Saying that the Democratic Party needs to splinter into multiple factions that don’t vote with each other. Basically burning down the centrists in hopes of pulling the party left. There’s a power vacuum with that, and that’s filled by the GOP, sorry, that’s just the truth. I won’t tolerate that. I do believe we’re building toward a 3 party system, but not until at least 2030.
I don’t believe we are building towards a 3-party system. Duverger’s law and all that.
My plan is pretty simple. Shift the rhetoric of the party towards a populist message of class warfare, targeting the political establishment, banks, corporations, and the Wall Street elite. Lean strongly into minorities being the base, even if it means turning off uneducated whites and driving them into the arms of the Republican Party (moreso than has already happened).
I’m not opposed to people being moderates. I understand why they think that way. I am opposed to people being weenies who want to go back to some fabled past where bipartisanship was the real. I think that era is simply dead. I can live with a moderate so long as they are partisan and want to fight Republicans. I don’t want some Vichy centrist who thinks that compromise and appeasement should be the default.
Who do you mean by “we”? Who is that exactly? Because I think I see the problem here. You think progressives are on your side when we would no longer want a Biden presidency than another Bush or Obama presidency. Yeah, Obama always said the right things. Was a fantastic orator. But he squandered almost all of his political capital and got nowhere near done what he should have. So you can have your moderate centrists. We may as well be in a different party. We can’t afford another 8 years of that because all will be lost by then
It’s basically a 3 party system now because the left is so fractured. If we can reform the left (that is, do exactly the opposite of what nunnihi proposes) we can win and do a great deal of good as one Democratic party
I get where nunnihi is coming from. I’m not an idiot. I just vehemently disagree with the strategy. Objectively, what it sounds like he’s saying is that we must win 2020 at all costs. Even if it means stagnating for another 8 years. I disagree mainly because I don’t think we have another 8 years in us. It’s now or never. We have the popular vote now and need to use it. Show me one poll where the majority doesn’t agree with M4A, increased minimum wages, eliminating college and medical debt, ending these unwinnable wars ASAP, racial and gender equality, ending the rigged system for the obscenely wealthy and increasing wealth disparity by taking a sledge hammer to big pharma, banks, and other Goliath corporate industry, women’s rights to their own bodies. I could go on and on
I disagree with this take, but obviously have nothing to cite as evidence because it’s a prediction.
The GOP will do what they need to do over the next 20-30 years to stay viable, if not continuously dominant.
Youngs hating the GOP and olds dying isn’t gonna change anything.
‘We’ is the people against Trump. You keep lumping me in with the Biden wing, and it pisses me the fuck off. We need the Biden wing to beat Trump, and until you realize that’s the case, there’s nothing to say to you.
Nothing about you sounds even remotely like a Democrat. You want the party to be something left of that, far left of any Democrat, even way far left of anyone who caucuses with the Democrats (all of these people know they need the Democrats to make any impact), and the GOP will stay in power forever with your mode of thinking.
And you admitted in your last post that you really do want to just burn it down and that we are sure things will work out if we just listen to all these people who do not vote. Things will not work out doing that. You are not a serious person at all.
We’re still a two-party system.
Generally, in American politics, we have a realigning issue that snaps the parties into two clear coalitions. As time goes on, the original issues become less salient, other issues emerge, and the coalitions become less clear. Sometimes this leads to a third party movement, sometimes it leads to a war between factions within a party.
The Republican Party has re-aligned big time, becoming the party of Trumpism. Democrats have not figured out how they want to re-align yet. I argue that polarization and divisiveness is the new norm and that Democrats should offer class-based lines of division as opposed to the blatant racism of Republicans. Centrism’s knee-jerk reflex against divisiveness hurts Democrats’ ability to build a coalition to counter Republicans, so I tend to be hostile towards candidates who stress civility, unity, and bipartisanship. I have no problems with moderates who don’t spend time pushing against divisiveness.
It just means the party is pushing left whether anyone likes it or not. The tug of war is that so many GOP have left, because it doesn’t represent them anymore. So, they’re doing look tests at The Third Way. Look at what could get through in 1996, 2004, 2009, and now. The people Cactus is a part of want to destroy all of these gains, which quite possibly could take us into The Handmaid’s Tale.
