Also they've misappropriated words like "leftist" and "socialist" so much that in my interaction with Trump supporters, at Trump events, I hear plenty of actual left and actual socialist policies presented as new ideas or attributed to Trump.
At a policy level, these people actually don't want neofascism, I've interacted with plenty. They really don't.
The Democrats tried to appeal to the hard right voter who found Trump icky. For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
>For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
What the hell are the democrats supposed to do to oppose a party that gets to redefine language however it wants with seemingly great effect?
America spent 100 years demonizing socialism. Not the policies, the word. And now republicans can just deploy it against whoever, because it doesn't have a meaning to US voters.
What possible strategy is there against that? My "democrat for life" (because republicans wanted to fucking murder the french catholics in the area, lookup the KKK in Maine) would vote against "socialism"!
The US is a uni-party state at the federal level. You either play with the republicans, or you will be labeled "socialist", no matter the objective reality, and you will lose.
Well since actual socialist policies like housing, health care, retirement benefits, childcare support, reducing homelessness, infrastructure funding, jobs programs and wage increases are incredibly popular when put in front of voters, the Democrats should just do actual socialism instead of trying to run away from it saying "nuh uh!"
That's if you count the entire coalition and don't take into account likely voters or primary voters.
I'm talking about reliable 90%+ will always vote D people and will show up on election day, the mainstays of the party, which is the biggest bloc of the Democratic Party coalition.
The largest bloc of the coalition are these mainstays, who tend to be older moderates. And almost half of these people are black. That's what I mean by "base". They lead the way of who the party chooses as a candidate.
The proper base is radical centrists and neoliberal ideologues.
A bunch of people sometimes show up but the base is people who think warhawks like Dick Cheney, William Kristol and Henry Kissinger are heroes and chronically wrong people like Francis Fukuyama are brilliant statesmen.
They're already saber rattling "Russia stole it" conspiracy theories about why they lost. Check Twitter.
They're dumbfucks who are deeply committed to the bankrupt political project that brought you Afghanistan and Iraq
That's the group that uses the imaginary "electability" metric to discount anybody which is popular but not aligned with their values in order to push forth their preferred candidate by imagining what they think the average voter is.
The earliest example of this I found was an op ed by Walter Lippmann in 1932 claiming Roosevelt was unelectable as he pushed alternatives like Al Smith. He was part of the failed "Stop Roosevelt" campaign trying to stage a convention coup to swap the candidates.
It's one of the very few times it failed so we have it as a counterexample of what happens.
Roosevelt was pretty electable after all.
These people don't have any interest in that however. It's a ruse. Lippmann, like Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith fit the political category of Liberalism (not how people flippantly use it).
This is the ideology of the people who have more or less controlled the party since.
In 1944 for instance, FDR's immensely popular hand picked successor and VP, Henry Wallace, was swapped out for the more "electable" Harry Truman, who almost lost.
Truman ended up firing Wallace after he wrote a letter predicting a nuclear arms detente between the USSR and the US (what we call the Cold war). The Liberals thought the cold war prediction was so absurd and impossible they let Wallace go - their Francis Fukuyama of the 40s moment (remember, they're ideologues and everything comes from that)
Then the immensely popular Estes Kefauver got swapped out during the 1952 DNC and dark horsed with Truman's pick of Adlai Stevenson and they got 1928 Al Smith like results.
Truman actually wanted to run in 1952 but he got his ass handed to him at the first primary by Kefauver and he dropped out. Then he made the now familiar electability argument at the convention.
When the strategy works it's almost always an unusual setup such as 1992 with Perot pulling away the populist (the neoliberals love showing national polls and ignoring state by state polls which show Clinton would have been defeated in the electoral college) or times like 2020, with Covid.
In more normal times like 1988, 2000, 2004, 2016, 2024 it's a failed strategy. But they don't care. They're committed to the ideology more than winning.
They were trying to push Hilary in 2008 and she sure of hell would have lost to McCain.
The advocacy from all of this is to form coalitions based on popular positions and offer the electorate what they want instead of claiming it's impossible like some scolding nanny and presenting an unpopular political project as the only sensible and logical conclusion.
It's always been a dumb move and when somebody actually does it they win. Even if they're a felon who stole things from the Whitehouse and who clearly is going to trash things, they still win.
The neolibs don't want to win, they want neoliberalism. Almost nobody else does, that's the problem.
The paleoconservatives, as a counterexample, learned how to successfully lie to the electorate. I could write an equally long response mapping their rise from groups like America First and the Black Legion to taking the Whitehouse in 1980. But really, go read Rick Perlstein's 2500 or so pages over 3 books on the topic. He explains it just fine.
Both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden got more votes than Donald Trump. The Democrats have a better track record of picking the more popular candidate that the electorate wants in recent history.
In fact, the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in all four of the most recent elections before this one (from 2008 - 2020, inclusive).
Except maybe for Obama, they were all lousy. Barely beating an incompetent criminal who sold presidential powers as private services and stole stuff from the Whitehouse, that's not impressive.
