Democratic (Party) Direction

I was thinking about this ILX thread, which, like some other ILX US politics threads, heavily includes people who might vote Democrat, people who used to vote Democrat, people on the Left, people who wish they could see a Left strategy for Democrats, etc, debating these things.

I arrived at this observation: this does not happen in the UK. At least, it does not happen on UK politics ILX - and even, to a large extent, I think it does not happen on eg: UK Left social media, for instance.

That is: in the UK, people do not bother debating the use or direction of the Labour Party as if it is or could be a good thing. They, we, used to. But we stopped. I feel that there has been a "mental break" for people in the UK, where they severed from caring about Labour, and even in some cases started to want it to do badly.

I am "projecting" my own views, sure, but I think this is wider. ILX poster Calzino would be one example.

I then thought: if this difference does obtain, why?

The obvious answer is that the US is a two-party system, and US leftists "don't have anywhere to go" outside that system, so stay engaged, in some way with the Democrats; whereas in the UK people might be able to turn to other parties. In Scotland, NI, Wales, certainly. But most UK citizens are in England, and most other parties in England are tiny, so we are mostly "protest voters" - at any rate those of us who vote Green or whatever know we are not voting for a party of government.

So I'm not sure if the two-party scenario is the whole explanation.

Then I thought of a second reason. People have often said: "The US equivalent of what Kieth has done would be if he drove Bernie Sanders out of politics and expelled AOC from the Democrats" -- etc. That is: UK Labour has actively purged its Left, whereas our perception is that the Democrats have not yet done that. Supposing that is true, it could explain why some US leftists still engage with the Democrats in good faith, whereas the UK socialists known to me now do not engage with Labour in that way.

The left is still stronger in Labour than in the Democrats, though - you had Corbyn and years of leadership. In the US there are 10 reps and 1 Senator even roughly on the level of the Labour left.

it's because the uk left had an opportunity where uk labour was its vehicle, briefly, and it was brutally crushed by the establishment, including the labour right, who are now more interested in crushing the left than anything else. there isn't any clear way that labour becomes a vehicle for the left again when they've changed all the party rules to prevent that happening ever again & are now attempting to deselect remaining labour left mps

the us party system is very different from most in that the parties are basically just positions on the ballot paper, there's not the same sort of formal membership and there's more actual democracy with everything having primaries. the way the dem establishment maintains control is largely through being better resourced in primary campaigns, which is very effective but not ironclad & it's much more difficult for them to completely cut off the possibility of left challenges. even if say, sanders got the nomination in 2016 or 2020 and the dem establishment blatantly sabotaged it in whatever way, there isn't the sort of centralised power that would allow them to do anything to block off further left challenges. third parties are also pretty much impossible to even get on the ballot in a lot of places and are even more of a non-starter in terms of ever having power than they are in the uk.

who are now more interested in crushing the left than anything else

"We are the People's Front of Judea!"

The left is still stronger in Labour than in the Democrats, though - you had Corbyn and years of leadership

not true, they've changed the rules to ensure that something like corbyn can never happens again. they've upped the requirements to get onto any future leadership ballot to ensure that the remaining left MPs will not be able to nominate anyone as a faction, have undertaken purges of remaining left-wing party members, permanently suspended corbyn from the parliamentary party, using control over pre-selections to ensure that no one remotely left-wing can ever run as a labour candidate, and are working on deselecting remaining left MPs.

gotta build some ramparts while the old boys are stripping out the copper wiring

Is the democratic party more on the left than it was twenty years ago? Ten years ago?

