That is very important to take note of.
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Oh ffs.
I’m a centrist (by BB lights) Dem. Not a chance in hell that I will vote for anybody with an ( R ) after his name unless it comes to stand for something radically different than the Republican party has stood for during the last 40 years, but I certainly appreciate the Lincoln Project’s help in ending (or at least slowing) the cancer on the republic that Trump represents.
The concern driving trollies about more moderate Democrats being lured to the dark side by Lincoln Project ads is getting a little ridiculous, frankly. They’ve thrown their support fully behind Biden and, moreover, have committed to opposing Republicans who, after the election, oppose Biden’s efforts to repair the damage Trump–and the forces that elected Trump–have done.
I get that they have fundamentally different policy preferences than most of the folks on the BBS, but that doesn’t mean either that their ads aren’t helpful or that they’re engaged in underhanded plotting. The easiest explanation for their behavior is almost certainly the correct one: because Trump is a danger to the republic in its entirety, he’s as much a danger to constitutional conservatism as he is to other, non-authoritarian political views.
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And Stalin’s agenda was far more nefarious than simply defeating Hitler, but we still managed to work together as long as our interests remained aligned.
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Especially centrist Dem elected officials who are still under the impression that any Republican since Gingrich is interested in dealing with them in good faith. You know, the kind of establishment Dem who counted a virulent racist like Strom Thurmond as a “close friend” and who probably doesn’t understand that Republicans, including the TLP, always expect to be paid back for favours (asked and unasked).
The key is to tell an ally of convenience to piss off once the mutual enemy is destroyed. I don’t know if that’s going to happen if (I hope when) TLP comes to collect from a president and party establishment that are already too close for comfort to “moderate” Republicans on economic and military policy.
Looked at another way, does anyone think TLP would be putting forward this much effort if the Dem nominee was Sanders or Warren? I highly doubt it. More likely they would have put all those resources into primarying out Il Douche or identifying and supporting some conservative billionaire to make a serious third party run.
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During shunting they all qualify as one entity.
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Obviously, the LP folks are targeting pro-Trump voters who still revere Reagan and Bush (for whatever fucked up reasons). By presenting R and B in the ads as good-old-day leaders, they have a better chance of establishing conservative “credibility”, holding their audiences’ attention, and — ultimately — influencing their vote. If you want to influence the scum base, you have to roll around in scum first.
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The Lincoln Project is about as helpful to America as Bloomberg’s candidacy.
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I’m beginning to wonder whether “centerest” is a useful term these days. perhaps we should think in terms of institutionalists instead.
The meaning of “centrist” is slowly changing in America, at least for supporters of liberal democracy. It used to be a synonym for “moderate”, but in recent years it’s more accurately described someone who’s willing to meet fascists halfway (this is why I sometimes use the historical term zentrum).
Basically, Americans who call themselves “centrists” are coming at things from a short-sighted (if not blind) place of privilege, comfort and security. It’s a luxury to take that position, which is why you don’t see a lot of poor Americans or young people or PoC calling themselves that.
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To be quite honest with you as someone who’s basically to your far left on the political spectrum in respect to you, I think most folks who call themselves centrists today are basically center left to left now only because of how far right the republican party has gone. The every idea of healthcare market reforms were from a republican think tank in the 90s. Now it’s called “socialism” by the same think tank. That’s how far right the republicans have gone. At this point, if they start talking about ‘living space’ and Canada I wouldn’t be surprised by it. Or any other kind of Nazi-like ventures seem to be in their agenda.
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Right, with the qualification is that that’s how they’re viewed inside the U.S. In most other OECD countries, Americans who call themselves centrists would be regarded as taking conservative (small- and large-C) positions on most economic and military issues.
For example, American “centrists” are still dithering about implementing a true single-payer universal health insurance system and championing broken-by-design “compromises” like ACA. Meanwhile, in the UK or Canada even Conservative party politicians regard changes that would weaken their countries’ decades-old systems as third-rail issues that are best avoided or danced around.
And the “centrists” would tut-tut over it to be sure – how “regrettable” that discourse has become so “coarse”. But then, to preserve their comforts, they’d immediately try to find a compromise (final) solution to whatever is being proposed by the fascists and bigots.
In his latest book, Robert Reich said the real struggle today is not between left and right or between Dem and GOP, but rather between democracy and oligarchy. When given the choice, “centrists” will always lean toward preserving the latter even as they proclaim their respect for the former.
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The left wing hasn’t been static either, though–and the Democratic party has made good, necessary concessions to that wing, especially on social issues like recognizing that “LGB” wasn’t an inclusive-enough description of the group of individuals being discriminated against on account of inherent sex and gender characteristics and advocating loudly for the rights of trans, queer, and intersex people as well. (I’m also hopeful that, if nothing else good comes out of 2020, we’re at least, and at last, seeing a significant leftward move on ideas of race, policing, and the inherently discriminatory justice system, but it remains to be seen whether those ideas stick as central planks of the party or get tossed aside the next time it seems politically advantageous to be “tough on crime.”)
I describe myself as a more centrist Dem than others on this board because I think Bernie Sanders is a pretty bad senator who would be a very bad president but still serves a very useful purpose by remaining in the Senate and anchoring the left wing of the party he’s not actually a part of. I also think that it’s better to have somebody who agrees with me 70% of the time in power than it is to have somebody who agrees with me 95% of the time out of it. I also recognize that in order to get a damn thing done in Washington (and especially to get it done in a way that isn’t undone at the next election cycle), there usually needs to be at least some degree of bipartisan buy-in, which usually necessitates horse-trading, earmarks, lobbying, and occasionally doing deals with people who are otherwise somewhere on the scale of abhorrent monsters but happen to be in positions of political power. And I think that because everybody on all sides of the political debate sometimes wants things that are unwise, impossible, or both, it’s useful to have a reasoned debate with a reasonable opposing party that is seeking in good faith to implement its own policy preferences.
“Reasoned,” “reasonable,” and “good-faith” are the important things here, but they do not describe Republican attempts at governance since at least 2008, when the Newt Gingrich burn-it-all-down and Grover Norquist drown-it-in-the-bathtub schools of conservative “thinking” came to dominate the party as a whole. George W. Bush was a very bad president–one who I wish we could still think of as the worst in our lifetimes–but I think there is a fundamental and important difference between a bad president who is bad because he’s rigid in his beliefs, of limited intelligence, easily pushed around by the smarter people he hires, and prone to making dumb blunders because he thinks he hears Jesus, and a bad president who is bad because he does not believe in advancing any cause other than his own personal wealth, power, and ego. The first of those can at least try to govern in good faith. The second can’t, and it’s what we’re seeing now.
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Or attacked with the usual tools of defund, disrupt, demoralize, until letting for-profit companies in to “fix the problem” is acceptable.
In Alberta, Jason Kenney, a Tea Party Koch libertarian, is basically trying to union-bust the Alberta Medical Association in the middle of a pandemic. (Doug Ford would have gone there too, but the pandemic happened first, and even he’s not that stupid.)
I wish America would go single-payer, so that the American private predators would stop looking at Canada as an untapped market, if only they could adjust the political climate…
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