as such massive surprises was the campaigns focused on what moves small-dollar donors on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Yeah, a viral ad with heated rhetoric can raise millions of dollars, but you don’t see the Americans who get turned off by it. There’s no emoji for that. They just go about their daily lives and don’t vote for you; you’re not even trying to reach them.
Fuck. He’s really going 10 Hitlers in a trenchcoat.
But also,
Look, the Democratic party is a coalition party with five partners: African-American groups, Latino groups, women’s groups, unions and progressive groups. If you’re only one of five factions, maybe one fourth of the party, you should only expect to win about one fourth or one fifth of the victories. You need to work with other groups in the coalition to achieve political success. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose, that’s how life works.
