You are still trying to give people someone to vote against.
They didn’t vote because they feel alienated. They feel like no one is listening to them. Bernie came along and they felt that he was listening to them. When Hillary won, she could have looked at that and changed some of her policies (not all of them!) in a leftwards direction, but she didn’t. She expected a group who were demoralised by business as usual politics to come out to support her, and was surprised when they didn’t.
Six month later across the Atlantic, Jeremy Corbyn was expected to lead Labour to their worst defeat in nearly 100 years. Despite having a lot of negative reporting right up to the day of the election he denied Theresa May a majority in Parliament, even taking one seat that had voted for some form of conservative in every election for the last 200 years. On the other hand, the Trump-like UKIP crashed and burned.
How? He inspired younger voters, specifically those between the ages of 25-44. He inspired the left. People are talking about the next election with hope, and May’s position gets weaker every day. We have a Labour party leader who we were told could never become Prime Minister who looks like he could be living in 10 Downing Street within the next five years.
You don’t actually need a Corbyn or Sanders to win in 2020. You just need to acknowledge that their voters are significant and offer something to them to vote for.
It’s not over-the-top from the perspective of a European, though. From that point of view, the U.S. system is currently limited to a choice between a centre-right party and a crazy authoritarian party. The introduction of left-wing populism and right-wing populism into those respective parties has created an informal four-party situation in a system designed to only handle two (because it never wanted any).
Further complicating this pseudo-parliamentary situation is the fact that the right-wing populists supplanted the crazy authoritarian party’s establishment during the Presidential primaries, pulling the political discourse even further to the right.
In that context, it’s understandable that more traditional liberals and progressives who feel unrecognised would want to pull the centre-right party toward the left, especially since that party’s establishment is incompetent at winning elections in addition to being corrupt.
That’s not to excuse the actions of those who ignore the formal reality of the American duopoly system or those progressives in swing states who choose to “punish” the centre-right party by voting for the crazy party’s candidate. However, that doesn’t change the fact that progressives and liberals have very legitimate grievances with the DNC establishment in both its neoliberal-lite economic policies and its constant bungling of elections absent a charismatic rock star like Obama or Bill Clinton.
Until the Dems recognise this fact and make some real changes we’re going to continue to see this kind of infighting. I think we’ll see the infighting ending and the party start to move left once the Boomers lose their electoral clout to the Millenials. I just hope it happens in time.
This. I don’t fault anyone for having their beliefs, but I do fault them when they put their petulance about feeling ignored above the good of everyone in this country and the world. FOR THE SECOND FUCKING TIME IN 16 YEARS! I feel I can guarantee that if the Democrats are lucky enough to take the White House in 2020, in 2028 we’ll see the petulant left do this once more.
I don’t fault anyone for having their beliefs, except when their beliefs involve voting for anti-human corporatists like the typical candidates from the two major parties, and then they justify this by claiming everybody else is doing it so therefore they had to do it too.
Which is fine, as long as you don’t divorce those foolish reactions from the very real grievances that inspired them. To give just one example, recall that the last head of the DNC was also effectively a Clinton staffer during the 2016 primaries, and that she spent some of her time as a legislator supporting the predatory payday loan industry that donated generously to her. This is not the kind of leadership that’s needed in a party that portrays itself as being on the left.
Also, Clinton’s supporters haven’t been immune to this kind of pissy infighting behaviour, either. You might recall the PUMAs from 2008. Since they were expressing their petulance against a truly charismatic candidate they had less effect than the very small number of Bernie Bros who stayed home in 2016 or voted for Dolt-45 out of spite (which is to say, not much at all).
In 10 years demographics should ensure that the Dems will be done with tone-deaf Boomer presidential candidates who are still campaigning as if it’s 1992. Whether they’ll have been smart enough to set up a GOP-style farm system to identify and foster new talent in the interim is another question.
When I think of a liberal laying waste to her own ideals, someone who pals around with Nazis who’d like to reserve free speech for whites only and someone who casually uses homophobic slurs like a chaner comes to mind before someone using his free speech to criticise someone else’s.
If the NYT wants another “contrarian” columnist, this is definitely one way to go.
The New York Times later issued a statement: “Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us.
Oh FFS, NYT! Was the CRT monitor in your research department on the fritz again? Did someone pick up the line and break the modem connection?
And context collapse is what happened here tonight.
[…]
Norton said she’s likely write a story about the incident later this week.
It will be entitled “Context Collapse: You Guyz, I was Totes being Ironic about my Nazi Friends and Calling People F-gs and N-ggers”, and will form the basis of her new book (forward by Anne Coulter).
I’m still kind of marveling at the brass balls it takes to say “I only used incredibly offensive and damaging slurs against marginalized groups because I was trying to fit in with the culture of the people I was talking to!” like we’re supposed to congratulate her for learning a foreign language or something.
More so because Milady Edgelord was using those slurs not on 4chan but on Twitter, where an audience not made up exclusively of adolescent boys of all ages (but apparently one that excluded the NYT Editorial Board) could see them. Most teenaged boys who use that kind of language in on-line games have the common sense not to use it on Facebook where grandma might see it – common sense Norton obviously lacks.
Hillary is and was a worthless elitist carpet bagging piece of shit who never won a legitimate election in her life, and everything she ever had was handed to her on a silver platter.
She was an arrogant, scumbag, monied liberal who didn’t give two fucks about anybody outside her donors. Good riddance.
Did you mean, “actual left”? Go vote for republicans and stop pretending you’re a democrat that cares about people.
Yup, thanks for perfectly illustrating my point about the left enthusiastically knifing it’s allies, in it’s quest for moral purity rather than election victory.
There’s a balance to be had. You support imperfect candidates, not ones that are antithetical to your beliefs, or who you believe will make the country a worse place. You support candidates who you believe will act in good faith even if they won’t always do things the way you want, not ones who you believe are cynically repeating talking points around your issues but who won’t actually do anything about them in power.
There’s a line, each person draws it for themselves. It may look like they are stabbing their allies in the back, but you really aren’t in a position to tell them who their allies are.
I’m not a Hilary fan, but I’ll vote for a yellow dog if it’ll keep a Republican out of the White House. I believe that makes me pragmatic not a sellout. Someone in the office who actively does things to harm everything you value is FAR WORSE than someone who is compromised and only does some of the things you want. GWB was FAR WORSE than Gore, and Trump is FAR WORSE than HRC. There has never been a winning party that was not a coalition of some sort, you always need voters who don’t agree with you 100%. But moral purity is a sweet drug…