1. I didn't say it was impressive. Just refuting the claim that the Republican party puts forth candidates that the electorate wants while the Democratic party does not.
2. Nobody has beaten Trump since he's been a convicted criminal, lied about winning an election he didn't, or stole classified documents from the White House. So it doesn't make sense to discuss "barely beating an incompetent [...]" in the context of my comment that refers only to Democratic candidates who ran before those things happened.
The sentiment is Republicans are focused on winning while
Democrats are focused on a deeply unpopular corporate-imperialist political project and scolding people into voting for them.
They will occasionally virtue signal elsewhere but their policies only align with the project
Progressive policies on minimum wage, labor and other things won in Red States once again. Nebraska's minimum wage increase, for instance, went 75-25. 60% for Trump, 75% for minimum wage increase.
It's important to realize the Democrats have no interest in those. Absolutely zero.
Their project is bowing down to companies like Wells Fargo, Equifax, Lockheed Martin, and General Motors and that's it.
You've been sharing this exact narrative all over the thread, which makes me think that you aren't really replying to my comment so much as you're just finding any pretense to share this same opinion again.
> The sentiment is Republicans are focused on winning while Democrats are focused on a deeply unpopular corporate-imperialist political project and scolding people into voting for them.
In the U.S. we are, for all practical purposes, stuck with two choices. Some people will vote for one side, while some people with vote against the other side. But, here you're claiming that people are voting for Republicans because they like them and people are voting for Democrats because they are being "scolded" into it. That is just you superimposing your opinion/analysis on to things. The only objective measure is that, until this election, Democrats consistently got more votes than Republicans. Period. You can read whatever tarot cards and tea leaves you want to figure out why.
> They will occasionally virtue signal elsewhere but their policies only align with the project
>
> Progressive policies on minimum wage, labor and other things won in Red States once again. Nebraska's minimum wage increase, for instance, went 75-25. 60% for Trump, 75% for minimum wage increase.
>
> It's important to realize the Democrats have no interest in those. Absolutely zero.
Let's get this straight. Voters in states that are being run by Republicans feel the need to take things into their own hands by going around their elected officials to implement progressive policies, like higher minimum wages. Voters in states that are being run by Democrats have NOT felt the need to add minimum wage increases to their constitutions.
And your conclusion from these facts is that it's the Democrats that don't care about increasing the minimum wage? Are you kidding? I think there's a MUCH more obvious interpretation here, and it's NOT that the Republican party is somehow in a more popular position when it comes to progressive policies...
None of that is born out by the facts. Look at the last few election cycles over on ballotpedia. The hypothesis doesn't hold.
You're just looking at superficial symbols and not substantive policy.
My brother is part of a union, voted for minimum wage increase, posts about evil communist Harris and her DEI woke mob trying to destroy our country. He's cooked.
He thinks Trump is antiwar and will have a federal jobs program.
I've been involved in right wing politics for 20 years because I have been trying to understand these people. How functioning democracies can enthusiastically elect clearly corrupt criminals based on laughable bullshit.
They deal in a world of symbols but at the policy and practice level, the actual ballot measures and positions, it's clear where they actually stand.
They want things like lower housing cost, jobs programs, affordable healthcare, better public infrastructure, increased wages ... That's all socialism. They just think it'll come through some wacky indirect way that doesn't work as opposed to direct and intentional implementation.
I don't know where you live. you got to go interact with the people if you really want to figure them out. Once you look past the scapegoats and boogeymen, it's pretty clear.
The Democrats have abandoned that platform. Arguably the last competent person to do that on a national stage was shot in 1968. You gotta lie to people, have bullshit factories ("think tanks"), media empires.. sitting down and playing classroom doesn't work. The 2024 DSA LA voter guide was 75 pages. I mean holy hell, no wonder they lose.
Because they're a specific political project. Radical centrism is a common term but the "left/center/right" is a bad name. Things are much more complicated.
There was clearly a winning path with say, Bernie in 2016. The state by state Bernie/Trump matchup polling data consistently predicted a clear and decisive victory. Or, maybe Estes Kefauver 1952, or go back to the 40s and Gallup predicted Henry Wallace would have had a 1936 style landslide instead of the squeak they won with Truman.
As a hobby I've poured over archives of primaries, old newspapers, speeches, going back even to Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first VP and how he got replaced.
I continue to claim that any actual left project (as opposed to whatever the propaganda industry is deciding to imagine the left is) would be far more successful under a Republican flag because they aren't as committed to the neoimperialist project.
That's why the Democrats had all the warring Republicans on their side this time.
DNC argued that they are a private organization and can do what they want In "Wilding v. DNC Services Corp." case (2017) in response to screwing the dem nomination from Bernie hands in favour of Hillay
These candidates are aligned with the Democrats.
That's what the party is.
It's not a party of the left or liberals or whatever you imagine it to be. They've been extremely clear on this.
Go over the historicals. I have. Many times. This is correct.