Democratic (Party) Direction

thinking about this today for no reason pic.twitter.com/lrPCUX0wrS

— Primary Takes Provider (@InternetHippo) July 12, 2022

Biden went to shake McConnell’s hand but he pulled his hand back and said “psych!”

xp I looked up the article. There is no picture of Mr. Heard, and based on the context I'd say there is a fair chance he is black. The piece as a whole talks about both black and white voters, but it is reminiscent of all the hand-wringing about the loss of the "white working class" following Trump's win in 2016.

The party has always been an uneasy coalition of disparate interests. What at least some of this hand-wringing has to do with is the erosion of one of the party's main pillars of support, organized labor. It's hard to maintain that support when you ignore labor's interests and are complicit in the decimation of labor unions.

The thing about the Bernie would have won stuff is that it assumes a world in which the Democratic Party accepts him as the nominee, tells all their rich donors to get behind him, does lots of reassuring messaging, etc, vs a world where, idk, some centrist billionaire launches a third-party candidacy with the silent blessing of party leadership.

― JoeStork, Monday, July 11, 2022 3:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Right, because if there's anything the last 6 years have proven, it's that there's this powerful, well organized core of the democratic party that has substantial control over outcomes. I mean it's fucking amazing to me that Trump's election did not completely disabuse people of this sort of liberal media class fantasy about how politics works in this country. And I find a lot of the head scratching over Obama to Trump voters to be symptomatic of the same. Cf the fact that a "Bloomberg run" is cited as something that could have been a threat to a Bernie candidacy -- did anyone pay any attention to his campaign? I can't blame you if you missed it, all you'd have to do is blink.

Fron the way the transition and quote get set up I assume Heard is Black.

Genuine lol @ the McConnell quote.

Here's the preceding paragraph; it's ambiguously/poorly written but I also would have assumed he was Black:

Mr. Biden’s base, in 2020 and now, remains Black voters. They delivered the president a 62 percent job-approval rating — higher marks than any other race or ethnicity, age group or education level. But even among that constituency, there are serious signs of weakening. On the question of renominating Mr. Biden in 2024, slightly more Black Democratic voters said they wanted a different candidate than said they preferred Mr. Biden.

“Anybody could be doing a better job than what they’re doing right now,” said Clifton Heard, a 44-year-old maintenance specialist in Foley, Ala.

at any rate, Kate's point about the valuelessness of a presidential vote in Alabama is otm

Here's the preceding paragraph; it's ambiguously/poorly written but I also would have assumed he was Black:

― rob

it's so fucked up that they apparently aren't willing to out and out tell us he's black, no, they have to fucking leave us to figure it out from ambiguous context. his race is central to the fucking argument they're trying to make! why don't they just fucking say he's black?

i agree with clifton heard, honestly. everything he says about joe biden is 100% spot on. he's considering voting for trump? i mean, i get it, sometimes i think real real hard about self-harm myself. i'm just desperate, you know? life is hard, and shaming me for making poor choices - and i do make poor life choices, on a regular basis - just doesn't help.

It doesn't seem shocking to me that a working class person might view life and politics through the lens of their immediate economic circumstances before viewing it through the more abstract lens of race issues. The argument that Trump is bad for black people is in large part indirect via ties to covertly and sometimes openly white supremacist groups. Trump's overt racism was mostly against immigrants. Clifton Heard probably isn't having his life or personal rights immediately threatened by those groups, but he sees gas prices and grocery prices every day of his life, and whether or to what extent that's actually Biden's fault is at best difficult to explain or prove in either direction. Like I'm not voting for anyone with ties to nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, etc. but my belly is full and I don't feel the pain that much from inflation. And that's putting aside the fact that black people and other POC could be socially/culturally moderate or even conservative.

I'm voting for a Democratic president because he/she will nominate the judges and justices who most advance my causes.

And the United States is worse for Clifton Heard and me thanks to Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and ACB.

