The victories were a clear rebuke of Trumpās politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic partyās own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the worldās wealthiest country.
ā¦Hakeem Jeffries, who is running for speaker of the House, will not commit to holding a vote on abolishing ICE. He opposes Medicare for All. He has said he will not hold Trump accountable for the human rights violations committed, portraying it as a question of āgetting evenā rather than achieving justice where it was denied. Chuck Schumer, who holds similar positions, has an extraordinarily low approval rating ā yet plans to run for majority leader in the Senate. Electeds are questioning whether these men should hold these roles.
But the dissent must also come from us, as it has been. We need to demand an end to the fast violence of guns on our streets trained on our neighbors, bombs dropped from the sky and the slow violence of people dying because their healthcare was denied or their food stamps were cut.
We need to organize, and mobilize, to demand the multi-racial democracy we were promised ā not a playground for the rich to get richer on the time and labor and lives of the poor.
āCentristsā who would sooner vote Republican (like Haley Stevens) than support any truly progressive policy.
Fuck Jeffries and Schumer, both of those fuckers are selfish assholes who just want to go back to the status quo so they can keep collecting their bribes in peace.
They will, the status quo is what got us Trump in the first place. Look at all the progressives who ran. They crushed it. Centrists donāt have the popularity to draw voters. All the progress gained will be lost because the DNC will squander it with infighting and will try to prop up an unpopular candidate like Hillary.
Gavin Newsome is just such a perfect embodiment of everything wrong with the DNC, I feel he will be the one foisted upon us all.
All centrism is is political cowardice. Just spend some research and pick a side.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
It helped having a President who pissed everyone off though. Maybe with some work we can turn some of the centric Republicans to the left a bit, if we can show having power to the left means results. It isnāt over, it hasnāt even started yet.
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
You could argue this happened in 1992, and it would also be the last time centrism won an election. In 1992, Democrats had basically given up on the political hegemony that had defined them since WW2, and accepted the political hegemony of neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan. And they won on it. It won an election for them.
And since that time, Democrats have been convinced that they had to run to the center to get āmoderateā voters, when in reality, ācentristā/āmoderateā voters never actually manifested. It was a middling black-swan event, but what it did, is it gave corporate democrats a hall pass to permanently assume a thing about a thing that didnŹ»t exist or even actually happen.
The very principal of a left versus right spectrum, represented as a normal distribution, is a construct of liberalism1. Its a way to represent an assumption about how voters think and behave and are distributed. And you are under no obligation to accept this construction. And when this construction has to get pushed up against reality; real actual voters with real actual data, it falls apart2. And this is because voters are messy, complicated, contradictory things. And this should be an obvious explanation because actual voters are actual people, and actual people are messy, complicated, contradictory things. A scientific materialist should faithfully reconstruct the models, push the models against the data, and reject the models which donŹ»t match the data. Any rational person who has borne witness to the previous decades of politics should recognize how the liberal construction of voters behave doesnŹ»t map to the data. It canŹ»t predict outcomes. There are ways of analyzing politics which do predict future states. But if you narrow your view to what assumptions liberalism demands you make, youŹ»ll struggle to predict future state of politics, which is the ultimate test of any theory. If
You are not obligated to accept the assumptions of liberalism. And if the assumptions of liberalism dont predict beyond the data theyŹ»re trained on, you should reject those assumptions. You are not immediately obligated to accept other assumptions. In science, we reject theories all the time when the evidence tells us to, and sometimes that leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty about how that system works. But it is better to be uncertain than it is to be comfortably wrong.
1: I consider liberalism to be the parent philosophy of democratic liberalism, republican conservatism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism; all of these extension find their roots in liberalism. Two philosophies not finding their roots here are social democracy (roots in marxism), and american fascism (roots in nazism/ european fascism).
2: I can go into explaining this, but I want to keep the argument brief. The case involves multivariate analysis and stats.
