There is a desire, specifically and especially on the left, to get so caught up in their principles that people believe it is the primary source of change.
For example:
What should be the first acts and priorities be of a democratic administration?
That’s how you think about politics. About power. Lock in any advantage and expand it. Democrats have popular support for their policies but cannot for the life of them think strategically.
Being embarrassed about wanting to be in power is a perpetual problem for leftism (It's understandable - it involves saying yes to the institutions you probably want to reform).
Consider Corbyn in the UK - Awful polling from day 1, doesn't help much with Brexit, loses 2 elections (One meh, one disaster) but the lessons learned is that they won the "argument" and it's all good?
To be fair, most American "left" politicians are hardly left, with the exception of Sanders and the handful of DSA-affiliated Congressmen. Although popular support for more-left policies seems to be forcing them (reluctantly) farther leftward.
To be fair, it is hypothetically possible that Corbyn did the best he could have done, considering he was being terribly smeared, even vilified, by all the big media organizations in UK AFAIK.
The Corbyn fans love to talk abut media smears but they neglect to mention that he never polled above 0% net approval in his entire term as leader.
Starmer, his replacement, is a man of intellect, principle, and service to the public - he is already doing better than Corbyn ever did - i.e. the media who didn't like Corbyn were writing amicable praise of Sir Keir (the mail love a nickname) even when he was making a mockery of their man (Boris)
The reason for that is that Starmer is a corporate stooge who doesn't present any threat to the merciless extraction of value from the working class. Of course they have no objection to the kind of competition which would have no adverse effect on their interests if it prevailed; their praise is evidence of Starner's complete lack of merit.
The media besmirched Corbyn BECAUSE he was a decent man with the interests of the public at heart, which is unacceptable to the owners of the media apparatus.
Now, now. Starmer might not be a militant marxist, but he spent a good chunk of his life fighting for workers' rights in court. He also served faithfully in the shadow cabinet under Corbyn - are you saying that Corbyn chose a "corporate stooge" as his shadow minister, and on the hottest issue of the day at that (brexit)?
One of Corbyn's lackings was that he was unable to make friends in his own party, to the point that half of his own rank & file literally sabotaged him at the last election. By calling good people all sorts of unwarranted names we're only going to see a repeat, and $deity knows this country deserves better than yet another Tory government.
The section of the rank and file that sabotaged him did so because they are possessed by a vile ideology that virulently opposes any concession by the powerful to the mass of the people. Being unable to befriend any of that metastatic species redounds greatly to Mr Corbyn's credit. They are not "good people".
Now Starmer may not be ideologically committed to the ruthless exploitation of the public like they are, but at the very least he harbours delusions about the possibility of compromising with a right wing, both within his party and in the media, that is implacably and rabidly opposed to any project of positive reform. They will never relent in their shameless calumny and perfidy until Labour's program has been completely neutered.
Democrats have popular support for their policies but cannot for the life of them think strategically.
You think they don't understand this stuff? Democrats have been deliberately "failing" to get shit done for 20 years. They keep holding out progressive and populist policies, tantalizingly close to enacting meaningful change -- but nope, somehow it always seems to be a matter of political strategy, badly run campaigns, and bad messaging that derails things.
Surely the Republicans haven't somehow had the better political strategists for decades. They aren't always better funded and they aren't always better organized. And certainly they don't have access to some kind of magic politics potion that the Democrats lack.
The only plausible scenario that I can see is that the Democratic party leadership has no interest in actually getting policy enacted, as long as they keep their cozy niche in power. Another 4 years of Trump will help them do very well in the 2022 midterms, and it will help keep their friends at the NYT, CNN, and MSNBC in business.
It would also explain why they hated Sanders and the DSA candidates so much. Liberals (not to mention leftists) who actually wanted to take power at the national level and actually do something? That would fuck up the whole game.
Basically you'd have to show me some actual evidence that Democratic party leadership actually wants to do anything other than campaign on a progressive platform and consistently almost-win. The whole thing seems worked to me.
I don't think you need anything that conspiratorial, it's not that centrist Democrats really don't want to get anything done, it's just that they really are basically okay with the current neoliberal consensus.
Well, one is the claim that Democrats don't get anything done because they have a secret commitment to keep things the way they are so that voters have a reason to come back to the polls for them, and I'm saying maybe the reason is simply that Democrats are mostly fine with the way things are. Maybe your point is that this is a distinction without a difference, which I guess I'd mostly have to agree with.
The difference is that it goes beyond being okay with a policy consensus. The current presidency is an exercise is dismantling the checks and balances in the US government and an experiment in pushing the limits of propaganda and keeping the public complacent in the face of crimes committed against them by their government.
For example, they had to have known that McConnell would kill the Trump impeachment. But they went ahead with it anyway. The only explanation I can see for this is that they wanted to somehow signal their opposition to Trump with their core voter base, while wasting and effectively discrediting the usefulness of a last-resort tool for asserting their authority.