I'm voting for a Democratic president because he/she will nominate the judges and justices who most advance my causes.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

that's awesome! you know what's best for you, and i'm totally in support of you doing that. but why does it infuriate you that clifton heard is skeptical? i mean, look, i hate to be talking about the poor guy when he's not even here - does it infuriate you that _i'm_ skeptical? that i didn't vote for Joe Biden, that I'm not going to vote for Joe Biden? If so, why? is it my _fault_ that these judges are in office? is it heard's _fault_?

i voted for clinton in 2016, in the primaries and in the general election, because, well, i thought she was the most electable candidate. now it's 2022, and i'm out as a trans woman, and clinton is saying that the democrats shouldn't support trans rights because it might lose them votes, and you know, i feel like supporting clinton was a mistake. i try to learn from my mistakes.

Depends where you live, as ever

Plus, voters like Heard are soft Dems if they think Trump will save them.

I work for a local Dem-affiliated group because to be queer in Florida under DeSantis is a rare gift.

Sure, they’re soft Dems. You don’t interview the guy who’s going to vote for Biden no matter what.

HRC may be shitty on trans issues now, but would the two or three justices she appointed have been more or less likely to uphold trans rights than Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett?

The problem is that her lack of conviction makes that question impossible to answer. I mean I do understand what you're saying, but she is the one who opened the door to the possibility that some political calculation in this alternate timeline where she is pres would have swayed her hand.

(that said, I have not heard what HRC said about trans rights)

Sitting out an election > voting for a Republican. That voter can fuck himself.

like I don't know if Biden is bad or good on trans issues, but Ketanji Brown Jackson will likely be better on almost everything than whatever cath-fash Federalist Society goon Trump would have put in during his 2nd term.

'They won't make things get better but things will get worse more slowly (maybe)' is an argument that works on a pretty narrow band of people (most of whom are dedicated voters anyway).

The material circumstances of Heard's life are worse today than they were in the past (in his view) - it doesn't say he's going to vote for Trump, voted for Trump in 2016 or anything else. It says he's reappraising Trump - as in "shit sucks right and shit sucked less for me when Trump was President I dunno what's up with that." He's not a committed ideologue.

totally in the tea leaves here and going off nothing other than my feeeelings, but if there isn’t a pretty marked course correction on the part of Dems I suspect to see their support among working and middle class black men go real soft in the not too distant future

(cue an army of bloodless psychopath consultants to tease these numbers out in just a way that means more money for more cops, and get even shittier on lgbtq issues)

HRC may be shitty on trans issues now, but would the two or three justices she appointed have been more or less likely to uphold trans rights than Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett?

― F'kin Magnetometers, how do they work? (President Keyes)

is that like a meaningful question to you? i mean, that's not political discourse, you're talking alternate history. sometimes it can be fun to talk about alternate history, but meanwhile it's 2022, joe biden got elected president in 2020, and the democrats are about to be slaughtered in the midterms because inflation is spiraling out of control, corporate greed is going unchecked, and nobody can afford to fucking live anywhere.

in the meantime the supreme court has just declared absolute dominion over women's bodies and the response from the democrats is to retreat further from anything resembling a stand on principles or values other than to say look, if you vote for us consistently for the next 40 years we might actually be able to get a supreme court majority again and overturn the ruling overturning roe v. wade! sure. i believe them. i mean, look at the principled stand they took on merrick garland! if i can't trust these folks to get progressive judges on the courts, who can i trust?

in the meantime, all of the red states are passing laws making my friends illegal, and yeah, it does matter where you live. in 2016, i lived in indiana, and i was fortunate to be able to move to portland in the wake of that, because i'm white, because my dad died and left us money, because i and my partner at the time both had college degrees. being able to move to portland made a big difference in my life. without moving to portland, i'm not sure it would have been possible for me to transition.

i have a couple of friends who moved from homes in red states to live on the streets here in portland, because if you're trans you're better off living on the streets in portland than you are in texas. hopefully i can keep being able to afford to live in actual housing here. i'm one of the _lucky_ ones, the _privileged_ ones, the _respectable_ ones.