Yeah, this is it. I appreciate the uncertain language of whether or not centrism āwonā the 1992 election as well. It really is just an oversimplification where everyone but the establishment loses. The results from the last decade or so should be data enough to show that the way things are measured is fundamentally broken. While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm is still the pervading ādefaultā mode of thinking in the meta of American Politics, but itās increasingly coming under more scrutiny, especially after this last election once again failed to produce predictions that had the results within their parameters. I think a good portion of that lies in this weird idea that many dem and even academic circles are getting recently that āpopulism is a right-wing thingā, which is once again predicated on the paradigm of left/right liberal/conservative. Almost like people really arenāt that simple or somethingā¦
While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm ā¦
Iām sure it is very convenient to the reigning political duopolies in the world to have people self-organise into two broad āteams.ā
Iāve seen it happen in real-time, where Iāll agree with someone on 90% of the facts, but then weāre off on the last 10ā and suddenly we consider eachother wholly on the āother side.ā
Then if youāre already labeled as being on one side or the other, and you have two major politicians representing just these two broad sides with barely any room for nuance, who are you going to vote for? Some loser 3rd party isnāt on a team, and just has human opinions??
Anyway yeah
Yup, it won them the Presidency.
And then lost them the Congress theyād held for a generation.
S+ tier comment, in the words of my generation. I love it.
I realise why weāve got so invested in certain framings of reality using different political lenses (conflict theory, my beloved) because it touches on literally every parts of our lives and our value systems.
But at the end of the day, itās just a system used to organise us. Iāve seen similar tiffs arise at work over co-op versus owned, kanban versus sprints, matrix versus pyramid, and itās the same kind of shit except for the scale: who benefits, who makes decisions, why do we do it. Real questions with concrete answers that we can experiment on and change our approachesāand keep changing them.
But just like with trying out workplace arrangements that would benefit the vast majority, there are people invested in the status quo for a variety of good and bad reasons.
We should be able to talk plainly and soberly about these things as long as we all agree that human flourishing is the ultimate goal of any system we build or reproduce.
deleted by creator
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
It can in countries with an actual political spectrum and multiple parties spread across all points of that spectrum.
Less so in a country with only a binary choice like the USA has.
It doesnāt work but they pretend it does because that way the donors get what they want and they get to āappearā to be trying, when in fact theyāre not. Covert Republicans and controlled opposition.
Centrism won 2020, kinda. Exactly because of the president who pissed everyone off first
Centrism didnāt win 2020; Biden adopted a lot of Bernieās platform and even then only won because of COVID. Trump overwhelmingly won the conversation on kitchen table issues.
Covid helped Trump by masking the effects of his economic policies. Iād say that Biden won despite Covid rather than because of it. Did you mean ābecause of Trumpās failure of a response to Covidā? Because that I could get behind.
Did you mean ābecause of Trumpās failure of a response to Covidā?
Thatās my point, yes. Plenty of people voted for Biden because they wanted someone who would handle COVID like an adult, which Trump was not willing to do. Given how tight the race was itās very likely Biden wouldāve lost if he didnāt have that to campaign on.
It feels like a safe trap to fall into. Republicans have the easier task because they just cater to where people are and use fearmongering to get there. Ends justify means. But itās nonconstructive. Blind lead the blind. To me thatās definitionally conservatism. When lost, Democrats feel they just need to be Republican-lite (or they are themselves compromised assets ā like Sinema, Fetterman, Schumer, etc.).
Democrats have to actually persuade and have a vision and lead the electorate, which can be a harder task. When they have charismatic leadership who can sell this with conviction, this is when they succeed. Especially when as you point out the other side is fresh off of being exposed for the grifters they are (gas prices, etc.)
The fear mongering works because liberal centrists always fail. Democrats has just to be a real opposition that do what rhey preach and abide with international laws
Thereās a superseding point. The fearmongering works because the electorate is uninformed and misinformed by megaphones of fearmongering from conservative billionaire megaphones and erosion of education and diversification of media. Yes, we shouldāve stuck with FDRās New Deal approach and his desire for a Second Bill of Rights. But the Business Plot 2 (Reagan) and 3 (Trump) won ā especially with aid from foreign interference most notably Russia and Israel but possibly China too.
This makes those who try to do the right thing less palatable to the masses because Fox News & Friends is telling them that any leftist is the literal devil.
Not an easy task to overcome, but tell me a viable path for how we put a Mamdani, AES, AOC in Arkansas and Alabama and Iāll listen.
Just a note on the FDR comment - I love history, not an expert in the details, but most of FDRās deals dried up and were discontinued because at the time it seemed their need was done. WWII made unemployment practically disappear, and much of what FDR did was to try and give jobs to everyone. A lot of the rest went away once liberal Republicans (Eisenhower) got taken into the Democrat side as Dixiecrats planned their takeover. Reagan was the first major result of that move, and it took over the country fast since businesses loved it.
