While bankrupting your whole family.
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Well, that goes without saying. Unless you’re from a non-shithole country where that doesn’t happen to hundreds of thousands of people every year.
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Did the mainstream democrats forget that California is finally joining in Super Tuesday for 2020?
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TRULY A WINNING SLOGAN 
VOTE FOR ME, IT'S YOUR JOB
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Yeah, maybe we can get Al Gore or John Kerry out of retirement to be their highly electible neoliberal centrist selves… That will Win it!
Recent polling has socialism has the same approval rating as trump and it is climbing and unless you missed it almost half of American’s thought Obama was a socialist. Running from social welfare and populist economics because you fear a label is like running from your own shadow. You just look like a coward and fool and never get a step of separation.
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A candidate won the popular vote nation-wide and still lost to him. That’s mainly an issue with the broken Electoral College, not with these policies.
I’ll assume you mean the rural and exurban parts of those states, since the residents of the big cities and college towns tend to cheer without prompting.
Voters in those states, including many in rural areas, aren’t all suckers who’ll continue to vote against their own economic interests. That “Medicare for all” is getting cheers from Fox News town hall audiences should tell the moneyCons and Libertarians that, one way or another, their trickle-down “free”-market scam is wearing thin.
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the US has wait times too, while you wait for pre-approval
This. My GF has chronic pain, and because it isn’t life-threatening, she’s been waiting months for treatment. She had to go through a test procedure first, for which she also waited weeks. And she doesn’t even know if the actual treatment will work for her (nerves are weird). She’s only trying it because what works for her, occasional doses of painkillers, is becoming harder to obtain because of the opioid crisis. Which is happening because of the same broken fucking system. It’s awful.
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Oh yeah just like Kerry beat W in 2004!
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Why should we take it as a given that a moderate centrist who appeals to conservatives is the best path to Democratic victory in 2020?
Republicans sure as shit aren’t worrying about nominating a candidate who appeals to progressives, and we outnumber them.
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The US eligible voter pool is roughly 1/4 die-hard Democrats, 1/4 die-hard Republicans, and 1/2 independents. A big chunk of that independent group doesn’t vote in every election. The candidate that appeals strongly to the independents and gets them to vote usually wins.
The (false) assumption is that those independents are centrists, who can be swayed by candidates who move to the center. Data from 2012 and 2016 indicates that’s a very bad assumption. It’s the candidate that can inspire people off their asses to vote that wins, not the one that’s least offensive. Bland and beige need not apply (Looking at you, Uncle Joe!).
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In addition, it’s not even a safe guess that independents are in the center. On medicare-for-all I’ve found one poll where independents are within the margin or error of the democrats and another that is hard to interpret unless independents are more in favour than democrats. There are some issues where independent voters are definitely “in the middle” (more like spread out across the spectrum but with an average in the middle) but others where they are not.
Goind “to the center” when the center is stupid isn’t necessarily a good plan.
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And yet I’m also seeing reports of a blue collar uprising against the Green New Deal.
The problem is the Green New Deal is a vague outline, which means conservatives can invent horror stories to use as talking points, and scare people into thinking their jobs are going to disappear.
Follow-up:
In this case, writing is her job. This is the other time-suck of the US system: the amount of time you guys spend negotiating, and not just in edge cases. People say they want their health care decisions to be between them and their doctor and not the government, but the doctor isn’t able to do that now. My prescription changes dosage and nobody says to be “whelp, that’s not covered now.” I get my new pills and start my new dosage.
(Oh, and for those who might be interested: the show in Iceland? LazyTown ).
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The larger false assumption is that Ideology and partisanship are interchangeable an exist on a linear spectrum.
Left: we want trans and gay rights
Right: we want no trans and gay rights
Center: we’ll compromise, and have pizza with some nazis.
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When anyone from the US calls themselves a “centrist”, I have to roll my eyes.
No, you’re not. Centre is around where the left wing of the Democratic Party sits.
US “Centrists”, you’re fucking Conservatives. Maybe Liberal, if you use the actual meaning of the term which is still right of centre. The very fact that you see “liberal” as left says it all.
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Some of us want people who are transgender to be respected and treated just like everybody else. Others us want to be kept from the reality that some people are transgender and to violently enforce that silence. The middle ground between those two positions is… don’t ask, don’t tell?!? (The most charitable thing I could possibly think of, and not exactly very charitable considering that was a failed policy)
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Socialism is a fun term. No one can agree on just exactly what it means because socialism is a spectrum of both social and economic systems.
I disagree however with the position that providing education is socialism in any way. In any system, an educated populace leads to greater prosperity for the entire group.
Labor protections I see has the most capitalistic of positions. It ensures an equitable exchange of work for pay ensuring the driving force (labor) behind your capitalistic enterprises are compensated according to fair market practices. In other words, it keeps companies from getting a leg up on everyone else by mistreating workers to save a buck.
Free healthcare is a no brainier pure capitalistic position. Employers would no longer be forced by the government to subsidize health plans allowing them to focus more on profits. Employees are kept healthy which increases productivity.But the big one is that it saves money. Govt healthcare costs less than private healthcare. Any capitalist will tell you that spending less to get your goods and services is the smart move.
You’ve provided reasons why these (socialist by the general use of the term, though you are entitled to your own usage what with descriptivism and all that) are good ideas. And they are! Excellent ideas! But they come from the general intellectual tradition of socialism—labor rights, in particular, are a mainstay of socialist parties and they have been fought for, bloodily, by socialist labor movements, often against strong resistance by capitalists. Consider the fight for minimum wage or the fight to unionize and consider who did the fighting.
Now, it is a soft democratic socialism (which, not accidentally, is AOCs preferred affiliation) to be sure, since there’s nothing in there about ownership of the means of production or self-management but most socialist parties in the world—especially those which are politically relevant—don’t stand for those.
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Yes it does. So does having a populace that doesn’t have to worry about paying for healthcare. So does having a municipal fire department that puts out any burning building regardless of whether the owners have been paying private firefighting insurance. That doesn’t mean these services aren’t “socialist,” it just means that not everyone who appreciates such services is comfortable with the word “socialist.”
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