that's my life in 2022, i have to watch my friends who don't have the privilege i do suffer, sometimes die, and not be able to do anything to help them, because for all my privilege and respectability, it's not within my power to give them what they need. i'm just one woman. and maybe it's not within the democrats' power either. either they're unable or unwilling to help my friends. it doesn't matter which.

clifton heard doesn't bother me. this long-running alternate history society here on ilx does kind of bother me, yeah. i'm sure y'all are well-intentioned, but what is any of this _accomplishing_? like, i am legitimately a team player. i believe in compromising for the common good. i don't believe in rugged individualism, in one man one vote, i think that we need to build community, to work together to collectively advocate for our own common good against people who don't have our best interests at heart.

i mean there are people here who clearly believe passionately in the democratic party and want it to succeed, and i think that's great! i just think that the ways in which folks here are trying to support the democratic party might possibly be counterproductive and alienating?

like, y'all are talking about whether heard is a "soft dem" and i mean... i don't know the man but it's not something that's really of interest to me? i see someone who's suffering and powerless and victimized by (assuming he's black here, which is never actually stated) systemic racism and abuse and the discussion is about yeah but is he a _soft dem_? it just comes off as tokenizing to me, and it's kind of why i want to shift the discussion away from this guy because he's not here, he can't speak for himself, i'm not a fan of trying to analyze his motives. let the man make his own decisions.

why are you like rating people on a scale, like someone who doesn't vote is "better" than someone who votes for trump? like, what gives you the right to make those sort of value judgements? why are you telling voters to go fuck themselves? i mean, god, people say that we on the radical left eat our own but i would never dream of telling a member of a marginalized group to "fuck himself". like really? maybe this guy's lived experience is something i can learn from, maybe i should listen to this guy?

Decent HRC wouldn't have gotten any Justices anyway or if she did they'd have been 'moderate Republicans,' unlikely Democrats retake the Senate in 2018 under Clinton.

Decent chance

Kate otm

one thing I'll add here is while I do understand the urge to sit out or vote Jill Stein or whatever doing so operates on the assumption that the Dems might actually learn something from getting their asses handed to them, when we know that they actually never learn shit, and that even if they by the time they nominate someone halfway decent the Republicans will have made it illegal to vote Democrat

the thing is that when Dems do "learn something" from voters like Clifton, it's usually things like "Talk about pocketbook issues not culture war issues."

one thing I'll add here is while I do understand the urge to sit out or vote Jill Stein or whatever doing so operates on the assumption that the Dems might actually learn something from getting their asses handed to them, when we know that they actually never learn shit, and that even if they by the time they nominate someone halfway decent the Republicans will have made it illegal to vote Democrat

― frogbs

and how many democratic legislators will respond by changing their party affiliation, so as to better reform the system from the inside?

me, my friends, the people i care about, a _whole bunch_ of other people - we are under attack, coordinated, systemic attack. just staying alive consumes my entire existence, and i can't do that alone. i need other people who will be with me, who will stick with me when things get tough. centrist democrats don't stick with anybody. they turn around and walk away and mumble excuses. at least the republicans have the courage to hate me to my face.

well if it's any consolation polling seems to indicate that a lot of people feel the same way, and as useless as they are the Democrat party can sometimes be bullied into doing the right thing

this has become "Murc's Law, the thread"

I wonder if that’s because it’s a thread about the Democratic Party.

like it's one thing to understand why voters feel a certain way, as misguided as it is, it's another to pretend like we don't understand why gas prices are high right now or that Biden is somehow responsible for inflation.

I was with this thread when it was for calling out Biden/Dems/et al for being behind the curve on the Dobbs ruling as well as going for optics over action, but some of y'all sound like "I did this" stickers atm

sorry, I should say this is ACCELERATIONISM, THE THREAD

and I'm out, because fuck that.