If people did not notice their lives getting worse due to failure of liberal a lot of them will not fall into the propaganda that immigrants are the source of all problems. Instead of understanding the root causes and try to solve it people like prefer to complain about regular people ans whitewash the liberals failures leading to more people voting for fascism
The more progressives that respect their engagement wins , the more it will be easier to win in harder places
That didnāt stop conservatives whose lives continue to get worse voting for Republicans in Arkansas and Alabama, so Iām not understanding your point?
Iām 100% all for getting more progressives in office, fully embrace a Social Democratic Nordic Model ā but Iām still not seeing this viable path to actually getting even a liberal let alone a progressive candidate on the ballot and to vote for in the likes of Arkansas and Alabama.
And are you American? I see you moderate Europe, so perhaps there is a disconnect in oneās understanding of our electoral system and the breadth, depth, and pulse of this nation and its particular statesā electoral makeup.
Conservatives always wins after the democrats and worldwide liberals centrists fail. Look at France, le pen has big chance of being next president after Macron centrism failed and led to civil disobedience. It took
Iāve already acknowledged agreement of the problem; the question is implementation of a solution. If I could magically snap my fingers and put a Mamdani, AES, AOC, Talarico in every single seat in government, I would.
But again the forces of money and how poorly educated the electorate is means sometimes persuasion to vote for a better candidate doesnāt come in time, and then we must choose between Center-Right and Far-Right because the electorate only voted for these two choices, given the paradigm I laid out in my original comment.
The electoral college is a problem for those states, but if that can be tackled, two of Alabamaās districts fell to blue this time, and one of Alabamaās got reasonably close, mostly because of urban Little Rockās votes.
Rural is going to vote red until they realize, through years of results and through educational messaging, that Republicans arenāt going to ever help them.
Yeah I absolutely believe from here through 2028 the most progressive members of the coalition should be going to these places ā kind of how AOC and Bernie reached out to rural voters in West Virginia this past cycle.
Itās the only way to make inroads and to short-circuit the onslaught of money and propaganda that comes from their televisions, social media algorithms, and churches.
My only point is that there comes a point when you must make a choice between two non-ideal candidates, and take what you will. Iām doubting these candidates had the most progressive platforms in the general election, but hey, they did elect their first open trans state legislator (I assume thatās a gerrymandered district, much how Maxwell Frost can win uncontested in FL).
Wait, does centrism ever win an election?
You need their votes to win any election.
You canāt even get your own voters to show up (2 million Ds sat out the last Presidential election).
You need independent votes to win anything. There arenāt enough Ds or Rs (28% each). Without independent support (of which centrists are the majority, two thirds) you lose. Every time.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/fact-sheet/party-affiliation-fact-sheet-npors/
Math never lies. Partisans do
Wait, does centrism ever win an election? Thinking back on both Republican and Democrat victories, it seems catering to the moderates of the other side to try and win them over never works.
Yes, centrist candidates tend to perform well in two-party systems. However, in systems with open primaries and/or two-round systems, centrist candidates can struggle to reach the final round. Indeed, US politics became much more polarized after the introduction of open primaries.
two-round systems (which are the same as open primaries) have not been implemented nearly widely enough to have such an effect, and where it is implemented it doesnāt do that because of how safe these states are for a certain party.
Not widely enoughā¦? Two-round systems are rather common globally.
youāre talking about āUS politicsā, no?
No more medical bankruptcies or crazy bills, and costs less than the current system. Healthcare is not lost when the owner eliminates your job in a recession and out of work for a year or more. Too many think they have theirs and wonāt lose it and thatās selfish. Do better, demand better, itās not hard to vote for that each time until it passes.
itās not hard to vote for that each time until it passes.
It is - because unless youāre willing to primary and punish the Democratic Party for not doing this, theyāll do exactly what theyāve done since 2008. Promise it, then backpedal once in power.
I mean, a progressive here would be a centrist in most countries. So in a way, yes, trying to drag the center closer to the actual center.
AIPAC WON
I think AIPAC and Israel are in their death throes
Itās beautiful to see people finally waking up to their terroristic state.
Still a long way to go, but we are on the right path and it is righteous.
Its a bitter pill to swallow when people realize the harm weāve caused. But sometimes medicine is very bitter.
Israel isnāt going anywhere. Bibiās regime maybe but thereās nothing indicating that the state itself is in jeopardy.
AIPAC probably have already rebranded and or splintered into a hundered new organizations. Thatās how I would do it at least.