I mean if you compare us to Slick Willie, I guess

pinefox - good questions re: existence of "debate" or not. my thoughts:

first, i _don't_ generally "debate" electoral politics on a national level. political debate was a major factor in my deciding to leave ilx entirely in 2020, and until today i've stayed well clear of the political threads. why am i jumping in today? i mean, it's a good question.

one of the things which i think is a _significant_ meaningful difference between the us and the uk is that we have a set election schedule, and a long, long, long campaign season. so here we are in august discussing the what's going to happen in an election which will occur three months from now.

elections are frankly traumatic events for me, and have been since 2016. the extent to which the election of donald trump personally affected me and made me rethink all of the values and principles i'd based my life around up to that point really can't be understated. i am very much filled with gnawing dread and an impending sense of doom, even this far out. my talking about it here is not so much based around any attempt to improve the democratic party, but to address, in the least unhealthy manner available to me, these own feelings of doom and despair.

the impact of the recent supreme court ruling overturning roe v. wade also cannot be understated. it's an emotionally apocalyptic event, and, crucially, one that is _not easily reversible_. this is why there's so much argument about the composition of the courts - because of all the things a democratic president can do, it's the one with the longest-lasting impact.

regarding bernie/aoc - i would argue that they _have_ been driven out of the democrats, in terms of _institutional power_. if you look at the shameful way aoc and bernie were treated at the 2020 democratic national convention, well, i think it sends a pretty clear message. i wonder, though, if the national democratic party isn't institutionally weak in a way that labour isn't. i'm not really aware how the labour party works, but in terms of selecting candidates, the democratic party process is a tremendously convoluted and arcane process of byzantine complexity. it is also patently obviously unjust, unequal, and unfair.

however, while bernie and aoc have been shut out of the _institutional_ democratic party, they are both extremely well-liked and popular among the left. someone mentioned, what, murc's law? bernie and aoc's marginalization within the party makes them immune to it. they have no power, and therefore nothing that goes wrong is their fault. if bernie were to get power and govern like obama did, i find it not unlikely that we'd be hearing grumbles of "thanks bernie" for the next decade or so.

the institutional democratic party provided for the selection of, and provides support for the governance of, the nominal chief executive of the united states. when was the last time labour was actually in power? fucking tony blair, wasn't it? christ, that was a long time ago. the democrats, in contrast, allegedly are in power, yet are unable to actually effectively govern.

while it is of course true that joe biden was not responsible for putting the judges who overturned roe v. wade on the supreme court, i think there's a good argument that the overturn of roe v. wade is, in some sense, an indicator of _decades_ of strategic failure on the part of the democratic party. what do we have, clinton, two terms, bush, two terms, obama, two terms, trump one term... i mean, the republicans have spent decades packing the court with fucking lunatic extremists in monomaniacal pursuit of the overturn of roe v. wade. i mean, we know this, right? we all know this. the democrats allowed clarence thomas on the court _despite_ anita hill speaking up against his behavior, allowed his behavior to be _accepted_ and _normalized_. the democrats allowed the ridiculous chicanery that put gorsuch on the bench, again, took it as _accepted_ and _normalized_. two of the judges on the top court of the nation owe their positions to egregious miscarriages of justice!

and that's the thing of it for me, what a _mockery of justice_ exists in america right now. i mean, i'd be glad to take a break from electoral politics, but republicans' behavior is increasingly atrocious and the democrats, who allegedly hold a certain amount of civil authority, respond to their injustices with nothing but empty words. republicans are rightly mocked for offering "thoughts and prayers" to victims of the gun violence they enabled, but do the democrats in power really have anything more to offer?

i mean yeah it's not healthy for me to engage too closely with politics. i don't like to do it. there's going to be an election in november, and the democrats are going to lose, and they're going to lose badly, and they've already started making their excuses, they've already started throwing, say, trans people under the bus. they haven't even lost yet!

i'd like to just walk away and focus on the rest of my life, but i don't really _have_ anything left, seeing my friends being called groomers by their parents, seeing people advocating for our extermination while the democrats shrug, i mean, it makes it hard for me to do anything else, quite honestly.

i've tried to do self-care, i've tried to wait it out, but this is quite honestly a crisis situation. something needs to change, it needs to change majorly, and it needs to change soon. even if i had any genuine belief that things _will_ get better in november, i'm not really confident in my ability to hold out that long!

