Democratic (Party) Direction

I missed that. Adam, go fuck yourself. Bet you liked Mark Penn's column today too. It never occurs to guys like him that "working class' includes women, blacks, gays, and the transgender. In an economy where no one who isn't working for Goldman Sachs can afford to live in Chicago or New York, we're all working class, baby.

i think re the iraq war + trump it was more like it was universally acknowledged as a failure in this particular instance and so trump kinda gave right-wing voters a way to repudiate the particular war without having to compromise the values that led to that war. he criticized it on grounds of incompetence (particularly in its failure to earn money for the US), not on ethical or moral grounds.

xp to Simon - I was just trying to illustrate the problems of communicating anti-war positions to vets
I am fortunate enough to not know anyone who went over and got hurt or worse

remember the democrats? lol. miss u, bb!

"fuck identity politics" is not a tenable position. "convincingly and simply draw connections between economic, social, and environmental justice" is.

yeah agreed w/ Mordy - plus trump's big strongman pitch was that he was better at things, whatever the things are. so asserting that iraq was fought dumbly/incompetently was just another version of how he built a great company and is great at running stuff, these bozos in office are bad at everything! helped that there is a lively fiction on the right that iraq somehow only turned bad after obama took office (and clinton became SOS) - they didn't let the surge work, we were just about to win, etc. this is obviously nonsense but the chronology of a long war is a VERY easy thing for people to get fuzzy in their minds, so if you were already with trump it'd be easy to just adopt this garbled narrative along with the strongman smarts, and none of it requires you to be (or think of yourself as) against war or even against this particular war.

trump kinda gave right-wing voters a way to repudiate the particular war without having to compromise the values that led to that war.

otm

plus he's not a chick

some good stuff in here for Democrats to think about

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n14/william-davies/reasons-for-corbyn

Amid all the noise, slogans and smears of the campaign, it seems that Labour’s simple, eye-catching policies (free university tuition, more bank holidays, free school meals for all, more NHS funding, no tax rises for 95 per cent of earners) had the ability to cut through. These policies were crafted to produce a left-populist platform, with the idea in mind that policies can influence voters, but only if they are sufficiently straightforward to be able to hold their shape as they travel around an increasingly complex, chaotic public sphere. New Labour had two sets of experts: one to run its technocratic policy-making machine, the other to handle the media, which it believed could be tamed. But once editorial bottlenecks no longer determine the flow of news, and neurotic control of image is no longer realistic, policies must be designed to spread of their own accord, like internet memes. Trump’s ‘Build a wall!’ did this. Less propitiously, once the phrase ‘dementia tax’ had attached itself to the Tory campaign, it couldn’t be dislodged.

always thought that the absurd abundance of right wing echo chamber outlets and "think" tanks was just a bald-faced grift operation designed to take money from swiss cheese-brained trust fund racists, but shit maybe Bartlett has a point.

https://m.facebook.com/notes/bruce-bartlett/what-progressives-could-learn-from-conservatives/10154956380912832/

also, to anyone plugged in to this scene: does this bit ring true?

smart but non-ideological young people simply looking for a way to make a living in politics are much more inclined to go right than left. After a while, they become true believers and are often among the best and brightest of the right

seems like he might be conflating shamelessness and greed with "smart"

Well, the friends who began as centrists/Republicans (one dual citizen started by working for a Tory MP, the other worked for Rep. Fred Grandy) circa '90 are now left as fuck, through the magic of disability rights, the NSF and LGBT activism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/advice-for-the-left-on-achieving-a-more-perfect-union/531054

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

By contrast, the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

I've felt like abandoning the melting-pot has been a blunder but Rorty at least seems to think that it could potentially be replaced by a new unifying source of commonality. nb at least it seems like there's hostility to the very notion of national commonality - that there should be no discrete unified nation separate/distinct from other nations, or that politics should remain in an antagonistic form this kind of openly schmittian conflict. neither of those seems particularly productive for regaining any kind of power.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0233/9503/products/WebMerch_DGAS-shirt1.jpg?v=1491603436

Support Samantha Bee & Planned Parenthood & buy a Nasty Woman t-shirt!https://t.co/I9qd3M3cFq pic.twitter.com/XDpBcFqF7k

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 11, 2017

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0233/9503/products/WebMerch_VoteDemChill1.png?v=1465242918

daily kos (i know!) but silver linings or at least filaments are brightening

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/11/1679869/-Don-t-look-now-but-Democrats-just-flipped-two-more-seats-from-red-to-blue-tonight

Unchange you can’t believe in: “Dems' rising star meets with Clinton inner circle in Hamptons” https://t.co/qpX4eyYlsD

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) July 16, 2017

already doing the GOP's work for 'em (yet again) eh

and working together

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/17/with-new-d-c-policy-group-dems-continue-to-rehabilitate-and-unify-with-bush-era-neocons/

do you read the whole thing before you link to it or do you just cackle as you imagine me trying to cope with an entire GG piece without losing my breakfast

anyway I loved these two bits

As this new policy group illustrates, the union is grounded in widespread ideological agreement on a broad array of foreign policy debates: from Israel to Syria to the Gulf States to Ukraine to Russia. And the narrow differences that exist between the two groups — on the wisdom of the Iran deal, the nobility of the Iraq War, the justifiability of torture — are more relics of past debates than current, live controversies. These two groups have found common cause because, with rare and limited exception, they share common policy beliefs and foreign policy mentalities.