And what is Biden campaigning on? What is his campaign even doing [0]? Where are the attack ads branding Trump as an anti-American grifter? This feels like 2016 all over again, except with the added danger that we already know how dangerous Trump is, and if he wins again he'll have nothing to lose -- and his handlers in the halls of power will take full advantage of it. They know they are ruining America and they simply don't care, they'll just run to the bunker when shit gets bad for normal people [1].
This kind of thinking assumes that the ruling party can unilaterally make policy changes, which is not possible in the American system currently (e.g. fillibuster).
w.r.t Sanders: he lost in a small d democratic primary. It wasn't the leadership: it was the voters that chose Biden over Sanders.
Controversial view: no, we shouldn't. Have you see how stupid people are? How easily they're manipulated? How little they understand about how government works? Any you want politicians pandering to these people?
If it weren't to the stigma of "literacy" tests and how the were historically used, I'd be fully in favor of "licensing" voters.
Paying people to vote is pretty out there. I think we should at least put election day on a weekend. Spread it over both days, even. This feels to me like a relatively easy small step that would really help make voting easier in a way that doesn't open itself up to voter fraud arguments (as far as I know).
The literacy test that I took wasn't even controversial. Back in middle school my civics teacher actually had us take one of these literacy tests. While very few people in the class passed the test (I think just myself and one other person), anyone actually familiar with the text of the US Constitution should be able to pass it. Sadly almost no one in our class was familiar with the US Constitution.
I'm totally okay with a test where the only document you need to study from is the US Constitution.
The whole electoral college is non-intentional gerrymandering. The candidate with fewer votes has been winning since 2000, and winning with a wider and wider vote margin. A major political goal should be getting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact done.
I don't think the changing media landscape can be disentangled from this, which is a trend happening for unrelated reasons. If the only thing happening was urban concentration, then the mathematical predicted response of politicians would be that the liberal part becomes political-center and the conservative part skews further right.
The Electoral College is specifically intended not to line up with the popular vote. It is the final chance for the conscience of the people of the United States, unfettered by anything, to weigh in on the merit of those the masses have chosen as candidates for the highest office. The Faithless Elector was a feature; not a bug.
Or at least it was until it was perverted by the two major National Conventions. As mentioned earlier, read the Federalist papers for more context; but be prepared for a let down when it starts to sink in how much care was put into the system just for things to go off the rails, and I don't mean because of things like suffrage or the Civil Rights Movement either; but by the slow degeneration of the integrity of the system through the death by 1000 cuts of self-centered legislation, dismantling and delegation of Legislative authority to the executive, excessive politicization of the Judiciary, non-mandating of sunset dates for legislation, and the cancerous taint that is the lack of House or Senate limits on consecutive terms.
To me, the most relevant difference between then and now is the looseness of the union. It makes sense that all states get an equal vote... only when the votes don't really matter. If California broke up into 5 states, they would get 5x the power by the holy virtue of making that administrative decision.
An alliance of states can make sense. Everyone at the table knows they're not equal, because they're representing totally different entities. However, they all have a voice because they all have decision power. In an alliance, votes don't make sense as a decision-making apparatus with power. The gathering is for the purpose of international diplomacy, and freedom of action is determined by the real capabilities of each sovereign.
>To me, the most relevant difference between then and now is the looseness of the union.
To me, it is the terrifying ease with which instantaneous information/sentiment propagation can be utilized to sever one from a rational ground state and whip up a furor with which to push through an carve up of the Nation's civil liberties that truly sets us apart now.
Even reading literature from the time, it factors heavily in that to prevent misbehavior and oppression by a majority, there must be a realistic point of view taken as to the weakness of such a large mass to chaos and lack of coordination to operate in concert. This is a point that I don't think many truly appreciate that the Founder's understood and accounted for. To them, the majority was not always right. In fact, it would be accurate to state that the structure of government they settled on was designed to effectively serve the purposes for which it was intended, and no more; so great was the risk represented by such an edifice. The amount of Liberty preserved so great, and the sacrifice of civil freedoms was meant to be as minimal as possible, leads me to believe they saw legislation as more of a failure state than as a desirable State of affairs. At least in as much as said legislation did not tend to reinforce and preserve the Unity of the Nation as a whole.
>If California broke up into 5 states, they would get 5x the power by the holy virtue of making that administrative decision.
That is dead on point. By the way, Federalist Papers 6-10 touch on the ills of factionalism, and the delicate balance that must be struck between the number of representatives, and the population they represent. It was a conscious decision at the time to try to satisfy suffrage in order to safeguard the liberties of the Nation as a whole.
Sure. I was pointing out that there's up-and-down fundamental issues with the American voting system that would take a massive reform to fix as mere tweaks alone won't suffice. I think we'd agree on this.
That Democrats identified the Republican inability or unwillingness to either woo or eliminate the new voters only further argues in favor of their strategic acumen.
There is a desire, specifically and especially on the left, to get so caught up in their principles that people believe it is the primary source of change.
For example:
What should be the first acts and priorities be of a democratic administration?
Healthcare? Nope.
Climate change? Nope.
A federal holiday for election days? Yes.
Passing legislation mandating mail-in ballots? Yes.
That’s how you think about politics. About power. Lock in any advantage and expand it. Democrats have popular support for their policies but cannot for the life of them think strategically.