I mean idk I do maybe have a problem with voters that blame only one party for economic issues, or people who can't see the aftermath of economic decisions politicians like Reagan/Trump make, even if they fool people into thinking things are great for five minutes during the temporary good it brings

wanna know why my (and my family's) life sucks now? BECAUSE FLORIDA REFUSED TO EXPAND MEDICAID DUE TO THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT BECAUSE OF HAVING ALL REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS FOR THE LAST DECADE. this directly affects my fucking family. it would have outright prevented a lot of what happened.

but hey, let's go on pretending nothing matters and forgetting that these decisions impact all of us IN AN ALMOST UNLIMITED NUMBER OF WAYS.

I guess the question then is why have democrats not found a better way to hammer things like that with voters xp

That the special learned class knows that actually Joe Biden is blameless for inflation and gas prices (which isn’t exactly true but nevertheless) doesn’t mean that the working class quite trotted out as a pull quote should know that.

Like maybe Democrats should figure out a way to improve his circumstances when they’ve held Congress and the Presidency? Might be popular!

There's a noteworthy tonal difference between "THEY ARE ALL HORRIBLE HORRIBLE PEOPLE!!" and "they do much less than we want them to do and we think they could be much better at making good things happen".

I got no problem understanding how someone's allegiance to the democrats can be grudging and provisional, based solely on the necessity for blocking the neo-fascists from controlling all our lives, but as Neando pointed out, actively discouraging even that grudging allegiance does no one any favors unless it is coupled with a reliable path to a better alternative.

Bringing up Murc’s Law is ironic since the Democratic argument is that they have no political agency - they’re not responsible for any of the bad stuff happening and also completely unable to reverse it.

Even if you agree that that’s true - what is the marketing pitch for that party?

A good chunk of dissatisfaction with Biden and the Democratic establishment is they can’t even get aroused enough to lie to us about having some plan to fight back.

That's a fair cop. There's plenty to be dissatisfied about. But most of what we do here is ratchet up the hopelessness in ever-more apocalyptic language. I'm not sure that does any good at all.

look, I ain't gonna shill for the Dems, but if we're pretending to empathize with voters who are ignorant of why inflation is the way it is, gas prices are the way they are, and fail to even account for the state of the union that the previous administration handed the country over to us in, as justification for re-considering voting for the guy who plunged us into this swamp....yeah, no. that's stupid.

it's also not 'alternate history' to bring up the SCOTUS justices, like....we know who nominated three Federalist judges, and we've seen what they have done since they've been seated on the court. I don't have to talk about what 'would have happened under Hillary', we're still paying for what happened under Trump and so will our children. and lots of parents and grandparents died due to him and his CDC stooge Redfield slow walking COVID at a time when it was ripping through nursing homes.

why was life better for anybody under Trump? simple - it was the last time in history before COVID existed and Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine.

Relevant:
https://www.gawker.com/politics/the-democrats-are-the-party-of-negative-hope

If ever the Democratic base were going to withhold its votes, this year — in which party leadership has all but declared its plans to lose anyway — would be the year to do it.

The counterargument to this position is that not voting is tantamount to voting for Republicans, and the Republican Party of 2022 is a fascist movement that finds it increasingly unnecessary to hide its contempt for democracy. This counterargument is true, unfortunately. For those of us who believe the American system should continue, the choice is between voting Democrat and taking to the street with sticks. We simply cannot afford to horse around right now. Last year, Florida passed a law protecting drivers who run down political protestors with their cars. (This law was subsequently blocked by a federal judge, so I’m sure the Supreme Court will eventually… oh no.) I can think of at least three right-wing paramilitary organizations currently making national news, and Republicans stormed the Capitol after the last election didn’t go their way. Now is the time to vote for elections to continue in the future, and that means voting Democrat.