we're not doing too well here in america. nobody i know is doing well. covid is spiking again where i'm at. i was going to go out and do something fun this evening, but you know, they've mandated masks again and people have stopped pretending to care, everybody knows the laws aren't enforced, and more importantly, i'm just too fucking depressed to have a good time right now, you know? i'm sorry, but i am. i have a pretty busy social life, i try to go out, i try to spend time with friends, but everybody else is just as miserable and fucked up as i am, if not moreso. there's no distraction, no relief, no escape from this shit.

so i guess that's why i'm here, talking about the Future of the Democratic Party. i like y'all here. even if i don't necessarily agree with all y'all, you are good people and i think we do basically share the same common values, the same common interests, and it feels good for me to talk about what i believe in. shit, times are hard right now, and if we're gonna have any hope of making it through we at least have to be here for each other, as much as we can.

"so here we are in august discussing the what's going to happen in an election which will occur three months from now."

wait. it's july, isn't it? what even is time? it's the trauma, i can't tell the hours, days, months apart any longer.

Kate super otm, as otm as it gets

which, tbf, should be permanently stamped on all of your posts. I apologize for being antagonistic upthread.

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

no worries, love you Neanderthal!

i wonder, though, if the national democratic party isn't institutionally weak in a way that labour isn't. i'm not really aware how the labour party works, but in terms of selecting candidates, the democratic party process is a tremendously convoluted and arcane process of byzantine complexity. it is also patently obviously unjust, unequal, and unfair.

this is what it comes down to, uk labour has much more centralised power which is now being used to completely prevent the possibility of future challenges from the left, while the democrat establishment maintains control less directly, and while the primary processes are a mess they are at least democratic and the establishment can be beaten in them. i would also think that the blatant uselessness of the establishment in the current moment opens up more room for anyone running to the left of them in primaries, even very normie dems seem to be getting fed up with the lack of action now.

the us situation is of course still very bleak & set to get dramatically worse if the republicans are successful in seizing power in the way they've indicated, but it's going to be an unstable, turbulent time where things get dramatically shaken up, so much so that further opportunities for the left aren't out of the question.

many xps but the Democrats don't have to change the rules or purge the left, because the left doesn't have enough power to bother actively purging them (throwing money at primary challengers out of spite is still a good hobby). Token DSA members work to the party's advantage, keeping some percentage of self-identified socialists voting blue because AOC and Bernie give them hope.

Labour seems worse because it's been better in recent memory but at the last Labour conference didn't they have a vote supporting sanctions against Israel and describing it an apartheid state? That wouldn't happen in a thousand years in the Democratic Party - less than ten Democrats could even work up the will to vote against Iron Dome funding.

As for whether the Democrats are more left than they were 10-20-30 years ago, Jesse Jackson did almost as well as Bernie in the '88 primaries (as a Black man in 1988) and his platform was equally progressive. Outwardly the party looks better (in part because social media amplifies voices who'd never have gotten on Meet The Press in the '90s) but institutionally it's hard to say it's improved (particularly given that Biden, Schumer and Pelosi have all been playing leading roles in the party for most of those 30 years).

there's a big difference between a party conference in the UK and the votes of elected US reps - a better comparison would be UK labour MPs to US dem house members, which still looks slightly better for the UK but again, the party is seriously trying to purge the remaining left (both membership and MPs), and there is no viable route for the left to expand its power within the party anymore. a UK labor government would not do anything remotely pro-palestinian if they win the next election, despite any symbolic motions the party conference may have passed, and the party has been actively working to expel anyone critical of israel.

because the left doesn't have enough power to bother actively purging them

there also isn't any way to directly do this in the US party structure, the democrats don't have members who can be expelled in the way that membership exists for political parties in most nations, so it would just mean trying to primary AOC etc. which they still have tried and just haven't been successful at yet

Congressional reps can be stripped of committees and completely isolated - withdrawing the whip but perhaps an even bigger deal since committee assignments are all-important in Congress.

but that'd be self-destructive rather than an effective power play, as it's still no guarantee of a successful primary challenge & it would mean they'd have less votes in congress

They still have just as many committee seats, they just get divided up among loyalists.