yes that very narrow difference between Dems and the GOP on torture, Iran and the Iraq war

also this is hilarious

What we see instead are leading Democratic foreign policy experts joining hands with the world’s worst neocons to form new, broad-based policy advocacy groups to re-shape U.S. foreign policy toward a more hostile, belligerent and hawkish posture.

re-shape it into a more bad, bad and bad and worse thing than it already is!! because the only thing worse than Rex Tillerson running the State Department and the DoD running itself would be a Democrat in charge of anything. Yours truly, Glenn Greenwald

I mean the policy group he's flipping out about is another fly-by-night beltway special that all these usual suspects glom on to in case it goes anywhere, and then it never does - Chertoff has to have been associated with like 50 of these things by now - and the whole piece goes on and on and on without making a single specific point other than guilt by association and the usual self-congratulatory confirmation bias that must be catnip for wont-be-fooled-again megacynics like Morbs

guilt by association

^^^this

Kamala also has a big dem donor class sewn up - she's a former AG of CA and her husband is head of the west LA office for Venable LLP. Big law firms were Hillary's #1 source of cash in 2016. (too lazy to google. if it wasnt #1 it was top 3 for sure.) xp

Relevant to GG.

The folks who sold Trump as a non-interventionist would rather talk about this Russia stuff than Trump's death toll. https://t.co/IIgDClIpRx

— Charles Davis (@charliearchy) July 17, 2017

yr losing yr breakfast is just gravy, T

ew

I don't understand who would eat "gravy."

it takes a special kind of asshole to require IDs to vote to avoid outside interference in our elections, then turn around and say russia interfering in our elections is okay. it takes professional socioeconomically comfortable democrats blind to their own privilege too polite to raise a stink to high heaven not to repeat that message day in and out

nominally straight reporting pushes deeply ideological editorial part 64,123 https://t.co/Wnb3DhjZ8P pic.twitter.com/49E3Hv81vg

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) July 18, 2017

Ryan Adams‏ @filmystic Jul 5

Ryan Adams Retweeted Bernie Sanders

How does it happen that we have a liberal senator who's done 10,600 tweets, yet this is the only time he's ever dared mention Putin by name?

yeah, ari melber was grilling bernie earlier about whether or not he benefited from russian espionage, or utilized it, when he called for debbie wasserman schulz to step down. he didn't seem to be coming from a place of red panic but it still seemed like an irrelevant and dumb question.

I like Harris. I'd rather win.

it feels like everyone is biding their time, not wanting to get out in front too early in the cycle, but the result is the party is being led by effectively nobody. There is nobody out there talking up platform planks and positions, it's all wait-and-see and holding statements and gross fundraising spam.

Oh, not "introduced Albert Hammond Jr. to heroin" Ryan Adams.

Thought this was good (in response to Chait, who is a hopeless charter school stan, and so of course believes neoliberal is just something strangers call him on Twitter)

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/18/15992226/neoliberalism-chait-austerity-democratic-party-sanders-clinton

yeah Vox has been slightly less useless of late

generally parties out of power never have leaders. Who was the "leader" of the GOP in 2010, John McCain?

christ https://t.co/OFdojTyPKn pic.twitter.com/CPFFU9CQ6s

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) July 19, 2017

because that worked out so well last time

as you all know I find HamNo's look-at-me writing style to be indigestible but I agreed with most of his points in this

http://fusion.kinja.com/democrats-wake-up-and-smell-the-failure-1797015279

They mistake weakness for pragmatism. They mistake pandering for savvy. They always seem to imagine that the closer they edge to Republican policy positions, the more votes they will inevitably capture, due to math. They—the establishment, the ones in control, with all of the plugs plugged into the current power grid—are unable to imagine a world in which they lead voters to their side with bold, progressive policies, and by telling the truth. That is considered hopelessly unrealistic, by the circle of operatives that helped to lose to Donald Trump. The entire apparatus of Democratic operatives who spent decades accumulating power, riding their way up through the Bill Clinton and Obama administrations, are still there. And they did their best in 2016. And here we are.

Anyway, to Shakey: Having no leaders of the opposition party, except in the managerial or tactical sense (which is not leadership), is probably responsible for more horrible problems in our democracy than we maybe want to admit. It guarantees at least four years of rudderless bitching and being dragged around from one carefully curated echo chamber to another by barely competent consultants who sustain their mortgage payments by keeping the country in perpetual 51-49 deadlock.

There is no Labour Manifesto to speak of for the Democrats, other than the 2016 Platform, but since that campaign "lost" the election by negative 3 points, those planks are of no interest to the grossly overmatched hacks still running the DCCC, and they're just one egregious example. There's nobody to lead on anything more than cussing in public about how we want to help people. Well and we have a guy who lost in the primaries to the "most unpopular candidate ever" who isn't even a Democrat.

right, he's a communist, as Ms Popularity all but said out loud repeatedly

btw

The former secretary of state has always been a polarizing figure, but this survey shows she’s even lost popularity among those who voted for her in November.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-18/finally-a-poll-trump-will-like-clinton-even-more-unpopular

nobody likes a loser

dems vomit out shitty slogans because they can't name that which is afflicting people's lives without upsetting their rolodex of donors.

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) July 20, 2017

What city is Adam Johnson from?

it's right there in his display name

H.

Here's your chance, Dems. Now! Let us all watch as you fuck it up in the most spectacular fashion.

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/342867-poll-majority-says-federal-government-should-ensure-healthcare-coverage