This arrangement is gigantically dispiriting, because it reduces the range of political opinions I can responsibly express to a biennial yes/no vote on the Republican agenda. Even in this insipid game the odds are against me, thanks to gerrymandering and the inherent distortions of a senators-per-state system operating in a country that increasingly concentrates its population in cities, but as long as we all pull together in a herculean effort at the polls, we can make sure that nothing happens. Then we will enjoy a one-year window in which it is permissible to criticize the Democratic Party, before we all have to pull together once again.

"That's a fair cop. There's plenty to be dissatisfied about. But most of what we do here is ratchet up the hopelessness in ever-more apocalyptic language. I'm not sure that does any good at all.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)"

aimless i'm sure you mean well but for trans people it is that fucking bad, "apocalyptic language" is warranted. _hopelessness_ is not warranted, but i have no _faith_ in the ability or willingness of the national democratic party as it is to make things better for us. much love, though. the greatest of these is love.

"wanna know why my (and my family's) life sucks now? BECAUSE FLORIDA REFUSED TO EXPAND MEDICAID DUE TO THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT BECAUSE OF HAVING ALL REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS FOR THE LAST DECADE. this directly affects my fucking family. it would have outright prevented a lot of what happened.

― We were clothed, except for Caan, who was naked. Don't know why. (Neanderthal)"

see! this is apocalyptic language! this is warranted! this is good! this is real! republicans are psychopaths who are ruining your life! that's _exactly_ the point i'm starting from, florida is terrifying, florida is run by crazy motherfuckers, and what power do _you_ have to help? is voting for democrats going to help? does florida have free and fair elections? is this system ever going to give you what you want? you're a fucking _victim_ here, neanderthal, not just of the _republicans_, but of a vicious and totally broken system of government pretending to be a democracy that treats its so-called "citizens" like shit and then blames _us_ for the abuse we suffer at the hands of the people in power. i mean, i don't want you to despair, i don't want you to be hopeless, i want you to think about the possibility that _you_ have power, _we_ have power, we are not dependent on this broke-ass system.

we're dependent on _each other_. that's what politics is, politics is community, politics is being here for each other, and if someone's not gonna be there for me, i can't be there for them, i have to find _other ways_ to survive, _other ways_ to get what i need. i don't hate or blame centrist democrats, not really. i just don't _trust_ them. i got needs, and they can't or won't meet my needs. do you think florida democrats can and will meet you and your family's needs? do you think they will ever have both the power and the will to use it to help you and your family? does that belief, or does the _fear_ that they won't, keep you from stepping away from this vicious, awful cycle?

like, again, i want to root this in my lived experiences, here are the experience i've had with institutional democrats in the past couple of years, where i live.

i'm here in portland oregon, where our police are institutionally racist, and there were protests against the police, and the mayor, ted wheeler, came out to _talk_ with the police, and the police tear-gassed him. and he has legal power over the police, and what has he done? he's done nothing, and he got re-elected anyway, like i said above, and you know, if i get beaten or sexually assaulted or something like that, which _is_ a risk i face, who am i going to talk to? well, nobody, i'm on my own here.

did covid affect our quality of life? yeah, covid did affect our quality of life. am i frustrated about the response to covid? yes, i am. i am frustrated because a lot of anti-vaxxers chose not to get vaccinated and as a result of that choice, a lot of people, primarily minorities, the immunocompromised, and other marginalized groups suffered and died as a result of that, and who is holding the privileged people who have access to high quality healthcare and are acting with depraved indifference to the lives of people i care about accountable for that depraved indifference? nobody. nobody. they get to do whatever insane, malicious, bigoted shit they want, and it doesn't matter how many of us suffer, it doesn't matter how many of us die, all we get are more excuses, all we get are more explanations about how it's Not The Democrats' Fault. i don't _care_! i don't _care whose fault it is_! i just want somebody i can trust to _help_.

That was a booming post.

When I return, I want to post a response that I hope palliates the suspicion I'm a shill. I'm a somewhat public figure, so I hope there's historical context too.

yes, great post.