Fewer votes on floor votes and in leadership votes but that’s not much different compared to withdrawing the whip. The tools to discipline politicians are not wildly different - primarying and deselection, committee seats, etc.. Democrats don’t make use of them as much because they don’t need to, not because the organization can’t.

Fewer votes on floor votes and in leadership votes but that’s not much different compared to withdrawing the whip. The tools to discipline politicians are not wildly different - primarying and deselection, committee seats, etc.. Democrats don’t make use of them as much because they don’t need to, not because the organization can’t.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

idk, there are still conservative democrats who won't vote for literally anything meaningful on the democrats' legislative agenda. i think it's been noted in the past that such tools might possibly motivate these conservative democrats into supporting the democrats' agenda, but you know, it's a huge fucking risk, the democrats never have more than a razor-thin majority in congress. their ability to govern is always limited to what the most right-leaning democratic member of congress nationally will support. the republicans work in ideological lockstep with strong social cohesion - deviation from the party line, whatever the party line happens to be that week, is punished quickly and effectively. their failure to rule effectively is less about lack of organizational clout and more to do with the fact that their actual policies tend to be not just cruel and malicious but actually impossible to implement effectively - they are by any reasonable standard completely out of touch with reality. the democrats, in contrast, are a "big-tent" party, meaning in practice literally anybody who's not in absolute lockstep with whatever the republican party line happens to be that week (and yes, this even extends to bernie and AOC), which does sort of limit their ability to govern.

Well, I'm not sleeping, again, so I guess I'm just gonna vent some. Just, you know, talk about my life a little, what it looks like in practice, what it looks like to be me.

Went to look at another apartment today. My ex and I broke up. We both care about each other a lot, a real lot, to where it hurts for us to talk to each other, and we're both trying to navigate this divorce. Shit happens, you know? A lot of divorces, they just defy easy explanation, easy categorization, but COVID stress has a lot to do with it. We've been through tougher emotional shit before and made it but you know, neither of us are at our best, we all the external stresses, we couldn't work shit out between us.

I've been trying to find another apartment for the past several months. This place actually got back to me, which is nice, a lot of people don't, but they only have a showing at 2 PM. It's way over on the other side of town and it's in the middle of my workday, but fuck it, it's not like I'm getting a lot of shit done at work anyway. I work from home, and one of the things I've discovered since working from home is that not being in an office environment makes it a lot harder for me to get anything done. It's an ADHD thing, apparently. "Body doubling". Being around people who are productive makes me more productive, and I just don't have that.

I have a prescription for Adderall but it only does so much. I've been on this particular med-go-round before. I've been addicted to prescription meds before, benzos prescribed to me in ever-increasing doses by doctors at the low-cost medical clinic in Florida who didn't know what to do with me and didn't seem to have the energy to care, exactly. Didn't have the energy to bother telling me about the withdrawal syndrome, either. Just like the benzos, the Adderall does something, I guess, but not enough. My brother, he saw what the benzo addiction did to me, he doesn't like that I'm taking Adderall. He's straight edge, he thinks I'm taking addictive drugs so I can be a better capitalist drone, and maybe I am, but what are my other options, you know?

I mean honestly it's hard for me to get motivated this month at my job, working for a Catholic health insurance company. I mean, I like the people I work with. I like my co-workers, all of whom are women. I consider a lot of them my friends. Their being accepting of me made my transition a lot easier. You know, one of them is in with a bad crowd, hangs out at one of those Christian churches, had a Trump bumper sticker on her car in 2016 and probably voted for him in 2020, but I genuinely like her. I think she's grown a lot over the past couple of years, done a lot of work on trauma, worked a lot to extract herself from the cycle of abuse, and you know, she just doesn't see the church she grew up in, the political party she's culturally associated with, as part of that cycle right now. That's painful to me, but her? Her I like.

I like my bosses, too, the upper management, who are all men, just like my co-workers are all women. My acting boss is a good guy. I like him a lot. He's LDS, taking the opportunity to move out to Utah. You know, it's his culture, right? It's where he's from. The Mormons are institutionally patriarchal and abusive and have fucked a lot of people up, but my boss himself, again, he's a good guy, kind, accepting. We've learned a lot from each other.