They already are doing, funnelling more money through UDP these days. Thatās why we need sites like trackaipac.com to keep tabs on it. If they had splintered years ago, it would have worked better. I think people can generally see whatās up nowadays.
Not until theyāre out of funds.
it kind of varied with region. Here in Texas both Talarico & Hinajosa are certainly more centrist in their approaches, and I donāt think open progressives could have won a Statewide elections here like they did.
Itās the same for Kansas, Ohio, Alaska, NH, Iowa, and a bunch of house seats as well. In fact most of the new gains are in red districts from moderate to conservative Democrats.
Iām a progressive but the article is bullshit. And Reddit/Lemmy progressives are starting to annoy me by burying their head in the and/or aggressively insulting people who point out reality.
Weāve made some good gains but people are acting like we took over the party and thatās not even close to true.
Completely agree, but for anyone not in Texas you need to understand that for a lot of people here āaverage centristā is basically āmilitant communist terrorismā.
In retrospect (and purely, only in retrospect), if we had packed the ballots with progressives theyād have gotten in anyway. I feel strongly that the election was decided here in Texas by low information voters doing the opposite of what they did last time because thatās all they could think to do. I really donāt think it went any deeper than that. The fascists knew that about their base, thatās why all their ads have always been fear based. This time, real world fear was flying in the face of the manufactured fear, and it became impossible to ignore any longer. Many of these people have never left the state. Theyāve only seen six dollar diesel in memes about California. When they saw that at home it was like seeing a tiger in their kitchen. They ran for the voting booths the same way theyād run for the shotgun.
Under no circumstances would I have ever placed a bet on a statewide blue sweep! I remember Anne Richards, I feel like sheād be happy about this outcome.
I feel strongly that the election was decided here in Texas by low information voters doing the opposite of what they did last time because thatās all they could think to do.
Thatās giving low-information voters too little credit. While I donāt know what exactly is going on in their heads, we do have a consistent pattern of Republicans voting for progressives (see: Obama in 2008*) so clearly thereās some amount of thought going on here. The complaints about Harris are I think also informative; some Republicans vote blue when the blue candidate seems like theyāll do stuff for them and isnāt an empty suit.
*Obama wasnāt a progressive, but he ran like one.
I think youāre on to something. The working class are so desperate for working class policies that they run towards anyone who can convince them thatās them, then when those lies are revealed, they run in the opposite direction.
When the overton window is skewed so far to the right like it is in the USA, what passes for centerism is still way off towards the right wing.
Yup. And hereās how it got there . . . .
Centrists wonāt stand anything that has happened under this administration, and will vote to repeal tariffs, defund the Iran war, and vote for real investigations of the corruption. If they dont, then they are with the proto fascists.
Iāve got news for you that might seem like clairvoyance.
Well then those arenāt centrists. Those are collaborators.
Thatās what centrism is. The half way point between concentration camps and healthcare for all is still fascism.
Lol thinking youāll be getting Healthcare for all. It will be socialism for the armed forces and brown shirts only.
Thatās currently how it is right now, you incredibly dense mung bean.
And healthcare for all is so difficult, only 42/43 developed nations and 155/208 nations on Earth have managed to do it. The US has the same healthcare access as fucking Somalia.
Manhattan projectā¦ no problem Human genome projectā¦ easy Copying an effective Healthcare system from 42 other developed countriesā¦ sorry we canāt because profit.
Even Jon Ossof was campaigning on Universal Healthcare.
Is he Medicare for All single payer, or the stupid public option Medicare for America which lets insurers dump their expensive patients onto the government plan then point at it for being inefficient?
Edit: heās a snake pushing a public option. Fuck incrementalists, theyāre the same radical centrists that got us into this mess.
Do you have a source for that because Iāve read equally valid comments elsewhere that suggest otherwise and a brief google search suggests that he in-fact does not support M4A?
Hopefully the people can move forward without too many politicians getting in their way.
News to nobody but ācentristsā and MAGAts.
I mean fucking duh. And no matter how desperately Matt Iglesias or Rahm Immanuel try and twist this, theyŹ»ll never win another election for Democrats.
on Bill Maher show last night (a hate watch for me) they were going on about how the midterm results were specifically NOT in support of the DSA and āextreme leftistā policy and i am like, bitch, the fact that you feel the need to deny it at all is the massive win here. š
This vote was against Jeffries and Schumer.