The GOP is doing what they can right now to stay viable, and it’s not working (they’re depending on not getting massacred in 2020 to remain viable). We’re getting daily hot takes from Gym Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Lee Zeldin as the face of the party. They’re not sending their best. The Tea Party is either going to fracture out of the GOP and never win another election (exactly as I predicted would ultimately happen in 2012), or the rest of the GOP is going to turn into Third Way Democrats, which will still leave the Tea Party in the cold. But that ain’t happening in 2020, and I know you know that.
Right. I get that. My point was that the Democratic party is in need of MAJOR reform. When you consider that the overwhelming majority agrees with hardcore progressive values and think hard about it… How the heck are we losing to Republicans? Centrists and moderates! That’s how
Do you understand why some people think that catering to the “Biden wing” of the Democratic Party will lead to 2004 all over again?
I’ve said this a million times. It’s NOT about Trump! Trump is the symptom, not the disease. The question you should be asking is how the heck did we ever get a president Trump in the first place? It’s because of an utterly failed system that has been broken and in place long before Trump ever came down that escalator. How you don’t see this is beyond me. Yet, you want to everyone to move back to center so we can go backwards from whence we came?
Even if I agree with you that centrists and moderates are part of the problem, I am not sure if you are doing a good job of explaining the mechanism by which you believe centrists are hurting the Democratic Party. I may be missing some of the previous back-and-forth on here between the two of you that I glossed over and I certainly don’t have an awareness of your posting on the old site, so I don’t know if this is something that has been hashed out repeatedly. It just feels like you are assuming that certain things are obvious when they are not.
Um, I don’t ever take anyone seriously who says Trump is the symptom. He’s the metastasized cancer of what they’ve been doing for the last 40 years. He is the result, specifically because the GOP is so incompetent. Concrete head that is you. I’m done.
You’re not missing anything. He doesn’t make any sense, and never has on this. He thinks we should be telling primary candidates what they should think, and will not budge on that. He somehow thinks putting our ideals on a face who’s willing to blow whichever way the wind does in the part of an election where they’re supposed to tell us who they are is a good strategy. AKA he’s not serious about any of this.
You’re saying ‘cater’. I’m not saying that. I’m saying enough of them might not vote, that the Dems give it all up to the GOP if the party pulls super hard left by 2020. I’m saying not to alienate them to the point where they allow a second term of Trump, just like they shouldn’t be alienating the left in a way that could lead to that same outcome. Both parts of the party need to work together to get rid of this guy, and then worry about what direction the party’s headed. I really don’t get why this is so hard to understand.
The Democratic party has spent basically the last 40 years thinking we are just one more election from electing a slew of corporatist DINOs and the like and that will be the catalyst for change. If you buy into that you are a moron. It has been a total failure at every level regardless of electoral outcomes. Incrementalism has been a disaster for the party and the country and has resulted in a dramatic shift right in this country as a result.
We need to win elections AND completely blow up and reform the Democratic party. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Also imagine showing up here as a self proclaimed 40 year super Democrat to lecture us all about how we are just one more election away from real change. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Look at 2008. Landslide win and super majority. But the people actually elected had no intention of doing anything progressive. And shockingly the result was doing nothing progressive. Who could have seen that coming.
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I think the left should signal a willingness to defect at least equal to the centrists’ willingness to note vote for a Democrat who is “too liberal” as part of a GTO political strategy to avoid being taken for granted post-election. I think it is reasonable to worry about this now instead of waiting until after the election.
Coalition-building should be about compromise. I think the left would be pretty reasonable in demanding that the centrists in the party move leftward towards something like Medicare For All in exchange for the left compromising on some other issue and tolerating a more centrist position for the party. What would centrists be willing to trade in exchange for M4A?
Pay attention on this site to what you’re saying about the left. These people here who advocate burning it all down want no compromise. Then adjust your expectation based on that (even though this site does not remotely represent anything going on in the real world). The in power right (Dem and GOP) knows it doesn’t need to compromise so it doesn’t. So you gotta do it via elections, and that takes time. The Dems can’t afford to lose to Trump in 2020 if he’s still around.
The sports analogy is that running centrists for presidents puts Democrats on the dreaded “treadmill of mediocrity” where the party puts a severe cap on what can be accomplished. I feel that your attitude is kind of like fighting a war for regime change without having a plan for what the post-war regime will look like. Win now and figure the details out later is antithetical to how I approach things.