People tell me there are lots of jobs available right now, that working for a Catholic health insurance company, no matter how much I like the people I work with, just doesn't seem like "me", but you know what, the rest of my life has fallen apart, and I need _something_ that's relatively stable, and really, they don't ask a lot of me. They've been really supportive of me, not just of my transition, but of my mental health. I've had two rounds of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the past couple of years, two intensive outpatient mental health programs to try and deal with the stresses of life over the past couple of years, and you know, the support has been helpful, it's helped me a lot. Not enough, really, not enough, but a lot.

No, what I need to focus on now is getting an apartment, getting moved out of this place. It's not my place, it was _our_ place, too many bad memories. I don't know why finding a place is so hard right now. Getting to the place is hard, Google gives me these wacky street directions and what they say is a street is actually a bunch of people's homes. The homeless population has skyrocketed. During the first couple of years of COVID, under Trump, there weren't so many homeless people, there were eviction protections in place, but now that we're in a "post-COVID world", whatever that means, I guess those protections aren't necessary any longer. I don't know where all of the homeless people are coming from, whether they're being evicted locally or whether they're migrating here from other places. And, yeah, it's a contentious local issue. A lot of landlords want to make the homeless disappear, keep them out of sight, they're bad for property values, and you know, that's pretty reprehensible. Also, an increasing number of my friends are homeless, and they at least deserve some modicum of respect.

But more than that they deserve to have places to live, you know? And that seems to be even harder than respect. You live out on the street, life is hard, people aren't always polite, people aren't always _accepting_ of diversity the way folks are in professional settings around here. Some of them - not all of them, of course, but it's not really easy for me to predict _which_ ones exactly - will maybe yell slurs at my friends, creep on us, threaten violence against us. And all of the politics are based around, you know, _respecting_ them, it's important for us to not shun them and try and make them disappear like the landlords do, but nobody's even talking about, that I can tell, finding any homeless people permanent, stable housing beyond the wholly inadequate steps that are already in place. A couple of years ago the local government wanted to move them into an old prison, but that didn't work out. Not because it's inhumane to put homeless people into a prison or anything, it just wasn't _practical_.

Anyway, if I don't find myself somewhere to live, I guess that'll be me too, so it behooves me to treat them with respect at least. There just don't seem to be a lot of places to rent, and the ones that do bother to get back to me, they seem a lot less interested in renting to me once they see me. I mean, it's probably just my imagination. Sure, nobody treated me like this the last time I was looking for a place, before my transition, but lots of stuff has changed since then. Maybe it's just not enough these days to have a house and plenty of money and a solid credit rating, maybe that's just not enough to get you into an apartment. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. I'm really tired and worn out.

They just renovated the particular place I'm looking at. I mean the complex is a shithole, but the apartment is renovated. Hell of a contrast. They make everything shiny and they put in all new appliances and jack the price up because of it. Well, I'm lucky, even the jacked up price I could still afford, if they were interested in renting to me, if I was interested in living there.

Everything has gotten a lot more expensive. I finally dragged myself out to the store the other day and a box of cereal costs $7.50. Look, I know inflation is a thing, I'm sorry to sound like a Karen, but that's a lot of fucking money. I work a professional job, I'm a white woman with a college degree and a professional certification. I get paid good money to stare blankly into the dead air a couple inches in front of my two monitors for eight hours a day. But you know, I'm trying to figure out how to manage on one income instead of the two my ex and I were living on, and it's an adjustment.

Wages have gone up on the low end, and I'm happy, but it's not even close to enough to live on. I remember just a couple of years ago the big thing was "fight for 15", and that's a bit of a fucking joke here right now. There are a couple of places still only offering $14.75 an hour, just as a "fuck you" to people who had the temerity to advocate for a living wage, but most fast food joints offer above that now, and they still can't find enough people to work at the wages they're offering, under the working conditions they're offering. It's great that Obama raised the federal minimum wage in 2009. It's what, $7.25? I can't say that the Democrats don't care about workers. I'm sure Biden would raise it again if it wasn't for those damn Republicans always wrecking their plans.

Nobody to work the jobs that we rely on workers for, and meanwhile more and more of us are out of work. Nobody can afford to rent or to own, which is I guess fine because there don't seem to be a lot of places available, even with the dramatic increase in the homeless population. It's weird. I don't super understand it. Probably investors or something. Real estate is apparently still a really good investment.

Anyway, I was talking about the apartment I was looking at yesterday. No cooling. It's stiflingly hot out, another heat wave, and it's only July. August is the really hot month. That was one of the luxuries of owning a home, we were able to put a heat pump in. If it gets too much over 100, which it does sometimes, even in Portland, it struggles to keep up, but on days like today, when it's only in the 90s, the heat isn't oppressive like it is for most folks around here. The atmosphere still _feels_ heavy and oppressive, but the temperature, the humidity, isn't.

I look at people talking about politics and they're arguing about, you know, what's more important to me, what issues matter more to me, "cultural" or "economic" issues, what policies the Democrats should take a stand on that would get me to vote for them, whether they _should_ even be trying to get my vote in the first place, and honestly I do think find it a little bit sickening? But I mean, there's a lot right now that makes me feel kind of sick and tired and queasy. Truth be told I'm going through another bout of suicidal ideation. I don't even like talking about it because everybody cares about me and wants me to be happy and wants me to get the help I need and I _have_, you know, I'm privileged enough that I _have_ gotten lots of help but honestly, you know, I tell my therapist this and she listens and she understands, she knows, my problem isn't mental illness, it's that being alive in 2022 is fucking bullshit. It's fucking bullshit and it sucks and it's totally ridiculous to ask _any_ of us to have to put up with the shit we have to put up with, on a regular basis. Human beings shouldn't have to live like this.

But hey, that's out of my control, right? Circle of control. Circle of control. No point in ruminating. No point in doom spiraling. I gotta take care of myself, because I'm worth taking care of, and if I don't have the resources to do that, if the many, many people who care about me don't have the resources to do that, well, you know, one does the best one can with what one has. And I am, and we all are. It's not really our fault that it's not enough. I'm as scared of change as anyone. For all the lit guillotine memes the kids like to share, I know it's my head that's on the chopping block like as not. No matter who's President, the fascists just seem more powerful than ever, right now, and yeah, I am grateful, these days, for anybody who's not overtly fascist, for everybody who's not actively calling for the eradication of "transgenderism". I just don't know how much longer I can keep living like this.

Thanks to kate for some booming posts upthread.

things going well in the Democratic Party

I’m sorry this is 100% wrecker shit from Nomiki and co at this point. Really despicable to watch. pic.twitter.com/VHjSePqaT1

— David Griscom (@DavidGriscom) July 13, 2022

did this pareene piece get posted

https://forummag.com/2022/07/11/the-never-ending-war-on-the-woke/

Thanks for the link, I hadn’t heard of Left Behind but have now added it to my reading list.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/leftbehind/images/4/4d/Currie2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090108175521

oh really now?

guh

Congratulations to the anti-PC brigade. You have gotten what you’ve wanted, over and over again, for many years. How’s it going?

since their only political project is getting people w disposable income to send them money I can only assume they love it.

anti-PC dems, centrists, media scolds, that is.

I think the anti-PC right has other plans in mind

Thanks for the link, I hadn’t heard of Left Behind but have now added it to my reading list.

― blatherskite

hopefully your reading list is like mine and this means you will never actually read it, god if only i could exist in such a state of edenic innocence

Biden just got Mexico to pay $1.5 billion to secure the border with actual smart technology, not a dumb wall. Feels like the media should be talking about this more.

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) July 13, 2022

"We're better at Republican policy than Republicans"

really does feel like harvard vs yale sometimes

NEW: The NDAA bars the Pentagon from assisting Afghanistan in *any way,* after an @IlhanMN amendment was ruled out of order https://t.co/XOlKRn1moh by @DRBoguslaw

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 13, 2022

Yesterday I read a Guardian article that said that Joe Biden would probably be Democratic candidate in 2024.

I realise that Biden wasn't the best or ideal candidate in 2020. But won't he be a considerably worse candidate in 2024?

Yes.

For sure, but he would still have the advantage of being the incumbent (most presidents who run for reelection win), and it's not clear that anyone else in the party who actually wants the job is more popular than him.

Worth noting that the last time a sitting president was not his party's candidate despite being eligible for another term was LBJ in 1968. Had he run, he likely would have lost, anyway, but the fractious Democratic nomination process that year and Nixon's ultimate defeat of Humphrey do not offer a hopeful precedent.

he is too fucking old, so is sanders, so are a whole lot of the people who think the best use for their should-be-enjoying-their-golden-years brains & bodies is a job that ideally would go to somebody really sharp & up on current things and all. if the Democrats would run somebody young it would help them, they won't.

which way, Democratic Party?

I cannot believe I have to be on the same side as this person. She is neither helpful to the cause of democracy, nor half as clever as she fancies herself. https://t.co/9zdqmL4MJG

— Rachel Vindman 🌻 (@natsechobbyist) July 13, 2022

absolutely agree with JCLC. my one hang up though is that both ppl in this tweet are young, sharp and up on things.

“natsechobbyist”

Vindman is a newcomer to the Democratic Party. Her husband was on Trump's National Security Council and was shunned for testifying in the first impeachment.

ha! interesting.

so at what point does the big tent start to actually hurt you

When you reach over to grope a cute dude and it turns out to be a rattlesnake.

Right, Rachel Vindman says she was a Republican until 2019: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/it-was-time-to-fight-back-my-journey-from-the-republican-party-through-grief-to-advocacy/ar-AAQ9hRb

the Republican gentrifiers in the Democratic party are upset that there are still brown people in the neighborhood

Amazingly, this article does not shit on the people interviewed:

Alexandra Chadwick went to the polls in 2020 with the singular goal of ousting Donald J. Trump. A 22-year-old first time voter, she saw Joseph R. Biden Jr. as more of a safeguard than an inspiring political figure, someone who could stave off threats to abortion access, gun control and climate policy.

Two years later, as the Supreme Court has eroded federal protections on all three, Ms. Chadwick now sees President Biden and other Democratic leaders as lacking both the imagination and willpower to fight back. She points to a generational gap — one she once overlooked but now seems cavernous.

“How are you going to accurately lead your country if your mind is still stuck 50, 60 or 70 years ago?” Ms. Chadwick, a customer service representative in Rialto, Calif., said of the many septuagenarian leaders at the helm of her party. “It’s not the same, and people aren’t the same, and your old ideas aren’t going to work as well anymore.”

Nate Cohn has a column in the NYT called the Upshot and recently posted an article there based on a NYT/Siena College poll that seemed to suggest that white liberal Democratic voters in upper income brackets are motivated by abortion and gun violence and could be counted on to vote in the midterm elections. Somehow this seems to me not to be quite the right footing for progress in the Democratic Party because I think economic issues even if unspoken are fundamental; carrying about anything else is a luxury. Why did he write this based on a college poll? What is a college poll?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/upshot/poll-2022-midterms-congress.html

Siena College's poli sci (or statistics or something) team does the polling.

When you reach over to grope a cute dude and it turns out to be a rattlesnake.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

tbh at this point i trust rattlesnakes more than i trust cute dudes, present company excepted

so at what point does the big tent start to actually hurt you

― no one wants to twerk anymore (will)

when you open a twitter account and start tweeting, as far as i can tell

yes, Siena College, realized after posting (bad parsing)

from 2006 (the possibilities for strategy if not purpose):

i think something that's still missing from a lot of this is an understanding that the current republican base was built from the ground up. it wasn't just a matter of coming up with the right code words or whatever, it was a long and systematic takeover of the party by various interest groups with overlapping or at least complementary agendas. the democrats at the moment seem disconnected from whatever constitutes their base, and even suspicious of it. it seems very top-down.